American Descent

In March thousands of Russians gathered in Moscow’s Red Square to celebrate Vladimir Putin’s reelection, waving tricolor flags before the jubilant domes of Saint Basil’s Cathedral. The rock band Lyube, whose nationalist music has been a soundtrack for Russian soldiers in Ukraine, performed. Three Kremlin-approved losing candidates showed up as a demonstration of their fealty. Putin appeared triumphant onstage, his awkwardly ageless face magnified on the JumboTrons. He welcomed the illegally annexed Ukrainian territories of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia into the bigger, beautiful Russia that he was building. “We will move on together, hand in hand,” he declared.

Behind this tightly controlled scene lay a grim reality. Putin’s chief political opponent, Alexey Navalny, had died about a month earlier in a prison north of the Arctic Circle. After years of state-sponsored poisonings, persecution, and brutal imprisonment, the exact circumstances of his death were murky, but there should be no doubt that Putin was responsible. Even relatively obscure candidates running against him had been struck from the ballot. The election in which Putin declared victory was anything but free and fair. In Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine, voting took place in areas where children have been kidnapped and civilians tortured. Within Russia’s recognized borders, voicing private criticism of the war can get you thrown in jail, and even critics outside of Russia’s borders are pursued.¹

Putin declared that “we know what it means to fight for one’s country.” The final count showed that he won over 87 percent of the vote, but it was impossible to know how much of the triumphant patriotism he heralded was real, how much was false, and how much was compelled.

This year, 2024, has been called the “year of elections.” Almost half the world’s population lives in countries that will be voting this year. It should be a global watershed. But scenes like Putin’s victory rally make it feel less like an international celebration of democracy than an extended wake, as a succession of nationalist autocrats flex their political muscles and entrench their own power.

Consider some of the results to date. In Bangladesh, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina detained thousands of her political opponents on the way to winning a fourth consecutive term. In El Salvador, Nayib Bukele—the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator”—ignored his country’s law on term limits and was reelected with a margin approaching Putin’s. In Indonesia, a former general accused of human rights abuses surged to victory thanks in part to his running mate, the thirty-six-year-old son of the current president, who was allowed to run despite a law setting forty as the age requirement (it may have helped that his uncle led the constitutional court).² In France, the far right made unprecedented gains in European Union parliamentary elections, though an unusual coalition of leftist and centrist parties was able to beat back the right-wing tide in the subsequent national election. And in India—in the largest election held in human history—even surprisingly close results led to a third term for Narendra Modi, the strongman Hindu nationalist whose government has jailed opponents, restricted civil society, and intimidated journalists.

The United States is no exception. Our election features two men who have already been president and have lived for a combined 159 years. Donald Trump, who tried once to cling to power through extrajudicial means, has already been convicted of falsifying business records about hush money payments to a porn star. His campaign aims to legitimize his past crimes while pledging retribution against his political enemies, which has only deepened the fervor of his support among a broad swath of the American electorate.

Notably, Trump has embraced his fellow travelers in autocratic nationalism. Already this year he has twice hosted the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán at Mar-a-Lago; embraced Argentina’s new populist president, Javier Milei; described his “very beautiful” relationship with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un; and said that if he is reelected he will tell Putin that Russia can do “whatever the hell they want” to some NATO allies.

At February’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland, Bukele thrilled a crowd with a shared set of enemies by declaring, “They say globalism comes to die at CPAC. I’m here to tell you that in El Salvador it’s already dead. ” In his own speech at the conference, Trump sounded familiar themes. “November 5 will be our new liberation day,” he announced. “But for the liars and cheaters and fraudsters and censors and impostors who have commandeered our government, it will be their judgment day.” To my eyes, November 5 looks like a judgment day for democracy itself.

Because they do not represent a single coherent ideology like communism or national socialism, it can be hard to make sense of why such a similar collection of autocrats from such different parts of the world have ascended at the same time. How should we understand the political trend they represent? That’s the question at the heart of the Argentine historian Federico Finchelstein’s new book, The Wannabe Fascists.

While Finchelstein’s casual title may inadvertently downplay the crisis facing global democracy, it does convey that we have reached a tipping point. For years we have debated how much danger Trump and strongmen like him pose. Are they just a collection of populists using grievance-based nationalism to gain power? Or do they represent a new wave of fascism leading to persecution, political violence, dictatorship, and war?

That darker possibility has recently been coming into focus. In countries like India and Hungary, nationalist political parties have used electoral success to advance their domination of the state. In Ukraine and Gaza, brutal wars are being waged by ethno-nationalist leaders, Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu. In the United States, Trump is open about returning to power with a far more developed program to hollow out the administrative state, install loyalists across the government, and use the powers of the federal government to serve his personal interests. “We will demolish the deep state,” Trump promised at a rally in Claremont, New Hampshire:

We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake-news media until they become real…. We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.

These words echo fascist rhetoric from history, but is Trump really a fascist? Finchelstein situates him somewhere along a spectrum. “Wannabe fascism is an incomplete version of fascism,” Finchelstein argues, “characteristic of those who seek to destroy democracy for short-term personal gain but are not fully committed to the fascist cause.” In other words, Trump and many of the autocrats driving global politics have enlisted aspects of fascism when it suits them, without knowing just how far they will go with it. “I see them as a dangerous threat to democracy, extremists who have not (yet) reached the levels of ideological fervor, violence, and lies achieved by historical fascists,” Finchelstein writes. “Wannabe fascists do not openly advocate for fascism, but they gravitate toward fascist political styles and behaviors.”

Finchelstein is a scholar of populism as well as fascism, and he offers useful historical background for understanding the difference between the two, drawing on the example of Juan Perón, the right-wing populist who governed Argentina after World War II. Perón had the same enemies as the fascists—chiefly, liberals and socialists. He also had a similar conception of the justness of his rule—that through his intangible connection to “the people,” a populist leader is imbued with a legitimacy that transcends laws and institutions. But in Perón’s time, fascism had been discredited by the defeat of Hitler, Mussolini, and imperial Japan, so Perón and other postwar populists generally acceded to the rule of elections and limits on their dictatorial ambitions. (Of course, the twentieth century’s record of coups and military governments occasionally demonstrated how tenuous that discipline could be.)

It is the strength of that thin line between right-wing populism and fascism that is now being tested. In many different parts of the world, the playbook has become familiar: a right-wing populist harnesses the backlash to globalization’s failures to win an election on a grievance-filled us-versus-them platform. Cronies, enriched via corruption, finance the leader’s political agenda. Courts are packed with judges who allow further power grabs. Parliamentary districts are redrawn to entrench the ruling party. Voting laws are altered to favor certain parts of the population. The media is turned into an extension of the ruling party’s interests, while independent journalists are threatened, deplatformed, or imprisoned. Social media is used to monitor, intimidate, and demoralize political opponents. Civil society is demonized, harassed, or restricted.

Since 2000 Putin has worked through a version of this playbook to transform Russia from a nascent democracy to the elected dictatorship that it is today. Orbán mimicked Putin’s approach in the next decade with remarkable success, which is one reason he receives such fervent support from imitators on the American right. So methodical was Orbán’s reengineering of democratic institutions after his 2010 electoral victory—he rewrote the constitution, redrew parliamentary districts, and had friendly oligarchs buy up media—that he has enjoyed near-total control over Hungarian politics, although his party received around 45 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections in 2014 and 49 percent in 2018. Early in Putin’s redesign of the Russian system, the Kremlin referred to its approach as “managed democracy.” Orbán updated the terminology to “illiberal democracy.” In both cases, democracy became a veneer for an increasingly authoritarian agenda, with Putin’s Russia blazing the trail.

Meanwhile, the populist fervor that justifies this illiberalism is replenished with a rotating cast of villains, within and beyond the country’s borders, who must be confronted. Indeed, the connective tissue between Putin, Orbán, and Trump has been their common enemies: immigrants, Muslims, LGBT communities, “globalists,” liberal elites, cancel culture, and George Soros. These enemies are set against a traditional nationalist identity that must be protected—the “real” Russians, Hungarians, or Americans. While those identities are white and Christian, a similar strategy has been used by hard-liners in other parts of the world—including Hindu nationalists in India and the Jewish settler movement in Israel—that also draw upon deep wells of historical grievance to justify supremacist policies.

What is so disconcerting about world politics today is the way this combination of populist mobilization and illiberal governance has spread like a contagion, often through the sharing or even coordination of far-right political strategies. Worse yet, at a time when violent conflict is also spreading to different parts of the globe, these “fascist political styles and behaviors” feel like a reversion to the politics that led to two world wars.

When does a populist become a fascist? Finchelstein acknowledges that even wannabe fascists like Modi and Orbán accept some separation of powers and a measure of independent civil society. And for all his fascistic rhetoric, Trump’s first term as president was accompanied by open and robust opposition from civil society. But Finchelstein sees warning signs, particularly in Trump’s behavior after the 2020 election. “By denying the 2020 election results and fomenting the Big Lie about voter fraud,” he argues, “Trump represents a turning point.” His effort to overturn the election may have lacked grounding in deep political thought, but the danger remains the same, especially as the 2024 election looms: Trump has already demonstrated a willingness to deny reality while embracing a politics in which personal interests are predominant.

Finchelstein presents four criteria to evaluate where a country sits on the fascist spectrum: political violence, propaganda and misinformation, xenophobia, and dictatorship. It is, to put it mildly, disconcerting to see where the United States now finds itself on that spectrum.

Political violence is increasing within our society through the flood of guns, pugilistic rhetoric, and the fetishization of law and order that has become commonplace on the far right. The repetition of propaganda and misinformation is central to Trump’s politics, including the projection that leads him to label his opponents fascists and election deniers. Anti-immigrant xenophobia is a predominant theme in his campaign, with mass rallies that spotlight white families who have been victims of immigrant crime and rhetoric that warns that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” (“In every society,” Mussolini said, “there is a need for a part of the citizens who must be hated.”)

Finchelstein notes the racialized prejudice and misogyny that infuse today’s wannabe fascists in the US and Europe, including fears of white replacement, shifting gender roles, and the decline of the West. “In fascism,” he warns, “there was a constant need to feed paranoia about differences and plurality. Anyone could become the enemy that symbolized these fears.” This is eerily familiar, as Trump’s attacks feature a shifting cast of characters, with a Black president, Muslims, immigrants at the southern border, Chinese people, campus protesters, or trans children all representing the same paranoia about the Other, standing in for a general fear of an increasingly diverse society.

And then there is dictatorship. This, of course, is the essential threshold that has not been crossed in the United States. Trump does have a cultlike following and compliant party functionaries. But the US has guardrails against the assumption of dictatorial powers, as was shown after the 2020 election. If Trump succeeds in regaining the presidency, how will we know if this line has been crossed? Perhaps immigrants will be rounded up, political opponents will be persecuted, ideologues will populate all levels of the government, or Trump will somehow seek to remain in power past the constitutionally mandated end to his second term. More likely, Trump would make gestures in these directions but stop short of achieving what Finchelstein terms the “unlimited permanent dictatorships” that true fascism requires, though his choice of J.D. Vance as heir apparent solidifies the far-right direction of the Republican Party.

Yet even if Trump doesn’t fully shed the “wannabe” label, America would be further damaged and divided amid the global rise of autocracy, nationalism, and conflict—with wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East and flash points in Asia along the Korean Peninsula, the Taiwan Strait, and the South China Sea—harkening back to the map of previous world wars. Should Trump be reelected, the United States would again be led by a man who expresses admiration for Putin, has shown little inclination to restrain the Israeli far right, and boasts of his relationship with Kim Jong Un and disregard for American allies. The United States may have the insurance of centuries-old institutions and federal government, but our own fascistic politics must be seen as part of a wave that could pull us into violent currents.

To many observers, Trump’s embrace of Putin and Kim Jong Un seemed like an aberration for the Republican Party, which lionized Ronald Reagan’s ostensibly moralistic foreign policy. But in America Last, Jacob Heilbrunn sets out to demonstrate how America’s right wing has had an affinity for foreign strongmen and a suspicion of democracy over the last century.

He illustrates this through a survey of right-wing thinkers, journalists, and politicians beginning with H.L. Mencken and his admiration for Kaiser Wilhelm II during World War I. In the years after the war, forces emerged on the right that infuse Trump’s rhetoric today. Historical revisionism blamed America’s entry into World War I on shadowy globalist interests, including Jews, bankers, and arms dealers. Immigration was severely restricted (“America must remain American,” Calvin Coolidge declared in signing the National Origins Act of 1924), and fears of white replacement were amplified through books like The Rising Tide of Color. Particularly after the Russian Revolution, communism was cast as a far more severe threat than the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany.

Out of this stew came the isolationist America First movement (another Trump slogan today), which opposed support for antifascist allies before America’s entry into World War II. The Nazis awarded medals to prominent right-wing (and antisemitic) Americans like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, who sympathized with Hitler and argued that America should only go to war if the white race was imperiled. The war brought temporary unity, but afterward there was a fast reversion to the norm, as many conservatives returned to a fixation on communism, support for right-wing autocratic allies abroad, and the defense of segregation at home. Universal values—and institutions like the United Nations set up to represent them—were viewed suspiciously as tools of decolonization and world government. Despite the damage done by ethno-nationalist fascists, communism and liberalism remained the true enemies of the American right.

Heilbrunn is particularly effective in highlighting the fathers and mothers of what became the modern conservative movement and the “Reagan Revolution.” William F. Buckley Jr. attended America First rallies when he was young, launched McCarthyite attacks on American academia, heralded Francisco Franco as an “authentic national hero” who saved Spain from Marxism, argued that Africans “tend to revert to savagery” in self-government, and sounded positively Trumpian in marveling at how Augusto Pinochet looked like a leader out of central casting: “standing erect, big-chested, penetrating eyes.” Another Pinochet fan was Jeane Kirkpatrick, who became a right-wing icon as Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, defending a cast of violent right-wing autocrats across Latin America who suppressed leftists, democracy be damned.

Reagan has been celebrated as a defender of freedom, but he only championed freedom for particular people. In his 1986 State of the Union, he declared: “America will support with moral and material assistance your right not just to fight and die for freedom, but to fight and win freedom—in Afghanistan; Angola; Cambodia and Nicaragua.” Stirring words. But the enemy wasn’t really autocracy; it was communism. Reagan’s allies, funded by the United States, included, in Afghanistan, the Mujahideen precursor of al-Qaeda and the Taliban; in Angola, Jonas Savimbi, the anticommunist rebel who engaged in scorched-earth tactics to pursue power; in Nicaragua, death squads who killed left-wing priests. This same mindset made Reagan a holdout in defending South Africa’s apartheid government against Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, which enjoyed leftist support domestically and internationally.

This doesn’t erase Reagan’s commitment to democratic self-determination for those on the other side of the Iron Curtain, but it does show that it was motivated more by anticommunism than support for universal human rights. In the 1990s a more Lindberghian Republican Party was bound to regenerate. Enter Pat Buchanan, who surged to popularity after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “What we need, is a new nationalism,” he argued, “a new patriotism, a new foreign policy that puts America first, and, not only first, but second and third as well.” Buchanan was an underappreciated bridge from the cold war to Trump, defining MAGA’s targets before there was MAGA: “globalists,” shadowy bankers, political correctness, immigrants, abortionists, and world government.

There should be no confusion about why Trump Republicans sympathize with Russia, the cold war Republicans’ antagonist. It’s simple: the American right didn’t change, but the Russians did. Instead of a communist regime, Russia is now governed by a right-wing autocrat who shares their enemies. “In lavishing praise on Putin and other dictators,” Heilbrunn argues, “Trump wasn’t creating a new style of right-wing politics. Instead, he was building on a long-standing tradition.”

A few years ago I wrote my own book about the rise of global autocracy and the commonalities among right-wing populist autocrats. What became clear in looking at Putin is how the logic of this brand of politics begets more extreme behavior over time. If the state can only be controlled through corruption and the rigging of institutions, the leader will seek ever more control. If civil society is seen as the tool of foreign powers, then it must inevitably be shut down altogether. If information—first television, then social media—is the means of shaping public opinion, then it, too, must be relentlessly controlled. If populism requires a fear of foreign encroachment and an enemy to be vanquished, those impulses can lead to war.

A common characteristic of the world’s new, virulent strain of populism—or wannabe fascism—is that it begets more extreme behavior over time. This has been the case with Putin, Orbán, Modi, Netanyahu, Bukele, Trump, and others from Turkey to Brazil. As the Russian writer Maria Stepanova told me, even before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, violence was normalized in Russia through the relentless and dehumanizing rhetoric on social media directed at anyone who could be deemed an enemy of Putin and his vision. If you are constantly warning your supporters that they face a mortal danger from some amorphous Other, how can you retreat?

This might sound alarmist. And it can be easier to focus a critique of global autocracy (as many neoconservative commentators do) on America’s adversaries: Putin, the Chinese Communist Party, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, and even the impoverished and relatively powerless Cuban Communist Party. But looking at the risk of fascism through that window willfully narrows one’s view and ignores inconvenient truths about how the United States ended up here, teetering on the edge of the wrong side of history.

How will we look back on this moment? It’s possible that the United States is further along Finchelstein’s spectrum than we know. But it’s also true that we still have the opportunity afforded to us by democracy in this year of elections to reject wannabe fascism at the ballot box. Currently, that weighty task rests on the aging shoulders of Joe Biden and a Democratic Party that has been complacent in the face of warning signs about Biden’s political standing and capacity to wage a vigorous campaign. Meanwhile the horrifying attempt to assassinate Trump highlighted the extreme danger of our climate of political violence and recalled incidents from history that foreshadowed further instability. There is, to put it mildly, a deep sense of fear and anxiety in our political life. Are we slipping inexorably into the quicksand of far right politics, or is there some kind of solid ground available—a center that can hold? Americans still get to make that decision, even if they aren’t enthusiastic about this campaign or the candidates running.

If Biden—or some hastily chosen alternative—can somehow win in November, we still won’t, as these books show us, move beyond the ominous nature of our current predicament. The solution lies not just in the election of a president but within our own diverse citizenry and the capacity that our political system offers us to resist despotism, rein in excess, and correct course. Alas, we know too well that democratic norms do not automatically replenish themselves. Our society has a constantly recurring need to ensure that politicians with impulses toward fascism are rejected before they can do the kinds of things that Putin has done.

In writing my book, I interviewed Alexey Navalny, who was fearless in his diagnosis of what had happened to Russia. Leaders like Putin, he warned, wanted to give their opponents a sense of cynicism and apathy—the cynicism that nothing matters and the apathy that nothing can change. After he was poisoned and nearly killed in 2020, I had to complete the mundane task of e-mailing him the quotes that I wanted to use on the record. He had been recovering in Germany but was already preparing to return to Russia and certain imprisonment. His first instinct was to send me a WhatsApp message to ensure it really was me. I have never shared the exchange that followed.

“Sorry for being paranoid,” he wrote.

When I told him that he had more right to be paranoid than just about anyone on earth, he responded, “Funny to hear from the guy who was targeted by Black Cube,” and added a smiley emoji. He was referring to a private intelligence firm composed of former Mossad agents, which had spied on me for murky reasons—just a tiny subplot in the more extreme forms of surveillance and repression that have become increasingly normal in recent years.

Recognizing that it was absurd to focus on clearing quotes for publication, I responded with a summation of what I’d learned from our exchanges:

Well, if there’s one lesson from writing this book, it’s that fundamentally they’re all the same: Putin, Netanyahu, Trump, Black Cube, etc. Obviously with differences in tactics and scale. But in the end, it’s a bunch of corrupt people profiting off of power in a system they’ve rigged to stay in power, which requires that they intimidate anyone who opposes them. Which is why you touch a nerve.

“They’re all the same—couldn’t agree more!” he responded. Shortly after, he flew back to Moscow for one final journey into the heart of darkness, offering his life as a warning to the rest of us about where wannabe fascism can lead.

—June 18, 2024