Portside

Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America
Edited by Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins
W.W. Norton
ISBN-13: 9781324074397

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins has edited a book which he hoped would finally put to bed the hotly contested Fascism Debate that arose from Trump’s 2016 candidacy, and which has found itself renewed intermittently, depending on election cycles or new political crises. A PhD student of Samuel Moyn’s at Columbia University, so far in his career he has followed closely in his Doktorvater’s intellectual and political footsteps. His polemical takes on social media will likely be familiar to those who follow him on Twitter. This book – or rather, its introduction – constitutes a no less polemical intervention. So closely has Steinmetz-Jenkins followed his mentor’s lead, it has even been suggested that Moyn plopped the assignment in Steinmetz-Jenkins’ lap. One can perhaps imagine why; it is rare for a collection of essays on a topic to have as explicit an agenda as this one. As Steinmetz-Jenkins puts it in his introduction, he seeks to “put the fascism debate to rest.” The sheer quantity of endorsements for this volume, from the elite circles of American academe, would seem to add weight to an apparently decisive blow that Steinmetz-Jenkins sought to land with this volume.

Little did Steinmetz-Jenkins know that, within a year of its publication, his volume would go from being a triumphant coup-de-grace against the liberal tyrannophobes, to an artifact of the shortest victory lap ever taken. Trump’s decisive acts since his second inaugural – from deporting resident aliens without due process; to mass firings within the federal bureaucracy; to populating the leadership of that bureaucracy with a gallery of ideologically-driven appointments wholly lacking in experience or expertise; to initiating the end of birth-right citizenship – have astonishingly led the most trenchant critics to finally concede that yes, Trumpism is fascism. Where actual experts of fascism like Robert Paxton waited no longer than J6 to “call it,” self-identified leftist intellectuals like Moyn or Corey Robin, whose expertise lay elsewhere but whose social following is much larger, were insistent right up to January 2025 that Trumpism could not be fascism. Within five days of each other, in March both Robin and Moyn threw in the towel. Their much more pugnacious satrap, Daniel Bessner, more petulantly declared that he was “exiting” the debate. Within a few weeks, two of the most persistent voices of the “It Can’t Happen Here” side of this running argument of ten years duration joined the “It Has Happened Here” side. The raison-d’être of this volume vanished. Steinmetz-Jenkins was left holding the bag.

The body chapters of this collection are all pre-published, and one presumes Steinmetz-Jenkins curated his list based on what he perceived – largely correctly – to be signal contributions to a broader debate about what fascism historically meant, how it was defined, and whose interests it serves. Classics of leftist analysis are thrown in – not least Trotsky and Angela Davis – along with what seem to be seminal contributions to the current debate, such as those of De Grazia, Gordon, and Evans. While the selections on current events are meant to lend the appearance of balance, the weight of the contributions tilts very heavily, with only Churchwell’s and Stanley’s chapters unambiguously stating that Trumpism is fascism. And the “last word” of each section favors Steinmetz-Jenkins’ own side. Curiously, some of the pieces make no mention of fascism at all, preferring instead to launch jeremiads against liberalism. Imagine a volume on the politics of female bodily autonomy edited by the American Life League which makes a putative attempt to include both sides of the debate but concludes with a chapter by Clarence Thomas. The results here are similarly orchestrated and similarly predictable.

The real question to be asked is not how Steinmetz-Jenkins’ mentors finally changed their minds, but what kept them so long? A clue was offered by Moyn, a contributor to this volume, who tweeted after Paxton declared J6 to be fascist: “FWIW, my reluctance was and is rooted less in the analytical propriety of the term as in my sense of the likely political consequences of certain framings.”

To wit: if we call it fascism, we declare the wolves have indeed arrived and we must do all we can to stave them off. Including coalescing with the very “centrist” liberals that socialists viewed as their main ideological adversary, ever since Senator Hilary Clinton voted for the Second Iraq War. Leftist scholars like Robin, Moyn, Bessner, Steinmetz-Jenkins and others found in Jacobin Magazine a focal point for articulating this vision. As Jacobin contributors saw it in 2016, Bernie Sanders was their opportunity to tear down a Clintonite, neoliberal status quo; liberal warnings that Trump was a fascist had to either be overreactions or knowing deceptions meant to stifle their burgeoning movement.

This political posture then informed the scholarly takes. When Dylan Riley, for instance, insisted in 2015 that “Donald Trump is not a fascist, and yes it matters very much that he is not one,” the cat of leftist scholarship on this question was let out of the bag: “In historical terms this process of disintegration opens up opportunities for the Left. The collapse of a major US political party, if it were to happen, can only be welcomed. In this context we should reject absolutely the hysterical lesser-evilism implicit in calling him a ‘fascist’; it is both historically inaccurate and politically disastrous because it plays into the logic of supporting whomever emerges from the Democratic Party primary.” Without perhaps intending to, Riley at that early point gave the game entirely away. Until Robin and Moyn finally signaled their concession that Trumpism was fascism – because their particular Rubicon of fascist praxis had finally been crossed – this politically overdetermined agenda united leftist scholars and led to some very tortured scholarly positions. Whether it was Moyn deciding that historical comparison was now methodologically suspect; or Robin insisting that for something to be fascist it must have absolutely no precedent; or Steinmetz-Jenkins explaining away as “neurosis” the entirety of meticulous scholarship on Trumpism as fascism, the contortions were self-evident. The possibility that fascism historically rears its head as a set of articulated demands before it turns to the “praxis” of violence was always discounted in these arguments; such critics would have proclaimed Hitler not a fascist after the Beer Hall Putsch, since it failed. Outside this volume, Riley made an even more outlandish claim that Trumpism couldn’t be fascism because the Soviet Union no longer existed. This was only one particularly strained effort at a sort of “originalism,” akin to being told that a Sunday mass couldn’t be Catholic because it wasn’t delivered in Latin.

We must consider the possibility that self-described socialists in this debate so strenuously denied that Trump is a fascist, not because they didn’t see it, but because it got in the way of their politics. As published intellectuals with followings on social media, they saw an opportunity to become “citizen scholars” and convince their following that here was an opportunity to strike a blow against capitalism. Rallying around Clinton or Biden threw up a barrier to this deeper objective. In this framing, Trumpist racism, xenophobia and misogyny became epiphenomenal to the question of class – the symptoms of bigotry could not be treated without dealing with its perceived roots in neoliberalism. Pausing the struggle against liberalism would forfeit what they saw as a real moment of opportunity. If Trump was publicly acknowledged as a fascist, this eschatology would be compromised. So, the argument had to be refuted; politics had to overrule evidence. Underneath this insistence, for many it was hoped that Trump would be the trigger for a Marxist resurrection.

Occasionally, the anti-anti-fascists did let slip. In a since-deleted tweet from November 12 2020, volume contributor Nikhil Singh expressed the view: “I don’t care if Trump is personally fascist. I may even agree that his political sympathies run in that direction. I do not agree that we’re in a political situation devolving into fascism; such descriptions at do not illuminate our actual political challenges.”

Here was something of a confession: yes, it’s fascism. Where others denied it could be, Singh at least conceded it was. Daniel Bessner, in a since-deleted tweet three days after J6, stated: “I don’t see liberals as the far right; I see liberals as more of a threat to democracy and the general well-being than the far right.”

Here again was a bald statement from a volume contributor that the fight against Trumpism was at best a distraction. Liberals were the greater danger.

That socialist voices couldn’t agree as to whether Trumpism was fascism, or that it was but that this didn’t matter, reveals a deeper tension. Do we deny Trump is fascist, or openly admit we don’t care? Denying Trump’s fascism would have its utility, since this would be a necessary step to overcome the “neurosis” being generated by liberals who were abusing the f-word as part of their own ploy to snuff out the Bernie challenge. Calling it fascism but adding “liberalism is worse” sounded calamitously partisan and emotionally dissonant. But all that quickly became irrelevant with Moyn’s and Robin’s volte-face. Bessner, for his part, has indicated that he has “nothing more to say” on this question. Which leaves only Steinmetz-Jenkins, who two weeks after Moyn’s concession was still mocking the “eternally annoying fascism debate” – presumably not a judgment on his own work on this volume. That his own mentor has now joined the neurotics, however, gives us pause to consider whether Steinmetz-Jenkins’ characterization wasn’t perhaps a case of projection.

https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/what-happened-here

“I have since turned out to be wrong. They have set off multiple conflagrations. And I have been shaken out of my skepticism.” https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/mahmoud-khalil-and-a-…

https://jacobin.com/2015/12/donald-trump-fascism-islamophobia-nativism

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii114/articles/dylan-riley-what-is-tru…