The f-word is back. Witnessing, directly or through cell phone videos, masked men in black shirts and body armor seize some people—and children—on the streets had already put some people, not already convinced, in mind of fascism; seeing others shot for their defiant actions, or more properly actions taken as defiant, pushed others into viewing the label as fitting the present circumstances of the United States. Others resist it—some believing in, or resorting to, scholarly cavils; yet others viewing the term as a foreign import for a home-grown product; and then another camp, like the Wall Street Journal’s Barton Swaim, arguing that Trump simply cannot be fascist.
Swaim makes several major claims:
Trump “sometimes acts and sounds like a strongman”, dismissing legal limits, engaging in spurious prosecutions, playing with constitutional fire, but most of the time he obeys court orders, and his strongman tendencies are limited to symbolic outbursts—“He likes to name buildings after himself, which is weird but doesn’t hurt anything but sensibilities,” Swaim writes of a president who renamed after himself a living memorial to a famously murdered predecessor. This does the Donald a disservice: the president has also shaken down allies and partners abroad for personal gain, used his office for immense personal enrichment, promoted the careers of friends and families, systematically dismantled expert checks and advisers, suborned corporate fealty, and, albeit just once, engaged in activity to overturn an election so brazen that the only major question is whether it was a coup or a self-coup. Toddlers eventually develop object permanence; one day, God willing, our opinion columnists will too.
He moderates in response to public opinion, as in Minneapolis after the killing of two people and an incursion into an entire metropolitan area. I could point to the vast literature on how authoritarians measure their responses to public opinion as well, but I would instead prefer simply to point out that moderation has vanished in a blaze of TruthSocial posts and ongoing repression.
To be a fascist is to be a Nazi, and hence un-American, and so to use the term is to place “its object outside the company of lawful American actors.” Swaim writes that when Trump calls his adversaries “radical left lunatics” his hyperbole “nonetheless places its targets on a spectrum of American politics”. “The U.S. didn’t fight a world war at the cost of 400,000 lives to rid the world of radical left lunatics,” Swaim contends. The logic is tortured but clear—Nazis are bad and foreign, but radical left lunatics must be purely American. Of course, in reality everyone knows that “socialist”, “communist”, and “radical left” are just synonyms. Swaim, perhaps, has never done much research into the Trumpian oeuvre, the reality of which is much different from the president’s higher-class defenders pretend. The first result for “Trump communist transcript” is to a 2023 speech in which the once and future president pledged to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” That was a reprise of a July 4, 2020, speech about “defeating the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, [and] the looters”. Or earlier this month when the president compared the American radical left to European social democrats who left their continent purportedly cold, hungry, and weak. It’s true the United States never fought a hot world war to oppose radical left thugs, but I do recall that there was a bit of a chilly one directed against Marxists and radical leftists—one that cost quite a few lives and which might have cost a billion or two more if things had gone poorly.
Swaim’s arguments cannot parry more than the weakest thrust. I am uninterested in them because of what they say. Rather, I am interested in his column because of what he uses these reeds as the foundation for: the claim that using the f-word is simply unthinkable:
American public figures have a duty to think better of their country than to believe it capable of putting a fascist in the White House. Some of them might ponder the possibility that he wouldn’t be there at all were it not for excesses they cheered at the time.
The logic is clear, even undebatable. The United States is good; fascism is bad; nothing bad can be good; therefore the United States cannot be fascist; therefore anyone who claims the United States partakes of fascism is bad. Given these axioms, it is all but tautological—and even the electoral argument, which might seem to be a non sequitur to the casual reader, follows from these premises: why would the American people vote for someone who thinks the American people would vote for a fascist? In that case, they’d vote for the other person, no matter, presumably, what their beliefs might be.
Well, all arguments can be shown to be true if you fix the premises right. Let me define terms and I will turn your grandmother into a toboggan; let me define an assumption or two and I’ll have you winning the Olympics with her.
The radicalizing moment in any social upheaval comes when the assumptions are called into question. This is the very quickening of new thoughts and perspective; it is when assumptions are scrutinized that we can see whether our mental frameworks promote reason or only rationalizations for comforting belief.
That moment is a fragile time. To have such questions raised is uncomfortable; to feel the ground shift under one’s feet is frightening. Comfort promises safety. A new perspective might be snuffed out.
Even those who pride themselves on rigor can fall prey. Those who defend a proposition with what they think is rigor might put themselves into a position in which their assumptions rather than their judgment make their arguments.
I think of Lord Denning, who presided over the case of the Birmingham Six. The Six, a group of Northern Irish Catholics who had settled in England, were arrested on suspicion that they had had something to do with the bombings of pubs, killing and wounding dozens, in Birmingham. They were interrogated roughly, beaten in some cases, and charged with murder; the confessions scared out of them by truncheon and dogs were the principal evidence against them. Convicted, they were sent to prison, where they were further abused.
They filed a civil suit for damages. Lord Denning, the judge in the matter, threw out the suit on the grounds the charges of official wrongdoing were so serious they could not be true:
Just consider the course of events if this action is allowed to proceed to trial. If the six men fail, it will mean that much time and money will have been expended by many people for no good purpose. If the six men win, it will mean that the police were guilty of perjury, that they were guilty of violence and threats, that the confessions were involuntary and were improperly admitted in evidence and that the convictions were erroneous. That would mean that the Home Secretary would either have to recommend they be pardoned or he would have to remit the case to the Court of Appeal. This is such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say: It cannot be right that these actions should go any further.
If the men were right, then to have that uncovered would have thrown the legitimacy of the system into question. An appalling vista indeed. Guilty or innocent, the men could not pursue their claim.
Eventually, following journalistic inquiries and the intervention of a Conservative Home Secretary, the case was tried again, and then again; finally, in the early Nineties, sixteen years after their arrest, the convictions were overturned and the men compensated—somewhat—for their troubles. An appalling vista.
It would indeed be appalling if a society produced an execrable result. It would be more appalling to rule out the possibility that abuses and evils can exist because, should they exist, they would be abusive and evil. The appalling vista might be the view from our window. We should at least open the curtain.
Swaim's line is exactly that of the reactionary centrist attacking the left
2016-2024 You can't call tens of millions of Americans fascists/racists/deplorables
2026 Ok, so it's more like a hundred million, and they're worse than anything you said, but it's inly because you called them nasty names
Paul Musgrave exposes a failure of the Fourth Estate. The press exists to test power, not to protect assumptions.
The failure here is editorial. At the Wall Street Journal, editors and publishers chose closure over inquiry and profitability over scrutiny. Journalists write. Editors decide what to publish.
In Barton Swaim’s argument, fascism is ruled out by axiom, not evidence: America is good, fascism is bad, therefore the two cannot coexist. That is not judgment. It is institutional self-protection achieved through definitional exclusion.
Musgrave’s warning is simple. The danger is not authoritarian drift. The danger is when editors declare such outcomes unnameable.
At that point, the Fourth Estate no longer guards the constitution. It becomes the editor of democratic decline.