NYU Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Yale Professor Jason Stanley on Trump’s Brand of Authoritarianism

From The Intercept's 31 October "Intercepted" podcast with Jeremy Scahill:

I’m joined now by two scholars of fascism. Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University. She’s the author of several books, among them, “Fascist Modernities” and “Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema.” Her forthcoming book is called “Strongmen: How The Rise, Why They Succeed, How They Fall.” She’s also a columnist for CNN.com.

And Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky professor of philosophy at Yale University. Stanley is the author of “Know How,” “Language in Context,” “Knowledge and Practical Interests,” as well as “How Propaganda Works.” His latest book, which was released earlier this year, is “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.” Ruth, Jason, welcome both of you to Intercepted.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Nice to be here.

Jason Stanley: Thank you very much. Great to be here.

Jeremy Scahill: Jason, I want to begin with you. In your latest book, you talk about how you’re going to talk about fascism in the book, and you say that you’ve chosen the label “fascism” for ultranationalism of some variety — ethnic, religious, cultural — with the nation represented in the person of an authoritarian leader who speaks on its behalf. As Donald Trump declared in his Republican National Convention speech in July 2016: “I’m your voice.” Jason, do you believe that what we are witnessing with Donald Trump’s ascent and the way he’s governing—is this fascism?

Jason Stanley: I make a distinction in my book between fascist politics and ideology and fascist government. Fascist government is when the institutions start to be corrupted and corroded by loyalty to the leader, and they start to collapse. And different fascist government appears in different forms. The resulting institutions after they’ve been taken over can look different—differently in different countries. And I don’t think there’s much of a doubt that what we’re seeing, including in the run-up to these midterm elections, are fascist tactics, classic fascist tactics.

RBG: I agree with Jason’s definition of fascism, and I agree that we’re seeing the use of rhetoric and tactics that remind us of fascism. I simply like to make a distinction. I like to use fascism only for situations where there’s a one-party state, because I think it’s very useful for us to see what is different and what stays the same over history. And also to recognize that we have rights. We are still in a — very flawed, but — we’re still in a democracy, and we need to exercise the rights we have.

Jason Stanley: But I think right now we are heading towards, more and more, a one-party state. We’re seeing that emerge with the Republican Party leaders exhibiting what Arendt calls “loyalty to party over parties.”

Jeremy Scahill: At the same time — and I understand the distinction that you’re making — you do have this reality that Donald Trump — and I don’t think it’s based on him reading historical texts, but — there are many tactics that Donald Trump uses that seem as though they are pulled straight out of either Mussolini’s history or figures like Joseph Goebbels in Germany.

This notion of creating a mythic past, the notion of victimhood for the real citizens of the country, combined with policies of warehousing children, stripping them from their parents — now he’s floating the idea of removing birthright citizenship. I mean, there are a lot of tactics that Trump is using that are just sort of dyed-in-the-wool fascist tactics from history.

RBG: I agree with that. And the way that the GOP has fallen — like in classic textbook case — has fallen into being the enabler. And being able to predict exactly what Trump would do and how the GOP would behave because of my knowledge of fascism, I simply think that “fascistic” and saying that “we are in fascism” are two different things. But there’s no question that we’re headed for what I’m calling a new authoritarianism.

These are terms that are used interchangeably. But I do think the existence of other parties, still, is a big distinction. In our case, in particular, we’re not Putin’s Russia, we’re not Erdogan’s Turkey, and we’re in the middle of a battle for the survival of democracy. So we are still in a multiparty system.

Jeremy Scahill: You know, Jason, part of — as I was preparing this and reading both of your writings, I started to sort of wonder if applying the label fascist to Trump lets him off the hook in a way, because it can be dismissed as, oh, you’re comparing Trump to Hitler, or you’re comparing Trump to Mussolini, when in reality, Trump was not a product of reading, you know, Mussolini and his men or Hitler and his men.

In many ways, Trump is a product of the worst components of America’s history, of American political history, and in fact, we know from historical documents that Hitler himself in Mein Kampf praised race laws and race practices in the United States and said that Germany should be looking to the United States for inspiration on how the United States dealt with black people and how that could be applied to Germany.

So, is there a way in which just even putting out the term fascism there undermines the very serious case that we could make that Trump is born of the worst components of American history and in fact is a product of the American political system?

Jason Stanley: When I use the term fascist, in no way do I mean to join the problematic nature of what I regard as the “crisis of democracy” literature like Madeline Albright, which acts like fascism is some foreign European force. No, in Mein Kampf, as you rightly say, Hitler says, when he’s talking about Germany’s lax immigration laws that are the mockery of the world, he says there is a country that is taking initial steps towards being a national state in the way he describes in Mein Kampf, and that is the United States.

And he refers to our then-immigration laws, including the 1924 Immigration Act. I think that’s what he has in mind in that passage. Bradley Hart’s book shows how fascist the ideology was in the 1930s in the United States.

Few self-respecting American fascists would call themselves by the term fascist, because it’s not an American word. And fascism is ultranationalism, and so, American fascist ideology would not come packaged with vocabulary taken from some Eurotrash language like Italian. It would be cloaked in American iconography, so the term carries these foreign implications. The ideology that the term expresses, I think, as you absolutely rightly say, is homegrown.

Jeremy Scahill: I also want to encourage people to watch the documentary that my colleagues at Field of Vision did last year, Marshall Curry was the filmmaker — “A Night at the Garden.” It was held at the German-American Bund in February of 1939 at Madison Square Garden, and it was a big rally of American Nazis. [Free Expression: watch it right here.] 

Fritz Kuhn: Fellow Americans, American patriots. I’m sure I do not come before you tonight as a complete stranger. You all have heard of me through the Jewish-controlled press as a creature with horns, a cloven hoof, and a long tail. We, with American ideals, demand that our government shall be returned to the American people who founded it.

JS: So, that was from the film “A Night at the Garden.” People can watch that at fieldofvision.org. Ruth, one other sort of historically important point I think that’s relevant to bring up is — we can say, oh, well, this isn’t something that is a direct analog to fascism right now, because we have a multiparty system, because we are having elections, because Trump has not declared himself president for life in an official way, although he does joke about it sometimes.

But couldn’t someone make an argument — yes, because we’re only two years into this, but the direction that we are heading in definitely has historical analogs in how Mussolini consolidated power and in how Hitler consolidated power, how General Franco consolidated power? Isn’t it a fair point to say, yes, you may be technically correct that we’re not living in that right now, but all of the warning signs from history are screaming out for us to recognize this for what it is?

RBG: Yes, and — you know, in the case of Mussolini there was a two-year period that’s very instructive where he was head of a coalition government — and Hitler had the same. It’s just that Hitler had already been trying to get to power for 10 years, and he wanted power immediately. You know, Mussolini used to joke about staying in power for 20 years. His personality profile, the way he treated and humiliated his allies in Parliament is very, very similar.

You know, one of the reasons he killed Giacomo Matteotti, who was the head of the Socialist Party —even I was taught in former years that it was just because he was anti-fascist. Well, turned out Matteotti was about to denounce Mussolini and his family and the National Fascist Party for corruption. And so, he was killed for a classic kleptocracy. Mussolini was put under investigation, and it was to escape investigation that he declared dictatorship.

So, these transition moments are very, very important, but they are transitions. When we — when things evolve, and — I believe that we are heading toward, you could say, a militarized authoritarian surveillance state. It will look different than the fascism of the 20th century looked. But we are heading toward that, but we are in the transition, and we still have time to do something about it.

JS: What would be, Ruth, the sort of next steps that people should be aware of based on your understanding of history?

RBG: One of the issues is, when you have someone like this in power, there’s so much going on, and they hit you in so many directions — which is a strategy, by the way. This is a Bannon “blitzkrieg” strategy, that it’s hard to know what to do first. So, you have population management, the very significant move that they were trying to have the National Park Service not allow protest, and GOP legislators introduced several bills to criminalize protest.

One thing I find interesting, which recurs in the past, is Trump is this charismatic figure. And they come along every so often, you’ve mentioned some of them. And they seem to coalesce the kind of anxieties and frustrations of a given historical moment, but the conservative elites—in this case, GOP—back them and not other people, because they believe that they can use them as a vehicle to do the things they’ve been wanting to do for a long time—the racist, the voter suppression, all the things that the GOP has been trying to activate and was very frustrated it couldn’t do under Obama, right? This is a kind of mutual using of the authoritarian and his backers, right? And so, many of the repressive, authoritarian-minded things going on right now are being introduced by the GOP.

JS: Well, it’s like the journalist Allan Nairn said, that Trump dragged the elites of the Republican Party kicking and screaming back into power and has been able to consolidate that power in a way that a Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio never would’ve have been able to.

Jason, one of the fascinating parts of your book is when you talk about the way that fascists have used or publicized false charges of corruption. And I just want to share with people part of the point that you’re making here. You say, “publicizing false charges of corruption while engaging in corrupt practices is typical of fascist politics, and anti-corruption campaigns are frequently at the heart of fascist political movements.”

We just had this huge New York Times exposé — you know, months upon months of work showing in the clearest terms how corruption and financial crimes made Trump who he is today, in excruciating detail. And yet, Trump is constantly lambasting the corrupt political establishment, corrupt Hillary Clinton. Everyone is corrupt except him.

Jason Stanley: Yes. So, this is a theme, and Kate Manne in her book Down Girl notes this about the 2016 election. And she says this also happened in Australia with Julia Gillard — when a female prime minister ran, she was accused of being corrupt.

And then, I was teaching Dubois’ Black Reconstruction. Dubois emphasizes that the story that white historians tell of the end of Reconstruction is that Reconstruction ended, and black citizens in the South were no longer able to vote, and the North accepted that because supposedly the resulting governments were corrupt. And Dubois, of course, documents in extensive detail how false that is. And he says, it appears that corruption just meant that 4 million black citizens finally got to vote.

And then I looked at Richard Grunberger’s 1975 book on the 12-year history of the Reich, and he also —with befuddlement — says, many people seem to think the Nazis were, like, these pure-minded anti-Semites who never would go for corruption, but a lot of them didn’t care about killing the Jews. They just wanted Jewish money and property.

So, you see it in multiple literatures that corruption seems to mean the wrong people are in charge. Fascist politics is a politics of purity, and corruption here means something impure is coming in, foreigners are coming in, nonwhites or women are destabilizing the hierarchy of power.

And if you think about U.S. politics, like what happened in Michigan with the emergency manager act, you were able to convince white citizens of Michigan that all black-led, black-majority cities were corrupt and needed to have their mayors and city councils fired. It’s a big Midwestern theme in America that black-majority cities are, are sort of a fortiori corrupt, because corrupt in this kind of politics means the wrong people are in charge.

RBG: In the case of Hitler and Mussolini, for example, corruption was used to bind people to the leader and to the state just as much as violence and propaganda. But it’s true that we learned about both these men that they were evil in so many ways, but they work almost like ascetics, and they didn’t care about money. And this is particularly pronounced if you — in Italy today — “Oh, Mussolini just cared about the nation. He worked so hard.”

These people were as corrupt as Putin and Erdogan and Trump are today because it really was used not only at the level of the major officials but down to the local party bosses, the neighborhood people. So, corruption is very important in getting loyalty, and authoritarian systems depend on these hierarchical chains of loyalty, going up to the leader.

Jeremy Scahill: Trump, his speaking style, which seems quite intentional, is — he speaks with a lot of vagueness. And he’ll say things like, “We’re going to figure out what’s going on” or “What the hell is going on?” Is that uniquely Trump, or is this also something that you found in your historical research of sort of authoritarian figures leaving things open to interpretation?

And we know when Trump says — you know, “I’m a nationalist, why isn’t this, you know, acceptable anymore? I’m a nationalist” — we know who he was talking to on that, and Trump can say, “Oh no, I just — I just love my country.” But the use of terms that—he knows how his base is going to respond to it, but he uses it in such a way that it gives him an out or gives his defenders an out to say that’s not what he really meant.

RBG: Yeah. There are these techniques that he uses that are consistent with a century of these rulers. One is the use of coded language. Most recently we have “globalist” versus “nationalist.” Another is jokes between quotes, and trial balloons, which is what I call them, where the leader floats ideas that are at the time unacceptable or unthinkable to the mainstream, and in doing so introduces these reprehensible things that then can bubble through, and they become part of the authoritarian shifting the boundaries of what’s possible.

And that’s very important in corruption and violence, to shift the boundaries of what is possible, which is how we got mass murder in the first place.

And the third tactic is the — creating confusion and uncertainty. So when Trump says “we have to see what’s going on” — and he did this very early in his campaign — and in that little phrase is contained the germs of a later project of even declaring martial law, shutting down government, sending troops to the border until we figure out “what’s going on.” And it also is designed to make you doubt things that you knew to be true. It’s a very toxic and destructive language politics that Trump has mastered.

JS: Well, and, Jason, you also write about the necessary mythology that comes with Trump’s whole spiel, that America was once great. What he’s really sort of telegraphing there is, there was a time when white people were in full control of this country until the immigrants, the blacks, the uppity women, the Jews, the globalists came to steal America’s greatness. And one of the stats in your book that you cite is 45 percent of Trump supporters believe that whites are the most discriminated-against racial group in America and that 54 percent of Trump supporters believe that Christians are the most persecuted religious group in America.

Jason Stanley: When the dominant group is made to feel like victims, that seems to be the culture that breeds the success of this kind of politics. The Protocols is sort of reflective of this, that —

Jeremy Scahill: You’re referring to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which has been published in many languages and many iterations, and — correct me if I’m wrong here — it was intended to give the impression that sort of elite Jews had gotten together and developed their roadmap for global conquest.

Jason Stanley: Right. So, the Protocols presents liberalism as a sort of attempt to displace the power of the dominant group and replace it by Jews. So, the idea is that all movements for equality are really masks for domination. And so, at that moment when you find the dominant racial group being made to feel like this enormous victim of feminism, of minority groups, that’s when you know the politics is taking effective control. Of course, it distracts them from what they’re really victims of, which is the people funding this kind of politics, which, as Ruth mentioned, are very often business elites.

Jeremy Scahill: We all continue to be sickened by this terroristic attack on the synagogue in Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh. You also have had black churches shot up. One of the most heinous of them took place before Trump came to office, but it’s the same sentiments that are embraced by the people that commit these.

You also have this sort of Proud Boys phenomenon of these, you know, heavy-drinking white nationalist thugs that are running around beating people. You had the killing of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville and then Trump saying, “Hey, there are, you know, good people on both sides.” Isn’t this really just an unofficial enforcement squad for the ideology that Trump is promoting through his presidency?

RBG: It’s worse than that. These rulers, when they’re still on their way up, they weaponize their bodies and their words. Authoritarians always tell you what they’re going to do. Duterte told Philippines before the election, during his presidential campaign, “I don’t recommend you vote for me because if you vote for me, it’s going to be bloody. I’m going to be killing people.”

You had just very recently, Bolsonaro in Brazil, where he said, “I’m going to be driving these people, letting them rot in prison.” He used very, very specific threats. It’s not just that the ruler espouses hateful, murderous ideologies like Hitler did. It’s that there’s—many of these people personally let you know that they are capable of violence, that they are capable of ordering violence without, like, brushing their hair in the morning. So, Trump, on January 24, 2016, for me, it was game over. Game over. He said —

DJT: They say I have the most loyal people. Did you ever see that? Where I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters — OK? It’s, like, incredible.

RBG: So, it’s a two-part thing. One, that he could actually shoot somebody, he could commit violence. Two, that nothing would happen to him. So, it’s all laid out. If we talk about corruption, about getting away with murder, about both-sides-ism — which is designed to protect the aggressor side, so far as in Charlottesville — he was letting you know what would happen. And the thing with Trump is that he’s been consistent.

Jason Stanley: The fascist state’s refusal to condemn the extrajudicial violence has a particular linguistic role because the state licenses it by not explicitly condemning it. But at the same time, the state uses its extrajudicial nature to say, “Look, we’re not the extremists. Look, you can see the extremists — they’re out there.”

It’s important to the white nationalist movement to have the people in ties and suits in government. And they need the extrajudicial violence on the street to say, “That’s not us. Look, just look at how we’re dressed versus how they’re dressed.” But you can tell the links between them, not just because of the clear overlap in language — minus a few words. Instead of white nationalist, you just use nationalist.

Instead of adding Jew to globalist, instead of saying, you know, “It’s the Jews that control the press, It’s the Jews that are behind lax immigration laws,” you say it’s the globalists. And then you don’t denounce the extrajudicial violence. You know, you pronounce it in certain extreme cases where you just have to, but you leave it crucially ambiguous at times. And then that has this licensing effect.

Jeremy Scahill: Trump has actually literally told his supporters, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

DJT: But it’s all working out. Just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.

JS: All of this stuff that you’re reading about or hearing, that they want to tell you is reality, isn’t reality.

RBG: One thing I’m quite concerned about, which is one of the last pieces of the puzzle in America — militias. If these people become activated in some way, they will fall into place as the paramilitary component. So, all of this is true, but when we have the actual leader of the country who has declared himself a violent potential killer, that’s a whole other level. And in fact, when Mussolini announced dictatorship, he made the speech to Parliament. He said, “If fascism has been a criminal organization, well, I’m the head of that organization.” So, that was it.

JS: I don’t think we as a society get how serious this is at this moment. And it does seem like the Democrats are totally incapable of rising to the necessary occasion of confronting what we’re witnessing right now, not just with the electoral politics, but also with their lack of a spine. On key issues, the elites of the Democratic Party have actually backed Trump.

They’ve given him sweeping surveillance authorities, colluded with him to massively increase the military budget. There is a pipeline of paramilitary and military weaponry and ordnance coming back from Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, and going straight to police departments in this country.

Look, we can talk about how offensive Trump’s words are until we’re blue in the face—or, as Ruth, as you’ve just been describing, how they actually can be lethal. But at the same time, the Democrats are not saying, “We need to shut this down.” They are supporting some of the biggest mechanisms of state power that someone like Trump has available to him.

Jason Stanley: Right. Trump is directly addressing the police in his speeches and his actions, to basically militarize police to prevent protests. Look at what happened in Ferguson with protesters met with astonishing military force. And it seems to me when Trump is up there speaking to the police, he’s calling for the police to take his side. And he [said], “I’m going to support you, and I’m going to back you.”

He’s got ICE. He has an entirely new military force that he’s clearly speaking to. The infiltration of local police forces by white supremacists and white nationalist ideology—and that Trump is representing himself consistently and repeatedly as their friend. You know, when my grandmother in her memoir describes National Socialism, she talks about the police being allies until late in the 1930s. And so, switching the police force — that’s something one has to pay attention to.

RBG: One way philosophically to look at this time is, we have been handed an enormous lesson in the operation of power on multiple levels. One is, Trump came up saying that he’s going to drain the swamp. Well, not only is he not really doing that, he is showing us he is the swamp. Trump is the swamp, and he’s showing us exactly how the swamp operates. Look how much we’ve learned already about the way that financial corruption operates, about why people don’t show their tax returns.

The optimist in me thinks that we can put that to use, and one day, perhaps we’ll spark reform. In terms of the Democrats not getting it, we also have a lesson in the slow erosion of conscience when you hold power for too long. Because to get rid of Trump in 2020—because, unfortunately, I feel that he has a good chance to win, because of this problem of not coming up with a proper opposition. You need to treat him with his own medicine, meaning, not go low, not certainly become racist or violent, but to have that charisma and the ability to inspire people.

But the party machine has not been able to embrace those people. It’s not just that the GOP has split with never-Trumpers. Perhaps there’ll be some kind of revolution within the Democratic Party. It didn’t work with Bernie Sanders — the mainstream made sure of that — but I don’t think that all of those lessons will be just thrown away.

Jeremy Scahill: Well, and let’s remember, the fate of the world is not entirely on electoral politics, as, as both of you know from your research history, it’s filled with ordinary people banding together and resisting in times of extreme authoritarianism or danger to the world.

RBG: There’s been a huge renaissance of civic engagement in this country, and not only ordinary people helping, driving people to vote. Many civil servants who were in the Obama administration who have left — or lawyers who have left high paying jobs to go work for advocacy groups that are doing a legal resistance to Trump. These are bipartisan efforts — former diplomats and civil servants, all of this.

Jason Stanley: And we also have a long history in this country, due to the black American resistance, of fighting fake news. From Ida B. Wells and Dubois to the present day, we have a long history of black Americans banding together with civil resistance and, I mean, Black Lives Matter, Ferguson. This kind of resistance is part of our DNA as Americans. And so, I think we actually have a kind of tradition and advantage over other countries when it comes to this.

Jeremy Scahill: Ruth Ben-Ghiat, thank you so much for joining us.

RBG: Thank you.

JS: Jason Stanley, thank you as well for joining us.

Jason Stanley: Thank you so much, Jeremy.

Jeremy Scahill: Ruth Ben-Ghiat is professor of history and Italian studies at New York University. She’s the author of “Fascist Modernities” and “Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema.” Her forthcoming book is called “Strongmen: How The Rise, Why They Succeed, How They Fall.” And Jason Stanley is a philosophy professor at Yale University. He is the author of “Know How,” “Language in Context,” “Knowledge and Practical Interests,” as well as “How Propaganda Works.” His latest book, released this year, is “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.”