Why historians are now using the f-word to describe what’s happening in America.
Some of you may have seen this already, but for those who haven’t: after years of thinking about it, I’ve finally started a YouTube channel!
This is something I’d wanted to do for a long time, but somehow never got around to. It always seemed too much work and too far outside what I knew how to do. But then I found myself surrounded by some brilliant colleagues at The School for Moral Ambition who showed me that it’s actually very doable. And of course, the costs of producing good video have come down a lot in the past few years.
So from now on, my plan is to publish a big essay every one to two months, and you’ll be able to either watch it as a video or – if you prefer the written word – read it right here on Substack.
The subject of my first essay is not a happy one. People have sometimes described me as ‘the optimistic historian’, but I’ve never liked the label. Optimism suggests a kind of complacency, a sense that we don’t need to worry, that things will turn out all right in the end. On the contrary. If there’s one belief underpinning all my books, it’s that history teaches us things can be radically different. Radically better, yes. But also radically worse.
That’s why it’s so important to be clear-eyed about what’s happening, while alsodeveloping a positive agenda for how the world could be wildly better. Maybe especially in this era of AI (where a positive agenda is almost entirely lacking), but that’s a subject for another essay. Today, let’s talk about the bad news.
Here’s the video. And if you prefer to read, the script is below.
I want to talk to you about a word. A word that many serious historians, including some of the world’s leading experts, are now using to describe what’s happening in America. A word that makes some people uncomfortable. A word that others think is an exaggeration.
Fascism.
I understand why that word provokes resistance. For many of us, fascism is inseparable from the Holocaust, from the industrial murder of six million Jews. Using it for anything else can feel like a trivialization, a disrespect to that unimaginable horror.
For a long time, I’ve also been hesitant to use this word. As a historian, I know how it gets thrown around carelessly. But in the last few months, I’ve changed my mind – and I want to explain why.
In this essay, I’ll make the case – carefully and precisely, based on what leading historians and scholars are telling us – that yes, we can call what’s happening in America fascism. And more importantly: why we must.
Let me first acknowledge that there is no single definition of fascism. If you ask ten scholars, you’ll get ten slightly different answers.
Robert Paxton is probably the greatest living historian of fascism. He’s now in his nineties. Paxton spent his whole career being careful with the label, and has long resisted applying it to Trumpism. When a lot of commentators started calling Trump a fascist in 2016, he pushed back. Paxton worried that the f-word was being used too loosely. That it had become, as he put it, “more heat than light.”
But then came January 6th, 2021. Paxton watched the mob storm the Capitol. He watched the violence, the Confederate flags, the gallows erected for Vice President Mike Pence. He looked at his television and was immediately reminded of Mussolini’s Blackshirts marching on Rome in 1922, and of the fascist riot at the French Parliament in 1934.
That day the careful, cautious historian – the man who’d spent sixty years warning people not to overuse the f-word – changed his mind. The invasion of the Capitol, he wrote a few days later, “removes my objection to the fascist label. The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.”
When a journalist asked him about it again, Paxton was even more direct:
“It’s bubbling up from below in very worrisome ways, and that’s very much like the original fascisms. It’s the real thing. It really is.”
So how do we identify fascism if there’s no precise definition? The philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein had a really useful concept: family resemblances. Think about what brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts have in common. Not everyone has the same nose. But you see the same eyes here, the same chin there: enough overlapping similarities that you recognize them as part of the same family.
That’s how fascism works. Italian fascism looked different from German Nazism. But they shared enough traits that we recognize them as the same species. And what scholars have done is identify the key traits – the family resemblances – that fascist movements share.
Now, I don’t mean to be exhaustive here, but let me walk you through ten of the most important ones. Here are the fascist traits that we can clearly see, and that make what’s happening now different than ‘normal’ authoritarianism:
First: a mythic past and national rebirth. Every fascist movement invokes a golden age that has been lost and must be restored. In that sense, “Make America Great Again” is the very structure of fascist thought. It posits a time when the nation was pure, strong, uncorrupted, before it was betrayed by – in Trump’s words – ‘the enemy from within’. Fascism promises that the old order will be torn down so that something pure can rise from the ashes.
Second: victimhood and humiliation: The fascist claims that the dominant group (the “real” Germans, the “real” Americans) is the victim of a vast conspiracy. They’re being “replaced,” attacked by elites, by globalists, by immigrants. And victimhood demands revenge. The emotional engine of fascism is humiliation: the burning sense that wehave been disrespected, that our rightful place has been stolen. Or as Trump said: “I am your retribution”.
Third: hierarchy and dehumanization. Fascism divides the world into a clear “us and them”. For example, Trump has called immigrants “animals” who are “poisoning the blood” of the nation. J.D. Vance wrote a glowing recommendation for a book called Unhumans (a title that refers to the left).
Fourth: contempt for weakness. Fascists believe that the nation has been “feminized” and that it must be hardened again. The strong should dominate. Or, as Stephen Miller recently said to Jake Tapper on CNN: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
Fifth: the cult of action. For fascists, thought and deliberation are weakness. Real men don’t waste their time by reading books or boring reports, no, they take action. The slow work of democracy (with its committees and compromises) is cast as perverse, because fascism demands the triumph of the will.
Sixth: the leader as savior. The fascist leader is an almost religious figure who alone embodies the nation’s will. “I alone can fix it”, as Trump said. Of course this is Trump being a pathological narcissist, but it’s also a structural feature of fascism. The leader’s enemies are the nation’s enemies, so to oppose him is to oppose the people themselves.
Seventh: the purification of institutions. In fascist regimes, loyalty to the leader becomes pretty much the only qualification that matters. All institutions must be cleansed of those insufficiently devoted to the movement. This is why fascism experts were not surprised by the mass firings and the loyalty tests.
Eighth: propaganda and the assault on truth. Fascists are known to flood the public sphere with lies. So many lies that people give up trying to distinguish fact from fiction. Journalists become “enemies of the people”. Anyone capable of exposing the lies must be discredited and destroyed.
Ninth: the merger of state and corporate power. In its hunger for power, fascism usually builds an alliance with big capital. Industrialists funded Mussolini’s rise and the German dynasties behind Volkswagen and BMW merged with the Nazi regime. And so it wasn’t surprising to see tech oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk in the front row at Trump’s inauguration. This is the same bargain the industrialists made in 1933.
Tenth: violence and terror. Historical fascism was never just an ideology. It was men in uniforms beating people in the streets. Mussolini had his Blackshirts, Hitler had his Brownshirts. Now, look at what ICE has become: federal agents in tactical gear dragging people from their homes at dawn, and masked men snatching students off the streets.
ICE’s budget has become larger than that of most of the world’s militaries. They’re opening hundreds of new detention centers and recruiting thousands of new agents. Once you have such an enormous infrastructure of state terror, the fascist imperative is to use it. For fascists, violence is the ultimate form of action. It purifies and cleanses, to restore the nation’s honor.
And of course, the violence carries a coded message: you could be next. This is why it’s so public. As the saying goes: the cruelty is the point.
Now, I want to be clear about something. Fascism in America doesn’t come from one man alone, it always comes from a movement. To repeat Paxton words: it bubbles up from below.
But here’s a question worth asking: Why now?
America has always had authoritarian tendencies. It has always had racism and demagogues. So why did fascism crystallize into a movement that could take power in 2025, when it couldn’t in 1995 or 1935?
Historians emphasize that fascism emerges under specific conditions:
All of these conditions exist in America today:
Now, here’s what I want you to take away from all this. If you’ve been feeling shocked by what’s happening, then I understand. But I want you to stop being surprised. Because once you see the pattern, you can stop expending valuable energy on shock and start directing it toward resistance.
When Paxton studied fascism, he emphasized that it doesn’t arrive with a plan. Fascists say whatever they need to say to gain power. Their “contempt for doctrine,” as Paxton put it, means they’ll contradict themselves constantly.
What matters is the pattern of behavior, and the pattern is unmistakable now. The list of family resemblances keeps getting longer.
In his classic 1998 paper ‘The Five Stages of Fascism’ Paxton argued that fascism is a process that moves through five stages:
We are currently in the fourth stage. The movement has come to power. Their leader is bending the state and the billionaires are making their bargain.
So if this is fascism – real fascism, not an insult but a clinical diagnosis – then what does history tell us about how it ends? Usually badly. Through war, or through slow decay over decades. But it has been stopped. And understanding the pattern is the first step.
I’m not saying we should all start shouting “fascism.” That’s not an effective political strategy. In 2024, Kamala Harris made “democracy” her closing argument, even though for swing voters it was a low priority compared to “affordability”.
So naming fascism isn’t about messaging, but about urgency. It means we should be bloody serious about winning the next elections, because we may not get another chance. That means no more purity tests on the left. That means building broad coalitions that can actually win. It means supporting what the data shows works: organizations that steer resources toward the most cost-effective interventions (see my recommendations below).
I’ll be honest: the window is narrow. Even if Trump loses the next elections, we can be sure the next violent insurrection will be better organized than the one on January 6th, 2021. But when we see the pattern, we can stop being surprised.
And when we stop being surprised, we can start being useful.
Key sources and further reading:
The best recent essays I’ve read about why this is fascism:
My top picks for donating:
