Robert Paxton, the world's leading historian of fascism, changed his mind on January 6. Ten family resemblances explain why the label now fits America in 2025.
For a long time, I resisted it. As a historian, I know how the word "fascism" gets thrown around carelessly, weaponized in arguments, stripped of meaning through overuse. I also know what it's inseparable from for many people: the Holocaust, the industrial murder of 6 million Jews. Using it for anything else can feel like trivialization, a disrespect to that unimaginable horror. So I held back. But in the last few months, I changed my mind. And Robert Paxton's story is a big part of why.
Paxton is probably the greatest living historian of fascism. He's now in his 90s, and he spent his entire career warning people not to reach for the label too quickly. When pundits started calling Trump a fascist in 2016, Paxton pushed back, arguing the effort had become, as he put it, "more heat than light." Then came January 6, 2021. He watched the mob storm the Capitol, saw the Confederate flags and the gallows erected for Mike Pence, and was immediately reminded of Mussolini's Blackshirts marching on Rome in 1922. The man who had spent 60 years urging caution changed his mind in a single afternoon.
The label now seems not just acceptable, but necessary.
Paxton was even more direct when journalists pressed him later: "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."
If you ask ten scholars to define fascism, you'll get ten slightly different answers. But that doesn't make the concept useless. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had a concept for this: family resemblances. Think about brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts. Not everyone shares the same nose, but you see the same eyes here, the same chin there, enough overlapping features to recognize them as part of the same family. Italian fascism looked different from German Nazism, but they shared enough traits to be recognized as the same species. Scholars have identified the key family resemblances. Ten of the most important ones are visible in America right now.
First: a mythic past and national rebirth. Every fascist movement invokes a golden age that has been lost and must be restored. "Make America Great Again" isn't just a slogan. It's the structure of fascist thought, positing a time when the nation was pure and strong before being betrayed by, in Trump's words, "the enemy from within."
Second: victimhood and humiliation. Fascism claims that the dominant group, the "real" Americans, is the victim of a vast conspiracy. They're being replaced, attacked by elites, by globalists, by immigrants. The emotional engine is a burning sense of disrespect, a feeling that a rightful place has been stolen. "I am your retribution," Trump said. Twice.
Third: hierarchy and dehumanization. Fascism divides the world into those who belong and those who don't. Some people are citizens; others are illegals, aliens, or vermin. Trump has called immigrants "animals who are poisoning the blood of the nation." JD Vance wrote a glowing recommendation for a book titled Unhumans, a title referring to the left. Once you define people as less than human, you've prepared the ground for treating them that way.
Fourth: contempt for weakness. Fascists worship strength and regard compassion as decadence. The nation has been feminized, made soft, and must be hardened again. As Steve Miller said 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."
Fifth: the cult of action. For fascists, deliberation is paralysis. The slow, boring work of democracy with its committees and compromises is cast as perverse. Just get it done. Cut through the red tape. Fascism is the triumph of the will.
Sixth: the leader as savior. In a healthy democracy, leaders are servants of the people, constrained by law. In fascism, the leader is a mystical figure who alone embodies the nation's will. "I alone can fix it," Trump said. This isn't mere narcissism. It's a structural feature of fascist politics. The leader's personal grievances become national grievances. His enemies become the nation's enemies. To oppose him is to oppose the people themselves.
"I alone can fix it." — Donald Trump
Seventh: purification of institutions. In fascist regimes, loyalty to the leader becomes the only qualification that matters. Expertise is suspect. Independence is dangerous. The civil service, the military, the universities must all be cleansed of those insufficiently devoted to the movement. The mass firings, the loyalty tests, and the dismantling of oversight agencies fit this pattern exactly.
Eighth: propaganda and the assault on truth. Fascists flood the public sphere with so many lies that people give up trying to distinguish fact from fiction. The goal isn't to convince people of any particular falsehood. It's to exhaust them, to make them surrender on the very idea that truth is knowable. Journalists become enemies of the people. Universities are defunded. Scientists are silenced.
Ninth: the merger of state and corporate power. Fascism builds alliances with big capital. Industrialists funded Mussolini's rise. The dynasties behind Volkswagen and BMW didn't just tolerate the Nazi regime — they merged with it. Seeing tech oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk in the front row at Trump's inauguration wasn't surprising if you knew the history. It's 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. These paramilitary squads didn't just protect the movement — they were the movement.
The cruelty is the point. The violence is filmed and shared deliberately, and the message is: you could be next.
Look at what ICE has become: federal agents in tactical gear dragging people from their homes, masked men snatching students off streets, tear gas deployed next to cars with infants inside, citizens and non-citizens alike treated as enemies in occupied territory. ICE's budget is now larger than that of most of the world's militaries. Hundreds of new detention centers are opening. Thousands of new agents are being recruited. Once you build an infrastructure of state terror that large, the logic of the system is to use it.
America has always had authoritarian tendencies, racism, nativism, and demagogues. So why did fascism crystallize into a movement capable of taking power in 2025 and not in 1995 or 1935?
Historians are clear that fascism emerges under specific conditions. It needs democratic deadlock, a sense that institutions have failed and cannot be fixed through normal means. It needs elite fear of the left so acute that conservatives are willing to ally with radicals. It needs economic dislocation that leaves people feeling abandoned. And it needs a critical mass of people who feel their status, their identity, their entire way of life is under existential threat.
All of these conditions exist in America today. A political system paralyzed by polarization. A media ecosystem that has shattered shared reality. Decades of wage stagnation while the super-rich captured nearly all the gains. Immigration and demographic change triggering profound anxiety about what the country is becoming. The left successfully portrayed as an existential threat to traditional America. These aren't accidents. They're the kindling fascism has always needed.
Paxton's research is emphatic on one point: fascism doesn't arrive with a manifesto or a plan. Fascists say whatever they need to say to gain power. Their contempt for doctrine means they contradict themselves constantly. What matters isn't the words. It's the pattern of behavior.
In his 1998 paper "The Five Stages of Fascism," Paxton argued that fascism is also a process. It begins with intellectuals lamenting national decline and lost greatness. Then comes the movement, exploiting polarization and deadlock to break onto the national stage. Then arrival to power, often because traditional conservatives, more afraid of the left than of the fascists, invite them in. Then the exercise of power, where the leader bends the state to his will while bargaining with old elites: the generals, the billionaires. And finally, the fifth stage: either radicalization and endless escalation, as in Nazi Germany, or entropy and slide into ordinary authoritarianism, as in Mussolini's Italy.
We are in the fourth stage. The movement has come to power. The leader is bending the state. The billionaires are making their bargain.
"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." — Robert Paxton
If every new headline fills you with fresh disbelief, I understand. But I want you to stop being surprised. Not because you should accept it. Not because it's normal. Because once you see the pattern, you stop being caught off guard, and you stop spending energy on shock that could go toward resistance.
Naming this as fascism isn't a messaging strategy. In 2024, Kamala Harris made democracy her closing argument even though, for swing voters, it ranked far below affordability. So the label isn't about persuasion. It's about urgency. It means we should be serious, genuinely serious, about winning the next elections, because we may not get another chance. That means no more purity tests on the left. It means building broad coalitions that can actually win. It means supporting what the data shows works: organizations that steer scarce resources toward the most cost-effective interventions.
The window is narrow. Even if Trump loses the next election, the next insurrection will be better organized than January 6, 2021. But when we see the pattern clearly, we can stop being surprised. And when we stop being surprised, we can start being useful.
