Is MAGA Really Fascist?
We should have a clear and concise answer ready.
Fascism remains probably the vaguest of the major political terms.
- Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism 1914-1945
The Trump regime is clearly, unabashedly authoritarian, and is seeking and exercising power in a way incompatible with a democratic republic.
But is it fascist? Truly, this-is-it fascist? The doubters are becoming fewer and further between; the early public adopters are taking victory laps. In spite of pushback from the usual suspects,1 the idea that this is, in fact, fascism seems fast on the way to becoming common wisdom.
Still, I want to dive into the question for at least two reasons. First, I’ve been using the term fascist often enough that I want to have a clear definition in, both for the sake of intellectual honesty and because it’s important to have a clear, succinct response to pushback.
Secondly, authoritarianism and fascism have different goals. If we want to crush the regime’s hopes and dreams into dust, we’d best start by understanding what they are.
As Stanley Payne points out, defining and identifying fascism is notoriously difficult, much more so than, say, communism. Whether they’re in Russia, China, or North Carolina, communists see themselves as part of a universal, global movement. They’ve read the same manifestos. They wear their identity on their sleeve; they are, at least in principle, comrades seeking both local and global solidarity.
But fascism doesn’t have a recognized corpus of core, defining ideological tracts. Fascism doesn’t have a Marx or an Engels. Partly for that reason, fascists don’t always think of themselves as such. The Nazis didn’t call themselves fascists. Fascist parties or groups are just as likely to use the terms national movement, national front, or even something as local and esoteric as the Ku Klux Klan. Fascism’s core ultranationalism allows it to look different wherever it arises, which in turn makes it difficult for observers to nail down common threads and provides denialists with easy points of deflection (B is different from A in these ways, therefore they’re not at all the same).
What’s more, Americans commonly conflate fascism with Nazism, a fascist variant specific to Germany in the 1930s and 40s. Having this extremely specific mental model gives us tunnel vision, and can make other far-right movements seem less fascist than they are. To take an obvious example, arguing over whether someone is the next actual Hitler is pointless; even during World War II, only one fascist leader out of hundreds or thousands ever was.
Finally, fascists are massive liars. Trusting the early supposed ideological commitments of the early Nazi party just makes you a rube—the Night of the Long Knives was littered with the bodies of socialists who made the same mistake, and if you persist in thinking that the name National Socialism proves that the Nazis were actual socialists I have some terrible news for you about the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
All this means that useful definitions of fascism will rely less on clear statements of ideology or belief, and more about what drives fascists and what they seek to do. One of the most influential such definitions comes from Roger Griffin, who proposed a “fascist minimum” of core shared characteristics:
Fascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythical core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism (The Nature of Fascism, 1991).
Unpacking and expanding on this a bit, fascism is a movement built around the rebirth, or palingenesis, of a nation’s mythologized past. Fascists promise the future while looking back ceaselessly to an idealized golden age of virtue, courage, and unity. Trying to return to that time leads, nearly inevitably, to promises to purge internal traitorous or polluting elements, which may be ideological (unions, socialists) religious (Jews, Catholics) ethnic (Roma) or cultural (gay or trans people, artists). Fascists seek to return to the imagined glories of an era that has not just been lost, but stolen.
Among the many writers who have expanded on Griffin’s minimum, Payne added an explicit focus on violence and “military virtues”:
[Fascism is] a form of revolutionary ultranationalism for national rebirth that is based on a primarily vitalist philosophy, is structured on extreme elitism, mass mobilization, and the Füherprinzip, and positively values violence as end as well as means and tends to normatize war and/or the military virtues. - A History of Fascism 1914-1945
While Robert O. Paxton emphasized the mechanics and dynamics of fascist rule:
A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with national elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. - The Anatomy of Fascism
Bringing these together gives us something like this: Fascism is a palingenetic, populist ultra nationalist movement driven by a mythic narrative of national and/or racial regeneration, which is pursued through the purging of internal enemies, valorization of the military, and dreams of external expansion. That’s my current working definition—and in 2025 America it’s a deeply disturbing one. Because all of this is pure MAGA.
Maga has it all: there’s the victim complex of some of history’s wealthiest and most powerful, including Trump himself. There’s the ludicrous attempt at blood and soil nationalism in a nation of immigrants (the notion of “real” Americans, the heartland, and the homeland). There’s the obsession with cleansing the internal pollution caused by non-white immigrants and/or traitorous Fifth Column liberals. There’s the military spectacle, the denial of opposition political legitimacy.
Above all, there’s the constant exhortation to Make America Great Again: to return to some perfect but undefined past, when life was simple, the country was great, and the cultural and political primacy of white Christians was absolutely unquestioned.
Some of this leads to deadly serious outcomes, like ICE raids or the murder of Venezuelan fishermen. Some of it manifests as fever dreams like the invasion of Greenland, or farces like renaming of the Department of Defense as the Department of War. All of it is ludicrous—and all insanely dangerous.
Because yes, this is it: MAGA is fascist, and if it looks different than other fascisms it’s only because it’s American to the core.
Sources:
Griffin, Roger. The Nature of Fascism. Milton Park, U.K.: Routledge Press, 1993.
Paxton, Robert O. The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Vintage Books, 2004.
Payne, Stanley G. A History of Fascism, 1914-1945. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.
To be clear, I’m not at all concerned about what J.D. Vance, Stephen Miller, and all the rest of them claim to think about this; they can take their umbrage and fuck off into the sun. It’s still important to have a clear response to people trained by the notion of American Exceptionalism to think that fascism could surely never take root here, that MAGA must definitionally be something different.