President-elect Donald Trump’s victory has revived the accusation that he is a fascist. Some even fear that he will try to make himself dictator for life.
That notion misunderstands the danger Trump presents. He isn’t aiming or likely to recreate Nazi Germany. Medieval Germany is closer: a collection of unaccountable fiefdoms in which local barons are free to abuse their subjects at will.
The dominant theme of Trump’s coalition is the yearning for crippled government, which is good news for well-connected private interests that would like to hurt people without being bothered by the authorities.
The accusation of fascism is concisely stated by his former chief of staff, John Kelly: “a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy…those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America.” Kelly reports that Trump often said admiring things about Hitler. Trump routinely deploys fascist rhetoric, conjuring up demonic enemy populations that he alone can resist. And of course there are echoes of the Nazis in Trump’s plans to build camps to detain millions of undocumented aliens, and the multiple occasions when he proposed shooting peaceful protestors.
But the Nazis were held together by a coherent ideology that unambiguously and unashamedly rejected democracy. Trumpism is merely a cult of personality, and Trumpworld is an untidy amalgam of hero-worshippers, opportunists, zealots, grifters and closeted responsible politicians who publicly abase themselves before him because that is their only hope of having any influence.
There is brutality aplenty, but it is not aimed at centralizing power in the hands of the leader, who is a vain infant who can’t be bothered with details. He merely likes wealth and power, and his decisions are likely to be shaped primarily by the last person he spoke with. As Kelly suggested, Trump only dimly understands who Hitler was and what he did.
If there’s a single theme that holds Trump and his followers together, it is not tyrannical government, but the desire to cripple governmental capacity. He proposes to end civil service protections for the officials tasked with policing pollution, financial market fraud, dangerous or ineffective pharmaceuticals, workplace safety and hazardous consumer products.
He particularly despises environmental regulation. His first administration abandoned climate policy and the protection of clean air and water. In the Environmental Protection Agency, initiatives to dismantle regulations were drafted by lawyers and lobbyists employed by the regulated industries, without even consulting staff scientists.
Regulatory overreach is a legitimate concern, and there are mechanisms that aim to ensure that the burdens on citizens and businesses are justified. Since the Reagan administration, federal regulations have been subjected to cost-benefit analysis. There is a case for tweaking them further. But the first Trump administration focused exclusively on the costs of regulation to businesses, either ignoring the benefits or attempting to conceal them. It made a sustained effort to defund any scientific research that might embarrass industry, leading to a systematic gutting of expertise throughout the federal bureaucracy.
As I argue in my book “Burning Down the House,” the ideology of small government attracts two very different groups: principled ideologues, driven by misguided philosophical commitment, and unscrupulous predators. As libertarian talk becomes more common, the second group increasingly likes to masquerade as the first.
This deception succeeds only because many are persuaded by a philosophy that teaches that massive inequality and poverty, crumbling infrastructure, pollution, dizzying economic cycles of boom and bust, financial disaster when jobs disappear, commercial fraud, dangerous workplaces and consumer products, pervasive discrimination, untreated disease, premature death and climate catastrophe are manifestations of freedom if government sits back and lets them happen.
Serious libertarians are appalled by Trump’s abuses of power, thievery and proposals for massive deportations and tariffs. But libertarianism still matters because a big part of the Trump agenda is dismantling the modern administrative state, gutting the protections of the civil service, eliminating regulations, destroying the government’s capacity to monitor and respond to climate change and cutting taxes. That agenda reflects an ideology held by many educated, idealistic people.
It isn’t populist: None of these measures will benefit working-class Americans, who are Trump’s core constituency. It certainly isn’t neoliberal. It is the product of bad philosophy, which confusedly identifies freedom with the crippling of state capacity. (My book aims to be a remedy for anyone tempted by the ideas of Ayn Rand or Robert Nozick.)
In a brilliant, classic paper, the philosopher Samuel Freeman observed that what libertarianism contemplates is not freedom, but feudalism, in which political power is not an instrument of the public good but rather “a system of personal political dependence grounded in a network of private contractual relations.” This vision is nicely epitomized in an opinion by Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee, Justice Neil Gorsuch. In a case where he allowed a boilerplate arbitration provision to bar employees from any effective remedy for wage theft, he described the question as whether “employees and employers be allowed to agree” to “individualized arbitration procedures of their own design.” Actually, the employer designed it and the workers signed.
Do Workers yearn to be at the mercy of their bosses, if only the big mean state doesn’t interfere? The lord of this duchy can do what he likes to what are, after all, his serfs. Similarly with any other regulation that protects ordinary folk from big business.
This isn’t Nazi Germany. But it’s pretty scary.
Andrew Koppelman, the John Paul Stevens Professor of Law at Northwestern University, is the author of “Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed.”
