Maurice Fitzpatrick writes: There is an urgent need for the US to evaluate the consequences of the full-scale assault on its democracy. One way to begin is to examine the alarming parallels in the US now with one of the most horrific periods of human history. Thirty years ago, in June 1995, Italian critic Umberto Eco published a famous essay in The New York Review of Books, ‘Ur-Fascism’. By this, Eco meant ‘eternal fascism’ or characteristics common to all manifestations of fascism. These included the German and Spanish iterations as well as the one he knew best, the Italian, having been born into fascist Italy. He set the tone with his own experience of the ideology: ‘In 1942, at the age of ten, I received the First Provincial Award of Ludi Juveniles (a voluntary, compulsory competition for young Italian Fascists – that is, for every young Italian).’ A few years later Italy was liberated, Mussolini was executed, and Eco began to ponder how and why countries adopt such a catastrophically destructive and shameful ideology. In ‘Ur-Fascism’, he offers a list of traits, which have uncanny applications to the US just now. In this article, I will attempt to draw these out.
1 ‘The cult of tradition’. Selectivity is key here. The government of a nation built on immigration has turned against the tradition of welcoming immigrants. The capitalist values of the same government continue to expatriate native industries to countries with cheaper labour costs while imposing tariffs on the importation of their products. Both despite and because of these contradictions a cult of tradition has been codified in a numbing slogan, ‘Make America Great Again’.
2 ‘The rejection of modernism’. Modernism in the US has been associated with gender politics, wokeism and diversity. The Trump administration’s backlash against them is framed as a protection of American traditions and the traditional family but its agenda is to silence free expression. Zhang Qianfan of the University of Beijing has characterised Trump’s agenda as establishing ‘America’s Cultural Revolution’. Mao’s Cultural Revolution closed universities and censored anyone who was off message. Trump has determined to either take over universities or to close them through funding cuts.
3 ‘Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes.’ For rash action consider Trump’s hundreds of Executive Orders and the other forms of chaos unleashed by his capriciousness in the US and throughout the world. The Trump-Vance capture of the Kennedy Center in Washington is an example of culture being suspect, from their perspective, if it espouses critical attitudes. Trump’s comments on the matter were unequivocal: ‘We took over the Kennedy Center …We didn’t like what they were showing … No more drag shows, or other anti-American propaganda.’ Authoritarian regimes cannot tolerate challenging programmes of dance, music and drama; art is degraded to the function of spectacles and messaging that glorifies the country and its leader. Equally, Trump’s framing of universities such as Harvard as being gripped by antsemitism is a pretext for the blackmail of government takeover as a condition of continued federal funding; it also gives cover to the doxxing practices of Canary Mission.
4 ‘In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.’ The war on scientific research has attacked the US scientific community more than anything since McCarthyism. Hence the will to install government oversight in the universities. Columbia University made the fatal error of complying. ‘Viewpoint diversity’ masks a war on the very basis of scientific reasoning and facts. As Texan Congressman Keith Self put it, quoting Joseph Goebbels: ‘It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion.’ Independent research is inimical to that objective.
5 ‘Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.’ ‘America First’ is cast as an economic agenda but it does not end there. Tourists, visiting students and researchers have been illegally detained for weeks in violation of habeas corpus and then deported. They are part of a trial run for far more extensive incarceration. Both non-American citizens and non-citizens need to know this. Trump may, for now, limit his purge to immigrants, alleging that they are ‘poisoning the blood of our country’, but history provides a declension narrative towards mass persecution and ultimately extermination.
6 ‘The appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation.’ MAGA is designed to appeal to anyone who feels left behind. It is a vent for decades of frustration over swingeing neoliberalist agendas by which cities and entire regions of the US have been systemically disinvested. The people impoverished by this have been mocked and stigmatised by a value system in the USA of which Trump is exemplary. Nevertheless, he has succeeded in instrumentalising their ressentiment by promulgating an ideology that takes it out of its reactive state.
7 ‘At the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one.’ Tariffs are possibly Trump’s biggest obsession: China, the EU and most of the world is exploiting the US; it is time to exact revenge. Given the underlying psychological importance of tariffs for Trump, even the immediate global failure of the policy in spring did not convince him to change course. There are a host of additional plots: fake news; Mexican rapists (first term), imprisoning the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang in El Salvador (second term); ‘the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections’; putative security threats to justify invasions of Greenland, Panama and even Canada.
8 ‘The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies.’ Here tariffs are also relevant: consumers elsewhere have a better deal and are stealing from the US.
The latter points in Eco’s essay (9–14) largely pertain to what happens when fascism has become a seemingly irreversible force and the fundamentals of democracy such as replacement of a government or leader by free election are suspended. Yet the US is already in thrall to aspects of these latter stages of a fascist coup. Consider the function of Truth Social. Its followers (an especially loaded term in this instance) are not so much people with individual rights as cyphers with a role to fulfil in which, as Eco put it, ‘the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People’. When US Senator Alex Padilla was handcuffed by the FBI after he attempted to ask a question at a press conference during the June protests in Los Angeles he said, pertinently: ‘if this is how this administration responds to a senator with a question … you can only imagine what they are doing to farm workers, to cooks, to day labourers out in the Los Angeles community and throughout California and throughout the country.’
Some of the characteristics of one of the most destructive ideologies of the twentieth century have been carried into the twenty-first and embraced by the most powerful nation on earth. Trump promised that he would be a dictator on ‘day one’, and he has partially delivered on that ambiguous formulation by destabilising the American constitutional order like nobody before in US history. He has also released and glorified the mob who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, the most fascistic violence yet: a bid to use violence to install pure state violence.
It remains to be seen if Trump has the seriousness, resolve and guile to manufacture, or to seize, a crisis that would serve as a pretext to overthrow the constitutional order completely – his version of the Reichstag Fire Decree (1933), which was enacted to ‘protect the people and the state’. If and when that happens, upholders of the constitutional federal republic need to be ready. The word ‘tradition’ derives from the Latin traditio, which means ‘a handing down’ but also ‘surrender’ or ‘giving up’. There is a dire need not to give up. In his essay, Eco did not treat of the failure of opposition in the 1930s to transcend their specific agendas and coalesce on the grounds that all democratic priorities depend upon retaining democracy per se. Organised opposition and relentless protest have never been more urgent to salvage the oldest democracy in the world. As Senator Chris Murphy said in March: ‘if we continue to engage in business as usual, this democracy could be gone’. Harvard University’s legal challenge against the government diktats and blackmail is hugely important as were the ‘Hands Off!’ marches across 1,200 locations in every state of the USA in early April and the ‘No Kings’ protests in June.
Such rallying points are essential for those who wish to retain democracy in the US. Always vital to democracy, mass demonstration is existentially important for democracy in the US now. As Paul Krugman argued in article, ‘Trump’s parade flopped. No Kings Day was a hit’. on June 16th, 2025: ‘most anti-Trumpists are reluctant to stick their necks out unless they believe that they are part of a widespread resistance that will grant them some measure of safety in numbers … the victory or defeat of competitive authoritarianism will depend to a large extent on which side ordinary people believe will win.’ The people elected Trump for a second term, and it will be the people who decide how far he can go. This is not only a matter of the relative strength or weakness of the people to oppose collectively. It is a question of the people’s consciousness of their agency in determining the survival of democracy in the USA.
19/8/2025
