Fascism Returned

Fascism has returned. Even if not yet fully as a regime-type, then certainly as a concept employed at the highest level of political discussions and struggles. This event should be worth noting for conceptual historians. Although far-left voices in the postwar era admittedly have long been more than willing to paint their enemies as at least fascistoid,¹ it is not every day that a US presidential candidate chooses to use this conceptual “F-bomb” against her direct opponent. It was therefore breaking news when Kamala Harris was first led into cautious acceptance of this signifier for Donald Trump on a radio show in October 2024 and soon after reaffirmed her opinion in a CNN townhall broadcast in expressing confidence that most Americans “care about our democracy and not having a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.”² While the Harris campaign had certainly not been pulling punches so far—painting Trump as deranged, corrupt, and narcissistic—this, most agreed, was still something different. Since we now know that most of the US voters in fact preferred Trump as president, it is worth considering more closely the conceptual implications of such political rhetoric. What were the merits and dangers of drawing a parallel between Trump and the mid-century dictators and totalitarian regimes usually referred to by this term?

However, while Harris's choice to use this kind of language is itself significant because it elevated the equivalence between Trumpism and fascism to the highest level of public discourse, she was not, of course, the first one to make such a connection. In fact, a host of US commentators and academics had been discussing the legitimacy of such a description of Trump's project almost since he entered the political stage in 2016.

In this editorial, we approach the discussion about the equivalence between Trumpism and fascism from the perspective of conceptual history, asking what such an approach can tell us about the semantics of the concept, its combative use, and its actual, analytical use-value in relation to Trumpism. First, however, we need to sketch the background and context of this ongoing discussion.

Fascism in the United States

Historians—not least the conceptually minded—are traditionally careful about employing terms or making analogies that too swiftly or too easily seem to collapse phenomena across decades or centuries. Catchy titles about this or that “New Hitler,” “New Tsar,” “New Crusade” or “New Dark Ages,” or “New Enlightenment” are more often found among journalists than among professional historians. But if the heart of the discipline is still a belief that “Historia magister vitae,”³ historians cannot entirely refuse to explore and discuss the value and legitimacy of historical analogies.

Needless to say, Trump supporters, whether academic, journalistic, or otherwise, reject any analogy between Trumpism and fascism as ridiculous—if not itself as morally reprehensible and borderline anti-democratic.⁴ But one certainly did not have to be a die-hard Trump follower to question its validity. As Jan Werner Müller recently demonstrated, it is easy to find plenty of definitional elements necessary for a proper fascism, which are simply missing in Trumpism, even when viewed as a fascism still incomplete—still in its movement phase.⁵

But definitions of fascism themselves come in many varieties, some looser than others. Judith Butler, for example, found Umberto Eco's characterization of fascism as “a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions”⁶ to be generously obliging for grounding an argument that Trump's gender policies indeed displayed a similar contradictory—and thus fascist—tendency.⁷

But definitions of historical fascism can also be sidelined more completely, by pointing out that fascism should be expected to mutate and change (surface) features according to the sociocultural context. We here often find reference to warnings such as that of Halford E. Luccock who in 1938 wrote that “if fascism comes to America, it will not be labeled ‘made in Germany’; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, ‘Americanism.’”⁸ While it is certainly true that a returning fascism today cannot be expected to be a carbon copy of its mid-century predecessor, this radical contextualism all but dissolves the concept of fascism and thus undercuts any further discussion of whether it is appropriate (or helpful) as an explanatory frame for Trumpism.

Many of those who from early on and most adamantly have stated an equivalence between Trumpism and fascism, however, had no need for either flexible definitions or radical contextualism, because they see in Trumpism an almost pure match with historical fascism. One of the first and most persistent voices calling out the apparent fascism of Trump has been the well-known historian Timothy Snyder. In both his On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century⁹ and The Road to Unfreedom,¹⁰ Snyder unequivocally analyzed Trump's political project and personal style through strict analogies with fascist leaders of the past. The Yale-based philosopher Jason Stanley's How Fascism Works¹¹ published around the same time perfected this style of argumentation in its minute comparison of various Trump statements with equivalents from historical fascists. A no less esteemed historian of fascism Robert O. Paxton, author of The Anatomy of Fascism,¹² still in 2017 had doubts. In discussing various aspects of Trump's political project and personal demeanor, he concedes some superficial equivalences with historical fascism, but nonetheless concludes: “Are we therefore looking at a fascist? Not really. Unchecked executive power indicates generic dictatorship rather than fascism in particular. And affixing the label to Trump actually confuses matters, obscuring his economic and social libertarianism. We might as well call the Trump regime by the appropriate name: plutocracy.”¹³ For Paxton, as well as for many others, one event fundamentally changed their outlook: the “Storm on the Capitol” on 6 January 2021. The images of a mob forcing its way into a democratic institution were apparently so shocking that Paxton, in that moment, realized that “It's the real thing [fascism]. It really is.”¹⁴

Three days later, Snyder could seem to finally settle the score in a defining article in The New York Times, where he insisted that with the Storm, the heart of Trumpism had been revealed to be the classic fascist strategy of the “Big Lie,” that is, Biden had “stolen” the election.¹⁵ Other luminaries soon followed suit. Drawing on his own personal memory, the former action star and governor Arnold Schwarzenegger explained that the storming of the Capitol was in essence an American Kristallnacht, and he “being from Europe, [had] seen firsthand how things can spin out of control.”¹⁶ During the subsequent lengthy, legal process attempting to hold Trump responsible for the Storm, his refusal to clearly distance himself from the event and the hardening of his supporters in the face of what they saw as unfair persecution, seemed only to lend further credence to Snyder's position. Yet arguably the widely felt necessity to condemn the Storm and Trump as such also had a silencing effect on those, who, while certainly worried and even disgusted by Trumpism, still did not feel that “fascism” was the most accurate or the most helpful conceptual means to understand—and thus ultimately to combat—it. After the Storm, intellectual hesitation to use what Paxton had himself originally cautioned was the “most toxic of political labels,”¹⁷ seemed vulnerable to being questioned as a sign of not taking the turn of events sufficiently seriously and still refusing to see what Trumpism really was. By implication, to take the challenge of Trumpism seriously one had to accept it was literally fascist in character. Even if this arguably meant jettisoning exactly the kind of complexity that had been early on captured by Salena Zito's famous (if somewhat enigmatic) 2016 remark that “the press take(s) [Trump] literally, but not seriously [and] his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”¹⁸ Harris's decision to use the concept of fascism about her opponent could thus be seen as the culmination of a process, reaching back to 2016 and pivoting significantly on the event of the Storm, through which the political opposition to Trump—as expressed by academics, commentators and activists—had itself hardened and increasingly moved toward accepting such a designation as applicable to someone still—at least formally—a legitimate democratic opponent.

Yet her decision to pick up such a designation is still significant because it circulated it to a much wider public and arguably tested its efficacy among those most likely not aware of Snyder's writings. In the end, of course, it turned out most of the American voters did in fact want Trump as their next president. Calling him out as a fascist—whether it has historical merit or not—failed to make him unthinkable as the leader of the world's largest democracy, at least not for a majority of those who voted.

What this might indicate especially to conceptual historians is that any discussion of the concept of fascism today should seek not only to unfold its semantics but also to evaluate what might be called its combative use and ask in the context of contemporary democratic struggles both what “fascism” means and what it “does.” To explore this, we need to revisit what conceptual historians have told us about the concept.

Fascism in Conceptual History

Historians interpret the present though the past. Whether an action, a statement, or an entire ideology can be articulated as fascist depends on comparison with historical fascism. Fascism is in this kind of approach first a concrete set of past events or statements—“what Hitler or Mussolini did/said”—and only secondly, a theoretical construct derived from interpretations of this history. Whatever is abstracted from these events depends therefore very much on which particular aspects of a present reality are chosen to carry the weight of a historical analogy with the past. The discussion tends to get caught in ever more meticulous and detailed considerations of whether “it is or it is not.” When a conceptual consensus is finally reached, it is very often normative rather than academic. It was the indignation felt at the site of the mob storming the Capitol that settled matters, not Snyder's many books. Conceptual History attempts to avoid both endless historicism and consensual moralism by thinking concepts historically and history conceptually. Concepts emerge when needed to signify new kinds of experiences that are thus captured by concepts and turned into language. Using a geological metaphor, they come to rest in the sediments that make up the archive of meaning (or the spaces of experience) for certain periods and cultures. Reinhart Koselleck's famous dictum for the history of concepts stated that “[a] concept is not simply indicative of the relations which it covers; it is also a factor within them.”¹⁹ The history of concepts goes beyond the referentiality of language and investigates the capacity of the actors to form their past, present, and future in specific contexts and using specific concepts. New concepts emerge, some concepts stay on, and others disappear. But arguably concepts can also “return” or rather be subjected to a creative recycling. As an example of the latter, Koselleck pointed to the way the GDR ideologues used the concept of fascism to designate West Germany in the Cold War.²⁰ This demanded quite some gymnastic bending of the existing Marxist ideology and arguably pushed the concept of fascism toward a purely rhetorical mode of propagandistic slander, which indicated that the life of certain concepts can take strange detours.

But Koselleck, of course, initially developed his approach to the history of concepts to understand the grand conceptual dynamics of modern societies. In the monumental lexicon Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (GG),²¹ he concentrated on basic concepts that served to combine and condense semantic experiences “in such a way that they become indispensable to any formulation of the most urgent issues of a given time.”²² In the lexicon, Koselleck and his co-editors selected concepts based on the principle of looking back: only those basic concepts erupting from the high energy period of European modernity, the so-called Sattelzeit and making it into the present time of writing (1972–1989) could carry the label of being basic and be granted an entry. The histories of the selected concepts followed a common matrix with shorter prehistories typically located in the Middle Ages, long sections on the Sattelzeit, and with equally shorter forays into the twentieth century. Since then several calls have been issued by subsequent generations of conceptual historians arguing for the necessity of a new lexicon of twentieth- and maybe even twenty-first-century concepts, if conceptual history is to continue living up to its philosophy of following the rhythms of the concepts shaping constantly changing presents.²³ The GG, in fact, includes a full entry on “Faschismus,”²⁴ but it is one that is emblematic of the minor preference given to twentieth-century concepts. The entry is written by Ernst Nolte, then the leading scholar on fascism and Nazism and later the one who became famously embroiled in the so-called Historikerstreit with among others Jürgen Habermas.²⁵ The entry is remarkably short compared to the standard length of entries and primarily renders a word history with a casual reference to its use in the Soviet Union and to totalitarianism. Nazism pops up in several other entries such as antisemitism, dictatorship, empire, state, party, and people. There are, however, also more remarkable absences. There is no single entry on racism, although the concept appears more sporadically in several other entries. The entry on power and violence ends in the nineteenth century with Marx and Nietzsche in accordance with the practice of “peak climbing” (the criticism launched by Rolf Reichardt and other second- generation conceptual historians of mainly relying on grand thinkers²⁶) and thus fails to discuss the industrialization of violence that twentieth-century totalitarian regimes arguably developed.

However, the fact that fascism is not treated as a basic concept by Koselleck and his fellow conceptual historians does not mean that an engagement with this phenomenon is completely absent from their work. Indeed, Nazism for this first generation of conceptual historians was for many a part of their own life experiences and memories. Even when not addressed directly it seemed to have the character of a specter that kept disturbing the clinical gaze of scientific rationality. As one of the second-generation conceptual historians, Hans Ulrich Gumbrect recalled that Koselleck's colleagues reacted with “angry and nervous refusal” when listening to his analysis of the dehumanization experienced by the victims of the Third Reich.²⁷ In a small, personal text published many years after his own war experience, Koselleck himself recalled how as a POW interned in Auschwitz being made aware of the common German responsibility for the Holocaust, a specific traumatic experience caused the acceptance of this guilt to “pour into his body like fiery lava and congeal there.”²⁸ If the contemplation of the atrocities at the heart of fascism had this effect on the war generation, it is perhaps less strange that the concept lead a shadowy existence in the lexicon and in much of the first-generation output in conceptual history in general.

However, Koselleck also produces a few academic engagements—if not with the concept of fascism as such—then certainly with how fascism became a factor, and a horrifying one, in the kinds of relations it articulated and thus made possible. In his famous text on asymmetrical counterconcepts, Koselleck discussed the Nazi idea of Untermenschen as a structurally necessary mirror image of the ideological fiction of a German Übermensch, and the logic between them that stipulated that the former had to be exterminated for the latter to be created.²⁹

Here as elsewhere, Koselleck clearly demonstrates that Nazism is not an ideology comparable to others; not simply “another” player on the modern political scene whose constitution he had traced in first book, Critique and Crisis. Rather it was the most horrific extent to which (and here he seems to echo Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno³⁰) the enlightenment legacy of confusing morality and politics could be driven—ultimately transforming itself into terror and dictatorship. While Koselleck neither here nor elsewhere discussed such a “totalitarian” zero hour of the modern project directly, he reveals a deep understanding of the impacts and experience of totalitarianism when he elsewhere examines how its total surveillance and dehumanization seem to overflow even into the realm of its victim's dreams. Pushing the limits of conceptual history, he here attempts to grasp that ultimate limit at which—under the pressure of absurdly “unlivable” circumstances—meaning breaks down completely and leaves the subjects with nothing but dreams of meaningless “light and color” and the escape into an apathetic existence as living dead.³¹ Although not engaging directly with the question of how to conduct a conceptual history of fascism, Koselleck might be said to have shown how difficult the total and horrendous experience of fascism would be to capture semantically both for its victims and for later historians.

This notwithstanding, there are of course plenty of works on “fascist ideology” or even the concept of fascism.³² This often involves tracing the roots of fascism in the large and loose archives of political ideas between the latter half of the nineteenth century and its moment of full formation in the context of the trauma of World War I or even (as the fascists themselves would endorse) much further back in history.³³ Tellingly however, Michael Freeden who within conceptual history has worked out a rigorous method for studying the conceptual morphology of political ideologies, in his defining work does not engage at length with fascism, while subjecting its three modern competitors—Conservatism, Liberalism, and Socialism—to detailed analysis.³⁴ Willibald Steinmetz has undertaken detailed conceptual studies of the functions of political language in twentieth- century extremism, and there also examines the propaganda of fascist regimes as well as the semantic survival strategies of their victims.³⁵ A more recent engagement can be found in the blog Komposita created for the occasion of Koselleck's one hundredth birthday in 2023, which contains an entry on fascism written by Federico Marcon.³⁶ The entry reiterates the Italian roots of fascism and emphasizes the role that the concept has played in (postwar) ideological discussion and points out that it has remained a crucial concept—whether used explicitly or implicitly—for reflections on the state and future of liberal capitalist societies, because it functions as their antagonistic alternative, their absolute negation, transgression, or constitutive outside. This is how fascism—in the guise of totalitarianism—is typically conceived in political theory, and though somewhat more abstract is a perspective that can ultimately, we believe, inform the understanding of its use in contemporary political rhetoric.

Fascism and the Political

Koselleck was certainly very aware that fascism in its totalitarian extension described a regime that transgressed all the forms of politics and morality inscribed in modern political space so far, and as such, the entire experience with totalitarianism expressed a conceptually novel experience. As also Hannah Arendt made clear in The Origins of Totalitarianism,³⁷ the European history of modernity culminated in creating a form of society, totalitarianism, never experienced before. If fascism (together with Stalinism) is the harbinger of a society that destroys the foundations of hitherto modern politics, it cannot be treated as just another “ism” in the catalog of ideologies, as one among a set of ideological alternatives that compete for prominence within a modern (democratic) space. Fascism—or totalitarianism—is the destruction of that space and the dynamics inherent to it. The French political philosopher Claude Lefort along these lines proposed to view the abstract level of “the political” (le politique), as it emerges in modernity, as defined by the constant confrontation between totalitarianism and democracy as forms of society.³⁸ Lefort's idea of the political designates the fundamental configuration of society established through the symbolic function of power (or sovereignty). Democracy, Lefort argues, creates a symbolic power that is fundamentally empty in that the place of power cannot be permanently, definitively, or finally occupied by some monolithic figure or anymore by the body/bodies of the king. This is what grounds the inherent dynamism and pluralism of democracy; it is designed to live with and through constant division and debate. The threat to democracy, therefore, does not come from “too much” internal heterogeneity, but on the contrary from a totalitarian desire to permanently “fill” the site of symbolic power (e.g., through the Führer principle and the party-state), thereby replacing the pluralist dynamic of heterogeneity with an enforced homogeneous order and singularity: “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.”

But if fascism is in this sense the abstract ultimate negation of democracy, it is of course also simply a concept that has been used—and is now returning to use—in the cut and thrust of democratic debate. Fascism is simultaneously a “constitutive outside” at the level of the political and a concept circulating in the concrete realm of politics. Squaring this circle entails understanding that while its use in the latter is not simply the same as its function in the former, it is the connection between the two that presumably gives the concept its rhetorical impact. It is, in other words, because we still hear the connotation of a much grander battle (for democracy as such), that the accusation of fascism against an opponent in a democratic contest marks (or at least is expected to mark) a different level of conflict. It is in this sense a concept that quite concretely transforms the relation in which it is employed, which not just “means” something but “does” something.

If the second part of an inquiry into the present reentry of fascism into the highest level of democratic debate is to regard in this way its rhetorical “use-value,” then we might within the vocabulary of conceptual history formulate this as oriented toward its function as a Kampfbegriff—or, as this term is somewhat weakly rendered in the English translation of his Vergangene Zukunft where Koselleck employs it—as a “concept that is consciously deployed as a weapon.”³⁹

Fascism as Kampfbegriff

Koselleck himself introduced the idea that a political concept's transition from intellectual use to a more general circulation potentially entailed its politicization and ideologization.⁴⁰ It comes to be associated with a certain ideological normativity, but in doing so also risks increasingly becoming solely a political weapon made imprecise, if not vacuous, by an ever more extended use. Pushing this line of thought further, one might argue as Ernesto Laclau has, that once political concepts become embroiled in the cut and thrust of heated political struggle, there is a distinct danger that any ideal of complexity and objectivity gives way to something more readily communicable (if not banal) and something more overtly normative (if not moralizing)—indeed that in the end what was a semantically complex concept becomes little more than an affectively invested “empty signifier.”⁴¹ Koselleck already seemed to imply something along these lines in his comments on the GDR's designation of West Germany as “fascist” and as Marcon also remarks there is no shortage of examples of “fascism” being used as “groundless rallying cry or simple ‘scare word’ to effectively load political mobilization.”⁴²

In such cases a stellar—and often very passionate—moralism all but eradicates semantic complexity. But this does not prevent the concept from functioning as a Kampfbegriff. While a concept devoid of all semantic content could scarcely function as a communicative vehicle, one who serves increasingly to signify and/or evoke the user's affective investment and stance on a matter, rather than to adequately describe a referent in the external world, is in fact a key element in political language.⁴³ Sharp semantics and poetic rhetoric are perhaps still thought of as key elements in any democratic duel, but when public debate descends into something resembling an all-out brawl a semantically “blunt weapon” can be just as effective.

Snyder's and Stanley's academic credentials notwithstanding, there is a certain heavy-handedly normative and (to the European reader) very American style of passionate public didactics in their critique of Trumpism. A case in point might be Snyder's On Tyranny where he pontifically delivers twenty lessons—or rather admonitions—from the twentieth century such as “be wary of paramilitaries,” “believe in truth,” “make eye contact and small talk,” and “be a patriot.”⁴⁴ Gone is most academic concern with complexity and abstraction in favor of an ambition to hammer home the point, that is at times so relentless as to feel condescending. Fascism was after all a phenomenon whose horrors and complexities set the tone—indeed the basic “problematic”—for a whole generation of European philosophers, who in the words of Arendt realized that “[t]he problem of evil will be the fundamental problem of postwar intellectual life in Europe—as death became the fundamental problem after the last war.”⁴⁵ Little, if any of that thinking, survives, for example, Stanley's reduction of fascism to the near banality of being a “Politics of Us and Them.”⁴⁶

But conceptual history is of course less about lamenting the quality or limits of the conceptualizations on offer at a given historical moment. Rather it is about analyzing—in Koselleck's classic formulation—the entanglement of “social history” and “conceptual history”—how concepts shape the actual sociopolitical experiences that they are employed in and how they are in turn changed by being employed in certain contexts. One way to proceed might thus be to attempt to write the next chapter in the saga about the historical morphology of “fascism” as a “basic concept” of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This would be to explore how the concept is semantically expanded, altered, and/or modified by those seeking to employ it to describe Trumpism. If we can be allowed a somewhat artificial separation, then this would concern how the social history/reality of Trumpism is inscribed in the concept of fascism as a distinct historical context of its use, to be diachronically distinguished from earlier instances or contexts. Such an ambition could well start from the myriad ways in which this kind of highly contextual semantic modification is often signaled by resorting to prefixes or adjectival modifiers. As such, several of the defining early academic works on Trumpism suggested descriptors such as “neo-fascism,”⁴⁷ “alt-fascism,”⁴⁸ or indeed “postmodern fascism.”⁴⁹ While this would certainly be a worthwhile endeavor, it would entail largely treating “fascism” on par with other political concepts active in the contemporary moment (e.g., sovereignty, citizenship, security, etc.), and thus backgrounding or at least for the time being “bracketing out” what seems to us perhaps the most significant aspect of its contemporary functioning and impact: its extreme “toxicity” and with that its ability to communicate an absolute moral condemnation of an opponent. In other words, its merits as a political weapon.

This line of inquiry would then take the other line of flight—even if the division is still artificial—and explore how a concept impacts a social experience; how the employment of a certain kind of language in a given situation performatively transforms it into something that it would otherwise not have been and can as such be synchronically compared against those alternative conceptual inscriptions annulled or suppressed in the rising to hegemony of a specific conceptual framing. While a full differentiation in this vein between an analysis geared toward the historical semantics of a “basic concept” and one interested in its political impact as a Kampfbegriff is neither desirable—because the historical semantics of a concept cannot be fully divorced from its weaponized impact and vice versa—nor in any way borne out by Koselleck's own cursory use of the latter term, it might serve as a heuristic device, indicating as on a sliding scale the primary concern of a given analysis. As such, to approach “fascism” as a Kampfbegriff deployed in the context of Trumpism would need to range beyond its historical semantics (and beyond historical analogy) and take an abstract critical interest in how the entire “social experience” of Trumpism is reconfigured when the concept of “fascism” is deployed in fighting it. It would be interested less in what fascism “means” and more in what it “does,” especially in the sense of exploring what alternative understandings or even experiences of the distinct sociopolitical context that is Trumpism and the curious relationalities that define it are implicitly discarded when we opt instead for fascism as our weapon of choice. If conceptual historians are experts not simply in the meaning of concepts but in the consequences of their use, they would seem well suited to also follow such a line of inquiry.

Recycled Fascism

As already indicated, the (expected) efficacy of fascism as a Kampfbegriff, must be understood considering its role as the major counterconcept to democracy. To call fascism is to mark an opponent as an antagonist of the entire system against which a united front must be constituted and with which no “intra-democratic” relation can be formed. To call fascism is an attempt at a speech act that would constitute a whole new political situation marked by what scholars of international relations have called securitization. It is a speech act performatively calling into being an extreme urgency and existential threat to the effect that “If we do not tackle this problem, everything else will be irrelevant (because we will not be here or will not be free to deal with it in our own way).”⁵⁰ Conceptual precision, it is implied in such an existentially securitizing political discourse, must be sacrificed, because the situation does not allow for massaging the semantic details.

However, such a stance, which excuses the bluntness of calling “fascism” by judging the situation as one of desperate democratic self-defense, still then relies on the expectation that calling fascism is as formidable a rhetorical weapon as it presumably used to be. The decisiveness of Harris's loss does not, however, seem to bear out such an expectation. More importantly, it relies on the implicit claim that the blunt historical analogy of calling Trump out as fascist is, even when delivered in a form that can be experienced as condescending and banal, still a more effective counterstrategy than to attempt to comprehend Trumpism on its own terms. As Yale Historian Samuel Moyn argued, it is not because it would be unfair to Trump that we should dismiss the concept of fascism, but because of the deadening effect it risks having on the critique of his political project, in that the rather noisy historical analogy lodged in the concept might all but “prevent us from seeing novelty.”⁵¹

But perhaps we should dare to contemplate the possibility that this might be part of the attraction—that “calling fascism” is an alluring strategy exactly because it makes what was confusing and disorienting about Trumpism seemingly evaporate under the weight of robust historical analogies. “Calling fascism” in this sense also by implication connotes several older “left-liberal-progressive” narratives where enemies and struggles perhaps—at least in retrospect—were more easily defined and confronted—against capitalism, against racism, against dictatorship, and against colonialism. The complexity reduction of going to conceptual “battle stations” is twofold; it simplifies both the enemy and our own position in the bright light of moral confidence. The nostalgia for a time of simpler (and more heroic) struggles is all the more seductive when the future horizon of one's political projects becomes unclear or ridden by anxieties. This is brilliantly narrativized by Svetlana Alexievich who, in her book Secondhand Time about the confusion and uncertainty experienced by post-Soviet citizens, relates an anecdote about a grandmother chastised for employing Bolshevik revolutionary hymns as lullabies for her grandchildren. In her defense, she utters no political argument or ideological justification, but simply the lament: “I don't know any other songs.”⁵²

Of course, Trumpism itself can readily be accused of nostalgia. Trump's rallying cry to “Make America Great Again” has rightly been called out as one that celebrates the past to hide the absence of a future and is thus emblematic of a political project that—in lieu of any real desire to remedy the divisions and inequalities of American society—offers instead only rituals of empty pride, a constant stream of hyperbolic promises, a shameless willingness to defame and ridicule opponents, and above all a vision of the good society curated through the imagery of an idealized 1950’s Americana.⁵³

But would it also not be possible to see in the rush to “call fascism” a nos- talgic streak at the heart of the discourses seeking to oppose him? Anxious and confused about the attraction that the nostalgic project of Trumpism has on so many people, it is perhaps tempting to resort to a counter- nostalgia of one's own. In other words, to fall back on a re-enactment of the twentieth century's key antagonism between the political utopias of democracy and totalitarianism, and thereby to avoid the challenge that would result from understanding Trumpism as a uniquely contemporary threat, namely to develop a twenty-first-century vision of the “good society to come” sufficiently attractive to compete with the seductive pull of Trumpist nostalgia. The old dichotomy between fascism and democracy is thus perhaps—also for those opposing Trump—“a kind of solution” akin to what Constantine Cavafy wrote in his poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” about a city suddenly unified and harmonious when hearing about a coming attack, yet immediately descending into confusion and inner strife the moment the danger is no longer imminent.⁵⁴

Postmodern Fascism

We will not presume here to be able to offer a full reading of Trumpism that attempts to capture its novelty. But a path in such a direction might be staked out. This in our opinion would entail revisiting the discussion about Trumpism as it was before the Storm and especially in the early years of his first term, and on this basis to reflect on the fact that if historical twentieth- century fascism—as epitomized by the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini—was an eminently modern phenomenon, then whatever fascism is today it would have to be equally an eminently “postmodern” one.

In contrast to today, there was, in the first years of Trump's first period from 2016, a wide and vibrant academic discussion about Trumpism as an inherently novel kind of para-politics suited for a context of post-democracy.⁵⁵ This was a discussion that sought inspiration far beyond what was on offer in the conceptual toolboxes of run-of-the-mill political science and/or history. There was a wide consensus that Trump had to be thought of as the direct product of a sociocultural configuration that not just the United States but most Western democracies could be said to inhabit (although to varying degrees). Trumpism was not simply fascism returned from its 1930s heyday and against which US democracy could then once again re-enact its heroic moment of twentieth-century self-defense. Trumpism was a creature entirely born in the liquid era of social media and reality TV, celebrity culture, and conspiracy theories.⁵⁶ If anything it seemed to have arrived from the future rather than from the past.

The consequence was a swathe of neologisms attempting to grasp Trumpism as something radically and uniquely symptomatic of the contemporary moment. Many of these in fact—implicitly and less often explicitly—drew inspiration for that set of diagnoses of the present that had unfolded under the heading of “postmodernism/postmodernity.”⁵⁷

A key observation with this kind of pedigree was that partly indexed in the somewhat inelegant conceptual innovation “post-truth.” Namely, that the relation to knowledge and discourse that Trumpism embodied seemed far removed from that of the modern epistemes so eminently analyzed by Michel Foucault.⁵⁸ Snyder's later insistence that the discursive performativity at the heart of Trumpism is that of “lying” is exactly a forceful insistence on returning to a modern contextualization of his interpretation—effectively reducing an idea of post-truth to its simpler predecessor “un-truth.” But post-truth in its original intonation marked a much more complicated attitude to public discourse than mere lying. Lying, as demonstrated by Harry Frankfurt in his philosophical analysis of “bullshit,”⁵⁹ requires a relatively stable conceptual universe shared by the interlocutors, against which the dubious real world referentiality entailed in lying can be accomplished and revealed. But as observed early on by Michael Freeden, populism cannot be adequately characterized simply by pointing to the factual deficiencies of its ideological claims. Rather it might be said to constitute a whole “new genre of ideology,” one in which a relatively stable conceptual universe subject to the laws of gradual morphology is replaced by a highly malleable and unstable conglomerate made up entirely of “modifiers” (we might be tempted to say “moods”)—it is “amorphous, sporadic, truncated, discursively bellicose”⁶⁰—now seemingly free-floating and unconnected to much ideologically authoritative and thus stable semantic content (of which these modifiers would in more traditional ideological structures be merely supplementary elements). In such a situation of persistent hyper-morphology, “truth” is arguably not simply challenged and violated by “the lie” as its dialectic opposite but disappears into the black hole of “bullshit,” because any charge of dubious referentiality struggles to find traction when the very concepts used to formulate the lie are themselves made malleable and when any shared standards of how to ascertain the facts of the world to which it refers are also subject to their own dubious redescription. Formulated most radically: it is a political language that does not itself fully believe what it claims, talking about a world no longer external to it (as a realm of indisputable “facts”) but sucked into the alternate reality produced in and through the performance itself.

This kind of situation was instructively likened by scholars of popular culture such as Sharon Mazer to that pertaining to the realm of professional wrestling as originally analyzed by Roland Barthes.⁶¹ Here the fights are choreographed and scripted, and the outcome thus never in doubt, and the audience is aware of this. Enjoyment is thus divorced from belief (in the “reality” of the struggle witnessed) and instead resides in an appreciation of the spectacle as such. Trump's followers seemed to maintain a likewise distanced yet invested attitude to the actual contents of his political exclamations. Trumpism did not therefore seem to be the kind of modern ideological manipulation, which had worried the critics of the crowd,⁶² propaganda,⁶³ or later even the Society of the Spectacle.⁶⁴ It was rather something akin to a knowing co- creation of an entirely fake, yet nonetheless affectively evocative, political world. Trump's followers appeared as a strange kind of political community seemingly somewhat incredulous toward even its own grand narratives and entirely comfortable with the haphazard mix of racist stereotypes, half-baked ideas, unrealistic projects, and mocking of political opponents substituting for anything “properly ideological” anytime their leader took the stage.

Indeed one might suggest that as opposed to the modern entanglement of knowledge and power, the postmodern enjoyment that Trump so powerfully supplied could dispense with authoritative knowledge (after all there were always “alternative facts” to be had) because it was about being “in the know,” about being wise to the dynamics of the spectacle, and above all not being naïve about its “reality.” Just as wrestling fans enjoy nothing more than to ridicule those naïve enough to be scandalized by the violence of the sport (Naomi Klein among other liberal commentators falls into this trap⁶⁵), Trump's political performativity from the very beginning seemed to incorporate—indeed to rely on—the scandalized response to his latest outrageous statement.⁶⁶ As one popular meme had it, Trump started his day with a big cup of “liberal tears.”

It is important to insist however that conceptualizations of Trumpism along these veins, never entailed a blasé attitude toward its potential for harm. As Jean Baudrillard had theorized, postmodern society might be entirely overtaken by its images of itself, but exactly because the resultant “simulacrum” entirely consumed and discarded the original “reality” of which it was once just the copy, it became deadly “hyperreal” in its own right.⁶⁷ Baudrillard's much misunderstood reading of both the first Gulf War and 9/11,⁶⁸ in that vein attempted to dispel the liberal self-righteousness so easily available in both these moments, by analyzing the uneasy entanglement of the “real” and “mediated” at the heart of them. In both cases, however, the predictable consequence was that, Baudrillard, in attempting to theorize the postmodern frivolity of a world where even death had become little more than just another mediated signifier, was instead—perhaps most unfairly and furiously by Bruno Latour⁶⁹—accused of frivolity himself. Baudrillard's point was however always that in a postmodern age the simulacrum or the hyperreal can kill and repress every bit as effectively as the real could and maybe even more so. It was because—as Baudrillard had scandalously entitled his essay on its hyper-medialization—that The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (in any phenomenologically consequential sense to Western onlookers) that we could enjoy the spectacular images of anti-aircraft fire against the night sky over Baghdad, without ever contemplating the fact that people were dying underneath it.⁷⁰ In this sense, this war was simultaneously the most real (i.e., the most closely and directly covered in the media) and the most unreal (the most disassociatedly, even frivolously, enjoyable) conflict ever to have been conducted. It was hyperreal.

This kind of attitude to reality is captured by Linda Hutcheon whose understanding of the postmodern entails a communicative situation in which everything is uttered in playfully parodying or semi-ironic air quotes rather than in a sincere form. But, crucially, where the “unreality” of the statement does not preclude it from having real effects⁷¹ because it is simultaneously thus problematizing the values implicitly lodged in a given mode of representation. While the discourse about postmodernity as it survives today is almost entirely negative (as it also mostly was in its 1980s and 1990s heyday), Hutcheon rightly sees in this kind of gesture a potential for freedom, as well as for domination. But the point here is rather to insist on its efficacy. As Umberto Eco has argued in a more romantic vein, the words “I love you” cannot, in a postmodern culture where they have been worn out in a myriad of bad Hollywood movies, ever be uttered “authentically” as though for the first time. They can only be articulated as a slightly cliché “quoting.” But even in that form, they can still mean something in—or better, they can still do something to—the relation in which they are uttered.⁷² Likewise, what Slavoj Žižek has called ideological cynicism is a mode of political performativity paradoxically uniting disavowal and efficacy. This is illustrated by Žižek through an anecdote about the Danish Physicist Niels Bohr who, having placed a horseshoe over his door for good luck, was asked by a friend whether he really believed in such superstition and replied “Of course not! But I have been told that it works whether or not you believe in it.”⁷³

Trumpism, in a postmodern reading, would in this vein be a fascism for an age of incredulity. A fascism that no one believes in, but which works nonetheless. A fascism returning to the United States, not “wrapped in the American flag” as the American novelist Sinclair Lewis was supposedly to have warned but rather wrapped in air quotes. Or perhaps rather in both. Slippery, inconsistent, over-the-top, unbelievable, scandalous, playful, half- joking, yet still potentially deadly to those who either do not “get the joke” or those destined to be the butt of it.

At the moment of writing, Trump is busy populating the key institutions of the American state with handpicked allies. It seems more crucial than ever to push toward a better understanding of the situation in which we find ourselves. As Koselleck pointed out long ago: “There may be no appropriate concepts to designate a new situation, or else one has to grope in the dark to discover it.” Recurring to the concept of fascism and finding comfort in a nostalgic rebooting of the grand struggles of the past is arguably ill-suited as a strategy in the face of what is a “darkness” of a later and different kind than that which engulfed the world in the middle of the twentieth century. Groping our way toward a conceptualization of the present situation requires the invention of new concepts for both the future we might want to see and the nature of its enemies. It might even require the courage to consider whether the underlying dynamics of how political concepts are used is still that described by Koselleck in the Sattlezeit of modernity. We are left with several questions: whether the contemporary conceptual universes in fact long have been undeniably postmodern; whether also beyond the vortex of Trumpism, political language seem increasingly to ignore our expectation of proceeding according to reliable rhythms of contestation and decontestation identifiable in semantic fields; and whether they show proper deference to the “real world” of “social historians.” However, as we hope the above illustrates, we believe there are ideas in Koselleck and in the field of conceptual history more widely, which, although presently peripheral to the canon, hold the potential of grasping analytically the turbulent and amorphous reality of contemporary politics. Not least conceptual historians have an obligation to partake in securing the conceptual means needed to maneuver in turbulent and dangerous times. Considering the real and present challenges posed to democracy by Trumpism and similar political movements, our democratic horizons of expectation would seem in dire need of some measure of creative re-inventions of conceptual analysis.