The MAGAism-Fascism Comparison and Trump’s Foreign Policy – From Hubris to Nemesis?

In the debate on whether MAGAism is a variety of fascism or not, this paper’s position is that there are enough similarities to make a comparison relevant and ask what it can tell us about Trump’s foreign policy. The comparison is based on Ian Kershaw’s and Nicos Poulantzas’ analyses of Nazism and a variety of current sources on the Trump administration. The comparison to Nazism is relevant because like the US today, Germany was a leading great power, industrially among the most developed in Europe, and widely respected for its arts, sciences, and technology. No other fascist country had a similar position. Major differences are that MAGAism is not antisemitic, it conducts mass deportations, not mass killings, it has not reached control over state and society comparable to Nazism’s, and it meets determined resistance. One central similarity is the rise of a charismatic, autocratic and nationalistic leader based on radicalized popular discontent. Secondly, the leader’s vanity, beliefs, animosities, and, in Trump’s case, personal economic interests play an outsize role in policymaking. Thirdly, these impulses are juggled with the need to maintain popular support and to gain acceptance from major parts of the business community. This leads to a constant maneuvering and inherent instability unless dissent is quelled by repression. Fourthly, this socio-political dynamic leads to a striving for national greatness through external aggression with no respect for international law, treaties, and so on. But the ways in which this drive is carried out are different. Hitler’s military fight for territorial expansion took the easy victories first, one by one, each step adding to economic and military capabilities and popularity at home. From the entry of troops into the Rhineland in 1936, over invasions or annexation of Austria, what today is the Czech and Slovak republics, Poland, Denmark, and Norway, to the victories over the Netherlands, Belgium and France in 1940. But the next step, the Battle of Britain, failed, and the long process of over-extension set in, leading to total defeat. For Trump the prime purpose is not territorial expansion but global pre-eminence, China being the main rival. Secondly, Trump had at the outset an aversion against ‘forever wars’ and an unrealistic belief in the power of tariffs. Contrary to Hitler he opened with a multifront tariff war against rivals, partners and allies, all at once. This first stage failed to subdue China, and Trump changed tack, using military might against weak opponents. It is questionable whether this can remedy the inherent tensions in the project, and it is worth recalling the subtitles to Volumes I and II of Kershaw’s Hitler biography: hubris and nemesis, and his concluding verdict on Nazism: ‘it was such an amalgam of contradictory social forces that it was capable of producing neither theory nor practice of any realistic new social construct’. There are reasons to hope that Trump’s route from hubris to nemesis will be much shorter and less destructive than Hitler’s, and reasons to work for this to happen.