At what point do the Proud Boys and other storming the capitol get labeled ‘fascist’?
I hate Trump and the worst elements of American culture he let flourish, but i was hesitant to call him a fascist. A lot because some professors who study this said that while Trump ticked a lot of the boxes, he specifically lacked ideology, and a militant ‘Brownshirt’ group to enforce his claims.
Well, Trump’s ideology is just pure narcissism. And the Proud Boys are clearly the brownshirts. As well as the police who support Trump and enabled the protesters.
Fascism is here on full display. And its being coddled.
here's something from r/askhistorians that explains contemporary American fascism as something uniquely American and unlike other fascists groups. You say that he lacked ideology, but MAGA is the ideology, it, like the ideology of other fascists, reaches for the past or a period of earlier purity.
"I can't take credit for the below, but am posting on behalf of /u/commiespaceinvader who worked on this but had to go to sleep.
Fascism is by its nature, by its design a violent movement and so it is no stranger to both coups and other attempts to take political power and political space by violence. Indeed, violence and its public display is an essential ideological feature of fascism as a political ideology.
Unlike the advocates of liberal democracy, it is not reason or modernization, which drives forward and unlike communists, it is not material relationships. For the Fascist the engine of history is conflict, whether between nations, peoples or races. History is a constant struggle in which a community of mythical qualities needs to assert itself in order to gain dominance over others. Dominance is the core goal and must be asserted. And only if the right and rightful people dominate will a golden age begin.
The political utopia of the Fascist differs greatly from liberal or communist visions of utopia: Both of the latter are built on a vision of a utopian future that needs to be built and achieved. The Fascist on the other hand looks to the past for its utopia since most fantasies of dominance are historically justified. Whether it is the return to the Roman Empire or the mythical Lebensraum of German kings, all Fascist utopian visions are built upon a return to a hazy, mythological past in which the world was right. And such a return must by necessity be a violent one, one that engages in the eternal conflict with the supposedly sinister forces that have lead to the lapse and prevent a return.
According to scholar of fascism, Robert Paxton, it is not an ideology like others but understands itself as a political practice more than anything else:
In a way unlike the classical "isms", the rightness of fascism does not depend on the truth of any proposition advanced in its name. Fascism is "true" insofar as it helps fulfill the destiny of a chosen race or people or blood, locked with other peoples in a Darwinian struggle, and not in the light of some abstract universal reason. (...) The truth was whatever permitted the new fascist man (and woman) to dominate others, and whatever made the chosen people triumph.
Fascism rested not upon the truth of its doctrine but upon the leader's mystical union with historic destiny of his people. (...) The fascist leader wanted to bring his people into a higher realm of politics that they would experience sensually: the warmth of belonging to a race now fully aware of its identity, historic destiny, and power; the excitement of participating in a vast collective enterprise; the gratification of submerging oneself in a wave of shared feelings, and of sacrificing one's petty concerns for the group's good; and the thrill of domination. Fascism deliberate replacement of reasoned debate with immediate sensual experience transformed politics, as the exiled cultural critic Walter Benjamin was first to point, into aesthetics. And the ultimate fascist aesthetic experience, Benjamin warned in 1936, was war.
Fascist leaders made no secret of having no program. (...) Fascism radical instrumentalization of truth explains why fascists never bothered to write any casuistical literature when they changed their program as they did often and without compunction. Stalin was forever writing to prove that his policies accorded somehow with the principles of Marx and Lenin; Hitler and Mussolini never bothered with any such theoretical justification. In the same vein, Paxton goes on to define Fascism as
a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood 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 traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
Lastly I’ll leave you with what Robert Paxton writes about Fascism and America:
The United States itself has never been exempt from fascism. (...) Much more dangerous [than movements like the American Nazi Party, which utilize already established tenants and creeds from Europe] are movements that employ authentically American themes in ways that resemble fascism functionally. The Klan revived in the 1920s, took on virulent anti-Semitism, and spread to the cities of the Middle West. In the 1930s, Father Charles E. Coughlin gathered a radio audience estimated at forty million around anti-communist, anti-Wall Street, pro-soft money, and – after 1938 – anti-Semtic message broadcast from his church in the outskirts of Detroit. (...) Today a "politics of resentment" rooted in authentic American piety and nativism sometimes leads to violence against some of the very same "internal enemies" once targeted by the Nazis, such as homosexuals and defenders of abortion rights.
Of course the United States would have to suffer catastrophic setbacks and polarization for these fringe groups to find powerful allies and enter the mainstream. I half expected to see emergence after 1968 a movement of national reunification, regeneration, and purification directed against hirsute antiwar protesters, black radicals, and "degenerate" artists. I thought that some of the Vietnam veterans might form analogs to the Freikorps of 1919 Germany and Itlaian Arditi, and attack youths whose demonstrations on the steps of the Pentagon had "stabbed them in the back". Fortunately, I was wrong (so far). (...)
The language and symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of course, have little to do with the original European models. They would have to be familiar and reassuring to loyal Americans as the language and symbols of the original fascism were familiar and reassuring to many Italians and Germans. (...) No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian corsses. No fascist salute, but mass recitation of the pledge of allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy."