Fascism for Dummies
It’s time for a new installment in the For Dummies series. Since the 1980s, these best-selling, concise, step-by-step reference manuals have illuminated the mysteries of plumbing, car repair, computer software, fishing, English grammar, baking, back pain, stock trading, and dozens of other endeavors for befuddled Americans. Up to now, they have focused on practical problems, but now the moment seems ripe for a political addition.
Ultimately, Fascism for Dummies reveals the Democrats’ fascism smear as a wild exaggeration akin to the red-baiting tactics of certain Republicans in the 1950s and 1960s.
That is because the air is thick these days with reckless accusations of fascism. Emanating from the Democrat Party and its constituent cadres of Hollywood activists, education bureaucrats, legacy media supporters, and social justice radicals, these rhetorical attacks characterize Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters as authoritarians moving lockstep to overthrow the American political system. Flinging the label around with the enthusiasm of the peanut vendor at the ballpark, but with much less accuracy, Democrats now regularly decry everyone and everything they don’t like in Republican politics as hurling the country into a fascist apocalypse. (RELATED: When Hate Finds a Bulletin Board at Georgetown)
Amidst this rhetorical uproar, however, it has become obvious that most Democrats have little idea of what they are talking about. They know fascism is bad, and Republicans are bad, but beyond that, things get hazy. A crucial consideration — the actual nature, history, and manifestations of fascism — remains unexamined. Clearly, the Democrat “resistance” would profit mightily from some clarity regarding the ideological smear they love to employ. (RELATED: The Absurd Nazi Label on American Christians)
So as a public service, I suggest publication of Fascism for Dummies, a handy booklet explaining the salient qualities of fascism and its impact on the modern world. It promises to help Democrats understand the word they adore but evidently misunderstand. It might look something like this. (RELATED: ‘Fascist’ Is the Dumbest Political Insult in the World Today)
Part One: What the Fascists Believed
The term fascism first emerged in the early 1920s to describe Benito Mussolini’s authoritarian movement that took over the Italian state and society. Referencing Il Duce’s proclaimed intent to recapture the glory of ancient Rome, it was named after fasces, the ceremonial bundled axes carried by magistrates in the age of the Caesars. By the early 1930s, a second and more powerful fascist movement appeared with Adolf Hitler and his Nazi movement that swept through Germany. While other minor variants appeared, such as Francisco Franco’s regime in Spain, Hitler and Mussolini established the fascist template.
German and Italian fascists shared several broad principles and impulses. First, they denounced democratic political institutions and liberal pluralist society as conduits for modern degeneration, promoting instead a totalitarian paradigm where power flowed from the top down. Second, they propagated an extreme nationalism embodying an almost mystical view of the nation and its people, elevating the collective will of the volk over the paltry desires and needs of the individual. Third, fascists embraced an ethos of military expansion that promised to fulfill the historical destiny of the Volk, whether it be Mussolini reconstituting the ancient Roman Empire or Hitler the historical German Reich.
Fourth, Mussolini, Hitler, and their followers promoted a program of national regeneration to revitalize the population, seeking to mold a heroic “new man” who was physically strong, self-disciplined, and eager to sacrifice for the nation.
Fifth, fascists sanctioned a doctrine of racial exclusion that enshrined the superiority of a pure “Aryan” population and stripped the rights, property, and eventually lives of “inferior” racial and religious groups.
Sixth, fascists manifested a special hatred of communism and socialism, believing they advanced doctrines — egalitarianism, class conflict, internationalism — that undermined the unity of the national state.
Part Two: What the Fascists Did
Hitler and Mussolini moved decisively to realize their fascist vision, beginning by systematically destroying existing political institutions and eradicating political opponents. In his famous “March on Rome” in 1922, Il Duce led 30,000 armed supporters to force the Italian king to declare him Prime Minister. Subsequently, he established a totalitarian one-party state by assuming dictatorial powers, integrating his private militia into the nation’s armed forces, and establishing government control over the press and trade unions. By the late 1920s, Mussolini had built a police state where opposing political parties and parliamentary elections had been abolished.
In Germany, Hitler acted even more forcefully. With the rise of his National Socialist (“Nazi”) Party, he was appointed chancellor in January 1933 by the German president. Hitler moved swiftly to cement his position, strong-arming the Reichstag into passing the Enabling Bill that granted him sweeping powers. Over the next few years, he banned all non-Nazi political parties, organizations, and labor unions. The merger of Germany’s presidency and chancellorship made Hitler the supreme commander of the country’s armed forces, whose members now took an oath of allegiance to him. Germany had become a one-party dictatorship under the domination of Der Führer.
The fascists utilized violence to silence opposition, murdering opponents and terrorizing the population into acquiescence. Mussolini utilized the “Black Shirts,” an armed private militia, and later the governmental secret police, to beat up or kill political critics. Hitler cracked down violently on opponents, murdering leading Nazi rivals in 1934’s “Night of the Long Knives” and orchestrating 1938’s Kristallnacht, a nationwide pogrom where Nazi mobs attacked Jewish synagogues, homes, and businesses, and killed hundreds. His SS stormtroopers and Gestapo secret police killed political opponents and intimidated the general population. (RELATED: So, You Want to Talk Hitler?)
Fascists took control of social institutions and functions while subverting the traditional authority of schools, the church, and family. In Italy, teachers were required to take an oath defending Mussolini’s regime while children were funneled into fascist youth groups for indoctrination. Il Duce’s regime co-opted the Catholic Church with promises of protection and remolded the family into a unit for producing large numbers of children to provide future workers and soldiers for the expansion of the fascist state.
In Hitler’s Germany, the Nazi Party established absolute control over every aspect of social life. Women were forced out of professional roles and restricted to raising children; the party took over education, rewriting textbooks and forcing instructors to join the Nazi Teachers League; children were required to join the Hitler Youth for boys and the League of German Maidens for girls; the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda assumed control of the press, radio, film, theater, and music.
Fascists moved systematically to eradicate “inferior” groups that threatened the purity of the Volk. In Germany, Hitler and the Nazi Party denounced the Untermenschen (“subhumans”) that polluted the Aryan population and launched the systematic extermination of Jews, Slavs, gypsies, homosexuals, and the physically disabled. This culminated in the death camps of the Holocaust that murdered some six million Jews and some five million non-Jewish “undesirables.” To the south, Mussolini implemented the Italian Racial Laws that forbade marriages with Jews and excluded them from education, public life, and much economic activity. Similarly, he implemented strict segregationist and anti-miscegenation laws aimed at black Africans and targeted gypsies, homosexuals, and “barbaric Slavic peoples.”
Finally, the fascists launched military invasions to fulfill their expansionist dreams. Mussolini invaded Libya and Ethiopia, annexed Albania, and attacked islands and port cities in the Adriatic. Hitler went further, vastly enlarging the nation’s military in pursuit of a “Greater Germany” before taking over the Rhineland, Austria, Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark and Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France.
Part Three: What Fascists Are Not
Clearly, Donald Trump and his MAGA movement do not meet the fascist standard. Trump has focused on negotiating peace, not making war, in the international arena. His popularity among minority voters — particularly African Americans and Hispanics — has increased notably during his two presidencies. He has championed an ideal of individual, capitalist competition and wealth accumulation, not submergence of the self into some mystical Volk. Under Trump, there are no death camps, no murdering of political opponents, no dismissal of the national legislature, no personal loyalty oaths from the armed forces, no attacks on the Jews, no MAGA takeover of the press or the arts or education, no creation of a one-party police state. To see otherwise is paranoid fantasy.
Fascism for Dummies also suggests a more subtle, but important conclusion. Hitler and Mussolini pushed forward a coherent, integrated ideological program aimed at remaking their societies — all their principles and actions were part of a larger whole. Thus, it is profoundly misleading to isolate a Trump proposal or utterance, note its similarity to some quality in Il Duce or Der Führer, and label it as fascist when, in fact, it comes from an entirely different ideological direction. It’s like claiming that someone sporting a pencil mustache must be a Hitler disciple, or that someone shouting from a balcony must be a Mussolini clone. This disingenuous maneuver can make almost anyone appear a fascist, as the following illustrates.
Democrats deem Trump and MAGA fascist because they have endorsed an expansion of presidential power. In fact, Trump merely follows in the tradition of most modern presidents, dating back to Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, who have constructed what Arthur Schlesinger described in 1973 as the “imperial presidency.” Trump is not a fascist because of this, and neither is Franklin Roosevelt for his vast build-up of the executive-directed bureaucracy with the New Deal, nor Lyndon Johnson doing likewise with the Great Society.
Many Democrats have labelled Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan as fascist because it supposedly expresses a chauvinistic “white nationalism.” In fact, Trump’s trademark phrase follows in the tradition of American exceptionalism, which sees the United States playing an exemplary role in the world with its ideals of liberty, social and economic opportunity, and representative government. This slogan does not make Trump a fascist any more than Abraham Lincoln for his description of the United States as “the last best hope of earth,” or Ronald Reagan, for his representation of it as “a shining city on a hill.”
Trump’s policies on immigration are fascist, Democrats wail, because securing the American border reflects racist sympathies while ICE agents corralling and deporting illegal immigrants embody “Gestapo tactics.” In fact, Trump and ICE are not enforcing some Hitlerian edict of his own design but upholding American immigration law enacted over the last several decades, most of which stems from the bipartisan Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Immigration enforcement does not make Trump a fascist any more than President Bill Clinton, who insisted in 1995, “We will make it tougher for illegal aliens to get into our country,” or Barack Obama, who said in 2005, “We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently, and lawfully to become immigrants in this country.”
Democrats decry Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Washington, D.C., Memphis, Los Angeles, and Chicago as a fascist tactic. In fact, it is within a president’s prerogative to use the National Guard to quell lawlessness and to protect federal officials. Trump’s action does not make him a fascist any more than Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, who federalized the National Guard in Arkansas and Alabama in the 1950s and 1960s to enforce federal desegregation orders against violent opposition.
Donald Trump’s plan to replace the East Wing of the White House with a large ballroom, Democrats fume, is a fascist project in support of grandiose, monumental ambitions that rival Mussolini and Hitler. However, presidents have complained for decades about the lack of space for government receptions that forces the erection of temporary tents in the yard. Many modern presidents have enlarged the executive mansion to meet such needs. Trump is no fascist for his ballroom undertaking, and neither was Theodore Roosevelt, who added the West Wing in 1903, Franklin Roosevelt, who built the East Wing and added a second floor to the West Wing in the 1930s and 1940s, and Harry Truman, who, from 1948-1952, gutted and rebuilt the entire White House.
Donald Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth delivered speeches to American military leaders in September 2025 that denounced woke policies and demanded heightened physical standards for service. Many Democrats censured “Trump’s Fascistic Military Jamboree,” characterizing the remarks as “Hitleresque” because they embodied toxic masculinity. According to this calculus, however, John F. Kennedy becomes a Nazi for lamenting that “The Soft American” — the title of his 1960 Sports Illustrated article — was endangering the United States in the Cold War struggle and launching the President’s Council on Physical Fitness to rebuild national strength.
The accusation of fascism that comes closest to sticking to Trump concerns his election denialism in 2020 and the subsequent January 6 riot, where some of his supporters assaulted the United States Capitol. While he stands guilty of inspiring this shameful episode, it’s doubtful if this fiasco was truly fascist in nature. First, while January 6 was certainly a riot, it was no insurrection any more than the great wave of Black Lives Matter violence that swept over American cities that same year, with far more destruction of property and loss of life.
Second, when it became clear the Capitol protest had gotten out of hand, Trump went on national television and told the rioters to disperse and go home, a most un-Hitlerian action. Third, Trump’s election denialism in 2020 was not unique but followed a path well-worn by Democrats over the previous two decades as Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden, and many other party figures publicly disavowed George W. Bush’s victories in the 2000 and 2004 elections and Trump’s own win in 2016, deeming each an “illegitimate president.” The January 6 incident stemmed from Trump’s reckless, self-serving, and hyper-partisan stance — and reasonable people can conclude that it disqualified him for the presidency — it’s a stretch to label it fascist.
Next Steps
Ultimately, Fascism for Dummies reveals the Democrats’ fascism smear as a wild exaggeration akin to the red-baiting tactics of certain Republicans in the 1950s and 1960s who regularly accused their Democrat opponents of being Communists. More importantly, it trivializes the profound horrors created by real fascists. Auschwitz, as I discovered when touring the site some years ago, provides a chilling reminder of the ghastly degradations, butchery, and sheer inhumanity manifested by actual Nazis.
There are reasons to criticize Donald Trump personally for his unbounded narcissism, juvenile name-calling, and mind-numbing loquaciousness, and ample grounds for disagreeing with his policies on tariffs, the best way to deploy ICE, the use of executive orders, and other issues. But for heaven’s sake, don’t call him a fascist. As an exasperated Democrat Senator John Fetterman rightly exclaimed a few weeks ago, “Do not ever, ever, ever compare anyone to Hitler … You can read up on exactly what he’s responsible for — 75 to 80 million lives lost in World War II — and you don’t compare him to anyone.”
But if Democrats finally grasp what fascism really is and quit flinging it at Trump, where will they turn since their unifying program consists of little else these days? It will probably be all-in on the “no kings” theme. After all, it’s more fun to dress up and march around in George III costumes, Statue of Liberty getups, or absurdist inflatable animal suits, as in the most recent protests. But there is a downside. Such efforts likely will inspire another installment — Monarchy for Dummies.
READ MORE from Steven Watts:
Charlie Kirk and the Shame of the ‘However’ Progressives
Happy Warriors: Teddy Roosevelt, Donald J. Trump, and Reflections on a Political Style
History Isn’t All Black and White. Just Look at Israel.
Steven Watts is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Missouri and the author of eight books, including Citizen Cowboy: Will Rogers and the American People (2024)
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