Sunday Reading List: On Fascism, Fear, and Trumpism
Essays on History and Current Events
Timothy Snyder, “The Berlin Wall Never Fell,” Substack
Timothy Snyder’s take on “The Fall of the Berlin Wall” is worth contemplating, less because of what it says about that event 35 years ago this week, but because it speaks to the current political moment.
Boiling the fall of Soviet Communism down to a single event, he writes, is shorthand that “transforms a complicated history into a simple moment.” It obscures the collective action that took place and tells us “freedom is something that just happens.” It wasn’t.
The resistance to communism was a human story of cooperation. Its dissidents stressed the need to work together. Its most important organization was a union. When a certain conjuncture emerged in 1989, it was these practices and traditions that allowed new political alternatives to emerge. The human cooperation, called "civil society" at the time, was not enough in itself to change the world. But when the world began to change in other ways, people were ready.
This is an important lesson, I think, because we are entering a moment of great peril. We have elected a man who has promised a fascist right-turn, who plans to unleash the power of the police state on immigrants, dissidents, and his enemies. This is not conjecture. He told as as much during his campaign.
We should not be so foolish as to assume that the rise of Donald Trump and his ultimate resurrection were singular acts. They were part of a historical project undertaken by conservative operatives that goes back to the early Cold War. (Rick Pearlstein’s four-book history of American conservatism should be read by all.)
The fight against Trump cannot be a singular act, either. Democrats had reveled in the election of Joe Biden in 2020, which they assumed was a Berlin Wall moment for Trumpism, that the size of the Democratic victory would force Trump to slink off. The work — a single election cycle — was done. Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and the Democrats saw that race — and the surprise pickups in the House made by the party in the 2022 mid-terms — as vindication. MAGA was marginalized and normalcy (as I wrote the other day) was the order of the day.
This unfolding history, to paraphrase Snyder, is far more complicated, and what happens next will require more than just electoral activity. Maybe Democrats hold win the House. Maybe 2026 brings a new Blue Wave. We can hope, but we should not wait, we cannot wait. Two years is a long time and a lot of damage can be inflicted.
Unions will be key, but so will other civil society groups with a wide range of goals and who undertake a wide range of activities — from groups that offer aid to those that march in the streets.
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Jason Stanley talks to Peter Beinart about fascism.
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Peter E. Gordon writes in The Boston Review that “the tragic ascent of Trump is not an anomaly to democracy but its fatal flaw,” using Karl Marx’s essay, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” as a guide.
What Marx understood—and what too many of us have today forgotten—is that there is always a powerful countercurrent in history that can sweep away like Noah’s flood whatever political gains may seem to have been made.
Democracy’s “logic of universal suffrage” does not guarantee progressive outcomes, because "democracy is only as enlightened as its citizens, who, in exercising their right to popular sovereignty, may just as easily opt for prejudice in place of progress and for charismatic authority in place of enlightenment.”
This happens when society decides that “liberal values have lost all credibility or have never gained sufficient traction in the first place” so that the society in question “will be inclined toward atavism rather than progress, and it will deploy democracy against itself.”
This is where Marx’s criticism of Louis Bonaparte in “The Eighteenth Braumaire” intersects with Trumpism, a broader loss of faith not just in progressive values but in the ability of liberals to govern. “This is the poisonous atmosphere in which authoritarianism gains an upper hand,” Gordon writes. “Populism supplants liberalism, and the true face of economic suffering turns into a grimace of nativism and racial hatred.”
This is where we are now. “Whether Trump will take that final step from illiberal democracy to outright fascism we cannot know,” Gordon says. “But he has made his aspirations altogether clear, and they should be familiar to anyone who has studied the course of history in the modern era.” Trump and Trumpism, I would argue, are organic outgrowths of the collected failures of Democratic administrations intersecting with racial resentment, misogyny, and xenophobia.
“Trumpism is hardly exceptional,” Gordon says, “and none of us should find it surprising that American democracy now finds itself all but consumed by the general pathologies that have accompanied the ascent of popular government since its inception.”