Trumpism, fascism and neoliberalism

The recent US presidential election has re-energised a debate about Trumpism and fascism that has been percolating since 2015. This debate has unfolded in stark binary terms of presence or absence. Alarmists argue that Trumpism bears all of the hallmarks of fascism and should therefore be labelled as such. Sceptics suggest that this conclusion is premised on shallow historical analogizing that mistakes form for substance. These differences are part of broader debates about Trump’s policies and whether they conform to or challenge neoliberalism, and whether neoliberalism is even compatible with fascism. This article makes an intervention into these debates, interrogating Trumpism through the prism of two literatures whose relationship has only recently come into sharper focus–one on fascism and one on neoliberalism. We draw evidence from the recent presidential campaign to argue that although Trumpism does not conform to inter-war European iterations of fascism, and while the conditions under which they emerged are strikingly different, Trumpism nonetheless exhibits fascistic tendencies that have intensified in recent years. We refer to this as ‘proto-fascism’, and suggest that neoliberal capitalism has been centrally implicated in its emergence.