The week when the transition team of President-elect Donald Trump named a TV journalist as defence secretary and revealed that the world’s richest man would be heading up a new department of governmental efficiency felt like a harbinger of regime change. Joe Biden was hailed in 2020 by relieved liberals as a course correction after the first Trump presidency. He now looks less like the upholder of America’s eternal mission to spread freedom around the globe, and more like the end of its ancien régime.
Yet today’s ancien régime once promised the world its future. The French writer and politician François-René de Chateaubriand spoke for many in 1825 when he described the invention of representative republicanism in the US as “the greatest political discovery” of modern times. “The formation of this republic,” he wrote, “has resolved a problem that was thought to be insoluble”: how to allow millions of people to live together under democratic institutions. The New World presented an ideological alternative to the Old World of bewigged monarchs and reactionary aristocrats, one that showed Europe’s masses an alternative and more inclusive path forward.
From the time when Europe’s Great Power system collapsed in war in 1914-18, grand claims were made for the transformative international power of America. Woodrow Wilson pledged to make the world “safe for democracy”. Hitler warned Europeans that Nazi ideas of racial purity were all that stood between them and godless transatlantic degeneracy. Cold war America aspired to forge a Free World of prosperous mass democracies and President Ronald Reagan famously extolled the US as a shining city on a hill — an open sanctuary at the centre of a world thriving in commercial and cultural exchange.
The American century ended much as it had begun, with Clinton advisers hailing the US as “the worldwide symbol of opportunity and freedom”. Many believed that the Washington Consensus would set the new rules of the economic game and liberal democracy would flourish even in the birthplace of Bolshevism. Today that looks like hubris. Since the 2007-08 financial crisis, the number of democracies around the world has fallen, and the backlash to globalisation has gathered pace. American voters themselves this time round welcomed a programme based around trade protectionism, immigration controls and opposition to multiculturalism.
Yet even in these very changed circumstances, it is hard to break the habit of seeing the US as a kind of precursor. If the US was once a beacon of liberty and hope to the world’s “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” (in the words engraved on the Statue of Liberty), does the 2024 election imply that a different, perhaps more authoritarian future lies ahead for everyone? Naturally people interrogate the past to try to figure such questions out and ask history to help them make sense of what is happening. In particular, they look for analogies.
The analogy of choice these days is fascism, not surprisingly perhaps in an era of strongmen in countries such as India, Russia, Turkey and Hungary. Some see fascist dictators between the two world wars as their forerunners. Historian Timothy Snyder posits much more than mere resemblance, asserting that Trump is “the presence of fascism”. Former White House chief of staff John Kelly has said that his ex-boss falls under “the general definition of fascist”. The prospect may be alarming; but it has the merit of familiarity.
Or perhaps overfamiliarity. Analogies are a mixed blessing because they can close down the hard but essential business of trying to identify the salient differences between then and now. The fascist label, for instance, skates over the fact that the world has changed enormously since 90 years ago when centuries-old European empires had vanished in the blink of an eye, mass politics was new, and an entire generation of ex-servicemen emerged scarred and radicalised from the trenches of the first world war.
Moreover, Europe’s interwar drift to the authoritarian right threw up not only fascists such as Hitler and Mussolini but other kinds of dictators too: ex-military men, clerics, professors and even kings who oversaw jerry-rigged elections. All of them opposed liberal democracy but not all were fascist. Some lasted decades, others only months. What their contemporaries asked was not who fitted some textbook definition of fascism but why democracy was in crisis and whether the institutions they had inherited were capable of withstanding the strain.
Their answers varied from place to place depending on the legacies of the past they had each inherited. This is surely why novelist Sinclair Lewis in his 1935 satire It Can’t Happen Here recast Europe’s slide away from freedom as a distinctively American story that rooted authoritarian impulses in the Rotary Club culture of small-town life. To assess what the 2024 US election means requires fewer historical analogies or general observations about fascism, and more attentiveness to the specificities of the American political experience, distinctive in crucial ways that help us understand both why the election this month turned out the way it did, and why this is not necessarily the path that others will follow.
It is telling, for instance, that fascism itself does not seem to have mattered very much to Trump’s voters. Not because they liked the idea but because it did not really register. Some have argued in the election’s aftermath that claiming that Trump is a fascist came across to many people as extreme and implausible, and perhaps damaged the Democrats because they suggested voters did not know what they were voting for. For the election was not generally felt to be a referendum on the events of January 6 2021, despite occasional efforts to present it as such, and if Democratic invocations of fascism in the run-up to voting functioned as a kind of warning, it was one that many Americans ignored. In the end, the health of the constitution turned out to matter less than the pocketbook issues they were really concerned about.
This should not have come as a surprise since most people in the US know little about Europe’s violent mid-century. The one historical event they are likely to recognise is the Holocaust, which they associate not with fascism in general but with Hitler, the Nazis and the mass murder of Jews. Since next to no one seriously expects a repeat under President Trump, the impact on voting patterns was small. And because the Holocaust is frequently presented in terms of extreme antisemitism and not racial prejudice in general, it does not offer most Americans an opening to larger questions of scapegoating, anti-migrant sentiment or political violence.
There is a significant divergence here with Europe. Unlike the US, most European nations have had direct experience in living memory of warfare, coups, juntas or forcible seizures of power that have helped forge a consciousness of the fragility of democracy. Several current European heads of state grew up under rightwing dictatorships that ended only in 1974-75; others under Soviet rule that ended in 1989. The elderly may even remember the Nazi occupation, which was a catalyst for submerged civil war across much of the continent. In Vichy France, collaborators and resistance squared off in a struggle fuelled by ideological animosities that had built up for decades. Something similar happened in Italy and Greece while across eastern Europe, ethnic struggles erupted under the gaze of the Germans.
The end of the second world war thus brought not merely the collapse of the Nazis but a painfully won reaffirmation of national unity and a repudiation of the political extremes. It was for that reason that many cross-party coalition governments were formed across Europe after 1945, and even if they soon gave way to more partisan successors the memory that produced them has not disappeared. In distinction to the US, the spread of Holocaust memory in reunified Europe in the past 30 years has served to spread precisely this kind of pro-democratic message, which explicitly encompasses recent immigrants.
In short, the fact that fascism was first and foremost a European phenomenon means that Europe inhabits a post-fascist universe. This has not prevented the rise of parties that would once have been considered far-right. Several of those who are descended from outright neo-fascist movements in the past are now in power or close to it. But in no case have their leaders been able to act as if fascism and the war did not happen: the common historical memory is an inhibitor, if a waning one.
In the US, this kind of historical legacy does not exist. The national experience of civil war lies further back in the past, and the conflicts of recent times have left it relatively unscathed and with its own territories almost entirely unaffected. It is easy to forget, reading about the shock wrought by Pearl Harbor or by 9/11, just how extraordinarily peaceful the tenor of American life has mostly been.
If the country has been fairly consistently at war in one part of the world or another since 1945, it is rare that the impact has been felt at home except via its returning veterans. Of the major combatants in the second world war itself, none had fewer civilian casualties: the US tally lies under 20,000, whereas in China, Poland and the USSR the total ran into the millions. The country’s historical memories are unshaped by the bitter tang of enemy rule or indeed of dictatorship.
The obvious chief exception to this — slavery and its legacy — continues to lie at the heart of American political debate; but it remains more of a divisive issue than a unifying one precisely because it marks out a trauma that was not shared by the whole population. In contrast, the mass mobilisation of European societies in the wars of the 20th century helped produce national institutions — in media, education or health — that foster a sense of a public commons: anti-elitism has obtained less purchase as a result.
The absence of extreme conflict on American soil in recent times has had another consequence: the US is the only nation in the world currently governed by a document drawn up in the age of the Enlightenment. Since the Americans acquired their constitution, the French have tried out no fewer than 15, Spain 13. In the whole of Europe and South America there are few countries that have not revised their constitution more than once.
Some other states — Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway among them — have ones that date back to the time of Napoleon’s defeat. But the American case is unique not least because in no other country is a constitution of such antiquity reinforced and upheld by a Supreme Court that believes it should decipher and follow the literal wishes of its drafters.
The same upheavals and conflicts that have provided the opportunity to re-evaluate political institutions and norms in the light of historical experience have also encouraged the reassessment of social and cultural attitudes more broadly. Take the now strikingly divergent impact of gender on politics either side of the Atlantic. Unlike in the US, the issue of abortion has been settled across much of the EU, even in fervently Catholic countries. Strong women leaders have led Britain and Germany in recent times and there are currently several female heads of state or prime ministers in the Union: the EU Commission itself is led by a woman.
In this respect, European rightwing parties too reflect European norms: Italy’s prime minister is Giorgia Meloni, leader of the rightwing Brothers of Italy; Marine Le Pen even toppled her father to head the French National Rally. The leadership cult of Maga in contrast values virility and a reaffirmation of masculinity that has few if any parallels west of Russia.
The critical consequence of this divergence in historical experiences and memory is political polarisation, perhaps the key difference now between the US and other democracies around the world. Although electorates have swung to the right in many parts of Europe in recent years, and although the centre-left is suffering from fragmentation, Europe has not become divided to the same degree as in America. Brexit notwithstanding, a recent analysis of the period from 1980 to 2020 shows that the longer-term trend in Britain has been towards a less polarised public opinion; the same was found to hold for other countries as well. Australia, New Zealand and Japan saw little change at all in the degree of polarisation over four decades while Canada, Denmark and France saw a modest increase only. Of all the countries investigated, only Switzerland compared with the American move away from the middle.
Some of this reflects the influence of political institutions such as the US Congress, which has become increasingly polarised, especially on the Republican side, since the advent of the Tea Party Caucus. The combination of a first-past-the-post system, the party primary model and the fact that the two major parties are generally so closely matched electorally in modern times across most of the country has helped push political elites away from the centre. The capture of one of the two major parties by an extremist movement has no European parallel.
But the politicians themselves are only part of the problem. Despite considerable overlap on a surprising range of policy issues, ordinary American voters have been separating emotionally too and feelings across the party divide have become embittered and heightened. At least one of the causes is clear: the retreat into information bubbles caused by the lack of a single trusted national news source — a problem much more acute in the US than elsewhere. Another is more or less spontaneous physical segregation — ideological rather than racial — as significant numbers of people relocate to areas and neighbourhoods they believe will be politically congenial in order to avoid argument. These are features of society not found in other democracies to the same degree.
In short, historical memories that serve to buttress democracy elsewhere are lacking in the US today, while the forces of polarisation are unchecked. The right is on the rise in Europe, but still operates within a broadly accepted institutional setting shaped by common recent experiences. These are contested but not fundamentally thrown into question.
European nations are made conscious by history and geography of their geopolitical vulnerability, which not only inhibits internal dissension but also makes for really heated arguments about the limits to co-operation and integration between states. Lacking a sense of geopolitical threat, and with a very different and almost uniquely benign set of historical memories, the American electorate appears to be poorly positioned to fight against internal polarisation and discord.
The world’s view of the US will probably have been altered forever in this election. But perhaps this is merely the ending of an illusion. For the US was always a society with its own charmed geographical and historical specificities as well as a darker side that was easily neglected by those who took its liberalism at face value.
In the past it combined the language of freedom with the reality of slavery. It spoke of modernity and the future while clinging to its own increasingly archaic institutions. Decades of international leadership have left it relatively little touched by the wars and conflicts that have raged around the world. Fascism may not be what awaits it, because fascism was a product of European circumstances in a now bygone era of history. But fascism is not the only test and the sooner this is understood, the better we will be able to orient ourselves in the uncharted territory that lies ahead.
Mark Mazower teaches history at Columbia University
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