Fascism renewed: an interview with Robert Paxton

This NYT Magazine article from last month discusses the opinions of the famed American historian of 20th century Europe Robert Paxton as he (initially) opposes the rampant overuse of the term Fascist in response to the ongoing rise of extremely right-wing politicians worldwide. Later, in what is possibly the most instructive part of the interview, he reflects on the real signs that point to current events replicating the historic rise of Mussolini and Hitler:

He believes that Trumpism has become something that is “not Trump’s doing, in a curious way,” Paxton said. “I mean it is, because of his rallies. But he hasn’t sent organizers out to create these things; they just germinated, as far as I can tell.”

Whatever Trumpism is, it’s coming “from below as a mass phenomenon, and the leaders are running to keep ahead of it,” Paxton said. That was how, he noted, Italian Fascism and Nazism began, when Mussolini and Hitler capitalized on mass discontentment after World War I to gain power. Focusing on leaders, Paxton has long held, is a distraction when trying to understand fascism. “What you ought to be studying is the milieu out of which they grew,” Paxton said. For fascism to take root, there needs to be “an opening in the political system, which is the loss of traction by the traditional parties” he said. “There needs to be a real breakdown.”

With the dumbfounding re-election of Trump, these chilling lines from Robert Paxton’s Vichy France sound more like forewarning than historical observation: “the deeds of occupied and occupier alike suggest that there come cruel times when to save a nation’s deepest values one must disobey the state. France after 1940 was one of those times.”