We’re told that the 2024 presidential election will decide whether America descends into fascism. But there’s a great deal of confusion about what this term means, and which candidate is likelier to lead us there.
Fascism is now routinely used to describe conservatives, but that’s only because of what Tom Wolfe called “the greatest hoax of modern history.” The original fascists were leftists. Benito Mussolini started his political career in the Italian Socialist Party, and Adolf Hitler’s Nazis took their name from “National Socialists.” Unlike their Communist rivals on the Left, those dictators didn’t directly seize the means of production, but they believed that a strong central government should direct the economy and the rest of society: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state,” in Mussolini’s words.
Mussolini’s principles and policies were widely admired and emulated by progressives in America during the 1920s, and the underlying philosophy—a society planned and regulated by “experts”—is still shared by today’s progressives, as Jonah Goldberg showed in his 2008 book, Liberal Fascism. But after the horrors of the Holocaust, progressives rewrote history by reclassifying fascism as a right-wing movement. Since then, they have deployed the term against every Republican presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan—including, of course, Donald Trump.
It’s true that Trump often sounds like an authoritarian, particularly when he’s misquoted by the legacy media (like the recent false accusation that he vowed to unleash the military on his political enemies). Democrats were appalled by his statements during the 2016 campaign about locking up Hillary Clinton, but his Department of Justice (unlike Joe Biden’s) didn’t actually try to imprison his political opponent. How does his record on authoritarianism compare with his rhetoric—and how does it compare with Kamala Harris’s record?
As president, Trump repeatedly denounced and threatened the press, vowing several times to sue the New York Times and calling for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to revoke broadcasters’ licenses because of the networks’ “partisan, distorted and fake” news coverage. But the FCC didn’t revoke any licenses (it has no authority to punish broadcasters for partisanship), and his one lawsuit against the Times was dismissed. The closest Trump came to actual censorship was the temporary revocation of CNN correspondent Jim Acosta’s White House press pass, which was restored by a court order. During the 2024 campaign, Trump has repeated those threats against the broadcasters’ licenses and filed a suit against the CBS news program 60 Minutes, accusing it of “election interference” for editing its interview with Harris. Thanks to the First Amendment protections that broadcast journalists enjoy, there’s no reason to expect Trump’s latest threats to have any more impact than the previous ones.
The Biden administration has proved a more effective censor. The administration successfully pressured social media platforms to silence eminent scientists who accurately documented the futility and harms of White House pandemic policies. The administration then created a Disinformation Governance Board, which prompted so many comparisons to the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 that it was shut down. Yet, the administration proceeded to put Vice President Harris in charge of a White House task force to combat online “disinformation campaigns” and “abuse” directed against “government and civic leaders.” It also helped fund a British group producing the influential Global Disinformation Index, which steered advertisers away from conservative news outlets. These actions led one critic to call the Biden White House the most anti-free-speech administration since that of John Adams (which sent newspaper editors to prison), and there’s little indication that a Harris administration would change course. Her running mate, Tim Walz, has declared (wrongly) that the First Amendment does not protect “misinformation or hate speech.”
Trump’s greatest power grab occurred during the pandemic, which saw the imposition of the most authoritarian measures in American history. Unprecedented restrictions of individual liberty caused massive social and economic damage. Technically, the lockdowns and most other restrictions in 2020 were the doings of state governors, not Trump, but the governors were responding to pressure from his administration. Though Trump himself soon began calling for the lockdowns to end and for schools to reopen, the White House officials overseeing his Covid policies, Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci, continued successfully pressuring governors to extend the restrictions. Trump did have the good sense to consult with scientists critical of the restrictions—notably Scott Atlas of the Hoover Institution, the lone dissident on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, who advised him to overrule Birx and Fauci. But Trump and his political team feared taking such action in an election year.
Atlas and others (including the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025) have urged the next president to make sweeping reforms in the federal health bureaucracy to prevent it from repeating its disastrous mistakes during the next pandemic. Atlas says he is confident that Trump recognizes the mistakes and would be eager to make the reforms. But Harris seems an unlikely reformer. She and Biden have continued to insist that the pandemic restrictions were necessary.
When Biden took office, he not only retained Fauci but promoted him to be his chief medical advisor. With Harris’s enthusiastic support, Biden instituted another unprecedented authoritarian measure: vaccine mandates for all federal employees, including members of the military, as well as more than 80 million workers at private companies. The administration even insisted, unlike European governments, on needlessly mandating vaccines for workers who already had natural immunity due to a prior infection. The ostensible public-health justification for this coercion was to stop the spread of the virus, but the vaccines did not actually prevent transmission. Critics argued that it was unethical to force vaccines with rare but serious side effects on younger American adults at minimal risk from the virus, but the administration persisted (and this year, Harris mandated vaccines for all her campaign employees.) The Supreme Court eventually overturned the mandate for private companies, ruling that the federal government had no authority to compel those workers, but by then many of them had already lost their jobs.
For an alleged wannabe dictator, Trump badly blundered in his choices for the Supreme Court. Those three conservative justices went on to help form majorities in landmark decisions limiting the power of the federal government and the president. The rulings shifted authority back to the states and severely curtailed the power of the executive branch—much to the dismay of Harris. In her criticism of the court’s decision last June overturning its 1984 Chevron decision, which makes it easier for citizens to challenge regulations by federal agencies, she warned that it would limit the power of “federal experts” to issue “commonsense rules.”
Harris’s idea of commonsense rules presumably includes mandates from the Green New Deal, which she co-sponsored in the Senate. The plan to eliminate fossil fuels never had any chance of being passed by Congress, but the Biden administration has quietly advanced this agenda by creatively using federal agencies to promote and subsidize “sustainable energy,” stymie oil and gas production, and force automakers to switch to electric vehicles. Harris is firmly committed to the goal of achieving “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050, which would be the most costly project in history and give central planners vast new powers to manage the economy and the lives of citizens.
Whether or not you want to call that fascism or just plain old authoritarianism, it would probably appeal to Mussolini.
Photos: Brandon Bell/Getty Images (left) / Bill Pugliano/Getty Images (right)