Right about now, something terrible is happening in America. Society is one tiny step away from the final collapse of democracy, at the hands of a true authoritarian, and his fanatics. Meanwhile, America’s silent majority is still slumbering at the depth and gravity of the threat.
Grim reading. It comes from a piece signed by ‘Umair’ who claims to speak for a group of “survivors and scholars of authoritarianism”. Speaking for people who’ve already taken refuge from authoritarian regimes, his message is, ‘we’ve been there and we know the signs’.
The signs include Trump’s incitement of violence and backing for it, as when he defended the young supporter charged with murdering two people in Kenosha. Trump also uses federal agents without name tags to disappear opponents off the streets, without warrants and without accountability.
Now I’ve long been aware of Trump’s authoritarian temptation. But I hadn’t thought that he’d already taken the US to the very brink. What finally opened my eyes to the imminence of the danger was that this piece, passed to me by a friend in the US, wasn’t going to be the only warning of approaching authoritarianism I received that day. My wife also sent me an article from the New Yorker which was just as stark.
The journalist quoted Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die, who told him:
I don’t normally like to make these comparisons, but this sort of encouragement of violence for political purposes is worryingly similar to what the Fascist movement did in Europe during the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties.
We try to avoid comparisons with Hitler, since they’ve become threadbare from over-use. Besides, while there’s no saying how far Trump might go in brutalising groups he hates, such as immigrants, he doesn’t seem intent on mass murder yet. That might change, of course. After all, there’s a track record of ethnic cleansing in the States.
Take the trail of tears, for instance. This was the forced expulsion under President Andrew Jackson of 60,000 law-abiding Cherokee and other Native Americans from the South-East. Around 15,000 died.
A great many Americans persist in viewing Jackson as a democrat. Who knows what an authoritarian might do.
Still, Trump hasn’t gone that far yet. So people often compare him to Mussolini rather than Hitler. For my part, though, perhaps partly because I live in Spain, I see a closer parallel to Francisco Franco.
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| Is Franco the right Fascist model for Trump? |
In one respect, Trump has nothing in common with Franco. The Spaniard was a soldier, at one time Europe’s youngest general since Napoleon. Trump went to exceptional lengths to ensure he never had to serve in uniform. Franco, for all his many faults, was a man of proven physical courage.
Trump is far keener on the military these days, now that he can order soldiers into harm’s way without having to share their fate. Why, he even tried to send the Army to intervene against civilian protesters back in June. Military leaders refused the order, but who knows what orders they might obey in the future.
This could be a key issue after the presidential election in November. Trump has made it clear that he intends to challenge the result if he’s defeated. Ultimately, it may come down to having to force him out of the White House, and that might require the Army.
But would it act?
If Trump wins the support of the Army to hold onto power illegally, then he will have become a new Franco. The Spanish dictator’s authority derived only from force of arms. He won a bitter, three-year civil war and then ruled for a further 36 years, dying peacefully in his bed, never held to account for his crimes. These were outstanding: nearly 500,000 dead in the Civil War, 50,000 executed in the years that followed it, along with 250,000 gaoled in brutal conditions, leading to numerous more deaths.
Franco was extraordinarily lucky. Two generals, both better placed than he to lead the movement, were killed in separate and almost certainly accidental air crashes. The Republicans, Franco’s enemies, also did him a great service by killing (executing or assassinating, depending on your point of view), the leader of the Falange, the Spanish Fascist movement.
Franco purged the Falange further himself, until it became an organisation led by mediocrities and sycophants. At that point, and not before, he took it over and made it Spain’s only legal party.
This is one of the great points of similarity between Trump and Franco. Neither of them believed in much. Franco’s slogan was ‘Spain, united, great and free’, with ‘free’ being used in a special, Francoist meaning, which has echoes in Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’. Especially as greatness escaped them both. Franco may have had a stronger faith than Trump, but both used religious institutions to advance their power: the Roman Catholic church for Franco, Protestant fundamentalism for Trump.
Otherwise, neither Franco nor Trump had any particular ideology. Neither was Fascist by conviction, only by opportunism: they would draw on the support of Fascists, and they’d be happy to use Fascist methods, but only as suited their personal ambitions.
In other words, Franco was above all a Francoist, just as Trump is above all a Trumpist. That is the key to understanding both men.
Not that they’re any less dangerous for being driven by unbridled ambition rather than any system of principles. Franco was ruthless in inflicting his terror on Spain. We’ve seen Trump’s brutality already, while he still accepts some constraint from law. What would he do freed of those legal limitations?
That’s where we’re heading. It seems clear to me that if he wins this year’s election, the chances of there being another in 2024 diminishes sharply. He has already talked about serving twelve years in power, and maybe we should learn to take his pronouncements of that kind seriously.
Even if he’s beaten in the presidential election, will he go? And if he decides not to go, where will the Army stand?
That is where we shall have to see whether Trump’s complete transformation into the new Franco can be stopped or not.
It was chastening to receive two warnings of where the US is heading in the space of a single day. Warnings we need to take seriously. Because if the would-be authoritarian isn’t blocked now, it may well be too late afterwards.
When Franco made his bid for power, the other side would cry “they will not pass”. But they did pass. What a tragedy if the US lets their Franco pass today as Spain’s did back then.
Blocking him means his defeat in November. A massive defeat. So decisive that there
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