‘The Americans want our resources, our water, our land and our country,’ says the new prime minister of Canada in his acceptance speech. Canada! Even a couple of months ago, a Canadian prime minister talking about the threat of annexation by its neighbour, and long-term ally, really would have seemed the stuff of speculative fiction, not something that could happen now.
Whether or not Donald Trump is a ‘fascist’ depends entirely on how broad or narrow a definition of the word ‘fascist’ you use -Is Putin a fascist? King Jong Un? Narendra Modi? – but he represents an extraordinarily sudden reversion to a style of leadership that prevailed for much of history: the naked and unapologetic wielding of power, not to make the world better in some way, but simply in order to dominate and prevail.
The use of force by powerful countries has of course never gone away and America, Britain and other nations have been actively involved in very recent times in overthrowing governments they didn’t like, but America’s new posture of openly flaunting its power to dominate and spread fear, even among its supposed friends and allies, really is reminiscent of a medieval king, like King Scyld in Beowulf (that ‘wrecker of mead-benches’ who forced neighbouring clans to pay him tribute, and of whom the poet says ‘That was a good king’*), or of the Roman generals who won adulation by conquering new territories, and bringing their defeated leaders back to Rome to be paraded through the streets in chains.
Since the Italian Fascists and German Nazis admired this kind of might, and claimed to be emulating this kind of leadership, it really isn’t an exaggeration to say that Trumpism is a cousin of Fascism and Nazism, an ideology, like them, based on the glorification of might.
* I’m referring here to the translation by the late Seamus Heaney from which I took the epigraph for America City.
