No. of Recommendations: 3
Do you think we are:
1. In fascism?
2. On the road to fascism?
3. The question is hyperbolic.
1. Certainly not.
2. No, except in the sense that any road that you are on leads to many different places. The road that is outside my front door leads to the end of the block, and it also leads to downtown Miami, and to New York, and Boise, and San Diego, and Toronto.
Democracy can lead to bad things without becoming fascism. The government has a lot of power. The head of state has a lot of power. If you democratically elect a bad person to be the head of state, that person will be able to do a lot of bad things - and that will still be democracy. Only if the bad person starts breaking or changing the rules of the democratic system do you start moving into fascism.
And Trump, for all of his sins, doesn't really break the actual rules of democracy to any great extent. Whenever he runs up into the actual limits of his power, he complies. That's why James Coney isn't in jail, while Alina Habba and Lindsay Halligan don't hold office why his Administration has actually complied with the Anti-Impoundment Act, why they ended up releasing one of their deportees the moment that a judge ordered the head of ICE into court, why they didn't nationalize any of the elections that have taken place in the first year of his term, why they didn't succeed in slashing the federal workforce by any material amount until they could amend the regs, etc. When a court issues a direct and final unambiguous order (or where that's likely to happen), Trump complies. That sort of stuff doesn't happen in a fascist government. And the "road to fascism" starts with the head of state starting to disregard the authority of those who can constrain him....which also hasn't happened yet.
What Trump has done is show how much power Congress has chosen to give the head of state. Over the last century or so, Congress built the modern administrative executive, and gave the President complete control over massive amounts of substantive decision making. Trump hasn't been seizing power to himself - he's been using power that was freely and democratically given to the office.
The reason this feels like he's breaking the rules or seizing power is because Presidents never used all that power before. They didn't, because they didn't want to damage their party and their allies. They wanted a legislative agenda passed, so they needed Congress - and because they needed Congress, they honored the past practice of not using all those massive powers that Congress had given in the expectation they would only be used in a true emergency.
It also feels like he's breaking the rules because Trump is a master at gaming the rules, but also the meta-rules, while complying with both. The "rules" are the substantive law - if the law says X is prohibited, you can't do X. The "meta-rules" are the rules that govern when there is a dispute over the substantive law - if the law says X is prohibited, and there is a dispute over whether Y is part of the X that is prohibited, what happens while the dispute is ongoing? Trump knows that there's an answer to that - that the meta-rules tell you what happens while there's a dispute over the law - and he's figured out that the answer is often that the law provides that the Executive's action is lawful and can continue until the courts decide.
Trump lived in a world where only one person was in charge, and therefore only one person's priorities mattered - and he's governed that way. So he hasn't paid any heed to what anyone else wants. He has no skill at managing a system with multiple sources of power. So he decided to ignore Congress and only use Executive power. That means he's completely sacrificed any legislative agenda (no modern President has gotten less through Congress). He hasn't escaped the boundaries of traditional democratic politics - he's just made a radically different choice within that democratic politics, abandoning legislation in favor of avoiding any political constraints on the executive power he lawfully wields.
Which is a too-long way of saying, no I don't think we're materially on the road to fascism. Trump is devoted only to government action that he unilaterally controls, but all within the bounds of power that was given to the office well before he was elected. If you elect a bad person to a powerful office, they will legitimately be able to do a lot of bad things. They way you stop them from doing that is by not electing bad people - once you elect the bad person, they have the democratic legitimacy to exercise the powers of the office. Fighting back against that isn't fighting fascism, and it runs the very real risk of actually eroding the democracy - because the key tenet of democracy is that the people who are elected wield the power.
