Trump 2.0: Fascism? Partial Fascism? Something else?
Mary Trump, the President’s niece who is a longtime public critic of the Orange Anomaly, recently did a podcast focusing on one of the ugly and sleazy aspects of the Trump state-terror arrests and deportation program: the money that private for-profit prison companies are making off of it.1
Private for-profit prisons are one of the most noxious products of the neoliberal era. How do for-profit companies make money, boost their stock performance, and generate huge bonuses for corporate objectives? Maximize revenue (bring in as many inmates as the government can feed you) and minimize costs, i.e., spend as little on the inmates as you can get away with doing. Responsible treatment of inmates? Rehabilitation? Medical care? The less they provide, the more profit they make.
This got me thinking about a political theory issue concerning the now-very-immediately-topical issue of fascism.
Partial fascism?
The description in that podcast reminded me of a recent revisiting of 1970s political analysis of American carceral practices. Which made me think of its implications for the current discussions of authoritarianism.
In a 2023 book, Late Fascism, Alberto Toscano takes a look at one aspect of the discussion on the American New Left in the 1970s. In that particular conglomeration of political theory and often-sectarian politics, the concept of fascism was often sliced and diced to a dizzying degree.
But Toscano focuses on a particular aspect of those polemics that might be thought of as a theory of partial fascism:
lt was largely due to the [Black] Panthers, or at least in their orbit, that ' fascism' returned to the forefront of radical discourse and activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s - the United Front Against Fascism conference held in Oakland in 1969 brought together a wide swathe of the Old and New Lefts, as well as Asian-American, Chicano and Puerto Rican activists who had developed their own perspectives on American fascism (for instance, by foregrounding the experience of Japanese internment during World War II).
In a striking testament to the peculiarities and continuities of US anti-fascist traditions, among the chief planks of the conference was the notionally reformist demand for community or decentralised policing - to remove racist white officers from Black neighbourhoods and exert local checks on law enforcement. lt is not, however, to leading members of the Black Panther Party but to political prisoners close to the Panthers that we must turn for theories about the nature of late fascism in the United States. While debates about 'new fascisms' were polarising radical debate across Europe, the writing and correspondence of Angela Y. Davis and George Jackson outlined the possibility of theorising fascism from the direct experience of the violent nexus between the carceral state and racial capitalism.2 [my emphasis; paragraph break added]
Without diving into the rabbit-hole of American polemics about fascism in the 1970s, one of the implications of the analysis he references is that practices of repression, racism, and violence that we associate with the whole society of Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany can actually exist within a society that is predominantly a liberal-democratic one. So, the practice of racial segregation and mass incarceration in the United States had put a significant portion of the population under an undemocratic, repressive manner of living. And fascism could be understood as the extension of those conditions to the society as a whole.
It was an important part of the New Left perspective that the treatment of “outsiders” by the society offered a key insight into the nature of the society as a whole. Outsiders in US in the 19670s and 1970s included racial and national minorities who were discriminated against, prisoners, the poor, indigenous peoples, the chronically ill, and cultural nonconformists from hippies to marijuana smokers to those with non-heteronormal sexuality. This notion that the essential character of a society can be recognized in its treatment of the most vulnerable has also been one shared by religious reformers for many centuries before that.
In the view referenced by Toscano, the treatment of the outside groups not only stands as a constant warning for normies not to depart too drastically from the preferred social model. It also provides a way to understand the imposition of fascism/authoritarianism in a country not as a sudden event but more as an expansion of the treatment of outsiders to the treatment of everyone. Such an expansion of repressive practices could, of course, occur as a sudden event, i.e., a rapid change.
Fascism and capitalism
In a famous observation about fascism, Max Horkheimer wrote the following in 1939 about German emigrants fleeing Nazi Germany, of which he was one of many. As the Jewish leader of the famous Frankfurt School, the leftwing Institute for Social Research, he had more than one reason not to hang around in Germany.
The opening sentence of this paragraph reflects the discretion that emigrants from Germany were aware they needed to practice in their host countries.
No one can demand that the emigrants hold up a mirror to the world that generates fascism out of itself precisely where it still grants them asylum. But those who do not want to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism. The English friends of today have better experiences than Frederick [II, King of Prussia] with the blasphemous Voltaire. His hymn of praise to liberalism by intellectuals may often come too late, as countries are transforming into totalitarian ones faster than books find publishers. But they do not give up hope that somewhere the reform of Western capitalism will take place in a milder way than that of the German version. And that well-recommended foreigners will still have a future. But the totalitarian order is nothing more than its predecessor, which has lost its inhibitions.3 [my emphasis]
The bolded sentence stresses a direct connection between fascism and the capitalist economic system. In the case of Mussolini’s Fascist Party in Italy, Hitler’s National Socialist regime in Germany, and their various admirers and imitators fit that definition well.
Horkheimer there also uses the term “totalitarian order” clearly in reference to the contemporary fascisms of 1939. In the postwar era, “totalitarian” came to be commonly used to refer to any kind of dictatorship. More specifically, it became a common way to equate Communist states and parties to fascist ones.
In the famous Studies in Prejudice project that Horkheimer directed in the US after the war, they used the more general term “authoritarianism,” but those studies were clearly focused on the phenomenon of fascism, in particular. Today, authoritarianism has also taken on a more general meaning to refer to “democratic deficits” in societies without particular reference to their underlying economic systems.
Defining political systems and ideologies is a fuzzier undertaking that, say, zoology, where the difference between say, cats and dogs can be defined in discrete physical terms. And while it’s not particularly controversial today to recognize that all kinds of societies can have “democratic deficits,” it is also widely assumed that economic relations do have a huge influence on political forms.
During the 1980s, the cooperation between China and the US in opposition to the Soviet Union led many Western commentators to treat China as a kind of honorary capitalist country, despite the large role of public ownership and the very explicit Marxist-Leninist ideology that it has had since the victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949 - although with some distinctly varying versions of it over the years.
The general focus on China as the rising superpower now seems to have focused more attention in public commentary on the structural differences between its economic system and capitalist ones.
Part of the fuzziness in characterizing China’s economy can from the popularity of the term “market system” to describe capitalism. And China does have a “market.” The post-Cold War neoconservative version of the End of History even adopted implicitly (and often explicitly) an economic determinism that the flourishing of the “market system” would inevitably create irresistible pressure for a country to adopt Western-style liberal democracy and the acceptance of so-called free-market capitalism.
John Kenneth Galbraith described the emergence of the concept of the “market economy” with one of his characteristically sardonic observations:
[I]n reasonably learned expression there came "the market system." There was no adverse history here, in fact no history at all. It would have been hard, indeed, to find a more meaningless designation - this a reason for the choice.
Markets have been important in human existence at least since the invention of coinage, commonly ascribed to the Lydians in the eighth century B.C. A respectable span of time. In all countries, including the former Soviet Union, as also in what is still by some called Communist China, they had a major role.4
Horkheimer’s 1939 observation remains true. Historically, liberal democracy was associated with the rise of capitalism. Nineteenth socialists including of course Marxists saw the capitalist system evolving by its own dynamics toward a more collective type of organization that would require what came by to be called by Marxists “collective ownership of the means of production”, i.e., state-owned major industries, banks, and services. Nineteenth century socialists also generally understood that form of economy to require democratic government. In Europe in the 1800s, the Social Democratic parties were the main champions of parliamentary democracy.
Without writing hundreds of pages about the evolution of democracy, socialism, and communism since 1900, the Italian and Germany fascisms of the 20th century definitely represented an anti-democratic development stemming from capitalist economies and societies. The tendency of capitalist accumulation to centralize wealth and power into the hands of a small groups of oligarchs is more evident in 2025 as it has ever been.
Former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich, in an adaptation of a saying credited to Louis Brandeis, have been saying lately, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.”
As Reich also says regularly, democracy is not a spectator sport. Even the best institutional arrangements can’t save democracy if enough of the citizens are willing to do away with it and enough others are indifferent to it.
But extreme oligarchy creates ripe conditions for doing away with it.
SHOCKING: Mary Trump UNCOVERS the Trump Scandal HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT. Mary Trump Media YouTube channel 06/21/2025. (Accessed: 2025-21-06).
Toscano, Alberto (2023): Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis, Chap. 2. London: Verso.
Horkheimer, Max (1939): Die Juden und Europa. Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 8:1-2, 115-116. My translation to English.
Galbraith, John Kenneth (2004): The Economics of Innocent Fraud: Truth for Our Time, 6. Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin.