Biden is right on MAGA…

The Trump movement is moving towards fascism

Joe Biden last week characterised the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement within US Republicanism as “semi-fascist”. Was he right? The short answer is yes, but in that word “semi” there’s a whole dynamic, past and future, around which the future of American democracy revolves.

In How To Stop Fascism: History, Ideology, Resistance, I argue against normative definitions of fascism, where we compare parties to a checklist of attributes, in favour of the view (inspired by Gramsci) that fascism is a process of social breakdown — of which the fascist movement is just one attribute.

That does not mean we cannot list the features of fascist movements, ideologies or states — or adopt legal criteria for classifying them and, as in Germany, repressing them.

But we need to understand the interaction of authoritarian conservatism, right-wing populism and outright fascism as part of a wider process, involving the disintegration of mainstream ideologies and democratic institutions, leading to the gradual coalescence of right-wing ideology around the fascist thought-architecture.

That’s what I think is happening in America. So Biden is on the money. Here’s what he said:

“What we’re seeing now is either the…