Is Trump a fascist? Or is he Voldemort?
Now in English.
The fascism debate is mostly a debate framed within very narrow understandings of politics. During the previous Trump period, there was a strong tendency to liken what happened to the Harry Potter universe. A political analysis framed only through the Harry Potter books is indeed very narrow and limited. Framing current politics within the Harry Potter universe requires a lot of shortcuts and simplifications. Despite it's popularity, forcing your analysis into a Harry Potter framework mostly shows your lack of other literary references and severely limits your analysis. While doing it once or twice might be a good take, this framing was so common among liberals that Twitter users came up with the "Anti-Harry Potter Action - Read another book"-meme.
The narrow debates of whether we should call Trump a fascist or not is similarly framed within a narrow liberal analysis of European pre-WW2 politics. We have to ask whether this thing that or that thing Trump does now is similar to what Hitler or Mussolini did, and whether that is enough to call it the F-word. The moderates are constantly warning that "this isn't exactly like Hitler, so we shouldn't make comparisons", while the "alarmists" are constantly comparing Trump to Hitler, and sometimes to Mussolini. Very serious historians and philosophers are engaged debates on the exact definitions of fascism, all within a framework Hitler and Mussolini. A very few, mostly outside the Anglosphere and Germany may even include other European pre-WW2 fascist movements, but the benchmark is still whether or not we can compare Trump to Voldemort Hitler.
So please “Read another book”, don't limit your understanding of fascism to Germany and Italy in the 1920s and ‘30s.
The current Trump regime has all the hallmarks of a classic authoritarian dictatorship. It is centered around one person. It is populist, racist, conspiratorical and willing to break its own laws to get their way. It undermines rule of law and has secret government agents that snatch people from the street in bright daylight before sending them to brutal prisons. It attacks "enemies of the nation", while stealing as much as it can from the state and nation they supposedly protect. It obviously is a form of fascism, despite not fitting directly into the pre-WW2 Potterverse of liberal debate.
What were seeing (instead of Voldemort) is not the fascism of the early 20th century, it is a classical post-WW2 US-backed dictatorship. Naomi Klein, in her book Doppelganger, argues that the Holocaust was the colonial violence of Europe turned inwards, against part of their own population. In the same sense, Trump is American colonialism turned on the US itself. Trump is not the American Hitler or Mussolini, he is the American Pinochet or al-Sisi.
Is there any reason not to call Pinochet a fascist? Or al-Sisi? It doesn't really matter, they are dictators. Fascism was a historical movement, but authoritarian right wing oligarchal rule is a political system that has survived into the current. 20th century fascism was a continuation of 19th century colonialism, and 21st century fascism is continuation of 20th century colonialism.
This was a system where the West had its "capitalism with a human face" with ideals of human rights and democracy, AKA liberal democracy, while money kept flowing in from the former colonies. Those often had to resort to a less human face to keep going, hence the dictators. Any country that strayed too far from the interests of American and European capital faced a coup and a fascist dictatorship. Even within Europe there were fascist dictatorships into the 70s. *
After the fall of the Berlin wall, liberals happily declared an "end of history" and told everyone that now we were all going to live in liberal democracies. This was an optimistic story and many former fascist countries moved closer to a liberal democracy during the 80s (ie. Argentina) and 90s (South Africa most famously).
Though, lots of countries was stuck with fascist dictators, and many former Soviet-backed countries kept the dictators while realigning to the US. This period of global expansion of capital found new ways of extracting resources from the periphery, like tax havens, debt and trade deals, but still often required a boot to stamp down protests that threatened the flow of capital. So fascist dictatorships lived on well into this day, like in Egypt. **
The discontents of this system has always been visible and caused criticism in the imperial core for its lack of "the human face". In the periphery it has been fought with uprisings and revolutions. Still, it kept going. So why has the system collapsed in on itself now, and produced Trumpism?
Comparisons to pre-WW2 fascism often point to the lack of strong socialist movement in the now. Mobilizing against the threat of a workers revolution was often the selling point of historical fascism and Nazism, and it was a credible threat to the ruling classes back then. No one fears a communist revolution in the West now.
Except, that is exactly what the populist right is openly agitating against! Anti-wokeism is at its core anticommunism.
The right is obsessed with how climate change, transsexuality and "critical race theory" is part of a conspiracy to unravel the whole of Western civilization. Cultural marxism and other bogeymen of the right is, in their view, a hidden communist agenda baked into academia, popular culture and "the deep state".
What if they are right? There's obviously no hidden communist masterminds at work, but there are inherent contradictions of capitalist liberal democracy laid bare with these issues. These issues can't be solved without major systemic changes that will threaten the power of capital. Unlike the 1920s and '30s, there are no revolutionary movement in opposition to liberal democracy trying to solve these issues, but instead there are movements trying to solve these within the institutions of liberal democracy. Science, bureaucracy and civil rights are tools to create political change within liberal democracy, and these tools are wielded by social movements now. Hence, liberal democracy in itself has become a threat to the capitalists, the oligarchal class in the US and beyond.
As with post-colonial countries which used their democracy to stray too far from the interests of American capital, the current US democracy in itself became a threat to American capital. This turned American capital against its own democracy, and that is where were at now.
Does it matter if we use the F-word, or if we claim that Trump is Voldemort Hitler? No, because democracy is under threat, and not only in the US. Maybe Trump won't be another Hitler, but he definitely will be another Pinochet. The "Free Helicopter ride" has been a right wing meme for a while, so don't be surprised when it goes from meme to reality. It is still fascism even if they have memes alongside the Roman salutes.
'* There's of course also the other side with Soviet-backed "socialist" dictatorships instead, but they aren't relevant to this case.
** Russia after the Soviet collapse is also a story of US imperialism, fascism and kleptocracy, but this isn't a full history lesson.