In his conference at Columbia University on April 25, 1995 Umberto Eco not only engaged in a biographical exercise about his first ten years, spent in the world of Italian fascism, and about how he discovered the word « Liberty » at the time of the Liberation. He also attempted to define fascism, a regime of which the Italian example gives the general appearance but which it does not summarize. Grasset, the French publishing house, has just reissued the text of this conference.
A family resemblance
Historians, attentive to differences, often object when more literary, more philosophical minds1 want to engage in comparisons, for example between different forms of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. This does not stop Eco. Without seeking to make a definitive statement about fascism and its supposed essence, Umberto Eco, as a good literary man, notes that the word is used as if it were obvious to refer to different regimes. In order to understand its uses, he proceeds according to the “family resemblances” method, the importance of which has been known in philosophy for at least a few decades.
It is from this perspective that he lists the fourteen criteria of fascism. They are not necessarily all found together in a single regime, he notes, but a fascist regime necessarily fulfills a significant number of the criteria on the list. Mussolini’s fascism, of course, which is the matrix regime, Balkan fascisms, Portugal’s Estado Novo, Francoism, Nazism… to limit ourselves to the regimes born in the interwar period. If, Eco tells us, Nazism was unique, fascism corresponds to a diversity of regimes.
So what about Trumpism, how can it be described? The debate gained momentum after the failed putsch by pro-Trump militants on January 6, 2021 2. Many American intellectuals have wondered whether it is a fascist movement. We know that the historian Robert Paxton considered that this Trumpism of 2021 was not really fascism. The start of the new Trump administration forces the debate to be reopened. Paxton has also revised his judgment.
Let’s be clear, at this stage and in an obvious way, the Trump regime, which is seeking to consolidate itself, corresponds to at least ten of the fourteen criteria defining fascism according to Umberto Eco. What are these criteria?
- The preference for traditional aesthetics3
- Irrationalism and the rejection of modernism despite the taste for technical prowess
- The cult of action for action’s sake and the rejection of critical reflection and culture
- The idea that any disagreement is treason
- The fear of difference, which leads to racism
- The appeal to the frustrated middle classes, disadvantaged by the crisis or political humiliations and terrified by the pressure of inferior social groups
- Nationalism and national identity seen as a privilege that cannot be shared
- Fear of the enemy and the forces it could mobilize against the regime
- Rejection of peaceful discussions in favor of the idea that life is a permanent
- Elitism, with contempt for the weak, under the direction of a dominant leader
- Education of each person to become a hero
- The will to power manifested in sexual matters and machismo
- The idea of the people as a monolithic entity expressing a common will, with rejection of “putrid parliamentary governments” according to Mussolini’s terms
- The adoption of newspeak to limit the tools of complex and critical reasoning
These criteria are impressionistic, and they only indirectly target certain essential traits of fascism, such as contempt for legal procedures and for all institutions that would like to maintain their autonomy4, contempt for civil liberties. They do not reflect the influence on Trumpism of the large companies managing the digital platforms or the great innovations of the early 21st century – a sign that the new state of capitalism has combined with this regime and gives it a distinctive air.
The fact that Trumpism combines a variety of elements – populism with a charismatic leader, digital management and even, in the person of his vice-president, Catholic fundamentalism – also corresponds to one of the traits also noted by Umberto Eco: syncretism, which characterizes fascist doctrines.
DOGE or management instead of the Military
However, what is lacking among the criteria is something that would derive from a military ethos, of which Trumpism seems devoid: a preference for heroes, a sense of action, a taste for war as envisaged by the military. Trumpism, aggressive as it may be in international relations, is not accompanied by military-style mobilizations or a desire for serious armed confrontations. It is isolationist, mercantile and not warlike. Attacking Panama or perhaps Canada, admiring Russian military force, is not typical of what a fascist regime would exhibit, especially in its early stages. The European fascisms of the 1920s and 1930s were conceived by soldiers or former soldiers. Trumpism was born in the imagination of a real estate developer. It has no military dimension.
Donald Trump has filled this lack. To the army, which seemed the perfect example of rational organization around 1930, Donald Trump and his deputy Elon Musk (or vice versa) today substitute Californian-style management5, that of the Department of Government Efficiency, the DOGE. A brutal managerial philosophy plays the role of militarism in Italian fascism, sharing with the latter the idea of re-founding the economy and even society on new bases, more rational according to the propagandists of the cause, but, in 2025, with means other than wearing uniforms and the handling of weapons.
With this slight difference, which illustrates an expansion of the family of fascisms, the regime that is trying to establish itself in the United States is fascism.
The question is whether the people of the United States, the institutions and the States are ready for this leap into a dimension foreign to their history, or whether there will be forces of recall.
Serge Soudray
Umberto Eco, Recognizing Fascism, translated in French from Italian by Myriem Bouzaher, Grasset, reprint 2024
Notes
| ↑1 | Hence the criticisms addressed to Hannah Arendt in her time. |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | Contreligne: January 6, 2021 – Davy Crockett: Denatured or True Fascists? |
| ↑3 | See Donald Trump’s wishes for official architecture. |
| ↑4 | Donald Trump today defends the theory of the unitary state, under his direction and without independent administrative authorities, going back on principles traditionally recognized in the United States |
| ↑5 | Digital and artificial intelligence, in the service of reducing costs and state attrition. |