How to beat fascism

Writer and legal scholar Omer Aziz on Trump's homegrown threat to democracy, fascism's grip on young men, and what needs to happen to break its hold

When the news broke last week that former staffers had called Donald Trump a fascist, it shocked many. But for others, the surprise was that it had taken so long to see his politics for what they were.

To Americans, “fascism” has meant something alien; a defunct idea the Greatest Generation defeated for all time in World War II. Benito Mussolini’s party may have coined the term, but when the Nazis were developing legal and policy ideas for a fascist state, they looked to the United States for inspiration, not Italy. Systemic racial exclusion and discrimination in the Jim Crow South (and the North), America’s explicitly racist immigration policies, and the subjugation and elimination of Native Americans during the colonization of the continent were all objects of close study for Hitler and his jurists — and key precedents for Nazism.

Omer Aziz — a journalist, memoirist, legal scholar, and former foreign policy advisor to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — thinks that the refusal to recognize that legacy has had dire consequences. He’s thought hard about fascism’s deep roots in America and has been at work on a project (Shadows of the Republic, a book based on the work he’s been doing as part of his fellowship at Harvard, is forthcoming in 2026) that uncovers those precedents to reveal the contradictions of American democracy and to understand the renewed appeal of fascist politics and the movements that threaten democracies around the world today.

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What is your definition of fascism?

Fascism is a precise term, though it is often used now as an insult. Even Trump is calling his opponents” “fascists” now. Fascism is a single leader radicalizing the masses and winning power through electoral means, reinforced with militias on the outside for the purpose of purifying the nation. It is an ideology rooted in fear and loathing, and is masterful at using propaganda to achieve its aims, especially when such propaganda requires overt lying, deception, and misdirection. It draws on revolutionary energy, on spectacle and theater, on pointing the finger at the most vulnerable among us. 

The aim is to control the executive branch of a government and to unleash terror. We’re in that process now. 

Your Harvard Radcliffe Institute presentation (which was sort of a progress report on your forthcoming book) opens with an account of the 1939 German American Bund pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden — an event recreated in venue, spirit, and language by the Republican campaign this past week.

In a recent poll, 47% of Americans overall said they were ok with the idea of rounding up undocumented immigrants and putting them in camps — a clearly fascistic policy. They are on board with fascism even when they recognize it. How did we get here? Can you talk about fascism as an American issue; about its roots in America (which you have traced even in the case of Nazism proper)?

We got here through years of institutional breakdown, of an economy rigged for the top 0.1 percent, and without enough of an interventionist, FDR-like approach to domestic policy. We got here because of the pandemic of loneliness and pain caused by two wars and the absence of genuine community. The left basically continued the Bush-era foreign policy, but with drone strikes and intelligence operations, while playing by the GOP playbook on economic policy — neoliberalism with a respectable face.

Moreover, the War on Terror unleashed domestic terror in America. It completely delegitimized the Republican Party and made it much easier to blame minorities for our problems. Consider the plight of non-college-educated men for example — their life expectancy has gone down, their job prospects have declined, and they are disproportionately dying from opioids and painkillers. When there is this much pain in a society, people will turn to anything to kill it. And as J.D. Vance accurately put it some years ago, Trump was like an opioid for the disaffected masses. 

Fascism does have roots in America. A strong case could be made that the original Ku Klux Klan, founded in Tennessee in 1865, was also the first real fascist movement. Racial “science,” eugenics, and race-based restrictions on immigration were American innovations. In fact, Hitler praised America in Mein Kampf as the “one state” that “excludes the immigration of certain races.” He admired what America had done to the Indigenous peoples and thought Germany should do the same in Eastern Europe. For Hitler and the Nazis, the crowning achievement of America was making white people dominant over all other races. Before Pearl Harbor, America and Nazi Germany had cordial relations — “fascism” and “Nazism” were not dirty words here until World War II.

What was different was that America also had this liberal constitutional system and a set of ideals that were universal, which the blood-and-soil fascists always had to contend with to some degree. The multicultural fabric of America was also real — which is why, for example, the Nazis hated New York City. 

Has the failure to act to stop fascism here had to do with the fact that people see it as “foreign” even though — as you’ve just said — the roots are very much American?

In 2016 and 2020, fascism may have felt like a “foreign” ideology — something from Europe that America had admirably defeated in 1945. Now, it feels very much like fascism is here. When a major presidential candidate speaks of immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the country, when he speaks of a “unified Reich,” when he praises Hitler’s losing generals, when he preemptively blames Jews should he lose, he is directly quoting from the fascist playbook. 

Trump, however, is not stupid. He can read the room. One-third of Americans agree that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country. Far-right influencers online regularly use Nazi and fascist symbols and language. The ideology has permeated American society and I think our unwillingness to acknowledge that this is an American-born issue has allowed it to fester. 

You’re writing in the mode of de Tocqueville, and I wonder how important that kind of insider-outsider perspective is to recognizing what’s happening here. And if so, how can that be translated into action?

The insider-outsider perspective is also critical because sometimes, outsiders like de Tocqueville can see what insiders cannot. In my case, I love the American project and the American experiment, but it’s also clear to me that this project has been fragile since the day the country was founded, that there have always been reactionary and counter-revolutionary forces that want to create their own racial utopia here. De Tocqueville himself had warned that when democracies turn into tyrannies, the old models of oppression and monarchy and authoritarianism do not apply, and something terrifyingly new is created. 

Why do you think no real pro-democracy movement has coalesced in the U.S.? The Democratic Party has started talking about the threat of fascism in clear terms at last, but given the scale and seriousness of the threat, it seems too little and too late in many ways.

The Democratic Party has wanted to play it safe for two decades. We saw this with the Democratic primaries in 2008 and 2016. We saw this with Barack Obama and his refusal to hold Wall Street accountable and with Hillary Clinton’s inability to reach working-class voters. President Biden had some good economic policies, though a lot of them were appropriating what Trump had done, such as tariffs on China. Even with the best policies, though, a unifying narrative has been absent. 

I think the key missing element has been to tell a positive, uplifting story of this country — one that brings people of diverse backgrounds together. The pro-democracy movement should have been talking about freedom, about unity, about progress, about becoming the greatest country on earth through values and investments in ordinary people. That hopeful narrative has been entirely missing these last few years, and so the Republicans have offered an easy solution: the country is broken, the elites broke it, migrants are taking over America, and if you vote for us, we will be your retribution. It’s a form of intoxication. 

You’ve talked and written about why fascism is cool with young people, particularly young men. Can you talk about how and why that’s happening, and what the appeal of fascism is?

I think young men are going through their own crisis right now. They are feeling unmoored, disconnected, alienated. They feel angry — and the roots of anger are fear and pain. Their job prospects have dwindled, and for men without a college degree, they are basically lost. I also think that the liberal and progressive movement has not done an adequate job of reaching young men, speaking to their hopes, and addressing their pain. Who are their role models? Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson? Or some male influencer whose life revolves around denigrating women? Where are the positive men setting standards and making it look cool? 

The veterans of the War on Terror have also been mostly men — and their communities have hollowed out. Men have experienced a complete loss of meaning, much as they did in the 1920s and 1930s, and that makes attaching to a male leader all the more likely. A leader with a simple slogan, a hat, a uniform. Victimhood is a problem here, because when people view themselves as victims, anything becomes possible — and can be justified. 

Democratic backsliding is international, whether we’re talking about fascists on the street or in suits. (Canada has its own fascism problem, very closely related to the movement in the US). — you’ve drawn parallels between the radicalization of young men around the world, whether that’s by ISIS, Neo-Nazi movements in Europe, the MAGA movement in the U.S.

Why is this happening worldwide, and what does the solution look like when considered that way? The typical prescriptions for addressing economic anxieties seem insufficient (or maybe it’s just an issue that is so broadly international the solutions demand global cooperation).

We are seeing the general breakdown of democracy and rule of law around the world. Technology has left people atomized and living in their own pseudo-realities. The old systems have broken down and the new systems have yet to be created, so we are existing in this liminal space where everything is up for grabs. You have someone like Joe Rogan who is more influential than the mainstream networks, because the mainstream networks have limited what someone is allowed to say and who is a good person and who is not, and you have a couple billionaires controlling America’s information highways. That’s a recipe for tyranny.

Defeating fascism this time around won’t be like World War II. There’s no military answer here; if anything, violence will only beget more violence. It’s an idea and movement that must be defeated, and that means presenting a better alternative. To flip your question, what is the optimistic and inspiring story of democracy? Where is the championing of the Constitution and Bill of Rights? Making those fundamental arguments about America as a land of opportunity will break the hold the fascists have over telling a good story.

Looking at the story that the Harris campaign has been trying to tell, proposing a future of freedom and potential versus one of chaos and consolidation of power, and her framing of reproductive freedom as part of the core freedoms that need to be regained and defended against authoritarians who’d take them away, and an appeal clearly aimed at men that offers a path to "success" (obviously that’s reductive, but just for sake of asking), do you think that has been at all compelling for people who need motivation to vote? Where does it fall flat if not?

I think the case for reproductive rights has been quite compelling. Women are energized to vote. If only women could vote, Vice President Harris would win in a landslide. The Republicans have caught on, though, with Trump repeating that he would not sign a national abortion ban. They seem to understand that the politics of this issue have evolved away from those of the Evangelical right. But we also know there’s a segment of the population that either wants greater restrictions on abortion or doesn’t care enough about the issue and is backing Trump for other reasons. Keep in mind that a majority of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction — and Harris has had trouble breaking that consensus. Given that Harris is technically the incumbent, such a statistic should be quite worrying. I fear that as compelling as Harris’s case has been, it has not broken through to people who may not prioritize the reproductive rights issue, or disagree with her on other issues. 

So we’re less than a week out from the election. I think we have already seen that American institutions are not particularly resilient: the courts are clearly OK signing off on fascist consolidation of power, affirmative action is no more and the universities — maybe in the face of direct threats from MAGA congresspersons and candidates — are complying with demands to curtail student and faculty protest, the major news organizations seem to be obeying in anticipation, to paraphrase Timothy Snyder.

The question, now, is what is there to be done between now and next Tuesday.

People need to get out and vote. They need to make their voices heard. People in the swing states need to think hard about what this country should look like for the next 50 years. There is no going back after Tuesday. And young people can recognize that their lives are on the line — their entire futures to be determined by what happens on Tuesday. 

What does the struggle against fascism look like if the election goes to Trump on Tuesday, and his second term has the repercussions domestically and internationally that one might expect? I’m thinking of the fact that your book is coming out in Spring 2026 — what will it mean in that world, versus one in which Harris wins?

If Trump wins, we are in an emergency moment. The next four years will be years of resistance; democratic norms will continue to erode, and there will be overwhelming pressure on the courts to sign off on the President’s wishes. Essentially, we will be facing a constitutional crisis, and the existence of the separation of powers will be at stake. One could see further copycat, mini-Trumps emerging in other democracies to use the same playbook to win power.

If Harris wins, there may be temporary relief, but the fascism issue does not go away — she will face the greatest opposition that any president since Lincoln has faced. State and federal Republicans will be further motivated (and likely enraged), and half the population may become further radicalized. The emergency moment will be punted until 2028. There are plenty of younger, more diverse Republicans waiting in the wings to take over the Trump project—and they might be even more dangerous than the former president. 

What gives you hope in this critical, pivotal moment?

I think young people give me hope. They’ve inherited the consequences of climate change, perpetual wars, social fragmentation, and inequality. They’ve seen more violence, more often, than any generation in recent times. 

Watch Omer Aziz’s full presentation on the history of fascism in America, delivered at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute last year.

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Photo by Bryan R. Smith/AFP via Getty Images; Omer Aziz photo by Tony Rinaldo