Nativism is what happens when a social subgroup tries to cling to legal and social power above everyone else.

Nine years after Charlottesville, GOP pushes "blood and soil"

• Charlottesville Legacy: The 2017 “Unite the Right” rally featured white nationalist chants like “Blood and soil,” resulting in Heather Heyer’s death and highlighting the GOP’s flirtation with extremist rhetoric.
• Heritage American Concept: Advocates like JD Vance promote a vision of America tied to ancestry and colonial lineage, challenging the idea of the U.S. as a creedal nation based on shared ideals rather than bloodlines.
• Legal and Political Implications: Red states are pushing laws to limit naturalized citizens’ rights, sparking debates over citizenship, heritage, and equality, while Supreme Court voices reaffirm America’s foundation on principles, not ethnicity or religion.

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A few months ago, I wrote Marxism and Liberalism: A Historical and Philosophical Overview. The purpose was not to tell anyone what ideology to adopt. It was to understand how another political tradition actually thinks before reducing it to slogans. The principle behind that post was simple: consent without understanding becomes habit. That same approach seems useful now, because one of the most politically abused words in America is fascism.

Donald Trump is called a fascist. His opponents are called fascists. Immigration enforcement is called fascist. Protest movements are called fascist. Eventually the word becomes so broad that it stops explaining anything. So rather than beginning with Trump and searching history for similarities, I went in the opposite direction. I started reading Leon Trotsky's writings on Mussolini, Hitler and the collapse of European democracy and asked a narrower question: what did one of fascism's contemporary observers actually mean by the term, and if we use his definition rather than ours, are there meaningful parallels to the United States in 2026?

Trotsky's definition is considerably more demanding than simply calling an authoritarian government fascist. He specifically rejected the idea that every reactionary dictatorship qualified. Comparing Mussolini with the Spanish dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, Trotsky argued that fascism was distinctive because it developed as a genuine mass movement. Mussolini's movement arose substantially from the lower and middle strata of society while simultaneously receiving support and financing from powerful capitalist interests. Germany, he argued, displayed the same basic structure.

Fascism, in Trotsky's framework, does not begin when a dictator simply seizes a government building. It emerges when a mass of people becomes convinced that ordinary politics has failed, that existing institutions cannot solve their problems and that some form of national restoration is necessary. Trotsky described the enormous expansion of German National Socialism as the product of a deep social crisis combined with the inability of existing political organizations to offer a convincing way out. His memorable description of fascism was the politics of “counter-revolutionary despair.”

That does not mean the United States is experiencing anything comparable to Weimar Germany's economic collapse. It plainly is not. The Federal Reserve reported this year that 73 percent of adults described themselves as doing okay financially or living comfortably. But the same survey found that 91 percent remained concerned about rising prices, only about one-quarter described the national economy as good or excellent, 16 percent had failed to pay all of their bills during the previous month, and 23 percent of renters had fallen behind on rent sometime during 2025. The interesting political condition is therefore not economic collapse but the gap between relatively stable personal finances for much of the population and deep pessimism about the country's economic direction.

There is also a recognizable version of the contradiction Trotsky found in fascist mass politics: anti-establishment politics can coexist quite comfortably with enormous concentrations of private wealth. That does not prove fascism, and America's wealthy are certainly not politically unified behind Trump. But the important mechanism is the ability of a movement to present itself as a revolt against an establishment while drawing substantial institutional and financial support from people who occupy the highest levels of that establishment. Trotsky considered precisely that combination worth watching.

The more serious contemporary parallel, however, concerns the structure of government itself. Trotsky did not assume that democracy disappears in a single dramatic moment. In The Rise of German Fascism, he explicitly discusses transitional political arrangements in which democratic and authoritarian features coexist. Emergency decrees, parliamentary institutions and increasingly concentrated executive authority could operate alongside one another during a period in which the final political outcome had not yet been settled.

That concept is particularly relevant because contemporary democracy monitors are recording measurable changes in the United States. V-Dem's 2026 Democracy Report estimates that America's Liberal Democracy Index declined by 24 percent during 2025, dropping the United States from 20th to 51st among 179 countries. V-Dem attributes much of that deterioration to executive overreach and pressure on the press, academia, civil liberties and dissenting voices. Freedom House uses a different methodology and reaches a less severe conclusion. It still classifies the United States as “Free,” scoring it 81 out of 100, but that is down from 84, and its 2026 assessment likewise points to escalating unilateral executive authority and weakened congressional oversight. The organizations disagree about the magnitude of the deterioration, but neither describes the current trajectory as ordinary democratic stability.

The changing structure of the federal civil service belongs in this discussion as well. In February, the administration announced rules allowing as many as 50,000 federal workers in policy-related positions to lose traditional civil-service protections, substantially increasing presidential control over hiring and dismissal. The administration argues that presidents need the ability to remove employees who obstruct lawful policies. Critics argue that the change makes it easier to replace an independent professional bureaucracy with a politically loyal one. Either way, the underlying question is institutional: is the civil service supposed to serve the law across administrations, or increasingly the political program of the individual who occupies the presidency?

The Justice Department presents an even clearer example of why that distinction matters. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche stated in April that Trump has both the right and a duty to influence federal investigations involving people he believes deserve investigation. The Justice Department has opened investigations involving individuals and organizations Trump regards as political adversaries. At the same time, judges and grand juries have frustrated several of those efforts. That second fact is as important as the first. The executive is pressing against traditional institutional boundaries, but independent parts of the constitutional system are still resisting it.

That same pattern appears elsewhere. The administration has pursued major reductions in federal labor protections while unions continue suing and organizing. It has used federal grants and regulatory authority in conflicts involving universities, cities and other institutions, while courts continue limiting those efforts. Disney and ABC are currently suing the FCC over unusually early reviews of eight broadcast licenses, alleging that regulatory authority is being used to retaliate against programming and editorial choices disliked by the administration. The FCC denies that and says it is enforcing legitimate public-interest and anti-discrimination obligations. The allegation remains contested, but the fact that a major broadcaster is defending its editorial independence against federal regulatory pressure is itself relevant to an investigation of democratic institutions.

Political violence also deserves careful treatment. Classical European fascism possessed organized street formations capable of systematically intimidating and physically destroying political opponents. There is no American organization today comparable in scale or function to Mussolini's Blackshirts or Hitler's SA. Pretending otherwise weakens the historical comparison. But January 6 still matters because it involved political violence intended to disrupt the constitutional transfer of presidential power, and Trump returned to office in 2025 and granted clemency to nearly all of the roughly 1,600 defendants charged in connection with the attack, including commutations for leaders convicted of some of the most serious offenses. That does not create a fascist paramilitary movement, but it does weaken the democratic taboo against treating political violence as an acceptable extension of electoral politics.

This is also where Trotsky's definition gives us an important reason not to simply declare that America is already fascist. For Trotsky, victorious fascism meant something much more comprehensive. Independent organizations capable of resisting the state were systematically destroyed. Workers' organizations were annihilated, and political power penetrated universities, schools, newspapers, municipalities, unions and other institutions in order to prevent independent organization from re-forming.

That has not happened in the United States.

Democrats still govern states and hold seats in Congress. Labor unions remain independent. Universities publicly challenge the administration. Newspapers investigate and criticize Trump every day. Civil-liberties organizations sue the government. Protest movements organize openly. Courts repeatedly rule against executive actions. Competitive elections continue. In fact, on August 28 a federal judge temporarily blocked implementation of new mail-voting restrictions tied to Trump's executive order, finding that challengers were likely to succeed in arguing that the federal government had exceeded its constitutional authority. On the same day, another federal judge ruled that the Pentagon had unlawfully retaliated against Anthropic and violated constitutional protections. Whatever one thinks about those cases, the ability of independent judges to issue such rulings is powerful evidence that executive authority has not consolidated into Trotsky's model of fascist rule.

Trotsky's most useful warning for the present may actually concern something else: the behavior of the opposition. He watched Germany's left fragment while the Nazi movement grew. The Communist Party treated the Social Democrats as “social fascists” and often regarded competing factions of the left as the more immediate enemy. Trotsky believed this was catastrophic. Whatever responsibility Social Democratic leadership bore for Germany's crisis, he argued, actual fascism threatened to destroy Social Democrats and Communists alike.

His proposed answer was what he called a united front. He was not asking Communists and Social Democrats to abandon their ideologies or merge into one political organization. In fact, his writings repeatedly insist upon preserving political independence and the freedom to criticize one's allies. His argument was much narrower: organizations that fundamentally disagree about the future can still cooperate in defending the political space that allows them to continue disagreeing.

Translated into the language of a modern constitutional republic, that idea becomes remarkably straightforward. A liberal does not have to become a socialist. A socialist does not have to become a centrist Democrat. A constitutional conservative does not have to abandon conservatism. A libertarian does not have to embrace progressive government. Journalists, universities, unions, religious organizations, civil-liberties groups and political parties do not need to share one ideology.

They need agreement on something more basic: elections determine who holds political power. Political opposition remains legal. Courts must be obeyed. Government cannot condition freedom of expression on loyalty. Law enforcement cannot become a tool for settling personal political grievances. Citizens retain the right to associate and organize independently of the government. And the president, regardless of party, remains an officer created by the Constitution rather than an authority above it.

This may be one of Trotsky's most enduring observations. Political factions sometimes become so consumed with defeating one another that they fail to recognize when the system that permits their disagreement is itself becoming the object of the struggle.

None of this makes America in 2026 Germany in 1932. The historical differences are enormous. America is not experiencing Weimar hyperinflation or Great Depression unemployment. There are no hundreds of thousands of uniformed party militants systematically destroying opposition organizations. Opposition parties remain legal and electorally competitive. Independent courts remain functional. Unions exist. The press remains free enough to attack the president openly. Civil society remains extraordinarily large and decentralized. Those are not minor details. They are central components of Trotsky's own definition.

The evidence therefore does not support saying that the United States is presently a completed fascist state in the Trotskyist sense.

But that conclusion should not become reassurance.

Several mechanisms Trotsky identified before consolidation are recognizably present: mass grievance politics, widespread institutional distrust, alliances between populist movements and concentrated wealth, expanding presidential authority, politicization of parts of the administrative state, pressure on independent organizations, attacks on the credibility of media and universities, attempts to use governmental power against perceived enemies, normalization of political violence and dangerous fragmentation among potential opponents.

The most accurate description may therefore sit between two slogans. “America is already fascist” goes further than the evidence presently supports. “This is just ordinary politics” increasingly ignores what the evidence is showing.

Trotsky had language for that uncomfortable territory. Political systems can enter transitional periods in which democratic institutions continue to exist while authoritarian methods grow alongside them. The Constitution may still be printed. Elections may still occur. Courts may still operate. The old institutions do not necessarily vanish at once. The struggle occurs over whether those institutions remain genuinely independent or gradually become subordinate to concentrated political power.

That may be the useful lesson in reading these books now. History rarely repeats the uniforms, slogans or exact institutions of the past. What it can repeat are vulnerabilities: public despair, institutional paralysis, political fragmentation, elite accommodation, normalization of exceptional powers and the gradual weakening of organizations capable of resisting concentrated authority.

So perhaps the most useful question is not, “Is this fascism yet?”

It is this:

Which institutions would have to fail before we finally agreed that the danger was real, and why would we wait for them to fail before defending them?

Sources:

1. V-Dem Institute, Democracy Report 2026: Unraveling the Democratic Era? -especially useful for executive aggrandizement, weakened checks and balances, pressure on media/academia, and the finding that U.S. electoral democracy remained comparatively stable even as liberal-democratic safeguards deteriorated.

2. Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2026: United States useful as a more cautious counterweight to V-Dem. It still classifies the U.S. as “Free,” while documenting erosion in institutional checks and civil liberties.

3. Federal Reserve, Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2025 - supports the section distinguishing present-day economic insecurity from Weimar-style economic collapse.