Neoliberal fascism?

 

I was working on an essay that was going to suggest that Trump's release of a health care plan last week is an example of how we might consider him a post-neoliberal president--I've been following the ACA subsidies drama in Congress pretty closely since the summer and then recently started reading Gary Gerstle's The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order.  Gerstle's "Neoliberal Order" rose up in the 1970s to replace the New Deal Order, but it's been breaking up in recent years, beginning with the Great Recession of 2008.  I haven't finished the book, but it seems to me that Trump and Biden are two different versions of some kind of Post-Neoliberal presidencies in a not-yet fully formed New Order.   

When Trump closes the borders and violates the principles of free-market fundamentalism he is violating the precepts of the Republican Party's version of neoliberal political economy.  I think his "Great Healthcare Plan" is another example of this. 

For example, as Politico reports, his “favored nation drug pricing policy, which would require drug makers to reduce prices in the U.S. to the lowest list price in the rest of the world” would align US drug policy with "countries with socialized medical systems.”

It contradicts Republican orthodoxy going back to Reagan, which held that any such government interference in free markets will only make things worse for consumers.  As the National Taxpayer's Union said in reaction to the plan, it would "lower innovation and make patients sicker."  Congressional Republicans, though, "sounded ready to embrace a plan to drive down costs that puts the blame on private industry" and "does not include free-market ideas."

Trump's approval on Health Care was net -20%, and elected Republicans fear it could lead to big losses in the midterm elections. 

So maybe the post-neoliberal Republican Party is going to be a "Party of the People," as Patrick Ruffini and Oren Cass argue. 

Then I happened to read Thomas Edsall's column in Tuesday's NYT.  He argues Trump has turned ICE into "a violent and unaccountable domestic police force, empowered by claims of immunity to exercise force against American citizens and immigrants alike."  For me the most disturbing information in the article was about recruitment efforts that seem to be purposely aimed at attracting violent white nationalists, and anti-Semites to the force, using slogans from their organizations, and even one from Nazi Germany (“​One people, one realm, one leader) in recruitment appeals.

The relationship between Trump and fascism resurfaces from time to time, most recently just before the 2024 election when Trump's former chief of staff John Kelly used the word to describe his former boss.  Even JD Vance once said he thought his future boss might be "America's Hitler." 

This morning I happened on an article from last March by two Australian political scientists, "Trumpism, fascism and neoliberalism" which considered the neoliberalism fascist questions all in one place.   

The essay concludes that Trump should still be considered a neoliberal, but one who was brought to power, ironically, by the failures of neoliberalism--he was "an outcome of and a response to neoliberal crisis capitalism with its austerity, its dizzying inequalities, and the precarity and insecurity it has produced for millions of Americans who feel themselves abandoned by conventional politics that is no longer responsive to their needs or demands."

As to the question of whether he's a fascist the authors dissent from academic experts on fascism like Robert Paxton and Frederico Finchelstein who decided after Jan. 6 that Trump deserved the fascist label.  They agree more with Richard Evans, who said J6 wasn't a fascistic event because “the attack on Congress was not a pre-planned attempt to seize the reins of government.”  Trump also, Evans argued,  doesn’t display the classic fascist hunger for conquest and expansionist violence. 

The Australians agreed, calling Trump "a proto-fascist phenomenon that bears some family resemblance to fascism."

I wonder, though, if any of them would change their minds in light of Venezuela and Greenland and if they read Edsall's column showing that Trump is turning ICE into something resembling the Nazi's Brownshirts.

I do think Evans is right, however, in arguing that "it is politically unwise for his opponents to fixate on a past category rather than analyzing his politics as a new phenomenon."  We know that history never actually repeats itself--it only rhymes. 

One More Thing 

A cautionary note for Democrats: A Wall Street Journal poll shows the Republican party has a negative approval rating on 10 or 11 important policy issues. Yet, when they asked voters which party they trusted more to address those issues, Democrats ranked even lower on 8 of the 11. As toxic as the Neoliberal version of the Republican Party has become, American like the Democratic version even less.