Six Propositions After Trump's Second Victory

Abstract 1. On Lateness and “Late Fascism” When news of Donald Trump's Madison Square Garden rally broke, the historians were ready. Not that much editorializing was required, for the image archive told the story in the bluntest terms. Black-and-white photographs pictured the German American Bund staging its “Pro American Rally” in the same arena in 1939, complete with a monumental portrait of George Washington flanked by swastikas, a low point in a movement full of them: It had featured, in 1937, Nazi sympathizers goose-stepping down the Upper East Side. A dispiriting and obvious lesson followed: The contemporary US electorate ignores—has ignored—fascism's history at its peril. So, is it now too late to interrogate fascism's regional inflection in the United States as its own sick brand of homegrown nativism? Or might lateness itself provide an opening, however small, to gain some traction on the present moment? To view Trump's rally as shocking—as a radical mutation of the nation's history—is to subscribe to a peculiar genre of American exceptionalism: that fascism can't or indeed hasn't already happened here. It is also to sidestep the ugly reality of November 2024 as a cracked mirror to January 1933. The NSDAP came to power legally, after all; Trump won his second term in office democratically. For both historians and the historically amnesiac alike, however, the risk of such analogies is their inducement of a virtual stasis. Are we stuck in a historical feedback loop from which there is no escape?