I recently expressed skepticism that Trump is installing fascism in America. Someone then asked me: what did I think was going to happen with Trump? I answered her as truthfully as I could: I don’t know. The fact is none of us knows. Not even, I suspect, Trump or Steve Bannon. That’s because our political situation is not a fixed or frozen force field; it’s changing every day. It also – crucially – depends in part on what we do.

Before I wrote my book on conservatism, I was a student of the politics of fear. My first book, which was based on more than a decade of research, was an analysis of how political theorists since Hobbes have understood the politics of fear. In the second part of the book, I offered my own counter-analysis of the politics of fear in the United States. Fear, American Style, I called it.

Here’s what I learned about it: the worst, most terrible things that the United States has done have almost never happened through an assault on American institutions; they’ve always happened through American institutions and practices.

These are the elements of the American polity that have offered especially potent tools and instruments of intimidation and coercion: federalism, the separation of powers, social pluralism and the rule of law.

All the elements of the American experience that liberals and conservatives have so cherished as bulwarks of American freedom have also been sources and instruments of political fear. In all the cases I looked at, coercion, intimidation, repression and violence were leveraged through these mechanisms, not in spite of them.



My skepticism about the possibilities of European-style fascism in the United States, in other words, does not rest on any optimism or faith about the American experiment or the resilience of American institutions. Just the opposite. I know how easily mobilized for terrible purposes the American regime can be. It is partially for that reason that I am skeptical that a strongman politics of the sort we see in authoritarian regimes elsewhere will be installed.

This is a country that managed to enslave – to torture and drive unto death, both physical and social – millions of black men, women and their children, for over two centuries, and then to re-enslave them by another name for another century, not by shredding the constitution but by writing and interpreting and executing the constitution.

This is a country that managed to mow down trade unionists and dissenters, to arrest and throw them into jail, to destroy vibrant social movements, to engineer a near-complete rout of American social democracy after the second world war, to build and fill concentration camps, to pass legislation during the cold war authorizing internment camps: all without a strongman. Indeed, all of this often happened with the collusion of some of the most esteemed voices of liberty in the country.



This is a country that in the last half-century has managed to undo some of the precious achievements of liberal civilization – the ban on and revulsion against torture, the prohibition on preventive war, the right to organize, the skepticism of the imperial executive – through lawyers, genteel men of the Senate with their august traditions and practices and the supreme court.

The most prized elements of American constitutionalism – shared and fragmented power, compromise and consent, dispersed authority – are the very things that have animated and underwritten Fear, American Style. The most terrible kinds of repression and violence have worked precisely because the constitution has given so many players a piece of the pie.

Insofar as Trump and Bannon believe that we need authoritarian strongman politics in order to achieve their ultra-revanchist aims, they don’t understand American politics. When it comes to American revanchism, that kind of strongman politics is almost entirely superfluous. Indeed, it’s pure surplus. And may be well counter-productive to what they and their constituents truly want.

The truth of the matter is that Trump and Bannon could get most if not all of what they want – in terms of the revanchism of race, gender and class, the white Christian nation that they seem to wish for – without strongman politics.

American institutions offer more than enough resources for revanchism. That Trump and Bannon seem not to know this – that they are willing to make opponents of the military and the security establishment, that they are willing to arouse into opposition and conjure enemies out of potential friends – may be their biggest weakness of all. And if they do know this, but seek strongman politics anyway, then they’re willing to put strongman politics above and beyond the project of social revanchism that their base seeks. Which may be their second biggest weakness of all.

So I do think Trump and Bannon are vulnerable: not because American institutions are so strong and resilient, but because Trump and Bannon don’t seem to understand how weak and pliable those institutions actually are, if you know how to delicately use and manipulate them.



Corey Robin is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the Cuny Graduate Center