Adam Adelpour looks at the difference between fascism in power and other forms of far right politics, and the lessons from history on how to stop them
Donald Trump’s actions since his inauguration in January, sacking public servants, arresting Palestinian protesters, threatening Panama, Greenland and Gaza, have been shocking.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, made headlines when he did a fascist salute at Trump’s inauguration. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has attacked dozens of federal agencies and attempted to sack tens of thousands of workers.
Trump’s executive orders released members of armed far-right militias imprisoned for storming the US Capitol. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have been unleashed to terrorise communities.
In the last decade we have seen the rise of the far right and fascist politics globally. So it is not surprising that some people are asking if the US is descending into fascism.
These developments are truly alarming. Understanding the rise of fascism in the 20th century is key to understanding how to fight today.
The key features of fascism
The first step is to understand what fascism is. There is a lot of confusion about the term.
German fascism is known for its extreme racism and antisemitism, leading to the Holocaust and the murder of six million Jews. But the defining aim of fascist movements is to annihilate working class organisation and liberal democracy, root and branch, as both the fascist movements that took power in Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s did.
The Nazis physically destroyed trade unions, banned all political parties, and imprisoned working class activists in concentration camps, whether they were social democrats (similar to Labor Party members) or Communists.
Every element of society from sports clubs to marching bands was put under Nazi control.
Fascism performs a service for the ruling class in a situation of severe economic and political crisis.
The Great Depression in Germany saw industrial production collapse by 42 per cent and unemployment explode to 5.5 million—30 per cent of the total workforce.
The German ruling class faced a strong trade union movement that had made important gains in the revolutionary years following the First World War.
To solve the crisis for the ruling class, trade union and socialist organisation had to be smashed.
This wasn’t possible using the usual parliamentary channels, it required physical confrontation—something that the Nazis with their street gangs could provide.
Fascist groups may run in elections for parliament like other parties. But crucially, they seek to build up a paramilitary force that can break strikes, smash working class organisations, and terrorise minorities.
By the end of 1931, the Nazi party had 800,000 members. By 1933, the party had built a paramilitary wing, the Storm-troopers, with a force of 400,000.
As the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote: “The historic function of fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organisations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery.”
This explains why the German ruling class was prepared to let Hitler take power in 1933, even though he never won the votes of a majority of Germans.
The fact fascism was a mass movement meant it could achieve for the ruling class what the normal military and police could not.
Trotsky argued that support for fascism was based among the middle class—small farmers, shop owners, landlords living off rent, professionals and managers. These groups were over-represented in the Nazis’ membership.
The Depression ruined the middle class on a mass scale. Businesses went broke, while others lost well-paid jobs and their life savings.
Their ruin created a frenzied rage among the middle classes that fascism directed against the working class and against Jews, who they said were responsible for the collapse of the economy.
Fascists and the far right today
Donald Trump is a far-right racist and populist, not a fascist. He is not working to organise a street army to annihilate liberal democracy. But Trump is more than willing to encourage and embolden those who are fascists and want to build a real fascist movement.
Trump is part of a global wave of fascist and far-right politics that is quite complicated and has different currents.
Some are classic fascist groups like Golden Dawn in Greece and Jobbik in Hungary that organise gangs of street thugs, mass marches, and stage violent attacks on migrants, refugees and left-wing activists in the mould of the Nazis.
In other cases fascist organisations have dropped their Hitler salutes, the use of clear fascist insignia, open Holocaust denial and overt use of street violence to try to present themselves as normal political parties running in elections. This is the model of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (formerly called the National Front) in France, Austria’s Freedom Party and the AfD in Germany.
Marine Le Pen’s father established the National Front as a party with a core of wartime Nazi collaborators and other fascists that sought to use elections to legitimise its ideas.
More recently Marine Le Pen has publicly tried to distance it from this history, hiding its overtly fascist politics and changed the name of the party. But National Rally maintains its fascist core and links with violent fascist gangs.
The AfD in Germany is more explicit than the French National Rally. Its leadership includes fascists like Bjorn Hocke, the leader of the party in Thuringia, who has been fined for using Nazi slogans.
But they, too, are trying to use elections to build a larger fascist party while hiding some of their more explicit Nazi politics.
Because these “Euro-fascists” do not yet have mass fascist parties with street armies as Hitler did, even when they join government they do not have the ability to impose a fascist regime.
Georgia Meloni in Italy is another example. She is a fascist who began her political life in a fascist party called the Italian Social Movement. But although she is Prime Minister she is not running a fascist state; her anti-migrant and anti-refugee policies are disgusting but trade unions, the ability to openly protest and the institutions of liberal democracy still function.
Racist populism
Mainstream political parties that are not fascist, nevertheless, play a role legitimising racism, for example pulling politics to the right and giving oxygen to fascists that help them grow. These include racist populist parties like Reform UK and the likes of Trump in the US.
The racist immigration policies and racist scapegoating that the major parties use to deflect from their own failures also creates fertile ground for the far right.
The Democrats’ embrace of anti-migrant policies under Joe Biden in the US is one example. In February 2025 Trump actually deported less migrants than Biden did in the same month the previous year.
There are dangers with characterising Trump as a fascist.
Firstly, it plays down the seriousness and the physical threat of a genuine fascist movement. Secondly, thinking the Trump administration is akin to Hitler coming to power in 1933 encourages the idea he is unstoppable and that it is impossible to protest or organise against him.
Trump is far from invincible. The anger about cost of living that helped bring Trump to power can rebound against him. An Ipsos poll in February found 53 per cent of Americans disapproved of how he is handling the economy. This is the highest level of dissatisfaction at any point in his first and second Presidencies.
Lessons from Germany
One of the key lessons from the rise of fascism in Germany was the failure of the working class movement and the left to build united action against the Nazis.
The Nazis may have had 400,000 storm troopers, but working class organisations—the Communist Party, the trade unions and the SPD (the social democratic Labor-type Party)—contained many millions. Together they could have stopped the Nazis.
Under the influence of Stalin the Communist Party viewed the SPD as just as bad as the fascists. This ignored the fact that the SPD had millions of working class members and depended on trade unions—and the fascists wanted to destroy them.
When Hitler took power in 1933 the Communists called for a general strike. But they had isolated themselves from the wider working class and no one answered.
Trotsky called for the Communists to organise united action against the fascists alongside members of the SPD. This would have meant organising joint efforts to defend SPD and union meetings against fascist violence.
This lesson about the need for united, mass working class action remains critical today—to fight the racist populists like Trump, or against the Euro-fascists or classical fascist groups.
In Greece, Golden Dawn became the third biggest party after the global financial crisis and waves of austerity after 2007.
But it was successfully pushed back. After the left-wing rapper Pavlos Fyssas was murdered by fascists in 2013, 600,000 joined a general strike. Through many other mobilisations, based on uniting workers’ organisations and the left, Golden Dawn was broken.
In France last year, before the second round of parliamentary elections, 800,000 protested against the National Rally, helping prevent their victory in the election.
The rise of fascists and the far right can be stopped. Pushing back the mainstream climate of racism that fuels the far right is crucial.
Trump’s bigotry can be beaten through mass action against deportations and for trans rights.
There have been inspiring migrant-led protests against Trump’s deportation regime. After ICE arrested Palestinian Mahmoud Khalil, a prominent activist in the Columbia University Gaza protests, hundreds of Jewish activists occupied Trump Tower in New York.
During Trump’s previous term, in 2020, the Black Lives Matter rebellion saw a massive, multi-racial movement on the streets that helped boot Trump from office.
This time the stakes are even higher. Trump and the far right can and must be fought.
As part of that fight, we also need socialist organisation to build the struggle to smash the capitalist system that creates the racism, crisis and despair that allows the far right and fascism to fester.
