Is Trump a Fascist?

Being right and being effective aren’t the same thing.

Photo by Miltiadis Fragkidis on Unsplash

The hot debate on my social media this past couple weeks is whether to call Trump a fascist. The conversation kicked off with a Megan McArdle piece in WaPo (she says no), followed by Jonathan Rauch’s piece in the Atlantic over the weekend (he says yes) and spirited discussion on social media by Shikha Dalmia of the wonderful The UnPopulist (she says yes, hard). Joe Walsh followed up over the weekend with a compelling Substack live discussing evidence of Trump’s fascism, including the clear racial overtones of the MAGA slogan and movement more broadly. Of the two print pieces, I find Rauch more convincing than McArdle and my instincts generally are to lean to “yes”. Why not be honest about what we’re seeing? I made similar arguments to those that Rauch makes about why Trump is so dangerous in a post earlier this year (I Was Wrong About Trump). While I dodged the term “fascist” in that piece, I tried to be clear about the serious dangers. And that was before masked government agents executed American citizens in the streets.

At the same time, the radical moderate in me just can’t avoid making things complicated. In some sense, I disagree with everyone a little and also think they’re all missing a central issue. I’ll also add that I respect all of these people and think they’re all acting in good faith. They share with me serious concerns about the future of liberal democracy or constitutional republicanism or whatever term you want to use that hasn’t been weaponized as either woke or reactionary. But academics and public intellectuals need to take tactics seriously if we’re going to get out of this mess and this is where I think we keep dropping the ball.

First, just to be clear, academics and public intellectuals should debate concepts like fascism. It’s our job to map language, debate meaning, and bring complex ideas into broader discourse. That’s important work and it’s work I hope I do a little bit of here.

But (you knew there would be a “but”) context matters. The fascism debate might be important in academic circles, but evidence suggests it may seriously backfire when it comes to public discourse.

It's not enough to be right. You also have to be effective. And tradeoffs exist in public communication just like they exist in every other kind of human endeavor.

Tradeoffs That Really Matter

And so I agree with everything Rauch writes in his otherwise excellent piece until the last paragraph:

In which case, is there any point in calling Trump a fascist, even if true? Doesn’t that alienate his voters? Wouldn’t it be better just to describe his actions without labeling him controversially?

Until recently, I thought so. No longer. The resemblances are too many and too strong to deny. Americans who support liberal democracy need to recognize what we’re dealing with in order to cope with it, and to recognize something, one must name it. Trump has revealed himself, and we must name what we see.

What Rauch doesn’t seem to realize is that the sentence I’ve bolded above is precisely the puzzle we’re struggling with: who are the Americans who support liberal democracy and how do we reach them? In a lot of ways, the question isn’t whether we’re facing fascism. It’s how we get most Americans to agree that what’s going on is both dangerous and unacceptable. It’s not enough to be right; we need to get other people to care. And so to some degree Rauch, despite his best efforts, still falls into the error of caring more about being right than about being effective. We have to understand how humans actually communicate and how they think about problems, particularly in an environment of deep partisan polarization. Being right and effective is what we actually need. And I just don’t see the insistence on being right, on its own, as terribly effective.

I’d like to live in a world where we can be right and effective at the same time, which means dealing with the reality on the ground. And the reality of all the polarization research out there suggests that despite Rauch and Dalmia and Walsh being right about Trump’s fascism, they might be wrong about where that conclusion leads.

“What Works?”: A Bipartisan Failure

And that wrongness has everything to do with polarization and our old-school tribalistic brains. It also has to do with a serious gap I see across both academic and public intellectual discourse on both sides of the political aisle which is, somewhat surprisingly, the almost total failure to pay attention to what really works in the real world.

Both liberals and conservatives are remarkably bad at asking a simple question: Does this actually work?

I suspect, like a lot of what ails us, that this is largely due to tribalism. Our cognitive biases make it really hard to step outside our own heads, to see the world from outside our tribal position.

This past week was a particularly tragic example. The Trump administration’s handling of immigration is so focused on “winning” this supposed “war” that very little attention is being paid to whether the tactics are actually achieving the stated goals. Yes, people are being deported. But is this approach solidifying support for sensible immigration policy? All signs point clearly in the opposite direction. The median Trump voter wants better immigration policy, not politically targeted brutality. The current tactics are undermining rather than advancing that goal.

But progressives aren’t any better at this. Part of why we have Trump in the first place is that Democrats failed to ask what actually works to communicate with the voters they lost in 2016. Instead of doing that research and adapting, they lost even more voters from key parts of their base in 2024. The inability to think strategically about communication and coalition-building isn’t a partisan problem—it’s a human problem.

Maybe it’s not that surprising. Academics and public intellectuals love opinions and we’re paid (to some degree) to share them. Pollsters are often paid to tell parties what they want to hear. And everyone has deep internal incentives to justify their priors, cherry pick evidence, and target their arguments in ways that advance their own team. What everyone is often paid less to do unless we’re in very specific specialities within academic disciplines is assess whether our opinions and tactics actually track reality on the ground.

And this is where I get irritated at everyone. Or maybe I’m just angry this week. Because the problem with so many of these debates is that people are being shot in our streets while we’re still failing to really dig into how we reach the people who can turn this around. And yes, I’m Substacking away here so I may not be helping much either.

But the real question for me is: how the hell do we get out of this? How do we work together as Americans? How do we find enough common ground to say “enough” and work toward a better America together?

Who Is Our Audience?

Part of the problem is that I’m not entirely sure writers like me are always thinking deeply about who their intended audience is and what kind of messaging will work with which groups.

This matters a lot for the fascism debate because research consistently shows that moralized political labels activate defensive responses rather than promoting persuasion—particularly when they implicitly categorize people as evil rather than describing specific behaviors. Debates framed around terms like 'fascism' tend to strengthen in-group identification while increasing hostility toward out-groups, making attitude change less likely. This is particularly true when people feel as though their identities themselves are under attack. (This recent APSR article has a more hopeful tilt, but it all depends on how a reader interprets the term “fascism” in the first place.)

When we argue about whether Trump is a fascist, we’re usually - whether we like it or not - performing for our own side, for people who already agree with us nod along. People don’t dig in deeper, tribal lines calcify and nobody’s mind changes.

Moreover, terms like fascism have lost all meaning for most right-leaning voters given the left’s use of fascism to complain about every Republican from from Bush onward.

But we still could make some progress here if we focused on being effective. The Trump electorate is not a monolith, and treating it as one is itself a form of one-dimensional thinking. More in Common US’s landmark study “Beyond MAGA” identifies four distinct types of Trump voters based on surveys and conversations with over 10,000 people: MAGA Hardliners, Anti-Woke Conservatives, Mainline Republicans, and the Reluctant Right.

The MAGA Hardliners—the fiery, deeply loyal core—are probably not going to be moved by arguments about fascism no matter who makes them. But only 41% of the Reluctant Right remain confident in their vote choice (and those number were captured prior to the chaos in Minnesota), a number that continues to decline. Mainline Republicans are middle-of-the-road conservatives focused on their families and daily lives more than national politics. Anti-Woke Conservatives have a practical rather than spiritual connection to Trump; they see him as effective against cultural forces they oppose, not as divinely ordained.

These are different audiences that require different approaches. If you’re going to come down on the side of “we have to hammer home that this is fascism,” if that is the hill you want to die on in terms of communicating danger to the public, then you need to figure out how to communicate that message in a way that will actually hit home for these voters with different values, goals and policy preferences. That means thinking really clearly about who your audience is and who the best messenger and message to that audience is. Are there people on the center-right or the right who are willing to sound the alarm? Can we pair that message with visible, consistent, clear-headed, and honest reporting about civil liberties violations and threats to people from both sides? We need all of that evidence, and we need more people on the right to come out and make these arguments.

That means careful message management (who is your audience and what motivates them) alongside thoughtful and enduring coalition and relationship building (finding the messengers who matter). Clearly there are real opportunities to engage with the Reluctant Right, Mainline Republicans, and Anti-Woke Conservatives, but the most effective messages and messengers will likely be different for each group. At the very least, we need something more than definitions. Not because they’re not helpful in narrow situations, but because in other situations they may actually be harmful.

What We Know

So what does the research say actually works?

It’s complicated, nuanced, and unfortunately really hard to scale. It’s not going to be accomplished by an article in the Atlantic or even a Substack like this one.

What does help is finding people who share deeply rooted identities with those you’re trying to reach—and who are trusted members of those communities—to have real conversations from within.

A great example that’s top of mind for me this week given that we just interviewed their co-founder Emma Addams on the podcast last week is Mormon Women for Ethical Government (MWEG).

MWEG takes women of faith who share a deep identity, an identity that in most cases runs deeper than partisan politics, and explores what their faith tells them about governance. It doesn’t say “Democrats think X” or “Republicans do Y.” It doesn’t align people on questions of whether Trump is a fascist or not or even what the right definition of fascism is. Instead, MWEG asks: As Mormon women, how do we think about the problem of immigration? What do we believe about protecting innocent lives? What does our faith call us to do?

This approach works because the messenger matters as much as the message. When Robbie George publishes a thoughtful critique of the Trump administration, it may reach certain Catholics. But he’s not going to move the needle with a lot of evangelicals who see him as a Princeton egghead. You need someone who’s a trusted member of their community to have that conversation.

Is it frustrating that who says something matters more than what’s being said? Maybe. But we don’t get to choose the rationality level of the people we’re trying to reach. We also don’t get to pretend we’re free of our own biases and tribalism—because we’re not. All humans are imperfect and fallible. The sooner we accept that and start working with human nature rather than wishing it away, the better off we’ll be.

So while Jonathan Rauch might convince members of his own tribe that Trump is a fascist, he may be inadvertently hardening the lines between his tribe and Trump voters. What really needs to happen is for thoughtful trusted people within a particular tribe to challenge that tribe’s position. It works best when they lean on values they all share and that are critical to their identities.

And here’s what I really want my conservative, progressive, and libertarian friends to understand: politics shouldn’t be about being right in some abstract way. It should be about how we live together in communities where people aren’t brutalized, where everyone has access to the basic resources they need to live meaningful lives, and where we avoid the cronyism that results in Jeff Bezos paying the Trumps $30+ million for a terrible documentary.

When we treat political discourse as a rational superiority contest—a way of proving we’re smarter or more moral than the other side—we’ve already lost. We’ve traded actual problem-solving for tribal signaling. And avoiding that is more important than ever. And for what it’s worth, I don’t think that’s what Rauch, Dalmia or Walsh were doing this week. But it is what I see a lot of left-leaning people doing, including people I know who are now using the willingness to call Trump a fascist a litmus test for moral righteousness. And that’s not ok either.

What the Research Actually Shows

I’ll leave everyone with a summary of what does work. It’s a pretty mixed bag, though some clear tactics emerge.

The sobering news: A 2025 meta-analysis found that most depolarization interventions produce only modest effects—about a 5-point shift on a 100-point scale—that decay within two weeks. Stacking multiple treatments or repeating them as “booster shots” doesn’t help. The researchers concluded that individual-level interventions alone cannot solve societal polarization; we need to address the elite behaviors and structural incentives that fuel conflict. On the one hand, that’s a bummer because I like to focus on individual agency whenever I can. On the other, there’s still a lot of room for agency even within those constraints. Some stuff does work, at least a bit.

What works (within limits):

• Deep canvassing stands out. A single 10-minute conversation using perspective-taking and personal narrative exchange can reduce prejudice for 3-9 months—far longer than any other intervention. In 2020, deep canvassing was 102 times more effective at persuasion than traditional campaign contact. The key: asking questions, listening without judgment, sharing stories rather than arguing facts. Asking questions seems to me to be the critical thing we’re not doing. Instead of telling people Trump is a fascist, we should be asking people what they think of what’s going on? What concerns do they have? What values do they hold that are either aligned or misaligned with what’s going on? How much does that matter to them and why?

• Highlighting sympathetic individuals from the other side works better than abstract arguments. A 2024 megastudy (32,000+ participants, 25 interventions) found that showing relatable people with different beliefs was among the most effective approaches.

• Similarly, correcting misperceptions about what the other side actually believes reduces animosity—we consistently overestimate how extreme our opponents are. Instead of screaming about how Trump voters are bigots, why not highlight some of the great Trump voters out there? And do the same for progressives too? I’ve been lucky enough to know a lot of conservatives, libertarians and progressives across my life and in almost all cases they were really good people. And the ones who weren’t were pretty evenly distributed across ideologies.

• Shared identity matters more than shared policy positions. Emphasizing common and cross-cutting identities (faith, community, profession) that transcend partisanship opens doors that political arguments close. This is the MWEG model and I think more of us should think about how to replicate that in various communities in our own lives. In my last post I advocated for starting an emergency preparedness community group and it’s one way to do the above. When we focus on our identity as members of a community that we care about protecting it and connect on a concrete task it’s easier to see past polarized partisan disagreements.

But, here are the buts:

We still have a messenger problem: Bridging organizations like Braver Angels find that Republicans are harder to recruit into depolarization programs, even when those programs feature Republican messengers. This suggests that trusted community voices—not outside experts—are essential for reaching across lines. It also has to be a relatively safe space where the goal isn’t conversion to a particular viewpoint. Again, the MWEG model is a good one here. Catholics criticizing evangelicals has a lot less meaning than evangelicals criticizing themselves. We can use in-groups strategically for depolarization and trust- and community-building. And that means connecting with leaders in those groups, helping them understand what’s at stake and giving them platforms for reaching their in-group members.

The critical caveat: Reducing how much partisans dislike each other doesn’t automatically reduce support for undemocratic practices. Those require different interventions—particularly elite modeling of democratic norms. While we have limited levers and this problem leads into larger structural debates, the average person should work to hold elites from their own in-groups accountable for violating democratic norms. Republican voters should call out their Republican congresspeople for failures and Dems should do the same. But it’s critical to remember that in-groups matter. Your criticisms have much more meaning and efficacy within your own in-group than they do outside it. Maybe the big lesson here comes from Voltaire: “let us cultivate our gardens.” At the very least, don’t hold the other side accountable for violating norms that your side is cheerfully violating too.

And here’s the counterintuitive truth a lot of the research points to: you, sitting at your dinner table, might have more power to change minds than anyone writing for the Atlantic or National Review.

If you’re a trusted member of your community, if you have connections across partisan lines, if you share a deep-seated identity with people who think differently than you do about politics you might be the perfect person to speak out. You might be exactly the kind of person who can get people thinking differently about the situation we’re in.

We need people like you more than ever. We need more people of faith speaking to their communities. More blue-collar workers who work alongside immigrants talking about their experiences. More people from rural communities who are watching their neighbors become unsafe and finding the courage to say something. More academics doing internal housekeeping, more Democrats listening instead of assuming, and more people calling out elites from their party when they violate critical principles and norms. We need people of all stripes to create complex social identities.

In a strange way, this moment could give the average American courage. The public intellectuals arguing about fascism on social media? They may not move the needle. But you might.

So... Do I Think Trump Is a Fascist?

No and yes. On a basic level, I don’t think Trump has any principles at all. He’s a megalomaniac who likes money and attention. It’s hard to be a fascist when you don’t stand for anything. Stephen Miller? Yeah, he’s a fascist. The principles animating the administration seem to be consistent with fascism. But Trump himself seems to be mostly a self-aggrandizing narcissist. Is the Trump administration fascist in scope and intent? Yes. Does this matter? Yes, but… what really matters is how we communicate the danger this administration presents to average people living in an America with high levels of toxic polarization and distrust of media, academia and public intellectuals.

Oddly enough, it might be Trump’s lack of principles that saves us from his own henchmen. He’s so concerned about being liked and making money that he reverses course whenever either of those things seem to be in danger, as we’re seeing this week with Harvard, Minneapolis, and a number of other extreme positions he’s backing away from as his poll numbers plummet. In fact, if you Google “Trumps backs down on…” it’s like a fun mad-lib game through recent history. This fickleness doesn’t make him a good leader or even not dangerous. But it gives me a modicum of hope that while we build a diverse coalition of Americans who oppose his administration’s abuses, his own greed will keep him from the worst excesses of his advisors. I won’t bank on it though, which is why we need to focus all our energies on fighting for the future we want as Americans, together. And doing that means we need to know what works.

I think one of the reasons the killing of Alex Pretti was such a crucial turning point: it was really, really hard to unsee. That kind of visible, undeniable evidence of harm does more to shift people than any amount of abstract argument about political taxonomy. We need more of that clear-eyed, honest reporting about civil liberties violations—not because the reporting itself convinces everyone, but because it creates the conditions under which trusted messengers within communities can point to concrete realities rather than contested labels.

I’m not trying to be wishy-washy and I’m not trying to say that we shouldn’t call things what they are. But from the very beginning of this Substack, we’ve tried to be aware that tradeoffs exist. Tradeoffs exist with our public communication just like they exist with every other kind of human endeavor. Being right but ineffective is a tragic lost opportunity, given the stakes. Being effective but wrong is intellectually dishonest and very bad long-term.

Being right and effective? That’s the goal.

I’m sure I’m going to get a lot of crap for this position. People will see it as too mealy-mouthed or as compromise with evil or like taking a knife to a gun fight. I guess at this point I don’t really care. I’m deeply worried about where we’ll be in five years. And I’m also worried about the role our polarized discourse is playing in keeping us fragmented and hopeless. My main hope lies with the American people. We can be right and care about what works if we align our tactics to our complex, messy, pluralistic 4D world. But that will take more work than articles like this one. Are we up for it?

Your Turn

What about you? What have you seen work when it comes to depolarization and strengthening democratic norms? What are you hearing from people on the ground in your communities? Are there communities you belong to where you might be a trusted voice? What identities do you share with people who think differently about politics? I’d love to hear what you’re thinking in the comments, even if (maybe especially if) you deeply disagree! And if you like what you read, please subscribe and share! Reader shares are still the number #1 way people find me and my work.