A leading expert on fascism claims the United States’ slide towards authoritarianism is unlike anything seen in modern times.
Donald Trump‘s attempt to consolidate power has been carried out with such speed and ruthlessness that it outpaces the likes of Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the historian contends, with the current U.S. political climate more closely resembling the aftermath of a coup than a democratic transition of power.
Speaking to Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Sunday evening, MSNBC’s Catherine Rampell asked if the current gutting of government programmes and social services by the Trump administration bore any resemblance to the “democratic backsliding” seen when countries transition into authoritarianism.
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Ben-Ghiat, the author of Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present, responded: “Honestly, the speed at which this is happening and the kind of concentrated push to do this, it doesn’t have any parallel in situations where leaders came to power through elections.
“If you look at the early Putin or the early Orban or Erdogan, they didn’t move at this speed. This resembles more after there’s been a coup.”
Ben-Ghiat, who teaches history at New York University and wrote several books on Benito Mussolini, also drew parallels between RFK Jr.’s MAHA movement and the authoritarian tendency to distort science to fit an ideology.
She added: “And the other thing that’s interesting, I was thinking about this the other day, is that eventually regimes make science and medicine bow to their ideology. So the communists would, you know, use psychiatrists to say that dissidents or journalists who didn’t agree with the regime had to go to psychiatric hospitals.
“But to do this so quickly, to have a war on science, on welfare, on knowledge of every kind, so immediately, and to have somebody like RFK Jr. there, that’s very unusual, even in the history of autocracy.”
In a previous interview prior to Trump’s re-election, Ben-Ghiat drew comparisons to Nazi Germany to demonstrate the speed with which an advanced nation can succumb to authoritarianism.
“For example, Germany was one of the most sophisticated nations in the world in the late ’20s and early ’30s; it had one of the highest rates of literacy, it was known for science, technology, graphic design—it was so advanced, and people didn’t think in Germany that this ranting lunatic, Hitler, could possibly do the damage he did. And then he came in, and he did things very quickly,” she told the Guardian last July.
