“Othering” Nationalism: The Bookends of the Industrial Age

More than any time in over 50 years, Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign provoked a serious discussion of the threat of fascism at the level of presidential politics. During the campaign, it was above all Trump’s scapegoating of immigrants that gave rise to the conversation about fascism—first tying Mexicans to crime, drugs and rape, and then doubling down on Muslims. Since the inauguration, observers’ fears of fascism have expanded to include the Trump administration’s wholesale subversion of democratic norms and its affinity with the illiberal, or authoritarian, international zeitgeist. However, the more accurate historical analogy to the current moment is not the rise of fascism in the wake of World War I. but to what Poulantzas, Organski and Bottomore outlined as fascistogenic conditions. It behooves us to consider what transpired in the transition from the early twentieth century blossoming of “othering” nationalism to the rise of fascism.