10 Signs of Fascism. America has all of them.

Rutger Bregman

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10 Signs of Fascism. America has all of them.<br>Why historians are now using the f-word to describe what’s happening in America.

Rutger Bregman<br>May 17, 2026

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Some of you may have seen this already, but for those who haven’t: after years of thinking about it, I’ve finally started a YouTube channel!<br>This is something I’d wanted to do for a long time, but somehow never got around to. It always seemed too much work and too far outside what I knew how to do. But then I found myself surrounded by some brilliant colleagues at The School for Moral Ambition who showed me that it’s actually very doable. And of course, the costs of producing good video have come down a lot in the past few years.<br>This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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So from now on, my plan is to publish a big essay every one to two months, and you’ll be able to either watch it as a video or – if you prefer the written word – read it right here on Substack.<br>The subject of my first essay is not a happy one. People have sometimes described me as ‘the optimistic historian’, but I’ve never liked the label. Optimism suggests a kind of complacency, a sense that we don’t need to worry, that things will turn out all right in the end. On the contrary. If there’s one belief underpinning all my books, it’s that history teaches us things can be radically different. Radically better, yes. But also radically worse.<br>That’s why it’s so important to be clear-eyed about what’s happening, while also developing a positive agenda for how the world could be wildly better. Maybe especially in this era of AI (where a positive agenda is almost entirely lacking), but that’s a subject for another essay. Today, let’s talk about the bad news.<br>Here’s the video. And if you prefer to read, the script is below.

You’re Not Overreacting. This Is Actually Fascism.

I want to talk to you about a word. A word that many serious historians, including some of the world’s leading experts, are now using to describe what’s happening in America. A word that makes some people uncomfortable. A word that others think is an exaggeration.<br>Fascism.<br>I understand why that word provokes resistance. For many of us, fascism is inseparable from the Holocaust, from the industrial murder of six million Jews. Using it for anything else can feel like a trivialization, a disrespect to that unimaginable horror.<br>For a long time, I’ve also been hesitant to use this word. As a historian, I know how it gets thrown around carelessly. But in the last few months, I’ve changed my mind – and I want to explain why.<br>In this essay, I’ll make the case – carefully and precisely, based on what leading historians and scholars are telling us – that yes, we can call what’s happening in America fascism. And more importantly: why we must.

Let me first acknowledge that there is no single definition of fascism. If you ask ten scholars, you’ll get ten slightly different answers.

Robert Paxton is probably the greatest living historian of fascism. He’s now in his nineties. Paxton spent his whole career being careful with the label, and has long resisted applying it to Trumpism. When a lot of commentators started calling Trump a fascist in 2016, he pushed back. Paxton worried that the f-word was being used too loosely. That it had become, as he put it, “more heat than light.”<br>But then came January 6th, 2021. Paxton watched the mob storm the Capitol. He watched the violence, the Confederate flags, the gallows erected for Vice President Mike Pence. He looked at his television and was immediately reminded of Mussolini’s Blackshirts marching on Rome in 1922, and of the fascist riot at the French Parliament in 1934.<br>That day the careful, cautious historian – the man who’d spent sixty years warning people not to overuse the f-word – changed his mind. The invasion of the Capitol, he wrote a few days later, “removes my objection to the fascist label. The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.”<br>When a journalist asked him about it again, Paxton was even more direct:<br>“It’s bubbling up from below in very worrisome ways, and that’s very much like the original fascisms. It’s the real thing. It really is.”<br>So how do we identify fascism if there’s no precise definition? The philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein had a really useful concept: family resemblances. Think about what brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts have in common. Not everyone has the same nose. But you see the same eyes here, the same chin there: enough overlapping similarities that you recognize them as part of the same family.<br>That’s how fascism works. Italian fascism looked different from German Nazism. But they shared enough traits that we recognize them as the same species. And what scholars have done is identify the key traits – the family resemblances – that fascist...