Is Trump a Fascist? Vlad Reacts to Sandbrook vs Campbell

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:01]Hello, beautiful community. Is Trump a fascist yet? Are the authoritarian ex-conservative populists in Europe fascists yet? Pertinent for us to talk about this, especially today with the Reform Party dominating local elections in the UK. And we're going to do this by a reaction to Alistister Campbell from the Rest is Politics and Dominic Sandbrook from the Wonderful Rest is History podcast disagreeing about whether Trump's a fascist. Let's do this.

[00:00:30]>> A fascist. I was basically yes and you were a no. And I just wondered if you've changed your mind at all given all that's happened since Trump returned for his second term.

[00:00:39]>> Okay. So Dominic Sandbrook from the rest is history has already disagreed about this with Anthony Scaramucci when all the rest pods came together and now he is disagreeing about this with Alistister Campbell.

[00:00:53]>> Answer is no I haven't. And I think part of the confusion is that people use the word fascist in two different ways. So number one, people use the word fascist to mean an authoritarian demagogue that they don't like. So when you say I think Donald Trump is a fascist or when lots of people say I think so and so is a fascist, I mean people said that was a fascist.

[00:01:10]>> There is no denying we've had a lot of leakage and concept creep with the f word. I was at a protest against the Iraq war in 2002 and the girl walked up to me and she said, "Look, that's a police officer on the horse. That's fascist power."

[00:01:28]Nixon was a fascist. They often mean this person is very right-wing and I don't like them.

[00:01:33]>> I wouldn't say that about either of those two.

[00:01:34]>> No, of course I I'm not saying you would. By the way, the other definition is more historically specific, which is the one that I would use, which is that I think fascism was a very distinctive historical phenomenon. It came about in the ruins of the First World War.

[00:01:46]There's a paramilitary politics. Trump is a narcissist. He's only interested in himself. I don't think he's powered by a wider ideology. I do think he has obviously total contempt for democratic norms, but I don't think that's because he thinks democracy is rotten and it's weak and all this. I think it's just because it gets in his way, so he wants to get rid.

[00:02:06]>> Okay. Well, it's lovely to see uh Dominic because it's rarely possible for me to spend some light time otherwise. In other words, I'm always productive or I'm too ill to do anything. But I had a few moments recently where I wasn't well enough to be productive, but I wasn't so sick that I couldn't do anything. And I watched their six episode um pod on the sinking of the Titanic um over a couple of nights, which was really special.

[00:02:37]So let's try to figure out which boxes Dominic is trying to put himself into and if he can succeed at the end he said I don't feel Trump has an ideology.

[00:02:54]Now the main sense of ideology that I recommend and here I agree um with Jason Blakeley who's um philosopher of the younger generation who's recently written a really good book about it but the sense I recommend is ideologies political orientation.

[00:03:17]So what are the images, the thoughts, the sentiments, the half thoughts inside you about two things.

[00:03:31]Kh, human nature. human nature and how you feel about the way your society should be organized and maybe the way all societies should be organized but definitely about the way you feel your society should be organized by political institutions taking certain shape doing particular things and so on that's not going to be translatable into a conscious ious set of propositions that you can articulate even for a professional political philosopher. Right? This is necessarily a partly unconscious, a partly uncapturable way of orienting yourself toward the political world. And from that point of view, Trump obviously has an ideology even on the point that Dominic raises, which is he just doesn't think anything should get in his way. He doesn't like any institutions getting in his way. That's an ideological orientation. Trump goes on as though there is a a monarch and the monarch can have a kind of direct link to a depoliticized citizenry that gives him power, perceives him to be the only institution in town with political legitimacy and meanwhile goes about their life trying to survive or consuming So a deeplyized population and a monarch uh who keeps getting reelected in fair or unfair elections um but who transcends institutions.

[00:05:15]So this sense that Trump has what the hell is going on? Why are things getting in my way? I want to be like Vladimir Putin. That's an ideological orientation. So it's not just credentially I don't like stuff getting in my way. That's a way of being in the world. That's a way of seeing the world.

[00:05:34]There is then a might is right element to Trump's ideological orientation. He goes around feeling that you should be able to buy all the stuff you want and if you can't buy it, you can threaten it and get it or conquer it and get it.

[00:05:48]That's not just a set of sort of practical positions.

[00:05:54]That's an embodied orientation toward politics.

[00:06:00]Right? So, I want to say a bit more about that, but I think that it's important to try to tackle the thing we heard from Dominic about how fascism is somehow constrained to the 1930s or 1940s, 1920s, whatever.

[00:06:19]Now, what I'm trying to do is see how Dominic can have a coherent position there.

[00:06:33]Because here is his problem. As soon as you describe what fascism, the ideology is at the general enough level as you encounter it in the middle of the 20th century.

[00:06:47]The generality of your description must necessarily mean it applies to other historical contexts too. So either Dominic's description applies to nothing or it applies to the 1930s. But in applying to the 1930s, it has to apply elsewhere too. At the level of your political imagination, you are nothing two inches away from people in the 1930s. You're very very very close. your really approximate historical relatives.

[00:07:17]You know, 80% of your wherewithal um in terms of the kinds of ideologies that are swimming about is going to be partly shared um with these people. So this is not this is not a group of humans in a different culture 600 years ago, right?

[00:07:36]These are basically your parents and grandparents. So there's a real proximity. The idea that there could be an ideological wash in the way we just captured to do with this embodied orientation in the political world that applies to them but doesn't apply to us is just not a starter. But I think probably Dominic's answer is that then he's thinking of fascism not as an ideology.

[00:08:01]Not sure that's Dominic's answer, but that's the answer he'd need to move into, but as a kind of historical formation. So this is not an ideology in the way we've just described a sort of a position individuals have toward the political world.

[00:08:19]But it's just something that captures a slice of history. It captures an historical formation.

[00:08:27]That's not how I'd recommend to in the first instance use the term. There's nothing illegal about using the term that way. But then you're not talking about an ideology.

[00:08:37]you're talking about an historical formation and then I suppose the questions that arise are is this a historical formation that is non-reproducible and therefore fascism is just a slice of time in the middle of the 20th century.

[00:08:53]Is it reproducible? Therefore, we could have fascism again in the 2030s.

[00:09:00]Or perhaps thirdly, is there some kind of ideal type to this historical formation whereby you can say that this ideal type um uh is something that two uh different slices of history have in common. But I think that it would make better sense to talk about that slice as an historical formation rather than as um you know uh an ideological orientation individuals have. So what about this orientation? Let's say a bit more about it.

[00:09:32]I think that there are basically are two and a half ways of talking about ideology. There are two substantive ways and then there is a sort of light way of talking about it as the political way of talking about it. Perhaps let's capture this half thing first. The two and a half. The half or the two and a half.

[00:09:54]Politics is a very crude business.

[00:09:57]Right? If I pick this up and this is high powered aristotilian metaphysics whatever that is. I I remember um a wonderful philosopher a Hegel expert once turned to me and said um you know listen Vlad I got to tell you something. And he said um what is it?

[00:10:23]And he said um look most professional philosophers can do highowered aristatilian metaphysics but I do it for breakfast.

[00:10:37]So imagine I take highowered aristatilian metaphysics and I throw it to you and then you throw it to your friend and then your friend throws it to another friend. It'll be a complete mess. It'll just fall apart. It's too fragile, you know. It's too dependent on reading 17 books, uh, having 11 conversations, having 14 years of studying something. It's a completely useless thing for the purpose of political discourse.

[00:11:07]Political discourse is much more like grabbing a bowl and throwing it and it having the kind of robustness that's necessary to survive being thrown around, right? throw it out the window, it gets hit by a car, gets trampled on by a horse. Um, you know, it falls into the drains, somebody picks it up, keeps throwing, it keeps throwing. So, you need a pretty robust object. And that means that you can't really get out of the following dilemma. And that's that in politics, you might wish for the F-word to be suspended. You might wish for political actors not to use the f word, but they're going to use it anyway. And therefore, if they're going to use it anyway, they might as well use it in a better than worse manner. And that means having this very minimal, very stupid, probably very binary political sense of fascism. That's not really what fascism is all about, but it's the way political actors, not me, not commentators, not baby public intellectuals, but just political actors have to use. And here I'm probably tempted to agree with Michael that the key binary to this political sense of fascism is whether somebody is going to come and take you away in the middle of the night. And if they're not, then it's not F. And if they are, it is F. Now, I don't want to tell you that that's what F is as an ideology. It isn't. But the problem is F as an ideology, it's not something that can really easily be part of our political discourse, right? Because if Gavin Newsome stood up and accused Trump of being F and gave this kind of ideological picture of F that um I'm about to give you in a moment, um he's not going to do very well, right? He's either to use the term in a kind of simple and binary way or he probably shouldn't use it at all. So, back to that girl in 2002 at the protest. Um, let's say that you are against the Iraq war and the question then is, is that policeman on the horse going to come and pick you up and cut you off to jail in the middle of the night? The answer is clearly no. And therefore, in that trivial political sense, it's clearly not an F situation. It's just a situation of a democracy doing a really destructive stupid policy um uh but maintaining in a legitimate way a monopoly of organized violence. So what are the two senses of f that are richer and are more appropriate ideologically?

[00:13:50]Well, the first is just about that orientation. And I won't bore you with how I'd love you to identify it because I've already done that in the main channel video called Trump's Not a Russian Asset, it's worse. And then I gave Trump scores out of 10 and Putin scores too for how monarchist they were, how fascist they were, and how hyper neoliberal, which is might type up type of politics they were. And in fascism, I gave Trump a sort of a lowish to middling score. and put in a higher score. And these are the ingredients I focused on. I don't want to forget them, so I'll just bring them up quickly here and I'll mention them just in a minute.

[00:14:29]Number one is revolutionary conservatism. So kind of a um a radical redoing of society in the name of a great past. I gave Trump a six for that.

[00:14:42]To the politics of enemies, I gave Trump a seven for that. action as an end in itself, which is this important inheritance from the romantic movement that fascism has. They gave Trump about a six for that.

[00:14:56]Uh, funnily enough, Trump's narcissism and impulsivity drag him in that direction. Um, uh, because he does indeed love the fireworks of, uh, action as action.

[00:15:10]Um, part of the point about the Iran war is that it's happening, not that it has a purpose.

[00:15:16]Four, the state is a semi-spiritual organization. I gave Trump only a three for that. Um, Putin is higher on this.

[00:15:23]Five, the cult of the leader. I gave Trump five or six for that. And then six, the importance of the inexpressable.

[00:15:32]Right? Fascism distrusts analysis.

[00:15:35]Overthinking kills organic political life. Overlaps you're already thinking about here, right? With post-truth culture.

[00:15:43]gave Trump a four for that. Permanent emergency, I gave Trump a five for that.

[00:15:48]And overall, I gave Trump a 5.1 out of 10 on fascism. Now, I don't know whether that means that he is an an F or not. It certainly means that he is in a kind of moderate range.

[00:16:08]But notice that there isn't really anybody watching this now who is less than a one out of 10, less than a two maybe out of 10 because on some of these ingredients we've listed, right, you have some instinctive empathy and that's because ideologies overlap and ideologies emanate out of concerns that we all share in particular cultural moments, right? And so all of us are socialist and all of us are conservative and all of us are F a tiny bit out of 10. So the F that really matters and the F that's the bad kind of F is the F that begins to sort of gather pace above two out of 10. And Trump's at five. So he's nowhere near as F as he is hyponyoliberal into might right politics. And he's nowhere near F as he is monarchist. I won't bother you with the ingredients I give for that. Um, but it's still moderate, right? And that's what sort of, you know, casually came up in the conversation with Anthony Scaramush, who does absolutely call Trump F. I said they're not extreme Fs, but there's a degree of fisation there.

[00:17:19]And that's a sort of a casual way of putting it that I think is reasonable.

[00:17:24]Now um having painted this sort of key sense of ideology and then having given the half sense of ideology that's political, what's this other sense of ideology?

[00:17:37]Because I said there was two and a half.

[00:17:38]I've just given you the one and a half.

[00:17:40]Where's the second one? And the second one is this. It's not a sense of ideology I recommend that you use um in the first instance but it's a sense of ideology I can't simply eliminate um somebody who believes in that sense of ideology today as primary is the philosopher Raymond Goce and I can't tell Raymond don't do it that's not ideology so what is how does Raymon see it Raymond of course who's written a lot about the procedural nature of power relations over many decades has written about critical theory. Um what he would say is that there is a sense of ideology that is peorative and important and here it is your position is ideological and therefore bad. That's in contrast to the sense of ideology I recommend which isn't bad at all. It's just inevitable.

[00:18:42]It's just a political orientation people have. But this is a sense of ideology is something bad. And so the way you'd capture is to say somebody's being ideological and that means something bad if they're expressing a view that is causally a product of corrupt power relations.

[00:19:09]You kind of get this question. You kind of think, well, you know, why do Russians accommodate Putin without necessarily supporting him? And you kind of ask the question, how far is that accommodation a product of the power Putin has over them? You might say totally or not at all. It doesn't matter what you say, but the point is you get that question, right? How much is stuff we think a product of power others have over us? So let's take an example of this kind of ideological corruption.

[00:19:38]Imagine that I'm deeply concerned about the climate crisis, but all of my concern is about how I'm not going to have a plastic bottle, how I'm not going to waste things, how I'm going to do exactly the right kind of recycling, how I'm not going to fly, and I say nothing about the politics of climate change.

[00:19:58]And so here a question arises. Might Vlad not be a victim of a certain insertion of power, an appropriate insertion of power into our discourse. For instance, in the 1980s, fossil fuel companies um made a gambit to privatize climate discourse to make it about individual choices rather than substantive political decisions. So I might care about the climate, but I might care about the climate in the way that is distorted and therefore ideological um by the uh inappropriate power exercise by people with malign interests on this issue, right? And so the reason I go on about recycling all the time, but I never say anything about core politics, right? is that I have been somewhat brainwashed, you know, by this messaging that climate's about personal responsibility that functionally serves to benefit people, right, who are making money on something that's that's ruining the planet.

[00:21:13]That irrelevant what the details of this example are. You get the structure of it, right? In other words, what I think is corrupted by me being in the power of people who are exercising power inappropriately.

[00:21:29]And so when you say that something is ideological, you diagnose it as being not a good position or a bad position that somebody's arrived at because of how they've really thought about it for themselves. you diagnose it as a position somebody has that is caused by the way they are uh manipulated by inappropriate power and I can't say get out of here with that conception of ideology I do accept it um interestingly perhaps Jason Blakeley whose book I mentioned doesn't I I don't see a way of getting out of that uh conception as usable so that's what I think um uh that's a philosophers's reaction to Dominic Sandbrook and Alistister Campbell talking about Trump being an F.