Roger Griffin, From Fascism to Trumpism

Summary

History As It Happens – July 10, 2026

Episode: Roger Griffin, From Fascism to Trumpism

Host: Martin Di Caro
Guest: Roger Griffin (Professor Emeritus, Oxford Brookes University; leading scholar of fascism)

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Episode Overview

In this illuminating conversation, host Martin Di Caro sits down with renowned historian Roger Griffin to disentangle the persistent charge that “Trump is a fascist” and to explore what fascism truly is—historically, ideologically, and as a mythic phenomenon. With stories from his own life and career, Griffin recounts his path to becoming a leading expert on fascism and explains why the temptation to label every right-wing populist as a fascist is both historically inaccurate and politically unhelpful. The discussion also touches on the difference between ideology and myth, the dangers of modern populism, and the evolution of fascist studies as an academic field.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Tempting Label: Is Trump a Fascist?

• Opening Discussion: The episode kicks off with Martin quoting Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric about “poisoning the blood of our country,” drawing clear echoes with language from Nazi Germany. Martin asks whether it’s accurate or simply convenient for critics to label Trump as a fascist.

  • Memorable quote:
    • “For a lot of people, calling Donald Trump a fascist was just ad hominem, a lazy political insult. It was the liberal who cried wolf.” – Martin Di Caro (02:24)

• Roger Griffin’s 2016 Analysis: Griffin’s own 2016 essay is cited, which argues that while Trump is a radical right-wing populist tapping into American prejudices, he does not intend to dismantle democracy and create a totalitarian order—the essential hallmark of fascism.

  • Quote:
    • “To be a fascist, Trump would, like Mussolini and Hitler, have to set about seizing power democratically so as to be able to dismantle or pervert the institutions of liberal democracy entirely.” – Roger Griffin (as quoted by Martin, 05:45)
    • “Criminals hide evidence, not honest people.” – Roger Griffin (06:45)

2. Ideology vs. Myth: What's Beneath Isms?

• The “Hollowness” of Trumpism:

  • Griffin argues that Trumpism lacks the intellectual substance of Marxism or even true fascism. Instead, Trump is best understood as a myth-maker, someone who mythifies American history and embodies a constitutional “myth” rather than an internally coherent ideology.
  • Quote:
    • “There is a particular hollowness in the idea of Trumpism as an ideology. However, if you dig a bit deeper… move from ideology to the word myth…” – Roger Griffin (08:23)

• Comparative Perspective: Griffin points out that all leaders participate in myth-making but not all are ideologues. This mythification is common to many political traditions but does not by itself amount to fascism.

  • Quote:
    • “Trump takes so much of the American tradition and blatantly mythifies it. The reason we can see that so clearly is because of his intellectual ineptitude in handling language and concepts.” – Roger Griffin (10:49)

3. Corruption, Chaos, and the Nazi Analogy

• Inefficiency in Authoritarian Systems:

  • Martin draws parallels between the chaos and grift around Trump and the famously corrupt Nazi regime, noting that inefficiency and corruption can exist alongside ideology.
  • Quote:
    • “Hitler himself was obsessed with ideological concepts of race and war and social Darwinism... but he was surrounded by a whole bunch of thugs and grifters, too…” – Martin Di Caro (11:52)

• White Supremacy as Myth:

  • Griffin notes that even supremely “rationalized” ideologies like white supremacy are ultimately hollow myths, easily dressed up with pseudo-scientific claims.

4. From Power Politics to Global Populism

• Political Marketplace & Gangster Models:
  • Discussion of the “political marketplace”—a form of “global mafia politics”—where ideals give way to naked power plays. Griffin reflects on historical analogues from the Roman Empire to North Korea to contemporary leaders like Trump.
  • Quote:
    • “There’s a lovely line from Bob Dylan that even the President of the United States sometimes has to stand naked…” – Roger Griffin (14:33)

5. Roger Griffin’s Biography: Becoming a Fascism Scholar

[17:36–38:46]

• Early Life & Education:

  • Griffin shares his humble beginnings in post-war Britain, getting into Harrow and Oxford almost by accident—with some comedic notes about his mother helping him pass the entrance exam.
  • Quote:
    • “My mom did your homework, this habit of doing loads of homework…” – Martin Di Caro & Roger Griffin (20:43)

• Epiphany at Buchenwald:

  • A formative trip as a student: after visiting Goethe’s house in Weimar and then Buchenwald concentration camp, Griffin felt an “unreconcilable” tension between German culture and the horrors of Nazism.
  • Quote:
    • “…oak tree was actually inside Buchenwald concentration camp. By the way, Buchenwald means beech forest. How about that for a linguistically misleading concept?” – Roger Griffin (24:13)

• Encountering Fascist Thought:

  • A random encounter in an Italian taverna introduces Griffin to Julius Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World, which crystallizes for him the mythic structure of fascist belief: decadence and rebirth.

• Sliding Door Moments & Drifting into Fascist Studies:

  • Griffin takes a teaching post to “counter Marxism” at Oxford Polytechnic, eventually develops a theory about the core of fascism (palingenesis), and begins to formalize fascist studies as a discipline.
  • Quote:
    • “I started trying to find other theorists who’d recognized this pattern of decadence and rebirth, or what I was going to call palingenesis. And nobody had.” – Roger Griffin (33:00–34:40)

6. Academia & the 'Palingenesis' Breakthrough

• Academic Vacuum & Resistance:

  • Griffin found that almost no one in academia took the underlying ideas of fascism seriously; scholars saw it as void of positive content.
  • Quote:
    • “When it comes to fascism, nobody was quoting fascists…because the consensus was fascism had no genuine ideas. It was all totalitarian ideology...” – Roger Griffin (39:29–41:29)
    • “Why are you bothering about fascism? I mean, fascism's dead.” – Dennis Mack Smith, to Roger, recalling early academic resistance (41:29)

• Defining Fascism: Palingenetic Ultranationalism:

  • Griffin’s key insight is identifying the core of fascism not as simple authoritarian nationalism, but as palingenetic ultranationalism: the myth of national rebirth from decadence.
  • Quote (on term origin):
    • “I just by chance…came across this little book…La Palingenesis Sociale—the rebirth of society... But it was never ever used in British academic English meaning rebirth as an adjective. And I had it.” – Roger Griffin (43:26–47:35)
    • “Most intellectuals like a little bit of jargon, so I found my own jargon palingenetic ultranationalism…My definition of fascism isn't true, but it's proved…really useful for sorting out the fascist goats from the pathological or democratic sheep.” – Roger Griffin (49:46)

7. Lived Experience: Learning from Italy

• Family Memories & Historical Continuities:
  • Griffin’s Italian in-laws, memory of fascist crowds, and local massacres illuminate how the myth of rebirth energized and justified horrendous violence—even among “little fascists” with no grand ideological commitment.
  • Quote:
    • “There was a massacre, reprisal massacre, of a whole load of local inhabitants of Campo Morone…They were machine gunned outside the local convent because partisans...had killed some Nazis.” – Roger Griffin (52:08)

8. Present-Day “Isms”: Why Populism isn’t Fascism (but is Dangerous)

• The Dangers of “Fascist” as a Catch-All:

  • Griffin urges listeners to reserve “fascist” for genuinely revolutionary, anti-democratic phenomena—not just any right populism, however grotesque.
  • Quote:
    • “If you want to call ICE an American equivalent to the fascist Gestapo, that's absolutely fine, but it's absolutely unhistorical.” – Roger Griffin (54:56)
    • “If you want to find a forensically accurate term to communicate the nuances of what Trump is, the word fascism really doesn't cut it.” (55:00)

• Real Threat: Populism as Autoimmune Disease:

  • In a contemporary twist, Griffin argues that destructive right-wing populism—currently dominant in many countries—poses even deeper practical dangers than today’s marginalized fascists ever could, precisely because it corrodes democracy from within, not by open assault.
    • “Populism now is the main destructive force in the world outside autocracies…we must distinguish fascism from what's actually going on, which is much closer to what you might think of as an autoimmune disease.” – Roger Griffin (56:46)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• “There is something deeply ideological about Trump, which is he locates himself existentially and historically within a particular version of American history, and that American history has got a very strong ideology in the constitutional myth.”
  – Roger Griffin, 03:13 / repeated at 08:23

• “When you read fascists, they were saying, ‘modern society is decadent, the nation is falling apart, we need a new era…we’re going to create a new modernity, but not a modernity based on democracy, but…on this extraordinary essence of the nation and the race which will make it great again.’”
  – Roger Griffin, 40:05

• On palingenesis:
  “I saw this pattern [of rebirth and renewal], but I had a language problem…I had this sort of—I wish I'd patented it—palingenetic, meaning palin-anew and genesis-born. Most intellectuals like a little bit of jargon, so I found my own jargon: palingenetic ultranationalism.”
  – Roger Griffin, 47:35

• “Populism, whether extreme or moderate, is actually posing a political danger domestically, a huge problem internationally…and finally, catastrophic impact on the chances of human beings to face the climate polycrisis…Populism is the main destructive force in the world outside autocracies.”
  – Roger Griffin, 56:46

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Important Segment Timestamps

• 02:24: Setting up the “is Trump a fascist?” debate
• 05:45: Griffin’s 2016 essay on Trump vs. fascism
• 08:23: The mythic hollowness of Trumpism
• 24:13–27:32: Trip to Buchenwald; the role of memory and myth
• 33:00–34:40: Identifying decadence/rebirth as fascist structure
• 43:26–47:35: Defining “palingenetic ultranationalism”
• 54:46–56:46: Griffin’s argument on why populism, not fascism, is today’s main threat

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Language & Tone

The conversation is scholarly yet full of personal warmth and anecdotes, combining academic rigor with a dash of British wit and self-deprecation (notably in Griffin’s recollections). Both speakers use clear, accessible language when describing complex theories, but Griffin is happy to introduce the “nerdier” vocab and illustrate it with vivid historical metaphors.

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Summary Takeaways

• Trump’s politics are not fascism: He is a right-wing populist, not a revolutionary aiming to destroy democracy in the palingenetic sense.
• The label “fascist” is both historically inaccurate and rhetorically powerful; its overuse can obscure the real, current dangers: entrenched, destructive right-wing populism.
• Fascism is best understood as “palingenetic ultranationalism” — the myth of national rebirth from perceived decadence, which distinguishes it from other isms.
• Griffin’s personal path reveals the value of learning languages and reading original sources for sound historical analysis.
• Today’s populism corrodes liberal democracy from within—a kind of “autoimmune disease”—and on a practical level, may be even more dangerous than marginalized contemporary fascists.

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A highly insightful episode for anyone struggling to make sense of the “fascism” debates of our era, and a primer on thinking clearly about the past’s influence on the present.

Transcript

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Try for free [e-mail] that's O D O O.com history as it happens. July 10, 2026 Roger Griffin from Fascism to Trumpism they're poisoning the blood of our country. That's what they' they poison mental institutions. I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within. That is right out of Nazi Germany. That is not constitutional. For a lot of people, calling Donald Trump a fascist was just ad hominem,

[Roger Griffin]

a lazy political insult. It was the liberal who cried wolf. He talks about the blood of America being poisoned, echoing the same exact language used in Nazi Germany.

[Martin DeCaro]

There's an ism for almost every everything. But in the current discourse are isms clarifying or confusing us as Americans try to make sense of Donald Trump's destructive politics and his corrosive effect on democracy, the law, norms, basic human decency. That's next with Roger Griffin, one of the world's foremost experts on fascism, who says fascism is really not our problem today as we report history as it happens. Martin, I'm Martin DeCaro.

[Roger Griffin]

Carl Gustav Jung said that today all our gods rhyme with ism. In other words, in a secular society, all that energy that used to feed religious cultures has been diverted like petrodollars floating around, investing themselves into individuals, either out of horror of what they are or out of misplaced adoration. There is something deeply ideological about Trump, which is he locates himself existentially and historically within a particular version of American history, and that American history has got a very strong ideology in the constitutional mist.

[Martin DeCaro]

Communism's easy to sell. I would be the greatest communist in history. I'd be right up there with Lenin. So as I've been paying attention to President Trump recently as his job approval rating dips even lower amid more reports revealing his staggering corruption and as he's fumbled everything from the war in Iran to something as seemingly inconsequential as fixing the reflecting pool here in Washington. As I watch and listen to him, I've thought about all the time and energy and oceans of ink and podcasts consumed by the fascism debate. I had one of Hitler's speeches translated into English. And I think this tells us a

[Roger Griffin]

lot about where Donald Trump is.

[Martin DeCaro]

Here we are 11 years since Donald Trump entered politics, and are we any closer to defining his politics accurately than we were a decade ago? You know, I gotta say, watching him recently, I don't see a fascist or even a fascist movement around him.

[Roger Griffin]

Yesterday we had 111 missiles shot by the Islamic Republic of Japan.

[Martin DeCaro]

Trump is still a right wing demagogue, a phony populist who pretends to care for the working class by tapping into their imaginary fears. It's the enemy from within all the scum that we have to deal with that hate our country. That's a bigger enemy than China. But, you know, way back in September 2016, that was just a couple of months before Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. Historian Roger Griffin wrote an essay about the Trump phenomenon. Griffin said despite the frequent stigmatizing of Trump biased critics as a fascist, it would be refreshing if more journalists used political categories with greater nicety. Trump is a populist, or to be exact, a radical right wing populist. Griffin said he owes his power to voicing in hardly sophisticated rhetoric, widespread prejudices and simplistic diagnoses to complex problems which if translated into practice and would prove counterproductive, discriminatory and inhuman in many areas. Both Domestically and on the international stage. Griffin went on to say, to be a fascist, Trump would, like Mussolini and Hitler, have to set about seizing power democratically so as to be able to dismantle or pervert the institutions of liberal democracy entirely. Trump, whatever his faults, has given no sign that he intends the destruction of the US Constitutional system and its replacement by a totalitarian new order with himself as its charismatic leader. For in his case, a short perpetuity. Again, that was written by Roger Griffin in 2016, and for the most part, it holds up pretty well despite everything, even January 6th, who hides evidence?

[Roger Griffin]

Criminals hide evidence, not honest people.

[Martin DeCaro]

When Trump incited a riot to attack Congress, a very fascist thing to do. Trump and his administration, full of anti government fanatics, charlatans and grifters, are doing severe damage to American democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties. But he is not trying to overturn democracy. He is not a revolutionary. He is there to make money while inspiring fear in his opponents. And he has done a good job of that. Well, maybe you think that's fascism anyway, or close enough. Roger Griffin, historian and professor emeritus at Oxford Brookes University, has studied and written about these matters for decades. He became a historian of fascism in a most unexpected way and defined this political ideology in a way that has influenced generations of scholars. Roger Griffin, welcome back to the podcast.

[Roger Griffin]

Thank you.

[Martin DeCaro]

We're going to dive into your history as a historian and how you came to this subject. A lifelong study of fascism and other isms and history, political science. We'll get to all of that in a little bit. I just want to talk to you about what's happening right now, because you've been coming on my show for four or five years now, and for the past decade in this country and really across the world, people have been trying to figure out what is Trumpism. It's really not an ideology. And given recent reports about Trump's staggering corruption, self enrichment, self dealing, the incontestable fact that the man really doesn't have any core values except himself, that maybe there really is no ism here.

[Roger Griffin]

Well, of course, any famous person can create an ism. Carl Gustav Jung said that today all our gods rhyme with ism. In other words, in a secular society, all that energy that used to feed religious cultures has been diverted like petrodollars floating around, investing themselves into individuals either out of horror of what they are or out of misplaced adoration. I think you're absolutely right to suggest that there is a particular hollowness in the idea of Trumpism as an ideology. However, I think if you dig a bit deeper, if you move from ideology to the word myth, and then you look at some major figures in the 20th century. I mean, Marxism is seen as an ideology because it had an awful lot of theory behind it, because of a guy called Karl Marx and a lot of his followers like Gramsci or whatever, they're definitely intellectuals trying to use intellectual tools to shape a worldview and shape policy, et cetera. But there are some very interesting forms of vision, political vision, which generate a lot of words, they generate a lot of thoughts. The point at which they actually can be dignified with the word ism is another matter. But in a way, I think if you were, say, a Chinese or Japanese sort of political scientist looking at Trumpism from a safe distance and another culture, you could say, well, look, there is something deeply ideological about Trump, which is he locates himself existentially and historically, and he did spectacularly, with an extraordinary display of EEGomania on the 4th of July within a particular version of American history. And that American history has got a very strong ideology in the constitutional myth. What's called the foundation myth of America is very, very strong. And it's got very strong ideological components. You know, the French Revolution, the French Enlighten Enlightenment, it wasn't yet the French Revolution, but major Enlightenment thinkers like Paine and Montesquieu, and these people informed a vision of liberal democracy, the rights of the people. And that is ideological. And it's no coincidence that we call Trump a populist. So I would be careful.

[Martin DeCaro]

He taps into that. He taps into American history, even though he's ignorant of American history.

[Roger Griffin]

If you see it comparatively, if you talk about Jingping's vision of China, whatever, I think by the time you've become a president, you are a carrier of ideas which are taken for granted. If you take contemporary China, I mean, there's very little Communism left. But nevertheless, you couldn't possibly make sense of who he is and what the Chinese leadership is doing now without going back to the Chinese Revolution and Mao, et cetera. So I think what you're dealing with, with politicians anyway, is very often a hollowing out of what was originally fairly substantial in terms of rationalization. It's just that Trump takes so much of the American tradition and blatantly mythifies it. And the reason we can see that so clearly is because of his intellectual ineptitude in handling language and concepts. But in a funny sort of way, I don't think he's much more hollow than an awful lot of American presidents in the 20th century, if you talk about their reasons for going to Vietnam.

[Martin DeCaro]

Yeah, well, you know, one reason why it's hard to discern an ideology with Trump for the reasons already mentioned, you know, he doesn't stick to a position for more than 45 seconds, et cetera, is that there's so much chaos. And I was thinking of Nazism before connecting with you. There was plenty of chaos and corruption and inefficiency in the Nazi regime, which we often think of as ideology in power. Hitler himself was obsessed with ideological concepts of race and war and social Darwinism, right? But he was surrounded by a whole bunch of thugs and grifters. Two, Goering basically stole every piece of art in Europe. So I guess these things can coexist within an ideological system. You can have self dealing, corrupt, inefficient, rival bureaucrats. I mean, that's something that Hitler fomented in Nazi Germany. He had people at each other's throats competing with each other to win his favor.

[Roger Griffin]

When we talk about political theory and political commentary, etcetera, we have to have a sort of sliding scale that goes from sort of absolutely irrational, blatantly psychotic myths, right, the way through to a high level of rationalization. And just to take one example, the idea of white supremacy can be massively rationalized, and it was with pseudobiology and pseudo anthropology and a whole load of pseudo history, et cetera, but it was taken very seriously. It became an ideology. If you look at the eugenics movement, et cetera, you see a high level of scientization as well. But ultimately, the idea of white supremacy is a completely hollow myth with no scientific basis whatsoever. So when we talk about Trumpism, et cetera, we have to accept the idea that ideas themselves manifest themselves in a whole range of different levels of substantiality and articulateness. But at the end of the day, probably all ideologies are rationalizations of very deep lying, mythic constructs.

[Martin DeCaro]

We've talked about what's happening across the world several times on this podcast, not just what's happening in the United States with Trump. Alex Duvall, who's a scholar at Tufts University here in the US Uses a term called the political marketplace, which is now the dominant dynamic in international relations. He calls it global mafia politics. Human rights, democracy, freedom, liberty do not matter. It's all about the deal. So countries on the periphery of world power are sliced, diced, ranked, and traded. And Trump is a practitioner of global mafia politics. Just look at Venezuela.

[Roger Griffin]

Well, I'm reminded of Brecht, one of Brecht's greatest plays was the resistible rise not irresistible, the resistible rise of Arturoi, which is a parody of the rise to power of Hitler, where Hitler is portrayed as the head of a gangster syndicate in Chicago which wants to take over the vegetable market. And it's a complete parody of the rise of Hitler. And to see Hitler as ultimately a sort of capitalist gangster trying to take over power, I mean, it's just, it's brilliant. And there's an element of that. If you look at the history of Soviet Union and you look at the tension between Trotsky and Stalin, I mean, you can see mafia elements in all power politics. As for something, a place like North Korea is quite extraordinary. But again, it's complicated, isn't it? Because if you go back through history or look at the history of the Roman Empire, et cetera, there are a few phases when the Roman Empire or the Roman politics seemed to ennoble itself with certain ideas. There was a period in the Roman Republic which also used the concept of the people, etc. And of course it was using the concept the people in a slave society where ideas and debate, et cetera, seem to be taken seriously. But there is an argument for the idea, and I think there's a feminist line here as well, that in the whole history of patriarchal power, ultimately there's a huge amount of, of rationalization and power play going on under the screen of villas and banquets and ballrooms and big sculpture, you know, to glorify something which is at the end, we talk about naked power. I mean, there's a lovely line from Bob Dylan that even the President of the United States sometimes has to stand naked. Trump manifests something which is probably an integral part. Look at the history of the papacy, look at the history of the borders in the middle age, in the Renaissance. I just think there's probably been a tussle between virtuous idealists and the most horrifically criminal pathological people all playing social games to dress up their power as legitimate.

[Martin DeCaro]

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[Martin DeCaro]

You've been studying fascism your whole professional life. Let's start from the very beginning, shall we? You were born in post war United Kingdom. You could still see the damage from the war that fascist Germany waged against your country. I guess if somebody ran into you as a child, they probably wouldn't have guessed you'd become a well regarded and highly cited professor on the subject.

[Roger Griffin]

I'm 78 now and I've reached a point where you sort of look back and you think, well, actually, this has been a very weird life. And it's especially weird when I meet eminent historians or political scientists who, when I look at their trajectory to being who they are, they see most of them seem to have actually studied what they've become an expert in. And a lot of them come from academic families or they had a father or a relative or something that initiated them to what they eventually got really good at. But my trajectory seems to have been extremely weird when I think about it, because I was in the coldest winter on record in, in Britain since the last ice age. 1947, 1948. And I won't take out the violin, but. But my mum's circumstances, she was effectively a war widow and her circumstances were deep impoverishment. She herself had left the school at 15 and had diphtheria and there's a whole tragic thing there. But she was born into a post war Britain, which was fantastic. Well, the rationing continued to the early 1950s for some products, so there was nothing really in my background there. And it was actually talk about sliding door moments. I went to a very ordinary, what's called a primary school in England. This was a suburbia of London called Harrow. If you know anything about the history of fascism. Oswald Mosley was MP for Harrow. If you know anything about upper class education, A lot of prime ministers went to either Eton or Harrow School. So it's famous for that. That's all on the hill. I was not on the hill, I was down in the depths of ordinary Harrow, but my school, which is a very ordinary school, I had never heard of this guy, but there was a guy called John Lyon, who was a farmer in the 16th century and he made a lot of money and he founded Harrow School after the dissolution of the monasteries, which meant that there was a great need for public education, which is why they're called public schools now, even though they're private schools. And he'd set up a found for a few poor kids at the time to go to a day school. And that by the time I came into the world and I was 11 years old in the 50s, meant that there was an exam that you could take as an entrance exam. Now I think I'm old enough to reveal this embarrassing fact. My benchmate took the exam on the Tuesday and I took the exam on the Thursday and he told me what the English essay question was. And it was my mum who wrote the English essay and I learned it by heart. And I got into this plush school on my mum's English and then for years had a total imposter syndrome, which meant that I thought I knew I was surrounded by very rich kids. But I also made the great error of assuming that rich kids were bright kids. So I thought at some point I'd be exposed as a fraud.

[Martin DeCaro]

So your mom did your homework, this

[Roger Griffin]

habit of doing loads of homework.

[Martin DeCaro]

Sure. But your mom did your homework to help you there?

[Roger Griffin]

No, no. Well, I actually very quickly got disillusioned with my mum and homework because I let her do a French test and she was rubb. And from then on I did it all myself. And I got into this sort of nerdy habit because there was a perfect feedback system if I did good homework. My mum was happy, the school was happy, and I was sort of happy in a nerdy sort of way. And I didn't have friends and things because it was a very socially oriented school and I didn't really realize till much later that nobody ever invited me to their house. It's probably I was sort of one of these horrible swatty kids. But what that did was create a massive. And this is of course long before social media or computers, etc. I got into the habit of reading. I just loved reading. And it was primitive days of TV as well. And my mum loved literature and loved classical music. Strangely enough, I grew up in a sort of hot house of literature and music, even though we were in a poor little house. One thing I would give my public school credit for was that I was taught languages well enough to apply for Oxford University. And I got a scholar scholarship to Oxford. So that sliding door moment of my mom's essay created an even deeper imposter syndrome. I. I no longer thought about that essay, but I really did not sociologically identify with Oxford at all.

[Martin DeCaro]

So you got into Oxford based on your strength in languages?

[Roger Griffin]

Yes, I did French and German literature.

[Martin DeCaro]

How many languages do you read today?

[Roger Griffin]

French And German, I'm. Italian is fairly good at. My wife's Italian, so that's down to her mum. And I can read other Latin languages. I've recently got a post in a Slovak university called Mate Bell. And I mean, I must say, learning another language at this age is really quite scary. But. No, but I loved languages and I think I was to quit for Oxford. Social life, rowing and parties and all that sort of all the stuff that Oxford's associated with. And I ended up, almost by default, doing lots and lots of work on what I loved. And I loved French and German literature, but I also loved relating literature to isms. And we're back to isms here. I mean, I found Voltaire fascinating because he was meant to embody this thing called the Enlightenment and the ideas of a better society and the debt of the French Revolution. And that's very quickly. I had this sense that when I was studying a literary person in either France or Germany, they were like a mirror of, or a prism for looking at what was going on in society in Europe and in that country. And at the time, so by default, I was doing a sort of intellectual history by studying literature.

[Martin DeCaro]

You know, when politicians write an autobiography, to be careful about their origin stories, you know, people write myths about themselves, but, you know, human memory is notoriously unreliable. And I think about how I got to where I am today. I decided at some point, because of something that happened, maybe I started watching a lot of sports, that I wanted to be a sports broadcaster. Had that one moment that stands in my memory. Right. An epiphany. I don't know. Truth is mediated over time, but whatever. I think of myself as a kid and at some point I decided this is what I want to do. You had a similar kind of experience, Right. You visited the Goethe House in Weimar.

[Roger Griffin]

Yeah.

[Martin DeCaro]

This was on the same day you visited.

[Roger Griffin]

Yeah. Well, this is another sliding door moment because I was this nerdy linguist. I ended up getting a. A good first from Oxford University. I never thought I could. I mean, it's a mythic thing, a first from Oxford, anyway, that's another story. But I mean, basically I. Again, I overestimated how much my colleagues were working because fellow students were doing very little work. But there I was studying away and taking seriously all my assignments. I found out later only what we call mugs in English actually take their assignments and their reading list seriously. But, yeah, I want money to go to study German in Germany. And I chose a course in a place called Gottingen where there was a big army base just after the war. But part of the course was a trip to East Germany. Now, East Germany at the time, this was the Cold War. And I mean, for me, East Germany was like Mars, you know, I mean, in the west, we had no real idea. In England there was this long before documentaries and good communications and obviously long before any sort of electronic communication with the world and all that. And I. I wanted to see what had happened to Eastern Germany, because this huge, huge area, which included most of Berlin and places like Leipzig and Dresden and all these places, they were in Germany, say Druven, they were over there. So I ended up part of the program, going through Weimar. Now, Weimar was associated with Goethe. Goethe is the German Shakespeare. And I went to religiously to his pilgrimage house, where I saw the study on which Goethe wrote some of his greatest poetry, et cetera. And in the afternoon we were bused out. And this was a Soviet hotel. I mean, it was big red star in front of it. And we were bused out to, coincidentally, a place where it was the site of Goethe's favorite oak tree. But shatteringly, I realized that oak tree was actually inside Buchenwald concentration camp. By the way, Buchenwald means beech forest. How about that for a linguistically misleading concept? And prisoners were actually tortured on Goethe's oak tree. I remember going around the museum, which incidentally didn't mention Jews. It was only communists that were killed, according to the Soviets. And I came away from there with a very weird sense of disconnect. Something had been lit inside me which was going to nag at me because I couldn't reconcile the Germany I was loving through its language and literature and culture and what the Germans had done or Nazis had done in the Second World War. And that, I think, became a sort of. Not like a time bomb, but it was like a latent fascination, almost morbid fascination. Don't forget, I'd been born just after the war. My uncle had been in the war repairing bombers that were coming back to base. He was very young, he became an engineer, etc. So the war was very close, in a way. And also I still remembered the extraordinary impact of the revelation of Belsen, which was reported on by a guy called David Dimbleby on the BBC. And that created a huge shockwave through British culture when we found out how. How justified the war was morally. So that was a big moment, going to Buchenwald and trying to make sense of the relationship between culture and Nazi concentration camp system.

[Martin DeCaro]

But at this point, you're still not decided on. You know, I'm Going to become an expert on fascism?

[Roger Griffin]

No, actually I wanted to be a Germanist. And I did have misgivings. I did reach this point, which was quite anarchic, where I said, actually, if you really love literature, you shouldn't teach it, you should write it. And I did have some abortive attempts at writing, but I didn't really have any. Don't. I didn't have a father figure, I didn't have any sort of vocational. I didn't realize that a lot of people go to Oxford to get a. First to get. To go into finance. I had no idea. I was very naive. And an awful lot of politicians and businessmen in Britain have been to Oxbridge and. And got a degree and gone straight into making as much money as possible. I was one of these rare people who actually sort of enjoyed what I was doing. So I started a doctorate. I got nowhere. It was an abortive doctorate because. Partly because I was sort of lost at that time in my sense of direction. My mother died very early, you see.

[Martin DeCaro]

Yeah, I'm sorry to hear that about your mother. I was just going to ask you about another step in your intellectual development toward becoming a historian of fascism and isms and political movements. Really. The first country that became a fascist country was Italy. And you were introduced to a book by Julius Evola, huh?

[Roger Griffin]

Yeah. Well, this is another sliding door meeting my future wife.

[Martin DeCaro]

So in the book La Revolta Cantro Mando Madero the Revolt against the Modern World. Go ahead, Roger.

[Roger Griffin]

I was in a taverna in a very beautiful part of Genoa. Well, I was on my own, having a meal and this guy who recognized my foreign accent, he tried to convert me to this book which he said had all the answers to all the problems of the world. And so, being a bit naive and not having very good Italian, I took a note of the title and went back to what, Oxford at the time. Again, naively, I thought Oxford, the Bodleian Library, had all the books in the world. Oxford hadn't heard of this guy. So I thought, oh, this is weird. And I suppose I had a sense this was going to lead me. I can retro justify it. But I got the book, read it, and suddenly I had this extraordinary experience that. Yet I suddenly saw what fascism was about for fascists. And it was about this extraordinary cycle in history between a national greatness, a decay of a nation and a rebirth of national greatness. It's absolutely mapped out in this book. It's the revolt against the modern world as it is. Liberalism, democracy, pluralism, equality, all These, you know, female emancipation, vulgarity of consumerism, et cetera. Written in 1936, Evola went on to become a major inspiration for black terrorism in the 1970s in Italy and a major figure, but nobody knew about him. In fact, my first article ever written was on this guy. So that was another bit of the jigsaw that I got interested in ideas. And I'd met this guy who saw and he was very articulate and he wasn't a fanatical racist. He didn't come across as such, but here was belief. And that experience of belief probably made a subliminal link with what I'd seen in Buchenwald. That they were destroying something they believed needed to be destroyed to make the world live again. I thought, wow, not psychopathic. Well, it's so complicated, isn't it? I mean, real psychopaths have a sort of some real malfunction somewhere that makes them psychopaths. But if you like, you can have a perfectly intelligent, normal, truth seeking, vision seeking individual who can't stand. That's why I use Taxi Driver as a great film. You know, I mean, he comes up from Vietnam, he's not a psychopath as such, but he ends up killing the pimps, Jodie Foster as pimps, because he has this sudden vision of his mission is to clean up New York. He sacrifices himself to this idea of a mission and suddenly it was all coming together. And then this extraordinary event happened which by this time I out of. I needed. I'd given up my doctorate, I needed a job and I was offered a job in teaching isms. I mean, how amazing. At Oxford Polytechnic, which was not a university yet became Oxford Brooks University, there was a fiercely anti communist head of department, a lovely guy, okay, I'll say, name was Moet. And he, he was.

[Martin DeCaro]

No one listening will know who that is. But I mean, you haven't done your PhD yet, right?

[Roger Griffin]

No, this was after I'd aborted my German PhD.

[Martin DeCaro]

So you haven't done the.

[Roger Griffin]

No, no. I was still a lost soul trying to catch up with my weird Oxford battered self. But the history department had just employed a Marxist and he was so anti Marxist and was so frightened he felt he needed a counterbalance to Marxism and he met me at a party and heard I got it first and loved literature and art and stuff. And he, he basically fixed a job for it, could never do it now. So again, in a total freak moment, I got a job without an interview at Oxford Polytechnic and I've never had an interview for a job in my life. Well, I have. Have from my recent one.

[Martin DeCaro]

And you were hired to teach the other side of this debate over.

[Roger Griffin]

Well, that was the subtext. I was just given free range to teach history from a non Marxist perspective. And at the time that wasn't difficult because I was too indoctrinated by my own background to even be close to being a Marxist. I was a sort of. What would now be called woke sort of.

[Martin DeCaro]

But you had studied languages, not history.

[Roger Griffin]

I know, but I, it was. My secret guru was Bob Dylan and, and Joni Mitchell and, and I. I only survived psychologically at Oxford by having been deep into Californian counterculture and the Doors and all sorts of stuff going on. I was teaching history of ideas, which was really getting me into things like liberalism and, and socialism, etc. Etc. And then along comes a new head of department and this guy was, was pivotal and I looked him up. He doesn't exist. And it shows how misleading it would be to allow Wikipedia or whatever to dictate who has been important. Because this guy, Robert Murray, he'd fought American guy, he'd fought fascism from Sicily up through the peninsula. After the war, he'd survived that. He went to university in America. I don't even know where he went, but he wanted to know what he'd been fighting. When he met me and knew I was now married to an Italian, he said, can you teach a course on fascism with me? Suddenly my life fell into place because I was now reading theories of fascism. Some shape was dawning in my mind and I started trying to find other theorists who'd recognize this pattern of decadence and rebirth or what I was going to call palingenesis. And nobody had. I mean, I couldn't find it. I had bits of it in a few, and I could list the names and that's irrelevant, but basically nobody had actually. She synthesized it into a sort of neat theory. And suddenly I thought, well, I'd blown the doctorate before at Oxford, but why don't I go back to Oxford part time and write a doctorate on this new theory of fascism?

[Martin DeCaro]

So what was the state of fascist studies at this point, the history of fascism? Because you're kind of coming to it randomly, almost, right?

[Roger Griffin]

Yeah.

[Martin DeCaro]

Languages, you're hired to teach history and. And then you meet this fellow who says, why don't we teach a course on fascism? What was the state of fascism studies?

[Roger Griffin]

Well, that was the beauty in a way. I mean, if I was on the right sort of psychotic drugs, I'd probably think I had some sort of destiny. But I Mean, that is nonsense, of course, but it was extremely neat. For example, if I'd very quickly found somebody with my theory, that would have been the end of my career as a political scientist. What I found ground was several major, major experts who had bits of what I call my theory. Now, it was never my theory. I mean, we're all on the backs of giants, etc. But George Mosser had taken fascist ideas seriously. He was this refugee from Nazi Germany and spoke German and he moved from medieval studies to fascist studies and he had, had seen a lot of this stuff, but he hadn't synthesized it into a theory. There was a guy called Stanley Payne, had got almost fully complete a theory of fascism as something not reactionary and not nihilistic, but actually having a sort of, I feel like an ideology. And I could give you a list of names, but generally speaking, if you had. And I could document this if you ran a conference in Reading, as a guy called Stuart Wolf did twice of international experts on fashion, put them all together in a conference. Nobody, the papers are all over the place. There's absolutely no consensus. Is Latin American dictatorship fascist? Is Stalinism fascist? A complete breakdown of any sort of scholarly consensus. So it was into this perfect Babel type smattering and spreading of theories. Tower of Babel scattering, that's the word, the scattering of theories that I came in and I did develop quite a missionary zeal skill. And I ended up with this theory which, very interestingly, I was examined in a college at Oxford called St Anthony's which was run by a guy called Ralph Darrendorf, very famous, he wanted to fail me. He was the internal examiner. So another sliding door moment was I'd written to now extremely eminent Sir Ian Kershaw, one of the most famous British historians, certainly the best biographer of Hitler you'll ever come across. I'd written to him, and this is long before emails, when I felt very lonely with my theory. And I got this letter back about three months later which said, I think you're onto something. So when I was asked, who'd you like to be the external examiner? I invited him and he defended me against my internal. It's meant to be the other way around. And I got my doctorate from Oxford.

[Martin DeCaro]

So what year was this?

[Roger Griffin]

1991. And there the story would have ended, except that I invited myself to a conference on fascism in Lancaster and it was being basically presided over by this guy called Roger Eatwell and I literally, literally buttonholed him, well, not literally after the conference and said, I've got this theory. I'VE just done this doctorate and I'd really like, and I mean, please, if you're ever in this position, just give somebody with a bit of enthusiasm a bit of hope. I don't think he thought I was going to make anything of it, but he was editing a series on the nature of the right, and suddenly I get this. Still didn't have emails. I actually got a letter. Would you like to turn your doctorate into a book? And then I can actually literally say, now the rest is history. That was the Nature of Fascism, which nearly got remaindered, except that a hard copy version of it was in the case of a reader for a publishing firm called Routledge when her car broke down on the way to a conference. She was sitting in a garage waiting for her car to be fixed. She fished the hard copy of my Nature of Fascism out of her bag and started reading it. And the next thing I know, I get a letter, 1993, saying, I think we'd like to turn your Nature of Fascism into a paperback. That was it.

[Martin DeCaro]

Well, let's go back here. Let's roll the clock back again. So you got this opportunity to study fascism. You develop this theory of fascism that you had a very hostile examiner who didn't believe it was worth studying. I was asking you before about what was the nature or the status of fascism studies. Here we are. What, in the 1980s, a generation or more after this political phenomenon had lit the world on fire and started a war that killed some 50 million people, your approach was different. You actually read because of your skill in languages, you read the writings of fascists to figure out what they believed in, whereas prior historians hadn't been doing that.

[Roger Griffin]

Well, I find this really fascinating. You see, if you actually look after at political science definition of feminism or anarchism or Marxism or liberalism, they quote theorists, they quote J.S. mill or Marx or Germaine Greer or whatever. But when it comes to fascism, nobody was quoting fascists like Mussolini on it. Why? Because the consensus was fascism had no genuine ideas. It was all totalitarian ideology. It was essentially destructive. It was like a tornado of nihilism, destructiveness and death.

[Podcast Advertiser]

Death.

[Roger Griffin]

And it was backward looking, it was anti modern. It wanted to take European civilization back to the Stone Age. And actually when you read fascists, they were saying, modern society is decadent, the nation is falling apart. We need a new era. We want to go forward. And we're going to take the best of the past, of our golden age, of the best qualities of our nation, and we're going to create a new Modernity, but not a modernity based on democracy, but a modernity based on, based on this extraordinary essence of the nation and the race which will make it great again. Now, before anybody takes that phrase out of context, I don't believe that Trump is a fascist because he's doing it within the democratic system. But these fascists had a belief system. But to show the state of the historical misunderstanding or non understanding of fascism, when I entered fascist studies, I just started again. Never do this if you're in a position of power. I went to a classic, classic Oxford thing called a little cocktail party or drinks party where you mix with big, big wigs. And one of these big wigs I just started my doctorate was a guy called Dennis Mack Smith, who's a very eminent Italian historian. You can look him up, Dennis Mack Smith. And he said, oh, Roger Griffin, I'd been to Oriel College. And he said, oh, you know. And I said, yeah, I'm working on something. Fascism. Why are you bothering about fascism? I mean, fascism's dead.

[Martin DeCaro]

I mean, it's over, it's over, it's over.

[Roger Griffin]

Yes, there's probably some fanatics, National Front, etc, but it's not a significant historical factor. Anyway, what's your, what's your approach? I said, well, I'm working on fascist ideology. He said, but fascism has no ideology. My dear boy, my dear boy, I love the mighty boy. Have another glass of sherry. And I thought, wow, what a put that. He was able to write entire books about Italian fascism with no reference whatsoever to the coherence of its underlying vision, the core of fascist vision that brought together all these very, very different fascists, technocrats, politicians, members of the church, et cetera, clustered around this central thing that I had recognized, which for him didn't exist. And so, so in a way that meeting with him, it didn't crush me. But I thought, oh dear, there really is a sort of vacuum here to fill.

[Martin DeCaro]

The conversation with Roger Griffin continues. But you know, you never have to listen to ads again. Support the important work we're doing here. Tap subscribe now in the show notes or go to history as it happens dot com. So, Roger, this brings us to what you identified as making fascism distinct from other right wing, ultra nationalist populist ideologies. Something that I learned from you, I think our first conversation, I offered you my definition of fascism and you gave me a B because I was missing something, something I was aware of it, but not what you had called it palingenesis. How did you figure out palingenesis? Well, first Tell us what it is. And then how did you figure out this being so important to understanding fascism?

[Roger Griffin]

Well, and this is where literature studies comes in, when you study something like Romanticism. Now, Romanticism isn't limited to Germany or France and Italy, and in fact, Italian Romanticism is different from French Romanticism from English. So you get used to your mind. Mind is trained to see a general pattern with dialects. And even within the same country, there are very big differences between Wordsworth or William Blake or Shelley or whatever. And so, in a way, one good thing came out of my Oxford education was A, I'd read a lot and B, I was used to pattern recognition, which didn't mean literal duplication, but permutations, more like a family of different relations, rooted ideas. So when I was reading all these different fascists, there was huge differences between Caudreano in Romania or Primo de Rivera in Spain. I mean, for a start, one was Spanish, one was Romanian. If you want to have a fascist revolution, it's going to be very much dictated by the country you're in. However, when they started talking about what was wrong with the present, there suddenly seemed to be this extraordinary pattern of this twin theme. And I could give it to you in different languages, but decadence, fair fallinger, the idea of falling or falling apart or falling to pieces, or I'll give you one little bit of trivia about Trump when he calls traditional Washington politics the swamp. That is literally the same term that the Nazis used about Weimar, Der Zumpf. It means the swamp, this language of draining swamps. One of the key concepts in Italian fascism was bonificari. Bonifico means draining a swamp. It's a metaphor for making good bonificare. So make good a swamp, you drain it and you build on it. So the fascists in Italy loved building on drain swamps, they're famous for it. They said they were getting rid of malaria, et cetera. Now, Germany didn't drain swamps, but the idea of clearing out, of making good, etc. So I saw this pattern and I got really excited. Being a nerd, I found this incredibly exciting and I probably bored people to death. If you ever make a bank transfer in Italy now they call it bonifico, which means making good a debt. I saw this pattern, but I had a language problem because I wanted an adjective which went with ultranationalism. This was a form of extreme nationalism, but there have been loads of nationalism. So it's history right back to the Middle Ages. You could even think that the Roman, Roman ness had a sort of nationalistic element. I needed an adjective to go with ultranationalism and it had to imply some sort of rebirth. But there wasn't an adjective from rebirth or renewal, renewing, ultra nationalism, rebirthing. Well, rebirthing is a Californian psychotherapy where you get psychologically reborn. And I was sort of vaguely looking for an adjective and I just by chance I came across this little book by a guy called Ballanche in French post revolutionary history. And his name of his book was La Panin Genesis sociale the Rebirth of Society. And I read around a bit and there we were in Italian, Palin genetico. In Spanish Palin genetico. And I looked it up in English. It was used about Christ and the rebirth of Christ and it was used about fingernails, cells regrowing in obsolete biological terminology. But it was never ever used in British academic English meaning rebirth as an adjective. And I had it. I had this sort of I wish I'd patented it and got a penny for a dime for every time it was used because it's now a standard word in Anglophone languages. But Palin genetic meaning Palin anew and Genesis born. It just was so neat. Most intellectuals like a little bit of jargon, so I found my own jargon palant, genetic, ultra nationalism. It's sort of slightly cryptic, slightly open. I found myself able to define fascism in a sentence.

[Martin DeCaro]

And that helps us understand how fascism is at the same time, looking back to look forward, a modernizing, renewal, rebirth almost at an anthropological level of society.

[Roger Griffin]

Society, absolutely. And the beauty is when you see that pattern is you then look at a nation and you think, well, what are you bringing about? Again, you have to find in your national history a glorious bit. Now if you go to Holland, there was the golden age of painting and navy and everything and Rembrandt, etc, that's easy. It's called the Golden Age. Spain had a Golden Age, Britain had an Elizabethan age. Now America's got a problem, problem you haven't been around.

[Martin DeCaro]

And Maga is nebulous, he doesn't identify

[Roger Griffin]

that you can have nostalgia. And Trump uses this constant. Well, look at him going to compare himself to faces of presidential statues, etc. I mean, you can always look back, but to find a genuine Golden Age in America is difficult. So then the default mechanism of fascists is to go back to some mythic racial point. Now the German Germans were only a Nation in 1871 and you could talk about the architectural Bach or whatever, but very interestingly, by default, if you can't dig up a Golden age in your History, you go racial myth, you dig deeper and you go back to some mythical racial point. And you could do that as Hungarians and you could say we're all from the Pergis steppes or something. So I found my pattern and I'd found my bit of jargon and I suddenly, in this manic and very nerdy way, I got a real high out of looking at all these in my doctorate and in my first book, surveying all this chaos out there, explaining why there was chaos, because they were all looking for an essence. And there are no essences in definitions in the human sciences. All you can have is an effective, heuristically effective definition. You can't have a true definition. My definition of fascism isn't true, but it's proved thanks to the work of lots of other people, really useful for sorting out out the fascist votes from the pathological or democratic sheep.

[Martin DeCaro]

And fascism in the real world or as practiced is vicious, it's destructive.

[Roger Griffin]

There's really no revolutions are.

[Martin DeCaro]

Yeah, positive fascist experience. Well, maybe for the people who are in the in group, at least for a little while. So you had some, well, your Italian in laws, their real life experiences of life under fascism that colored your engagement with the subject?

[Roger Griffin]

Well, yeah, I mean, in a way, I suppose I was on a sort of magic carpet by now. I had this wonderful Italian wife. I was learning Italian. When we were going home, we were going to this little village outside Juneau where I'm sitting at this moment. Not only had my father been in the war, I could sit on the terrace and try out my theory about how it felt to be fascist and what they were being told about what they were fighting for. And it was of course, the Roman Romans, the Italians again had only been united in, in the late 19th century. They'd never been a nation. So you couldn't have a golden age, the Italian nation. But you, you had your Vatican, you had the church, but you had the Roman era.

[Martin DeCaro]

Mussolini was obsessed with that. Yeah, go ahead.

[Roger Griffin]

He was never a fascist in belief system. He was very Catholic and true Catholics never quite bought fascism, even though it was a lot of collusion. But he could recognize in what I was saying, he said, yeah, that makes sense. He could see, he could remember the frenzy of the crowds in the streets and the way they were being encouraged to feel that they were experiencing rebirth. And the time when you can go back to that energy is in the beginning of the French Revolution. If you look at how people experienced the early days of the French Revolution, the experience of revolution, fascism is a revolution of course, that's maybe completely ignored or hated by Marxist theories of fascism, because that is anathema. There is only one true revolution. This was all manipulation, et cetera. But I seriously believe that for some of the crowds worshiping Hitler and some of the people in the squares worshiping Mussolini, they really had a powerful subjective sense that their nation was being reborn into this extraordinary golden age. And even though Trump isn't fascist, if you study his early rallies, you can get some little hints, hint of what a palingenetic fervor can be like, even though he's done it in a very trashy, watered down way.

[Martin DeCaro]

Yeah, it's tacky.

[Roger Griffin]

But my mother, my mother in law, who was what's called a little fascist, a little Italian, she was in the female youth bit when she was really, really young, and she liked the hoops and the uniform. But in this village where I'm sitting now, not more than 200 hundred meters away from where I'm sitting, there was a straga, there was a massacre, reprisal massacre, of a whole load of local inhabitants of Campo Morone. In fact, the street where my wife grew up was called the street of Martyrs because that's where they were killed. They were machine gun, outside the local convent because partisans who were in the hills above where I'm sitting had killed some Nazis. And so I started getting. And the village just above us, about two miles away, was completely wiped out. So I suddenly started getting this real sense that the destructiveness of Nazism and fascism, and in Italian it's called Nazi fascism because of the collusion between the two. This was motivated by almost religious fervor about protecting the world from the evils of communism and liberalism and all the. These, this decadent stuff. And I. And in a way, yes, a wonderful symbiosis took place between my private life, my teaching life, because I could invent courses on this and teach it, and my publishing life and, and really what you see, if you see an official account of my life, these are just the external, I mean, so lucky. I mean, I've lived a long time as well. I've written a lot, but I kept on being asked to write things.

[Martin DeCaro]

Let's talk about that. Because over the decades, and I'm in this group, people consult you to do interviews, they cite your work, you're a very heavily cited scholar, you're invited to conferences. But often people find what you have to say maybe, well, disappointing if they're looking for someone to confirm, yes, Trump is a fascist, yes, Orban is a fascist. Yes. Modi is a fascist. You have a different way of explaining these modern phenomena, this populism that we discussed earlier.

[Roger Griffin]

Well, I mean.

[Martin DeCaro]

But you apply your knowledge of fascism to these movements.

[Roger Griffin]

Yeah, but I mean, in a way, I'd like to qualify what I'm about to say, because actually, I think the word fascism has got such powerful cathartic value to actually distance yourself from somebody you find repulsive ideologically or almost physically, that, actually, I'm not going to say you're wrong to call Trump a fascist. I utterly understand.

[Martin DeCaro]

Yeah.

[Roger Griffin]

That on one level, on an emotive level, he's a fascist. And to call him a. An illiberalizing Democrat, populist doesn't really.

[Martin DeCaro]

Yeah. It doesn't resonate.

[Roger Griffin]

I mean, so I would say if. If you're going to use the word fascist about politicians you hate on the right, then do so in the knowledge that you are using the term not as a piece of forensic political jargon, but you're using it in order to emotionally distance yourself from and express your disgust and sense of injustice about somebody. And there. I'm totally with people. If you want to call ICE an American equivalent to the fascist Gestapo, that's absolutely fine, but it's absolutely unhistorical. I mean, the Gestapo was infinitely more horrific than ice and Hitler and what he had done in his empire was infinitely worse than anything that Trump has done. So let's have a sense of. But if you want to find a. A forensically accurate term to communicate the nuances of what Trump is, the word fascism really doesn't cut it. And it doesn't cut it precisely because the subtlety of this new attack on freedom and democracy does not come from fascists. It comes from Democrats who want elections and they want freedom of speech for themselves, and they are trying to get rid of what they consider to be the corruption of their democracy by international institutions like the EU or the United nations or food relief or health relief for people in the Third World, or just being liberal, Trump withdrew from the fascist moment, and I believe he went back into the fold. He's within the system. Whereas everything points to the fact that Hitler and Mussolini, from this out, only wanted democratic power in order to destroy much more. Like Putin. Putin is much closer in that sense to fascism than populist.

[Martin DeCaro]

Well, fascism is revolutionary, isn't it?

[Roger Griffin]

A, it's revolutionary, but B, I'm going to chuck in another thing that populism is worse than fascism. Modern, contemporary fascism is really, in terms of its material impact on modern society, is Absolutely marginalized. Whereas what is populism done? Populism, if you put together Bolsonaro, Netanyahu, Modi and all these things, they have cut off food aid and health aid to millions of people, they've had committed war crimes in the Middle east, they've attacked academic freedom in universities, they've allowed large chunks of the rainforest to be cut down in the name of commercialism and climate denial. I mean, if you put together collectively all the things that have been done in the last 20 years in the name of the people, people and populism, then actually right wing populism, whether extreme or moderate, is actually posing a political danger domestically, a huge problem internationally in terms of solidarity with a nation like Ukraine or whatever, and in the support populism has given to what I consider to be an absolute anathema of what's going on in Gaza and in the Middle east, east, and finally, catastrophic impact on the chances of human beings to face the climate polycrisis. And so I think even though populism sounds somehow less bad than fascism, oh, don't worry about it. It's not fascist, just a populist. No, populism now is the main destructive force in the world outside autocracies. And so I take it extremely seriously. And I understand why people keep reverting to the word fascism, because it's much closer to the destructive truth of populism. But we must distinguish fascism from what's actually going on, which is much closer to what you might think of as an autoimmune disease. It's something actually happening within our body politics. Whereas Nazism and fascism was like a virus attacking liberal democracies from outside. And in a way, the autoimmune metaphor makes it much more scary because it's your own body attacking itself, whereas Nazism and Hitler really was much more like an alien force attacking what was already there. Look at the destruction of Weimar and look at Trump's destruction of American liberal democracy. And they are both horrific, but they're both the rationales and the vision. Visions drop driving them are different.

[Martin DeCaro]

All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical left Democrats, which is what they're doing and stolen by the fake news media. That's what they've done and what they're doing. We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn't happen. You don't concede when there's theft. On the next episode of History. As it happens, we're going to talk about democracy and Moby Dick. Yes, a white whale. I say as we report history as it happens. Make sure to sign up for my free newsletter. Just go to Substack and search for history as it happens. Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out out you're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with LibSync, go to LibSynads.com that's L I B S Y N ads.com today.