Jonathan Rauch

Well, it was painful.

I'll tell you that.

This was the article I had hoped never to write.

A year ago in The Atlantic, I wrote an article saying that Trump was not a fascist.

He's a patrimonialist.

And that's a style of government that you find not only in states, but in the mafia, criminal organizations, cults, political machines, where the state is, in effect, the personal property and family business of the leader.

Mm-hmm.

And in that situation, the head of state will go rampage through the bureaucracy, cutting through rules and replacing people with personal loyalists.

And then things get very corrupt and they get very incompetent.

And that's clearly what we were seeing.

And that, I think, uncontroversially applied to Trump.

But patrimonialism, it's not ideological.

It's not especially aggressive.

It's not interested in the use of force or taking over other countries.

for example.

And it could have just been about Trump and enrichment.

And I thought initially that's probably where things were headed.

But over the course of the last year, and specifically over the course of the past few weeks and couple of months,

We saw the emergence of so many properties that are associated with fascism that to me it became perverse to withhold the label.

So I finally dropped my resistance, sat down, thought of all the things I could think of that are usually associated with fascism.