T
he notion that Donald Trump is an authoritarian—or worse—is now a staple of political commentary, both in the United States and abroad. Nor are pundits of the left the only ones inclined to look at Trump in this way: Bill O’Reilly claimed on the night of the Florida primary that Trump won there “because he comes across as more authoritarian—not authoritative, authoritarian.” Garry Kasparov goes so far as to argue that he has in common with Vladimir Putin “the authoritarian instinct, the veneration of power over the values that direct it….A President Trump would happily take his place as Putin’s latest Western lapdog.”
Some of what has been written about Trump’s alleged authoritarian tendencies is interesting and, up to a point, illuminating, especially given the coincident and continuing rise of right-wing populist political leaders and parties throughout Europe. Still, it is hard to see how comparing him to a man like Putin sheds useful light on his career to date. Trump is an American politician and media celebrity, not the dictator of a non-Western nation in whose tyrannous political culture liberal democracy has never managed to make any lasting headway. Indeed, no one has had much luck in explaining what of authoritarian he might be, much less why so distinctively European a concept as authoritarianism should now be taking root in the hitherto-uncongenial soil of America.
To cite George Wallace’s 1968 and 1972 presidential campaigns in this connection, as several political writers have done, is understandable enough, but much less relevant than it appears at first glance. Wallace, like Trump, was a charismatic demagogue of spectacular virtuosity, but there was nothing authoritarian about the policies he espoused as a presidential candidate, nor was he popular enough to come anywhere near winning a major-party nomination.
It says something revealing about Trump’s highly distinctive political persona that his only plausible-sounding homegrown forerunners are a trio of fictional characters. One of them, Willie Stark, the populist anti-hero of Robert Penn Warren’s great 1946 novel All the King’s Men, was based in part on Louisiana’s Huey Long, which accounts for some of his powerful plausibility. But Paddy Chayefsky’s Howard Beale (from Sidney Lumet’s 1976 film Network) and Budd Schulberg’s Lonesome Rhodes (from Elia Kazan’s 1957 film A Face in the Crowd) are, unlike the far more complex Stark, caricatures of media-enabled charisma run amok, brilliantly and suggestively realized yet painted with the broadest of brushes—which doubtless explains why they are so often cited in connection with a garish, even grotesque figure like Trump.
No, it is Great Britain alone that provides us with a real-life example of a charismatic English-speaking politician who both embraced authoritarianism and built a mass movement—one that, for a short time, appeared to pose a real threat to British democracy. That was Sir Oswald Mosley (1896–1980), who in 1932 founded the British Union of Fascists, a party whose black-shirted members were once taken as seriously in England as Long’s Share Our Wealth Clubs were in America.
Mosley is the only full-fledged authoritarian who has ever successfully established himself, however briefly, as a national political leader in England or America. (Long, whose economic program resembled Mosley’s in certain respects, might well have succeeded in doing so had he lived, but his rise to power was cut short by his assassination in 1936.) Yet so far as I know, no mention has yet been made of him in connection with Trump’s campaign, presumably because Mosley is now all but unknown in the U.S. For the most part, he is remembered only by literary Anglophiles who know him as the brother-in-law of the comic novelist Nancy Mitford and the model for P.G. Wodehouse’s Roderick Spode, 7th Earl of Sidcup and the black-shorted nemesis of Bertie Wooster. In 1938, Bertie insulted the attire of his fascist followers in The Code of the Woosters:
The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting “Heil, Spode!” and you imagine it is the Voice of the People.
There was, however, nothing remotely funny about the real Mosley. “In foreign countries,” Winston Churchill wrote of him, “such people are confined in fortresses—at least, they used to be when the world was still civilized.” Anyone who seeks to understand how authoritarianism might become a force in America would thus do well to consider his spectacular rise—and ignominious fall.1
A
wealthy member of the landed gentry, Mosley entered politics at the age of 24 after serving in World War I. Elected to the House of Commons, he simultaneously set up shop as a playboy, keeping fast company with the “bright young things” of his social set and acquiring a well-deserved reputation as a philanderer. His motto was said to be “Vote Labour, sleep Tory.”
For all his hedonism, Mosley was no lightweight. Not only did he come home from the war determined, like so many of his fellow veterans, to prevent the coming of another, even more destructive one, but youthful exposure to the writings of Thomas Carlyle, who believed that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men,” had persuaded him that he was a romantic man of destiny.
He would be even more strongly influenced in this conviction by his reading of the works of George Bernard Shaw, whom he saw as “supreme…in his understanding of the great men of action,” just as Shaw in turn would later find Mosley’s “air of certainty” to be “marvelously appealing in a world of danger and confusion.” Scarcely less attractive to him was the thinking of Nietzsche, which he admired for “the virility, the challenge to all existing things which impede the march of mankind, the absolute abnegation of the doctrine of surrender.”
Slender and dashing, with a high-pitched but incisive voice that made him a natural at platform speaking, Mosley quickly established himself as a public figure of note. Starting out as a Conservative, he became obsessed with the seemingly insoluble problem of mass unemployment and in consequence moved leftward, finally joining the Labour Party in 1924. At once extraordinarily charismatic and extraordinarily arrogant, he was widely seen as a coming man by his contemporaries but was no less widely distrusted by older party officials, most of whom believed him to be opportunistic and unsound. And while there is no reason to question the genuineness of Mosley’s feelings about unemployment in England, there is also no reason to doubt the testimony of the many colleagues who agreed with Clement Attlee that “there is a certain megalomania about him. I think there is a streak of cruelty in his character and I doubt whether he is entirely mentally stable.”
The coming of the Great Depression heightened Mosley’s sense of urgency, and he developed an economic-reform program whose principal planks were high tariffs and corporate-style central planning. When his colleagues declined to endorse it in toto, he left the party in 1931, declaring himself to be “in a hurry because we believe that if the present situation is allowed to drift on, a catastrophe will overwhelm the country” and predicting that “drastic and disagreeable measures will have to be taken….We shall not shrink from that final conclusion, and will organize to stand between the State and ruin.”
Many observers, including Shaw and Harold Macmillan, believed Mosley was making a fatal mistake and that he would have inevitably ascended to leadership of the Labour Party had he been patient enough to play by the rules. In fact, Mosley, who feared “the tyranny of communism with its iron control of all human affairs,” had concluded that it was his destiny to lead an anti-Communist dictatorship in order to save England from violent revolution. His first step toward power was to launch what he called the New Party, whose slogan was “Britain First.” But the NP met with the fate of most third parties, splitting the Labour vote and putting Conservative candidates into office who might not otherwise have been elected.
Mosley then decided that his best bet was to abandon conventional party politics and lead a populist mass movement that would stand ready to “take control in a revolutionary situation” if and when “the little men of talk and of delay” fell from power. In common with many Britons on both left and right, he was fascinated by Italy’s Benito Mussolini, whom he met in 1932 and found to have “the quickest and clearest mind of any statesman I have met.” Accordingly, the New Party was disbanded, and he organized the British Union of Fascists in October. “I have finished with the people who think,” he said. “Henceforth I shall go to the people who feel.”
Rebecca West, a close observer of Mosley’s career, would later unpack this unguarded utterance with savage precision:
He abandoned the attempt to wrestle with the vulgarity of the vulgar by argument and by example and decided to court them in their own fashion. Thereafter his agitation might have deceived the vulgar into crediting himself with a like vulgarity, and it looked as if he might seize power through their support.
In practice, this meant embracing anti-Semitism of the crudest kind. Mosley believed that “a political party must ultimately be based on emotion…. A new movement must find somebody or something to hate.” To this end, he deliberately pandered to what he took to be working-class prejudice by attacking “Jewish financiers” and the “Yiddish mob” in his speeches, eventually going so far as to praise Adolf Hitler’s “singularly shrewd and lucid intellect” and to openly support Nazi Germany.
Mosley and the BUF wore the black-shirt outfits of the Italian Fascists, later donning military uniforms and adopting the Nazi salute. The New Party had already set up a paramilitary defense squad whose members were popularly known as “the Biff Boys” and who (in Mosley’s phrase) used “the good old English fist” to police its mass meetings. Now its successor, the Blackshirt Defense Force, became notorious for the viciousness with which it ejected protesters from BUF rallies.
Newsreel footage conveys something of Mosley’s inflammatory magnetism, which initially lured to his banner both working-class people and left-wing writers, among them Shaw, Christopher Isherwood and H.G. Wells, who shared his dream of a planned society led by a virile, decisive politician-hero. Shaw in particular found him more impressive than ever:
The moment things begin seriously to break up and something has to be done, quite a number of men like Mosley will come to the front who are at present ridiculed as Impossibles. Let me remind you that Mussolini began as a man with about twenty-five votes.
When the Prince of Wales, who was known to be pro-Nazi, ascended to the throne at the beginning of 1936, Mosley thought that his moment had finally come. But King Edward VIII’s subsequent abdication put paid to his dreams of grandeur, and the BUF, which by that time was already in decline, soon found itself relegated to the extreme fringes of British politics.
Insofar as Trump’s policies lend themselves to coherent explication, they are broadly congruent with Mosley’s “Britain First” nationalism, if not with his espousal of left-wing corporate-state socialism.
In the words of Joseph Goebbels, Mosley
was an outsider of small political significance….What Mosley was doing over there with his Blackshirts harmed rather than benefited our cause. Far more important were a number of Conservatives who pleaded for a close association with Hitler, although, from the ideological point of view, they had nothing in common with him.
With the coming of war, Mosley and his second wife, the former Diana Mitford, were arrested and interned as security risks. 2 They spent the rest of World War II in prison or under house arrest. Though Mosley sought to return to public life after 1945, his postwar views were no less noxious—among other things, he was a Holocaust denier who supported racial apartheid, not merely in South Africa but in England as well—and he was treated as a pariah. He left the country in 1951 to live in Ireland and, later, France, where he died in disgrace.
W
hen the Washington Post declared in an impassioned editorial that Donald Trump is a “strongman” who “presents a threat to American democracy,” it included in its lengthy indictment the following particulars:
He considers himself exempt from the norms of democratic contests, such as the release of tax returns, policy papers, lists of advisers, and other information that voters have a right to expect.
Granted that these are all desirable things, and that the Post’s editorial made other, far more serious criticisms, the fact remains that reading about the career of an outright fascist like Mosley helps to put Trump’s so-called authoritarianism in perspective—a perspective that is increasingly missing from journalistic discussions of his campaign. For all his gross excesses, Trump has never said or done anything to suggest that his ultimate goal is to wield dictatorial power, nor has he himself so much as flirted with the Mosley-style anti-Semitism that is a traditional part of the fascist package (though he has remained disturbingly silent about the open and extreme anti-Semitism of many of his “alt-right” supporters).
That said, several important similarities between the two men are plain enough to see. Insofar as Trump’s policies lend themselves to coherent explication, they are broadly congruent with Mosley’s “Britain First” nationalism, if not with his espousal of left-wing corporate-state socialism. Like Mosley before him, Trump is an opponent of free trade and unrestricted immigration who believes—or affects to believe—that high tariffs and a closed border will strengthen the American economy. He has also cultivated a swaggering, bullying belligerence of manner that is unmistakably reminiscent of Mosley, as are the racially charged rhetoric of his speeches and the growing willingness of his supporters to use violence to eject protesters from his rallies, a practice that he more or less openly encourages.
All this sets Trump sharply apart from the GOP establishment, as well as from those conservatives who see him as an opportunistic liberal disguised as a populist Republican. It has, however, been crucial in winning him the loyal support of disaffected voters from both parties who long for a fearless, outspoken leader who will “make America great again.” Most of them appear to be anxious middle- and working-class white men who sense that official employment statistics understate the problem of long-term unemployment in the U.S., fear that their own jobs may be at risk, and have come to the conclusion that unrestricted immigration, be it de jure or de facto, is a direct and mortal threat to themselves and their families.
These voters believe that the leaders of both parties have written them off and that they have no political power as a result. Trump, by contrast, offers himself as their protector, a strong, incorruptibly wealthy man who is capable of rising above partisanship to safeguard their interests, just as Mosley claimed to speak for Britons who distrusted both the Conservative and Labour parties.
No doubt the comparison does Trump a disservice, but given the consistent lack of specificity of his florid utterances on the stump, who knows what he really believes about anything—including liberal democracy itself?
In this respect Trump also recalls Patrick J. Buchanan, the political columnist who campaigned against the GOP establishment in a similar fashion in his second run for president in 1996. Buchanan made the following declaration after winning the New Hampshire primary:
They are in a terminal panic. They hear the shouts of the peasants from over the hill. All the knights and barons will be riding into the castle pulling up the drawbridge in a minute. All the peasants are coming with pitchforks. We’re going to take this over the top.
None of this means that Trump is any kind of fascist, least of all one of Mosley’s ilk. Unlike Mosley, he has chosen to operate within the existing two-party system and run as a Republican, albeit one of an unusual kind, a Jacksonian populist who speaks the coded language of white ressentiment fluently. Not since Buchanan (who is, not surprisingly, a Trump supporter) has such a politician won anything like a major national following, and Buchanan’s three presidential campaigns all petered out fairly quickly.
But Mosley’s own politics also pose problems of categorization. “I am not now and have never been a man of the right,” he declared in 1968. “My position was on the left and is now in the center of politics.” He was, indeed, a man of the left who embraced national socialism for the same reason that Shaw embraced Stalinism in his dotage: They both came to the conclusion that liberal democracy was no longer capable of grappling with the crises of their day.
Could this be what Trump believes as well? When he says that “I’m very angry because our country is being run horribly and I will gladly accept the mantle of anger….Our country is disappearing. Our country is going in the wrong direction and so wrong [that] it’s got to be stopped and it’s got to be stopped fast,” one can hear a distant echo of Mosley, who declared in The Greater Britain, his 1932 manifesto, that the BUF “did not begin with the wiseacres and the theorists. It was born from a surging discontent with a regime where nothing can be achieved.”
No doubt the comparison does Trump a disservice, but given the consistent lack of specificity of his florid utterances on the stump, who knows what he really believes about anything—including liberal democracy itself?
Whether or not Trump is an authoritarian in the conventional understanding of the word, his enthusiastic assumption of the mantle of righteous anger puts him at risk of setting out on a dangerous and uncharted path. The road to authoritarianism, after all, is not always a clear one, and it is by no means impossible to travel down it with the very best of intentions. As Rebecca West wrote in The New Meaning of Treason, Mosley himself “was inspired by that impatience with evil which often produces evil.” One need not be a fascist—or even to understand what it means to be a fascist—to fall victim to that temptation.
1 Mosley’s life and political career are chronicled in exhaustive detail in Stephen Dorril’s Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism (2006), on which I have drawn in writing this essay.
2 Diana, like her sister Unity, was an ardent Nazi sympathizer. She and Mosley were married in 1936 in the presence of Hitler.
