Since Donald Trump’s ascent nearly a decade ago, political discourse has thrummed with warnings of approaching American fascism. The talk has only grown louder since the former president’s attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021, his vows to lock up political opponents, and his boosters’ 2024 campaign video invoking a “Unified Reich.”
But despite chilling parallels to 1930s and ’40s regimes, what’s actually on the rise isn’t fascism. It’s “Caesarism,” a strain of despotic leadership historians have described for more than a century.
Charismatic Caesarist leaders, sociologist Max Weber argued in the early 1900s, occupy a murky middle ground between democracy and autocracy. Like the Roman dictator Julius Caesar, they frame their rule as the ultimate expression of the people’s will. “Caesarism,” wrote 20th-century historian Oswald Spengler, “grows on the soil of democracy.”
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Caesarism is distinct from fascism, a word whose casual usage far outstrips its real meaning — and Trump critics should consider that it’s easy for people to dismiss warnings freighted with a term that doesn’t quite fit.
True fascist leaders are openly anti-democratic, and they demand national unity and sacrifice. Neither condition seems likely anytime soon in countries like the United States, where democratic processes are entrenched and the drive to form associations is historically weak.
Fascism permeates all of politics and civil society, says University of Pennsylvania political scientist Damon Linker, with distinctive trappings like secret police forces. Benito Mussolini’s regime in fascist Italy, for instance, banned opposing political parties, censored the press, and established a network of secret police, the OVRA.
“Caesarism doesn’t envision that happening,” Linker says. “It’s much more an expression of something ancient or pre-modern: A tyrant seizing power and wielding it without restraint.”
This doesn’t mean Caesarist leaders are less dangerous than fascist ones. They’re actually more threatening in one sense: They mislead people about their intentions by conjuring an illusion of democracy. Historians peg Napoleon Bonaparte, ruler of France from 1804 to 1814, as a classic Caesarist. Though he hoped to become a perpetual “consul,” or despot, he’d once backed the French Revolution — fought to install democratic ideals — and claimed he’d come to power to “save the Republic.” He even insisted French citizens vote on whether he should be named consul for life.
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“I cannot feel assured of their complete confidence in me,” Napoleon said of the French people, “until the act that prolongs my term of office shall have been ratified by the whole nation.” In practice, this yes-or-no vote was heavily coerced, with citizens forced to mark votes next to their full names. Napoleon went on to rule as an autocrat, crowning himself emperor, expelling dissenters from France, and depriving women of civil rights.
While Caesarists may go to great lengths to stage elections (however corrupt), they do not suffer dissent gladly, if at all. They draw on democratic traditions mainly to serve their own autocratic ends. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan delivered a master class in this art when a 2017 voter referendum proposed installing a so-called “executive presidency,” which would allow Erdoğan to dismiss Parliament and implement laws by decree.
Though this vote was ostensibly free and fair, it was rife with intimidation as Erdoğan accused “no” voters of terrorism. Predictably, the measure passed, and the veneer of legitimacy it gave Erdoğan persists to this day. Likewise, Vladimir Putin’s Russian elections function mostly as large-scale pageants that burnish Putin’s credentials. A vote for a Caesarist leader, as Weber wrote, is “not an ordinary vote or election, but a profession of faith in the calling of him who demands these acclamations.”
In return for loyalty, Caesarist leaders invest their closest followers with a kind of purpose by proxy. “Admirers place themselves under the influence of the leader,” French historian Christian-Georges Schwentzel wrote in 2017. “In their banal existence, they find themselves illuminated by the dream of grandeur and power that the leader figure instills in them.”
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Attendees at Trump campaign rallies bask in the reflected light Schwentzel describes. Trump’s-head banners punctuate seas of MAGA hats in a display of mass devotion. Trump has signaled plans to blaze his own Caesarist trail upon reelection. He applauds leaders like Erdoğan and Putin, and like them, he frames threats to his power as attempts to subvert the popular will. “Our goal is to defend the integrity of the election,” he said while seeking to overturn votes after Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. “We can’t allow anybody to silence our voters and manufacture results.”
Caesarism has advocates
For historians like Schwentzel, Caesarism’s standard-bearers are obvious threats to liberty. But in recent years, activists on the US right have ventured close to endorsing a Caesarist leader, and some hope Trump will step into that role.
“I like, if not love, the idea of Red Caesar,” commentator Charles Haywood has written, referring to the color associated with the political right in this country. “Caesarism, and its time-legitimated successor, monarchy, is a natural, realism-based system, under which a civilization can flourish.” Former Trump adviser Michael Anton, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, describes Caesarism as an intriguing alternative to a US political system he views as having failed. That this shift would mean upending the Constitution seems lost on the Caesar-curious.
No matter how this year’s elections turn out, pathways of resistance to Caesarism will remain. “The single most important thing is for people who work in the federal government in various capacities to continue following the law and the norms that govern the offices they hold,” Linker says. “If that happens, there’s little a wayward would-be Caesarist president can do.” (Trump aimed to foil such objectors with a 2020 executive order, since overturned, that would have let him fire thousands of civil servants at will.)
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History also shows that the single-mindedness fueling Caesarists’ rise inclines them to overreach. After Napoleon — the so-called “colossus of the 19th century” — went down to defeat at Waterloo, he ended up exiled to the island of St. Helena, a pale shadow of his former self.
“American Caesarism is inevitable,” writes the sociologist Peter Baehr, citing historian Amaury de Riencourt, “but our responses to it are not predetermined.” As Caesar himself might have put it, the die is not yet cast.
Elizabeth Svoboda is a writer in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author of “What Makes a Hero?: The Surprising Science of Selflessness.”