The Five Stages of Fascism

Mark A. Ashwill Books, Commentary, video, , , ,

Robert O. Paxton’s book, The Anatomy of Fascism, originally published in 2004, is on my list of books to read. Unfortunately, this is not history but a credible description of what’s happening in the US.

I recently watched a 3-minute 25-second video analysis entitled The Empire Strikes Back by Charles McBryde in which he argues that the US is entering the fifth and final stage of fascism. Below is a transcript in which McBryde discusses each stage in the US context. He also offers some sage advice about what US Americans should do to ensure that the final stage ends in entropy, defined as a “lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.”

  1. Intellectual Exploration/Mobilization: Fascist movements emerge from disillusioned groups (often veterans) exploring radical nationalist ideas, focusing on national rebirth and rejecting liberal democracy and socialism, but without a fixed program.
  2. Rooting: The movement gains traction through political deadlock, polarization, and violence, becoming a significant player in national politics, attracting followers, and making tactical alliances, as seen with conservative forces.
  3. Arrival in Power: Traditional elites, fearing leftist threats, invite fascists to join or lead the government, hoping to control them, leading to fascists sharing power (e.g., Mussolini, Hitler).
  4. Exercise of Power: The fascist movement consolidates control, balancing or dominating existing state institutions (police, army, clergy) while suppressing opposition and radicalizing society.
  5. Radicalization or Entropy: The regime either becomes increasingly extreme and revolutionary (like Nazi Germany’s total war) or devolves into a more conventional, often decaying, authoritarian state (like Italy’s later period). 

Paxton emphasizes that only Germany and Italy truly progressed through all five, and this framework helps understand fascism’s dynamic, situational nature rather than a static doctrine. (Source: AI Overview)

Video Transcript (my italics)

ChatGPT created this image based on the transcript below with the title “America at the crossroads of chaos.” It features Dear Leader with his signature long red tie and his wittle hands. Perfect.

American fascism is in an extremely delicate moment right now as we are entering the fifth and final stage of fascism. Let me explain. In his book, The Anatomy of Fascism, the premier historian of fascism, Robert Paxton, identifies five distinct stages of fascism.

The first stage is intellectual exploration, when fascist leaders start to break with the conservative establishment. For us, this would be like the Tea Party era. The next stage is movement building.

This is when the movement finds its voice, finds the grievances that it’s going to want to focus on, and most importantly, it finds the leaders. For years, the Tea Party was a movement without a leader. And finally, that leader arrived on the scene in the form of Donald Trump.

I met Donald Trump twice in 2015 and I couldn’t help but think that this man is going to be the next president of the United States.

The third stage of fascism is arrival to power. This one’s confusing for us because Trump arrives to power twice. The first time, it’s unexpected, it’s incomplete, and he kind of fumbles it. At every turn, his agenda is blocked not only by his own incompetence and the incompetence of the people he surrounds himself with, but also the longtime bureaucrats who are uninterested in seeing the fascist hollowing out of the US government.

It is only in his second arrival power that we really see the fourth stage of fascism, which is the consolidation of fascist power. This is when you start to see the union of state and corporate power really starting to merge. The fascist movement now has a program, it has a vision, and most importantly, it has the levers of state and it can turn them against its enemies. This is what we’ve seen over the past year as tech billionaires, longtime conservatives, and even many liberal establishment figures have bent the knee to Donald Trump and his agenda.

But now with the midterms approaching, his favorability level’s low, the recent actions in Venezuela, and now the controversy surrounding ICE, we have entered the fifth and final stage of fascism. And this is the most precarious stage. Robert Paxton divides this stage into two separate paths, radicalization and entropy.

Depending on which of these the Trump administration pursues, you could either have a very dark future or we could watch the entire edifice of this movement collapse. The premise is this, fascist movements have to radicalize in order to survive. That’s how they built their power in the first place, finding shared grievances, finding shared enemies.

Then when things go badly for fascist movements, they have to shift the blame elsewhere. They have to find new enemies, they have to fire, they have to purge. All of this has been happening over the past year and a half and Trump is now testing the limits of what the American people are going to put up with.

If we stop putting up with it, then his entire project collapses into entropy. The whole thing starts to unravel from the top. People turn on Trump, Trump starts distrusting his people, and pretty soon they realize that the only way to get out of this is to de-escalate tension with the American people.

Paradoxically, the only way that we, the American people, can meet this moment is by escalating. We need to make it socially, politically, economically impossible for the Trump administration to have any peace, for ICE to have any peace. Our decision to escalate with this administration forces it to de-escalate with us because the more it escalates, the more radicalized it will become, the harsher will its crackdowns be, and the more unpopular it will become.

This is bad news for Trump because he’s already a deeply unpopular president with an unpopular program. He hasn’t consolidated power enough to be entering this stage. His fascist takeover is still incomplete.

It has a long way to go. He’s showing his hand too early and it’s time for us to call his bluff.

(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.)

Dear Leader is “showing his hand too early” because he’s experiencing cognitive decline coupled with the fact that he’s a textbook malignant narcissist. He’s no Hitler or even Mussolini. Having said that, he has some hardcore and determined fascist wingmen and -women supporting him, including Stephen “Goebbels aka Pee-wee German” Miller.

In a nutshell, 2026 is shaping up to become a watershed year in US and world history. Stay tuned.

Peace, MAA

5 thoughts on “The Five Stages of Fascism”

  4. Never in the history of humankind have so many people made the exact same New Year’s wish: that the liars lose power, the bullies crawl back under their rocks, the con men stop running the country, and decency finally gets a seat at the table again. We are exhausted by cruelty. We are done negotiating with corruption. We are no longer impressed by noise, money, or manufactured outrage masquerading as leadership. What the world is asking for now is not perfection, not even prosperity, just competence, conscience, and a government that remembers the difference between power and responsibility. The collective mood of this moment is not partisan. It is human. It is the quiet, stubborn refusal to keep normalizing the morally grotesque, and the growing understanding that if we don’t demand better now, there may not be a later in which to do it.

    And nowhere is that hunger for sanity more urgent than here, in this country, at the beginning of 2026, a year that was supposed to represent renewal but instead finds us standing in the wreckage of yet another self-inflicted wound. We were promised strength and delivered chaos. We were promised peace and got spectacle. We were promised prosperity and received a government that treats cruelty like policy and division like sport. What we are living through is not leadership. It is performance. It is grievance theater, run by people who mistake volume for vision and vengeance for virtue, while the real work of governing rots unattended in the corner. History will not describe this era as a misunderstanding or a fluke. It will call it what it is: a moral stress test, and one we are dangerously close to failing.

    The consequences of this failure are not theoretical. They are showing up in classrooms, courtrooms, hospitals, polling places, and on the dinner tables of families who are working harder for less while being told, with a straight face, that everything is “the best it’s ever been.” Trust in institutions has collapsed not because people suddenly became cynical, but because cynicism became the only rational response to leaders who lie without shame and govern without empathy. The social contract, that fragile agreement that says we are in this together, has been shredded by a ruling class that profits from permanent conflict while the public pays the bill in anxiety, isolation, and rage. This is not the politics of disagreement. This is the politics of erosion.

    Donald Trump did not create this collapse of character, but he weaponized it, monetized it, and turned it into a governing philosophy. He rose by telling people that their worst instincts were their best ones, that cruelty was honesty, that selfishness was strength, and that accountability was something only for other people. He did not unite a country, he trained it to sneer. And the movement that formed around him did not happen by accident. It is built on grievance, sustained by misinformation, and enforced through fear. This is what happens when a nation mistakes a con man for a savior: the lies become the language, the chaos becomes the culture, and democracy becomes collateral damage.

    And yet, here is the stubborn, inconvenient truth they cannot erase: we are still here. Still thinking. Still voting. Still creating. Still caring. History does not belong to the loudest men in the room. It belongs to the people who refuse to surrender their conscience. This is the moment when we stop waiting for permission to demand better.

    The future is not something that happens to us. It is something we choose, together.

    — Michael Jochum, Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition

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  5. An appeal from Robert Reich

    Friends,

    This is a national emergency. Trump is off the rails. His ICE and Border Patrol goons are loose on America. The havoc in Minneapolis will worsen and will occur elsewhere. Yesterday, someone else was shot there.

    His military is loose on the world. Now Venezuela and the Caribbean, at any moment Iran or Cuba or Greenland. (European nations are at this moment sending troops to Greenland, presumably to defend it from Trump’s America.)

    You may feel helpless — a powerless observer of this hurricane of violence and stupidity.

    You may be experiencing the kind of despair that immobilizes the brain and numbs the senses.

    You may want to scream but can’t find your voice because you’re so shocked and frightened.

    Please do not succumb to helplessness, despair, or fear.

    You are needed. Desperately.

    What more can you do beyond protesting, calling your members of Congress, and (if you can afford to) writing checks to candidates who can flip seats?

    Stay politically engaged, but don’t wait for the Democratic Party to get a spine or hope that the Republican Party discovers integrity. We are moving beyond party politics.

    Here’s what you can also do: Mobilize your employers, your organizations, and your congregations — anywhere you work, any group of which you’re a member — and get them to use their influence to end this barbarity.

    Organize your fellow employees, retirees, alumni, and congregants. Get them to help you pressure trustees, directors, and heads of every major university, professional association, charity, and foundation. Every corporate CEO or managing director. Every religious leader.

    Push everyone with any formal authority in this nation to speak with clarity and conviction against what is happening, and to commit themselves and their organizations to ending this scourge.

    Help them understand that silence in the face of this catastrophe is complicity. That there is no longer any excuse for them to be “prudently cautious,” no longer any justification for them to wait until “others take the lead.”

    The emergency is now.

    Help them see that as America slides further into this authoritarian nightmare, their own organizations are on the line. No group is secure. No corporation is immune. There is no place to hide.

    You can be a leader by getting the formal leaders of America to exercise their formal leadership and power.

    The heads of American corporations and financial institutions need to issue strong rebukes of this regime. Corporations and banks that pride themselves on their responsibilities to the American public have a special role: Patagonia, TOMS, Ben & Jerry’s, Salesforce, Adidas, Microsoft, Google, JPMorgan Chase.

    We also need to hear from leaders of America’s great foundations, which, after all, are organized to pursue the public interest: Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Bill and Melinda Gates, J.Paul Getty, Robert Wood Johnson, Kellogg.

    We need America’s religious leaders to condemn this brutality: bishops of the Catholic Church, the United Methodist Church, and the General Convention of the Episcopal Church; pastors of the Southern Baptist Convention and National Baptist Convention; president and counselors of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; rabbis in the Central Conference of American Rabbis, Union of Reform Judaism, and the Orthodox Union; imams in the Islamic Society of North America.

    We need America’s great nonprofits to loudly repudiate what’s occurring: League of Women Voters, Salvation Army, Common Cause, National Urban League, Public Citizen, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Hispanic Federation.

    Also the American Bar Association, American Medical Association, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, American Association of University Professors, National Library Association — all must loudly condemn Trump’s lawless reign of terror.

    We need every labor union in America and its leadership to denounce what is happening and organize against it.

    All must use their voices and their influence in this fight, because no other fight is as crucial at this point in the history of America and the world.

    Make them see this. Deliver this message to them: If these organizations and these leaders stand up against what is occurring and use their considerable influence to stop it, history will praise their leadership and courage.

    If they fail to do so, history will condemn their cowardice and complicity.

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