It's Happening Here: Rosan Smits on Fascism in America & Europe

“Today’s fascists don’t look at all like those from the past. What is similar is how they act. You’ll recognize the fascist by what they do.” — Rosan Smits

Fascism is a reality in both America and Europe. At least according to Rosan Smits, the Dutch political scientist whose This Is Fascism: A Wake-Up Call to Resist is already a bestseller in Europe. Sinclair Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here in 1935 as a warning about the possibility of fascism in Great Depression America. Not only does Smits argue that it can happen, but she suggests that it is happening right now.

Rather than unearthing swastikas and jackboots, she suggests that we identify what she calls the fascist methods which connect the Thirties with today. From Geert Wilders in the Netherlands to MAGA in America, that’s where history is repeating itself. What she sees is grievance manipulated into atavistic populist cults by insecure elites. If the original fascist movements were coping strategies for modernity, today’s fascism is a coping mechanism for postmodernity. Thus both its Christian nostalgia for the idea of truth and its attack on the scientific method. Thus today’s simultaneous embrace of digital tech and its attack on the promise of technological progress. So fascism is a kind of riddle. Which is why it appears both ubiquitous and invisible. It’s happening here, then, is a paradoxical reality. Which may be why some (like myself) are so skeptical.

Five Takeaways

• Not the 1930s. Smits opens by refusing the analogy that everyone reaches for: it isn’t the 1930s, it’s 2026, and every era gets its own varieties. What she offers instead of a definition is a description — a cult of grievances turned into mass politics, manipulated by elites who feel threatened because the systems underpinning their privileges have stopped delivering for the masses. Not a disease, she insists when Andrew offers the word, but a coping strategy: rather than address root causes, point at scapegoats. It isn’t AI taking your job, it’s the migrants; it isn’t private capital wrecking the housing market, it’s the migrants. The core ideas stay constant — xenophobia, racism, violence, authoritarianism, hierarchy — but the aesthetics shape-shift, which is why the recognition test is behavioural. Hence the book’s focus on the playbook: how power is won within a democracy and then used to hollow it out. And no, she says flatly when Andrew raises Maduro: there is no fascism of the left. Andrew’s framing: if the original fascist movements were coping strategies for modernity, today’s is a coping mechanism for postmodernity — hence the Christian nostalgia for the idea of truth alongside the attack on the scientific method. Other authoritarianisms exist and the playbooks overlap, but fascism is a right-wing form.

• The Dutch Warning. The most alarming stretch of the hour, and the part Andrew couldn’t argue with, because Smits is reporting from home. The international story after the Dutch election was Wilders’ setback — he came second by a margin. The domestic story is that the far-right bloc as a whole grew to its largest ever presence in parliament, polling around 40%, and is radicalizing: Wilders is now the moderate one. The party to his right, with open Nazi sympathies and around eighteen seats in a hundred-and-fifty-seat chamber, holds rallies with neo-fascist groups, argues the great replacement in parliament, says the Netherlands should be for white people only, and wants mass deportation of second- and third-generation citizens. It is polling as one of the largest parties. Its base is not the elderly: it is strongest among students and among schoolchildren too young to vote, and far stronger among young men than young women — which is Smits’s answer to Andrew’s point that Trump’s movement, unlike the fascism of the 1920s, is old.

• A Coalition, Not a Party. Fascism always involves a coalition, Smits argues, and in the American case she counts three partners: the Christian nationalists of the New Apostolic Reformation, a transnational network of self-styled apostles backing authoritarian leaders from Washington to Budapest to Jerusalem, whose hard-core believe they are accelerating the end times; the tech world, rallying behind the idea that democracy no longer serves its purposes and looking to replace it with startup cities and startup countries; and the white supremacists, Stephen Miller her clearest example. Trump himself isn’t part of the religious movement, she says — he pays it lip service. And the interesting question is what happens when the coalition’s interests stop aligning, which they will. Meloni is her counter-example to the idea that power moderates: a gifted politician who manages her coalition well and picks her fights, but who was first to use a border crisis in Ceuta to call for suspending Schengen, and who has pushed the great replacement and the Soros financing claim.

• Andrew’s Challenge. The hour’s real argument, conducted with mutual good humour. Andrew’s case, in four parts. One: Smits has never been to the United States to research a book substantially about it — she immersed herself in the media ecosystem and the work of American reporters instead, and defends that as the way to see a transnational pattern. Two: if Trump’s people live in an echo chamber, might those who fear fascism live in one too? Her answer: she quotes these leaders in their own words, and the “I don’t see it around me” response is precisely how fascism thrives — first it can’t happen here, then it doesn’t affect me, then it’s too late. Three: Orwell warned in 1946 that the word had decayed into a term of abuse; Smits concedes the risk and notes that calling everyone fascist right back is itself part of the playbook. Four: tech fascism needs names, and beyond Thiel and Musk she offers few — prompting her sharpest return, “How would you then qualify Elon Musk?” When Andrew asked what would count as proof, she was blunt: “What kind of proof are you looking for? I think I prove it in my book.”

• What Resistance Looks Like. She divides it into professionals and everyone else. Politicians are democracy’s first line of defence, and that line, she says, has broken. Journalists need a different approach to politicians who mean to destroy the public debate: less fact-checking of individual lies, more investigation of what the lies are for. For everyone else, the rule she borrows from Timothy Snyder: don’t obey in advance. Her examples are close to home — Dutch travellers scrubbing their social media before a US trip, European companies quietly ditching DEI policies to keep American business (she accepts Andrew’s point that one can be skeptical of DEI without being a fascist; her objection is to abandoning a policy you believe in for a contract). On leaving: she won’t judge Snyder or Stanley, but the question is where you can be of most use. On the emerging Canada-EU alignment: yes, but not an anti-fascist bloc — a new geopolitical power bloc that might defend the rules-based order. And the strongest barrier of all remains the ordinary one: refuse to participate in the hatred, and form a wall around your neighbours, as they did in Minneapolis. Andrew’s verdict: fascism is a kind of riddle, which is why it appears both ubiquitous and invisible — it’s happening here is a paradoxical reality.