Michael B. Loughlin

I was born in Ypsilanti, Michigan and grew up in Mishawaka, Indiana but spent a few years as a child in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. I also taught European History and political theory for 35 years in Ada, Ohio, so you could say I am pure MIdwest. However, two years doing research in Paris, a year teaching at Texas A & I, and two years in research at UC Berkeley also left their marks. I went to high school across the street from the University of Notre Dame, but I have three degrees from Indiana University. I was one of those slow learners who did not know you were supposed to change schools when you became a graduate student. My coming of age was the 60s: the era of The Viet Nam War, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Hippy and protest movements but I was not quite typical of those trends either. I attended the March on Washington in October 1967 and was in Grant Park in the summer of 1968 but I was never arrested, never dropped acid, never called the police pigs, and never threw a stink bomb.

A six month tour of Europe in late 68 and early 69, led me to think about a life as an artist, but one studio class in late 1969 convinced me that a bit more talent was probably necessary to keep from becoming a starving artist. My first wife Cheryl and two children Patrick and Kelly experienced how close we came to a Midwestern version of Bohemia. So I switched gears to teaching and graduate school which did not immediately preclude near poverty.

My academic interests have involved intellectual and cultural history along with a focus on extremist politics. I started to concentrate on the intellectual origins of fascism around 1970, and that interest soon led me to investigate the many leaders from the left and extreme left who migrated toward fascism in the wake of World War I, once they discovered that nationalism was a much more effective recruitment mechanism than class interests and economic motivation. In that context I spent decades investigating the political and journalistic career of an Insurrectional Socialist named Gustave Herve who, after supposedly planting the French tricolor in a dungpile, underwent an infamous transformation in the years prior to World War I from antipatriotism and revolutionary activism to nationalism and then national socialism, which was sympathetic to fascism during the interwar era. I published articles on Herve from 1995-2017 during which time I completed a massive biography of Herve in 2016 titled From Revolutionary Theater to Reactionary Litanies.

At the completion of that work on fascism, I was ready for a change. But I did not stray too far afield because the arrival of Trump on the scene as a purported populist stimulated my interest and sparked my growing fears of what that would mean for our country. Why? Trump was not only described as a populist by most observers, some even called him a fascist or a potential one. With my decades of research on fascism, including work on Mussolini and Hitler as well as Herve and many other notorious purported fascists, it seemed that I had the experience and background to comment on the Trump phenomenon. While I was certain that Trump in 2016 did not fit any definition of fascism that I could cite, I was far from certain about the best way to describe and explain his political movement. I soon realized that there was a lot I needed to learn if I were to comment wisely on populism and the many other political terms, metaphors, and commonplace explanations that were being employed to describe, explain, and analyze Trump and his movement.

After 2016 I taught classes on Trumpism, wrote related editorials, and composed presentations on the Trump phenomenon for scholarly conferences. Needless to say, in the era of Covid and online teaching, once my lectures reached into the Ohio heartland, I was warned about my comments by university administrators. My retirement in 2023 gave me the time and energy to finish my research and writing in time for the current election. This book employs academic as well as popular sources to arrive at a collection of arguments, each of which seems to tell part of the story. Each of the political terms, metaphorical insights, and commonplace explanations portrays crucial aspects of the reality about Trumpism and its increasingly dangerous impact on our politics. What I discovered was that Trump is not the cause of our polarized and dysfunctional politics. He is the product as well as an important catalyst. However, when this book was published in early August 2024, no one could be certain where Trump's trajectory would lead.