Fifth Columns, Fascism & the Republican Party
Today’s Republican Party, careening toward fascism and serving the goals of Vladimir Putin, is the Fifth Column of our time. What are we going to do about it?
To my surprise, my last piece, “Time to Call the GOP What It Is: An American Fifth Column,” received a lot of attention. The thrust is:
Taken together, today’s Republicans are acting as a Fifth Column for the Kremlin, a movement whose clear aim is to destroy democracy. The only question left to be answered is: are they witting agents or incredibly disingenuous Useful Idiots?
Those who follow me know that I’m not some wild-eyed lefty conspiracy theorist. My long career as a diplomat, and previously in military intelligence, entailed wading through gigabytes of all-source information, dispassionately screening the facts and providing Washington policy-makers my best assessment on people, events and nations. So, I don’t conclude that one of our two political parties is a Fifth Column lightly. Rather I find it deeply disturbing and feel the need to join others in warning fellow citizens and outsiders as to what we are facing.
So, given the interest, I’m doing a deeper dive into the matter.
I started with Ernest Hemingway (whose haunts I visited in Cuba during one of my diplomatic assignments — the daiquiris at El Floridita are still great, though over-priced; Cubans, by the way, hold “Papa” in high esteem to this day). In 1938, Hemingway published The Fifth Column, an anthology of stories drawing on his adventures during the Spanish Civil War. It received mixed reviews but does shed light on how Franco’s forces managed to seize Madrid using a “fifth column” of Falangist supporters. But what particularly captures my attention is a speech Hemingway made the previous year before the Writers’ Congress. As a writer myself, I particularly identify with it:
There is only one form of government that cannot produce good writers, and that system is fascism. For fascism is a lie told by bullies.
Fifth Columns are always anti-democratic movements. So, where does the GOP stand?
Fascism Takes Root
Hemingway is spot on. What we’ve been witnessing for the better part of a decade from the political right bears him out: a non-stop torrent of lies told by bullies. The lying bully in chief is Donald Trump, followed by his monkey-see, monkey-do imitators: Stefanik, Vance, Lake, Gaetz, Hawley, the Fox puppetry, etc. The Washington Post documents that Trump told 30,573 lies publicly over the four years of his presidency. His Big Lie about the 2020 election being stolen, of course, is his greatest whopper. For its role in propagating the Big Lie, Fox is on the hook for a $787.5 million defamation settlement, with another case awaiting trial. Actions have consequences. Who knew?
Along with the lies, the Republican Party has increasingly taken on the trappings of a neo-fascist movement rather than a democracy-anchored loyal opposition. We may not be a fascist country yet. But the GOP, under the spell of a megalomaniacal sociopath, has been creeping in that direction: a disciplined, belligerent, racist, anti-democratic movement potentially supported by paramilitary militias in the wings, hell-bent on destroying the American Experiment for the sake of power and racial supremacy. We saw a prelude on January 6, 2021. Many, in fact, call that putsch attempt merely Act I. As Madeleine Albright said, “Fascism is not an ideology; it’s a process for taking and holding power.”
And Trump’s Project 2025 has the hallmarks of a fast-developing conspiracy to complete the mission, a vivid, detailed road map to full-blown fascism, starting with activating the Insurrection Act, purging and politicizing the civil service, neutering the judicial system, and persecuting foes. Add concentration camps for tens of thousands of migrants prior to their mass expulsion. It’s there in plain sight. Should Trump return to the White House, no one should express surprise at democracy’s demise.
The GOP as Fifth Column
A Fifth Column is defined as “a group or faction of subversive agents who attempt to undermine a nation's solidarity by any means at their disposal.”
One historical example is Austria in the 1930s. Once Adolf Hitler attained power, a key objective was to sabotage Austria’s sovereignty and incorporate it into the Third Reich. He used the Austrian Nazi Party to achieve his goal, clandestinely providing it with financial support, training and propaganda. Berlin’s first attempt was in 1934 when it helped stoke a civil war in its neighbor and dispatched troops to the border for a full-scale military assault into Austria to support the National Socialists. The Austrians, however, managed to put down the uprising and banned the Nazi Party, many of whose members fled to Bavaria. There the German government set up clandestine military training camps for the exiled Austrian Nazis.
Hitler finally succeeded in 1938 when, after destabilizing the Austrian government, he invaded and absorbed Austria in his Anschluss and installed a puppet, Arthur Seyß-Inquart, as governor. Most contemporary scholars estimated that about two-thirds of Austrians wanted their country to remain independent.
An example of Fifth Column subversion today is Putin’s accelerating efforts to destabilize pro-Western Moldova by directing Russia’s clients in breakaway Transnistria and the minority province of Gagauzia to request “protection” from Moscow, a tried-and true trick that the Russian leader has previously used in Georgia and Ukraine.
Though historians have given it scant attention, the U.S. had its own run-in with Fifth Column machinations. In the years leading up to World War II, a number of pro-fascist groups actively served Hitler’s interests, including not only the America First movement, the German American Bund and the Silver Legion, but also members of academia, conservative media, big business and Congress.
Some conspired with the German government to overthrow the U.S. government and install a fascist regime. They included 24 members of the House and Senate who coordinated their efforts with a German agent. Foremost among these were senators Ernest Lundeen (R-MN), Gerald P. Nye (R-ND) and Burton Wheeler (R-MT) and representative Hamilton Fish (R-NY).
In 1942, the Justice Department charged 23 plotters with sedition. The congressional collaborators, however, pressured the DOJ to close the case, as did President Harry Truman, who didn’t want a messy sedition scandal involving members of Congress on top of ending World War II, gearing up for the Cold War and putting the country back on a peacetime track. Virtually all the seditious politicians, however, met accountability by losing re-election.
In a 1940 Fireside Chat, FDR alerted the American people to this “Trojan Horse. The Fifth Column that betrays a nation unprepared for treachery.”
The method is simple. It is, first, a dissemination of discord. A group…that may be sectional or racial or political is encouraged to exploit its prejudices through false slogans and emotional appeals. The aim of those who deliberately egg on these groups is to create confusion of counsel, public indecision, political paralysis and, eventually, a state of panic. Sound national policies come to be viewed with a new and unreasoning skepticism, not through the wholesome political debates of honest and free men, but through the clever schemes of foreign agents.
Sound familiar?
One-hundred-forty-seven members of Congress refused to vote to certify that Joe Biden won election as president. Nearly 70 percent of Republicans today believe Biden’s win was not legitimate despite 69 court rulings that it was. This is because of Trump’s Big Lie.
Fascism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat states, “I have long said that his [Trump’s] party has always acted as though he is still in office, with fearsome powers.”
The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum writes:
Donald Trump, who is not the president, is using a minority of Republicans to hand a victory to Russia, and to weaken American power and credibility. Why?
Trump rarely talks about Ukraine, because Ukraine is still popular and Russia is not. But he threatens and manipulates legislators, including Speakers McCarthy and Johnson, to persuade them to block the money and weapons that could keep Ukraine fighting this year
I posit that Trump, a Russian kompromat asset for many years, is doing Putin’s bidding. Yes, the former U.S. president leads an American Fifth Column serving a hostile power.
Several years ago, Ken Gude, writing for the Center for American Progress, made the same point in explaining the support given to Putin by Western far-right political parties:
There is far too much consistency in these positions across these parties for it to simply be the result of ideological convergence or admiration for Putin’s leadership style. When assessed in the context of the Kremlin’s interpretation of the color revolutions and the Arab Spring, it appears there is a strategy unfolding of Russian overt and covert support for far-right parties that then become a fifth column helping advance key Russian objectives from inside Russia’s European adversaries.
[I]t is difficult to understand why nationalist political parties — that are premised on putting their own countries’ interests first — would adopt policies that advance a rival country’s interests ahead of their own. It is also possible that this is not merely a coincidence explained away by ideological convergence. If it’s the latter, Western democracies need to wake up to the challenge posed by Russia’s fifth column in our midst before it is too late.
Today’s Republican Party, careening toward fascism and serving the goals of Vladimir Putin, is the Fifth Column of our time. What then are we going to do about it?
Ask Hemingway: “Was there ever a people whose leaders were as truly their enemies as this one?”
The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.