Fascism Has an American History, Too

Abstract

Fascism Has an American History, Too Olivier Burtin (bio) The specter of fascism is once again haunting the United States. After the victory in the 2016 presidential election of a candidate who showed clear affinities with authoritarian leaders abroad and white supremacists at home, many Americans realized that their country was not as immune to such forces as they had thought. On the night of the election, “fascism” was the most searched word on the Merriam-Webster online dictionary.1 While the term had always been popular as a throwaway epithet to condemn one’s political opponents, the publication of a few monographs on the topic in the aftermath of the election marked its return as an important scholarly category in its own right. In Fascism: A Warning (2018), former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright cautioned her readers that the new president had anti-democratic “instincts” and was leading a “herd” of other like-minded authoritarian rulers “in a Fascist direction.”2 The same year, philosopher Jason Stanley dissected the various elements of fascist politics, from the use of a mythical past to the vocabulary of victimhood, in a call for Americans to reject this type of right-wing nationalism.3 It was not a coincidence that both authors were children of Central European émigrés who had fled to the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. Almost three-quarters of a century later, they feared that history might repeat itself. Not everyone agreed that fascism was the right term to express these anxieties, however. On the right, most voices dismissed such language as yet another attempt by the left to prevent a healthy exchange of ideas by marking its opponents as beyond the pale. Perhaps more surprisingly, fascism also received mixed reviews in liberal and progressive circles. Historian Samuel Moyn argued, for instance, that the concept hid more than it revealed: not only did it obscure the profoundly American roots of the 45th Presidency, but it also “[spared] ourselves the trouble of analyzing what is really new about it” by focusing only on what it had in common with a distant past.4 Historian David Bell joined him in discarding the label, pointing to differences between the present situation and the 1930s as well as to the fact that fascism was for most Americans “an alien, foreign ideology” whereas Donald Trump was a [End Page 494] very American phenomenon.5 Other scholars have also raised the concern that using this term could serve to delegitimize participatory politics as a whole and to give new surveillance powers to the “security state.”6 In rejecting the term “fascism,” these critics seemed to share the common assumption that this phenomenon had never taken roots in America. Here I demonstrate the opposite. This essay reaches beyond contemporary politics in order to assess whether this form of political behavior is really as alien to U.S. history as we often assume it to be. Bringing together recent works in a variety of subfields, I argue that the relative absence of fascism from historiographical debates after the mid-twentieth century tells us less about the historical record than it does about the blinders that hinder historians’ vision. Though fascism as a term was invented in interwar Europe, the kind of politics that it describes could be found as early as the mid-nineteenth century in the United States. After paving the way for the collapse of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, fascist groups continued to play an active role in American politics throughout much of the twentieth century. Scholars have failed to take this phenomenon seriously for a number of reasons. The first has to do with the long debate about the U.S. populist tradition, which was defined to a large extent in opposition to fascism from the 1960s onwards. The second is related to the strength of American exceptionalism, which has made many historians of the United States reluctant not only to compare their country’s past with that of others, but more importantly to import analytical tools initially developed abroad (especially when those were associated with darker episodes of the past). Finally, the U.S. victory in the Second...