April
5, 2023
It
borders on cliché the number of times historians lament how “fascism” is an
over-used term. But Sinclair Lewis, writing about the specter of fascism a
century ago, understood something most historians don’t – that U.S.
intellectual culture is loathe to acknowledge fascist undercurrents in this
country. I attribute this hostility to intellectuals’ belief that their nation
is an exceptionalist democracy – hence fascism “can’t happen here.”
Historian
Bruce Kuklick’s Fascism Comes to America is a great example of an academic
bemoaning the abuse of “fascism” in U.S. discourse, despite the book refusing
to engage with evidence that suggests the opposite. One should read this
review, not so much as an indictment of his book, but as an indictment of a
larger intellectual culture that’s elevating this book to the status of a
serious work of scholarship, while ignoring critical scholarship that’s already
been published on fascism in America.
Kuklick
writes that he’s interested in “the spectacle of fascism in the United States.”
Which is to say he thinks it should be understood as a concept that political
thinkers and practitioners use time and time again to further their own
personal political agendas. He talks of fascism as something that exists in
“the imagination” of Americans – leaving his readers with the distinct
impression that there’s little substantive meaning to the term outside of it
being wielded as a weapon against one’s opponents. Kuklick says as much
multiple times in his book, writing that fascism is one of those “political
swear words” that people use to malign others. Throughout our history, he
argues, “people who did not like someone else’s politics could always find in
that politics enough to label the other fellow a fascist.”
For
Kuklick, fascism discourse is “a growth industry.” He cites examples throughout
modern history in film and other popular culture mediums, including Stanley
Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, and Philip
Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. Kuklick believes that discourses on fascism
are an American “obsession” – which would suggest a lack of rationality in our
political culture. He elaborates by saying about U.S. discourse that “political
talk” in America “is puzzling, artful distortion. Much of politics is
linguistic theater, the showy and indiscriminate ejaculation of words. The
evaluations of officials, entertainers, and pundits have a crooked relation to
reality, and the scholarly analysis of politics is conducted with these
evaluations.” This is not the sort of language used by someone who thinks the
U.S. is suffering from a threat of rising fascism today.
There
are at least three major problems with this book. First, the available evidence
pertaining to contemporary political discourse suggests the author is far off
base when he claims that fascism is an abused term and that it’s a massive
growth industry. Second, there’s little to no effort in this book to seriously
engage with recent scholars who argue, contrary to Kuklick, that fascist
politics are ascending in the era of Trump. By refusing to adequately address
these competing works (or address them at all), Kuklick fails to demonstrate
why warnings about fascism should classified as imagined, embellished,
paranoid, or wrong. Third, the author’s dismissal of a fascist threat speaks to
his, and other privileged academics’ disconnect from the struggles that
repressed people face, as related to white nationalism, rightwing demagoguery,
and patriarchal-authoritarian politics.
Marginal
Scholarship
First,
there’s the issue of the author’s weak research methods and evidence. Saying
that people throughout history have warned about fascism in America or elements
of fascism says nothing about how frequent those warnings are, or how seriously
they’re taken by officialdom and in political discourse. The book draws on
various examples from popular culture and politics, referencing various people
talking about fascism. There’s nothing systematic here – from a social
scientific perspective – to suggest that fascism-discourse has become a
national “obsession,” as the author claims. Certainly, one can find evidence of
people warning about fascism when surveying American politics over a long
period of time. As Kuklick writes, critics of the FDR administration called it
fascist. Fascism and totalitarianism as concepts were used throughout the Cold
War to refer to the Soviet Union, Cuba, and the much hated specter of
communism. More recently, scholars such as Jason Stanley, who the author
briefly mentions, warns of a rising fascist politics today. Joe Biden also
talked about Trump as embracing “semi-fascism.”
But
simply noting various anecdotes over the last century doesn’t educate us about
the frequency of the warnings, which we need to examine to get a better sense
of whether fascism has truly become a national obsession. To do this, we need a
more focused, deeper, systematic analysis that transcends a broad survey of the
last 100 years of mass political commentary. It may be that such warnings
appear from time to time but are the exception to the rule of a largescale
refusal to consider that the U.S. is characterized by fascist politics. If
that’s the case, cherry-picked anecdotes are not evidence of a nation’s
fixation on fascism, so much as they’re an indication of a superficial academic
analysis.
Because
Kuklick doesn’t look at any of the available empirical evidence in contemporary
discourse, we’re left to take on faith that his description of U.S. politics is
accurate. But looking at the previous work that’s been done, we see that, quite
the opposite of fetishizing fascism discourse, U.S. political leaders,
journalists, and academics overwhelmingly downplay references to fascism –
particularly as related to the question of whether Donald Trump and the
Republican Party embrace it. I feel confident talking about this research as
someone who’s been at the forefront of this work for the last decade.
Here’s
what we know. First, U.S. officials are incredibly reluctant to suggest that
Trumpism is a fascist phenomenon. My examination of the Congressional Record
database, which looks at all House and Senate floor debates and statements from
members of both parties during Trump’s term, finds that there was not a single
reference to Trump and “fascism” or “fascist” politics during his time in
office (early 2017 to early 2021). Second, my review of presidential
discussions of fascism under the Obama and Biden presidencies reveals officials
who are quite reluctant to acknowledge a fascist threat. Barack Obama, Hillary
Clinton, and Clinton’s Vice-Presidential candidate Tim Kaine privately
acknowledged that they believed Trump was a fascist – a point that they never
shared with the public. Biden has referred to “semi-fascism” in America in the
run-up to the 2022 midterm elections, but he’s the only one of these four who’s
been willing to publicly associate Trump and Republican politics with fascism.
How
common is presidential rhetoric on fascism under the Biden administration?
Reviewing the University of California Santa Barbara’s American Presidency
Project database, I looked at presidential declarations, interviews, news
conferences, Biden’s 2021 inaugural address, press and other media engagements,
Biden’s State of the Union addresses, various public remarks by administration
officials, and various speeches from the president. I find that the words
“fascism” or “fascist” appeared just 8 times in presidential communications
from January 2021 through March 2023. Of those 8, two were made in relation to
the allied powers fighting fascism in World War II, and six were related to
discussions between reporters and members of the administration about Biden’s
single reference to Trump as embracing “semi-fascism.” Eight references in more
than 26 months is hardly evidence that the Biden administration is obsessively
fixated on the rhetoric of fascism. And in the case of Kaine, Obama, and
Clinton, they’ve gone out of their way to avoid using the term in public as related
to Trump and the GOP, while Biden clearly hasn’t engaged in such language
routinely.
What
about other metrics for U.S. political discourse? In Rising Fascism in America,
I draw on the Nexis Uni academic database, documenting how U.S. journalists at
the nation’s most prominent newspaper – The New York Times – routinely and
ritualistically avoided discussions of the Trump administration and fascism
during his time in office. Discussions of authoritarianism were relatively more
common, and reports that talked about Trump and populism were far and away the
most frequent of all. There’s little here to suggest that “fascism” was a
normal part of U.S. discourse during Trump’s presidency.
Finally,
what about academics? Rising Fascism in America looks at the op-ed page of The
New York Times. This is the place where we’d expect to find discussions from
academics about fascism, considering how their warnings have been ignored in
news reports. Outside of a couple scattered references from Paul Krugman and
Jason Stanley, there’s virtually no evidence that discussions of Trump and
fascism appear in op-eds from the paper of record. An alternative metric of
academic discourse might look at the most elite presses – ivy league and other
elite university book publishers – to see how they’ve treated the fascism
question. But having followed these publishers closely over the years, I’m
aware of not a single book from Yale, Oxford, Harvard, Columbia, University of
Chicago, or Stanford University Press that focus primarily on the claim that
rising fascism in America is occurring. The only book that’s made this its
central focus is Kuklick’s, and that book’s clearly denialist, downplaying a
fascist threat.
Ignoring
Competing Accounts
A
second problem with this book is that there’s virtually no substantive effort
to engage with contemporary scholars who’ve warned of rising fascism in the era
of Trump. There are various progressive scholars working in this area,
including Paul Street, Henry Giroux, William Connolly, myself, and Jason
Stanley, among others, and various scholars of historical fascism including
Ruth Ben Ghiat, Timothy Snyder, James Whitman, Stefan Kuhl, and Robert Paxton,
who have talked about historic U.S. ties to fascist politics or warned of a
rising fascistic politics in the U.S. today. Kuklick mentions some of these
scholars, such as Snyder, Paxton and Stanley, but there’s very little
engagement in the substance of the claims they offer. Other scholars I’ve
referenced are ignored entirely, despite writing book level treatments about
rising fascism. When Kuklick does engage with critical scholars, it’s not to
contest their arguments, but to provide superficial summaries. In his chapter
on academics and fascism, he references Whitman’s Hitler’s American Model, but fails
to engage the substantive findings of how the Nazis drew inspiration from U.S.
Jim Crow politics, white supremacy, and anti-miscegenation laws. In that
chapter, Kuklick also mentions Stanley’s book, How Fascism Works, providing a
single sentence summary referring to the author as discussing “the roots of
fascist thought” in America. These are not serious engagements in the academic
evidence that’s been put forward of fascism in America.
Whatever
position one takes, the question of rising fascism is a serious one. It
requires a substantive engagement with the work that’s already been done. To
gloss over or ignore this work speaks to the superficiality of Kuklick’s book,
which operates in service of American exceptionalism and fascism denial.
Notably, the book has only a single chapter covering fascism in America over
the last half century, from 1970-2020. That chapter is just 12 pages long and
devotes only a single paragraph to the fascist question in the Trumpian era.
When the chapter finally gets to this issue near its end, the analysis is
limited to a single reference to rightwing ideologue and ex-felon Dinesh
D’Souza who argues in a non-scholarly book that the Democrats, not Trump or Republicans,
are fascist.
Entirely
ignored here is Trump’s own rhetoric and policies, which critical scholars
argue are symptomatic of rising fascism. This includes his white nationalist
politics, such as his efforts to shut down immigration from Muslim-majority
countries, and his demonizing of Mexican immigrants, alongside his
romanticizing on numerous occasions of Confederate iconography (see here and
here), and his idealizing of immigration from northern Europe. It includes his
eugenics-style embrace of an overwhelmingly white crowd of Trump supporters for
their “good genes,” and his demands that U.S. soldiers shoot Mexican immigrants
at the border and Black Lives Matter activists in the streets. It includes his
authoritarian efforts to overturn the 2020 election, which culminated in his
stoking of violent insurrectionists at the U.S. Capitol and his effort to get
national and state Republicans to overturn election results that favored Biden.
It includes the cult of Trumpian personality, in which nearly two-thirds of his
supporters indicated that there was nothing he could do when in power to make
them reconsider their support and adoration for him. It includes his demand
that the Department of Justice throw his political detractors in prison,
including Obama, Clinton, and Biden, based on fallacious claims that they were
spying on him and trying to overthrow him in a coup. It includes a president
who identifies with QAnon – a movement that indulges in neo-Nazi antisemitic
messaging, and endorses an authoritarian and eliminationist politics calling
for Democrats to be executed in public alongside the establishment of a de
facto Trumpian dictatorship. And it includes Trump’s own bragging about
sexually assaulting women, which he did with impunity in the run-up to the 2016
election. One might try to account for all these developments in a way that
denies Trump is a fascist, or that his party is fascist for embracing him. More
commonly though, as Kuklick does, fascism denialists simply ignore all these
points. By doing so, they avoid dealing with the fascism question and the
evidence for it. It’s difficult to defend this silence in a book that purports
to be a serious examination of fascism in America.
“It
Can’t Happen Here” as Academic Elitism
Finally,
Fascism Comes to America is problematic in the ways that it reveals the elitism
of an ivory tower that’s so privileged and disconnected from practical politics
that academics feel they can avoid serious, substantive discussions of the
fascism question. Kuklick seems to indulge in a sort of post-modernism that
rejects the position that one can talk about essential truths related to what
fascism is and isn’t. He writes: “there is no elemental fascism, or much
empirical content” behind the discourses of fascism. “Every political posture
has been christened as fascist. Unable to associate fascism with any stable
observables over one hundred years, I am unconvinced that they exist.” He also
denies notions that entire groups of people exist, callously and cynically
referring to Antifa as a “supposed” group of “anti-Trump activists” who claim
to “fight against American fascism,” and dismissively referencing “something
called the LGBTQ community” – as if to suggest that there’s little to connect
individuals in these groups by way of their identities and experiences.
To
deny that there’s such a thing as a group of people who collectively identify
as part of an LGBTQ+ movement is the sort of empty contrarianism that one sees
from privileged people who’re divorced from the real-world struggles of
minority groups. All of this reeks of extreme privilege and a disconnect from
reality that’s become all too common among ivy league academics and
institutions – and in the academy more broadly.
I’m
a firm believer in what sociologists call positionality – the view that all
people have their own personal biases that impact how they think, see the
world, and behave. Applying positionality to this case, it’s difficult to
divorce ivy league privilege from the ways that elite academics engage in
denialist discourse on fascism – if they talk about it at all. Kuklick himself
is a while male, highly educated, and an emeritus professor at one of these ivy
league schools – the University of Pennsylvania. He’s published his book with
another elite venue – the University of Chicago Press. Considering the various
facets of his personal privilege, one can see how scholars like Kuklick feel
empowered to disconnect from the struggles of anti-fascist activists, LGBTQ+
people, and other repressed groups.
What’s
so disturbing about the academic disconnect from real people is that it
demonstrates the ways that privilege in higher education shapes discourses to
remove injustice from discussion. This means that scholars serve power by
failing to stand against fascist political developments such as the rise of
white supremacy, authoritarianism, and the ascension of the men’s rights
movement. The struggles against these developments are very real and are
playing out in deadly ways in the political world, even as academics feel
empowered to ignore them. Fascism itself is a very real ideology, with
incredibly dangerous beliefs that’re being normalized in contemporary politics.
To ignore all of this by claiming that fascism can never really be understood
as a real phenomenon speaks to the total abdication and complicity of elite
academics.
To
conclude, I would draw attention to how perverse it is that the entire
political context surrounding the publication of Fascism Comes to America
undermines its very thesis. This is an author who would have us believe that
U.S. intellectual culture, including the academy, is fixated on the specter of
fascism in America, at a time when the ivy league presses have refused to
publish a single book offering such a warning, and when the books that’re being
published by non-elite presses that make this claim are almost entirely ignored
by mainstream media publications. This, as Kuklick’s book and his denialism
receive high praise from mainstream media venues, including The New Republic, The
Wall Street Journal, and New York Magazine. A more sober reading of this
political environment suggests the opposite of Kuklick’s thesis. Rather than
the country and mainstream political culture being obsessed with fascism – U.S.
intellectuals have spared no effort to suppress discussions of fascism as
applied to the Republican Party. In the process denialist accounts like
Kuklick’s are privileged, despite its superficial engagement with the
contemporary fascism question.
Why
spend so much time on a single book? The simple answer is that this review
isn’t really about a single book. It’s about a larger political culture where
the media, officials, and academics overwhelmingly ignore the fascism question,
and in which elite scholarly book publishers circumscribe the boundaries of
thought by avoiding publication of works that warn of a fascist threat, while
elevating denialist discourse as the only legitimate position one can adopt. We
should all be concerned about the toxic effects of this sort of denialism at a
time when rightwing extremism is being mainstreamed at every turn.
Anthony
DiMaggio is Associate Professor of Political Science at Lehigh University. He
is the author of Rising Fascism in America: It Can Happen Here (Routledge,
2022), in addition to Rebellion in America (Routledge, 2020), and Unequal
America (Routledge, 2021). He can be reached at: anthonydimaggio612@gmail.com.
A digital copy of Rebellion in America can be read for free here.
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