The F-Word and Its Consequences
Did It Happen Here?: Perspectives on Fascism and America, edited by Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, W.W. Norton, 384 pages, $28.99
The debate about what fascism is—and whether America is standing on its precipice—is not merely an academic argument. It guides how many people vote, and even how they think about their neighbors. This debate has been active since 2015 in many political corners of the country, including the left, where liberals, socialists, and everything in between have squabbled over these questions.
For readers not of the left, this debate may come as a surprise, given the narrative dominance enjoyed by corporate liberal outlets, which all seem to agree that fascism is indeed happening here. Seeking to convey the broad strokes of this discussion is a new anthology, Did It Happen Here?, edited by the Wesleyan historian Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins. The collected volume’s title, a play on Sinclair Lewis’s dystopian novel It Can’t Happen Here, brings together several academic voices to debate whether fascism has, can, or will come to America’s shores.
For the contributors who believe that fascism is indeed here or on its way, the modern populist right and similar movements overseas are fascistic because their political vision hinges on racial hierarchy, nativism, national renewal, authoritarianism, and a disdain for majority rule, all to be enforced by violence and intimidation. Several of these writers argue that America’s history of nativism and racial violence was itself a form of proto-fascism, a history they claim is being resurrected by a new anti-democratic right.
Part III of the volume—”Is Fascism as American as Apple Pie?”—centers on such arguments. The Yale philosopher Jason Stanley highlights the ideological overlaps between eugenics-inspired American immigration laws and the subsequent Nazi extermination policies, among other ideological borrowings. Turning to the present, Stanley then points to the rise of immigration restrictionism, strict electoral laws, and other policies preferred by conservatives as evidence of a throughline in fascistic American thought. “If we think of fascism as a set of practices,” he claims, “it is immediately evident that fascism is still with us.”
Other contributors in the affirmative camp eschew historically rooted arguments and call for an expansive redefinition of the term fascism to match modern political circumstances. Geoff Mann, a geographer at Simon Fraser University, opines that the “problem with demanding a precise definition of fascism is that it exaggerates both the ‘exceptional’ character of fascist politics and the distance between us and its historical calamities.” Leah Feldman and Aamir R. Mufti, both professors of comparative literature, argue that mores ranging from antisemitism to traditionalism to “Orthodox Nationalism” fit the f-word too. For such contributors, the stakes are too high to worry about precision: It’s better to err on the side of antifascist caution and cast an extra-wide rhetorical net.
But not everyone in this book agrees. The dissenters take issue with the comparisons to fascism on technical, operational, and conceptual grounds, noting that the Trumpian right does not share the material, ideological, or organizational capacity displayed by classical European fascism. They point out that the modern American right is not a mass movement reacting to a potent communist party, motivated by the anguish of a lost world war an
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