'Fascism Comes to America' Review: It's Always Happening Here
By: WSJ
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Popcorn doesn't come with books published by respected university presses, but in the case of Bruce Kuklick's "Fascism Comes to America," maybe it should. The book is as much about Hollywood as it is about a movement or ideology. Mr. Kuklick, a professor emeritus of history at Penn and an accomplished historian of ideas, turns his skills to Hollywood's treatment of fascism. He explains why American entertainers, intellectuals and others have so often resorted to the term "fascism" to denounce things they don't like: FDR's New Deal, the Reagan Revolution and much else.
The contrast with communism is striking. "The United States routed the fascists militarily but not the communists," he writes. "Yet fascism has remained alive in American
imaginations long after its eclipse in 1945." Movies reveal popular sentiments in ways policy analysis does not. Hollywood's use of farce to portray fascism illustrates a problem at the heart of this book. Hollywood did produce a few movies that mocked communism. One was "The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!" (1966), a comedy starring Alan Arkin about the misadventures of a Soviet submarine crew stalled off the coast of New England. Another was "Red Heat" (1988), with Arnold Schwarzenegger (Soviet) and Jim Belushi (American) as "buddy-cops" catching a Georgian drug kingpin. Such communist-based farces vanished once the Cold War ended.
The opposite was true for fascism. During the days of Mussolini and Hitler, the Marx Brothers (“Duck Soup,” 1933) and Charlie Chaplin (“The Great Dictator,” 1940) poked fun at fascism and succeeded at the box office. After the defeat of the Axis powers, fascism remained an object of derision. For instance, Billy Wilder’s “A Foreign Affair” (1948) featured Marlene Dietrich as a former mistress of a high-ranking Nazi whose allure, Mr. Kuklick writes, “hinted at the bizarre erotic possibilities that National Socialist women” had for American men. “Stalag 17” (1953) rendered Nazi soldiers as “central fools” inside a POW camp. The success of that movie paved the way for one of the strangest successes in American television history, “Hogan’s Heroes,” which aired from 1965 to 1971. Jewish actors who had fled Nazi Germany played Col. Klink and Sgt. Schultz. Only two decades removed, these fictional soldiers were little more than hapless stooges.
Midcentury historians writing shortly after the war’s end, Mr. Kuklick shows, didn’t see fascism around every corner. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., in “The Vital Center” (1949), and Richard Hofstadter, in “The Age of Reform” (1955), contrasted America’s liberal polity with extremes of right and left. Both advocated what now looks like a pompous and naive consensus liberalism, but neither categorized politics outside the mainstream as fascist.
Their reticence didn’t last. The Vietnam War and the crisis of Watergate stoked American historians’ obsession with fascism. A younger generation of scholars looked back to the 1930s and ’40s to find parallels with contemporary America. For them, Mr. Kuklick writes, fascism was “a political expletive” not “an investigative concept.” American policies on Native Americans conformed to definitions of genocide, in some historians’ judgments. George Washington, in another study, qualified as an instigator of fascism. Jacksonian democracy’s “völkisch” dimensions adumbrated the Nazis. Theodore Roosevelt’s imperialist foreign policy leaned fascist.
Intimations of fascism persisted among the creative class and journalists. Tony Kushner’s play “A Bright Room Called Day” (1985) compared Ronald Reagan to Hitler. The 1993 movie “Falling Down,” starring Michael Douglas as a former engineer for the defense industry, explicitly evoked America’s “fascist flavor” when the psychologically unstable protagonist shoots a gun-store owner. Meanwhile, conservative writers like Jonah Goldberg, in “Liberal Fascism” (2008), and Dinesh D’Souza, in “The Big Lie” (2017), used fascism to explain the American left.
It didn’t take much prodding, after Donald Trump’s election in 2016, for fascism’s explanatory power to grow. Two scholars who refrained from characterizing the United States as fascist, Columbia University’s Robert Paxton and Yale’s Timothy Snyder, stood out for independent judgment. Mr. Paxton’s essay “The Five Stages of Fascism” (1998) described political processes that escaped ideological conformity. Mr. Snyder’s “Bloodlands” (2010) recognized important affinities between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Yet after the 2016 election Mr. Snyder wrote essays and books about a fascist takeover, and after the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Paxton a piece in Newsweek headlined “I’ve Hesitated to Call Trump a Fascist. Until Now.”
Readers may need whiskey to accompany that popcorn when they come to Mr. Kuklick’s brief excursus on American government and the Founders’ “agony” over democracy. He surmises that Americans’ obsession with fascism is the flip side of a collective inability to reckon with the calamitous gap between the Founders and contemporary America. The “Constitution’s republicanism” has given way to democracy, the very polity the Founders hoped and planned to avoid. Repeating “democracy” as a benediction and “fascism” as an epithet obscures the contradiction between American reverence for the Founders and ignoring the limits they placed on democracy. We “are estranged from them, and they ought to be strange to us,” Mr. Kuklick warns. The author’s point is simply that “an unthinking dedication to democracy” prevents Americans from learning from the Founders or acknowledging changes in their government.
His final observations about Mr. Trump may point the way forward. For Mr. Kuklick, the former president fails to qualify as a fascist because of an isolationist (not expansionist) foreign policy and domestic programs that favored federalism and localism (not nationalism). Moreover, Mr. Trump had “only modest electoral support” and was “disliked by well over half the voting public.” None of this was true of Hitler and Nazi Germany. The author could well have added that Germany’s intellectual class praised Hitler in contrast to American intellectuals who despised Mr. Trump. Mr. Kuklick thinks contempt for Mr. Trump is justified. But calling him a fascist, he rightly insists, is an awful way to express it.
Mr. Hart teaches history at Hillsdale College and is the author of “Benjamin Franklin: Cultural Protestant” (2021).
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The above review is an understatement. The modern world is threatened by Communism, not Fascism. It is all understandable when one considers how many of our academics are Marxists.
The Book is:
Fascism Comes to America: A Century of Obsession in Politics and Culture
By Bruce Kuklick
University of Chicago Press
LOL. There isn't even a single sentence in the seeded article that tries to make that point.
Start here:
The contrast with communism is striking. "The United States routed the fascists militarily but not the communists," he writes. "Yet fascism has remained alive in American
imaginations long after its eclipse in 1945.
Uh, that sentence does not claim communism is a present threat to America.
refers to World War 2.
President Biden clearly sees the PRC as our most significant foreign threat. From hiks National Strategy:
" In the contest for the future of our world, my Administration is clear-eyed about the scope and
seriousness of this challenge. The People’s Republic of China harbors the intention and,
increasingly, the capacity to reshape the international order in favor of one that tilts the global
playing field to its benefit, even as the United States remains committed to managing the
competition between our countries responsibly."
"The most pressing strategic challenge facing our vision is from powers that layer authoritarian
governance with a revisionist foreign policy. It is their behavior that poses a challenge to
international peace and stability—especially waging or preparing for wars of aggression, actively
undermining the democratic political processes of other countries, leveraging technology and
supply chains for coercion and repression, and exporting an illiberal model of international order.
Many non-democracies join the world’s democracies in forswearing these behaviors.
Unfortunately, Russia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) do not."
"The PRC and Russia are increasingly aligned with each other but the challenges they pose are, in
important ways, distinct. We will prioritize maintaining an enduring competitive edge over the
PRC while constraining a still profoundly dangerous Russia."
China
"Beijing has ambitions to create an enhanced sphere of influence in the Indo-Pacific and to become the world’s leading power. It is using its technological capacity and increasing influence over
international institutions to create more permissive conditions for its own authoritarian model,
and to mold global technology use and norms to privilege its interests and values. Beijing
frequently uses its economic power to coerce countries. It benefits from the openness of the
international economy while limiting access to its domestic market, and it seeks to make the
world more dependent on the PRC while reducing its own dependence on the world. The PRC is also investing in a military that is rapidly modernizing, increasingly capable in the Indo-Pacific,
and growing in strength and reach globally – all while seeking to erode U.S. alliances in the
region and around the world."
There is something interesting in this article, but its not what Vic thinks it is. The writer makes it very implicitly clear if not explicitly clear that he thinks America would be better off with less democracy
Oddly enough, or appropriately enough, Elon musk and his ideological ilk are becoming more and more associated with anti-democracy sentiments. See "the Cathedral" .
The author of the seed works at Hillsdale College. Hillsdale College is connected to the Claremont Institute, a right wing "think tank" that has posted numerous anti-democracy opinions. This branch of the right wing thinks that society should be led by strong individuals who are above checks and balances (presumably because they are sufficiently to the right).
Trump may not be a fascist as of yet, but its hard to imagine him turning those sorts of powers down if they were within his reach.
Should "fascism" be an epithet Vic? There seems to be some doubt in the writers mind.
No more or less than Communism should be.
America is a Republic, not a pure democracy.
Free Speech is a vital right.
The daily kos is leftist shit.
The author of the seed works at Hillsdale College.
Hillsdale College is one of the few Colleges, if not the only one, that does not take federal money.
Trump may not be a fascist as of yet
Don't look now, but you made my point. Thank you John.
You need to get your mind out of far right websites and learn something about the groups and arguments you present.
I used the Washington Post earlier. I guess you missed that.
You mean they allow free speech?
OMG!
Can you imagine anyone alive not knowing about Jan 6th!!!
You are floundering. When one reads your seeded article with some knowledge of the viewpoint of the groups the writer is associated with it is not difficult to discern that his true objection is to complete democracy, and to see that he feels fascism is being "picked on".
Oh, I better be careful.
When one reads your seeded article with some knowledge of the viewpoint of the groups the writer is associated with it is not difficult to discern that his true objection is to complete democracy, and to see that he feels fascism is being "picked on".
It is truly sad that some view democracy as the the land of Big Brother Joe.
As you make arguments citing Salon and Dailykos
When you are 4 miles left of Che' those are moderate websites.
You do realize that the book was written by Dr. Bruce Kuklick, a Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Pennsylvania.
Here are some brief book reviews from the right wing locations:
"Fascism as both an idea and a political reality in America is an important, even urgent, topic, and it has found the ideal author for its examination in Kuklick. He draws on an impressive variety of sources-from political theory, philosophy, novels, movies, the popular press, and more-to knit together a century-long history of American ideas about and images of fascism. This important book shows persuasively, and with considerable writerly flair, the specter and appeal of 'fascism' in American political thought and culture."- Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Fascism Comes to America is amazing for the range of sources it analyzes and for the effectiveness with which it mobilizes theories of politics, language, and culture. Epoch by epoch, decade by decade, international crisis by international crisis, domestic election by domestic election, Kuklick takes the reader through the last hundred years with a firm hand, showing how movies reflected contemporary politics at home and abroad without being directly caused by them." -- David Hollinger, University of California-Berkeley
"Briskly narrated and perfectly timed, Kuklick's study examines a concept that has enjoyed a central, if disputed, place in American political and cultural discourse for exactly a century. Surveying academic analyses, journalistic jeremiads, popular novels, and Hollywood films from the 1920s to the present, Fascism Comes to America shows how people across the American political spectrum have employed the concept of fascism as a multivalent signifier to express their fears and fantasies about the country's democratic well-being. This is a must-read for anyone seeking to make sense of present-day rightwing trends in the United States."
-- Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, Fairfield University
You probably missed that part.
My comments were about the seeded article and what is in it. I havent read the book or even seen it.
Is there some reason Im supposed to care who wrote a book I am not commenting on?
No, I read it.
I inferred from you comments about Hillsdale and extreme right wing sites that you that the book was a product of the same. My mistake.
Ok.
The seeded article implies that we have too much democracy. Any thoughts about that?
Our Constitution’s Article IV, Section 4, declares “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” not a democracy. The framers feared both the kind of mob rule witnessed in the French Revolution and the risk to inherent freedoms imposed by a powerful centralized government.
The first 10 amendments are rights that the government must protect. Their construct was to limit government power by decentralization and a system of checks and balances. In the Federalist Papers, James Madison, said of pure democracy, “there is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual.” Chief Justice John Marshall said, “Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.”
The Electoral College was emplaced to prevent heavily populated states from always being able to pick the presidential winner. Amending the Constitution requires a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress, not a simple majority. Likewise, 51 senators can block the wishes of 435 representatives and 49 senators. The president can veto Congress.
All the highbrowed gobbledygook about Fascism completely ignores the glaringly obvious. The United States' defeat of Fascism is the greatest victory in American history.
Invoking Fascism is not a call for compromise. Americans crushed Fascism out of existence. There wasn't a Versailles Treaty. The only acceptable outcome for Americans was unconditional surrender. Americans invoking Fascism is more than a call to fight; its a call to obliterate opposition without compromise.
Calling someone Fascist doesn't really have anything to do with Hitler, NAZIs, or actual Fascism. Someone labeled as Fascist has been targeted for obliteration. And we're expected to sacrifice everything to obliterate that Fascist target.
Democrats have actually adopted many of the tenets of real-world Fascism. But the real-world isn't the point.