When you ponder the many problems facing the country, or when you think about whom you might vote for in November, does fascism enter the picture?
Fascism was a real problem a century ago in interwar Europe, and two fascist movements achieved power — in Italy and then in Germany — with catastrophic consequences. This right-wing ideology was born in certain historical circumstances that don’t exist in the United States today. Yet since 2015, when Donald Trump entered presidential politics, a good many historians, public intellectuals and media commentators have argued that Mr. Trump and the Republican Party are, if not outright fascists, eerily reminiscent of past fascist movements.
In this episode of History As It Happens, University of Washington historian Daniel Bessner, the co-host of American Prestige podcast, skewers the notion that creeping fascism threatens American democracy.
“The starting point of [defining] fascism should not be: things that are bad that are associated with the right-wing [historically], but must be in some meaningful way historically linked to actual fascist regimes of Italy and Nazi Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Otherwise the term is just floating and can mean whatever someone wants it to mean,” said Mr. Bessner, who co-authored an essay that was published in the new anthology “Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America.”
“I think it is a movement that was born from the failures of WWI, the mass death experience of WWI and the particular stage of mass politics that existed in the 1920s and ’30s before there were fully developed modern states … but I think most of the meaningful circumstances that gave rise to fascism are not present in the United States,” he said.
History As It Happens is available at washingtontimes.com or wherever you find your podcasts.
