Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, ed. Did it Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America. New York: W.W. Norton, 2024. 384 PP. $28.99 Cloth. ISBN 9781324074397.
You would be hard pressed to avoid media coverage of the upcoming presidential election, particularly since what once felt like a foregone conclusion has become an actual race. The growing intensity of the campaign has only exacerbated the acrimonious rhetoric surrounding it. Prone as he is to lob sometimes outlandish labels at his opponents, former President Trump is himself often called a “fascist” and a “threat to democracy” by both the American left and moderate right. Trump and his allies have done plenty to raise doubts about their faith in the democratic process, but skepticism about whether some form of American fascism is now on the march remains. Amidst this public debate, Wesleyan historian Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins invites readers to revisit a perennial American question: is the United States at risk of a fascist takeover.
Edited by Steinmetz-Jenkins and published in 2024 by W.W. Norton, Did It Happen Here? gathers together voices from the historiographical debate over fascism’s relevance to contemporary politics. In a public dialogue often given to slogans and soothsaying, the contributors to Did It Happen Here? take a more nuanced view, incorporating varied perspectives with often contradictory assessments. The contributions of this varied and intellectually challenging collection go beyond the classic “fascism debate.” Steinmetz-Jenkins, via the assembled writings, challenges readers to think critically about the history of the present without relying on the past to predict the future (XX).
Did It Happen Here? is split into five sections, each with a distinct analytical angle. The first section, “Classic Texts,” provides readers with an intellectual foundation and situates the book’s central debate. Writing in 1937 and 1940, respectively, Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) and Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) argued that the political character of the United States prevented fascism from penetrating its body politic. Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) and Raymond Aron (1905-1983) were less optimistic. Both saw fascism as far more adaptable and thus potentially global, an ideology that could establish itself among any people who had begun to lose faith in democracy.
This sense of fascism as an ideology of opportunity has been shared by other scholars. In his 1995 essay “Ur-Fascism,” Umberto Eco (1932-2016) characterized fascism as “fuzzy,” and an “all purpose term” with many defining features (40-42). And decades before Eco wrote “Ur-Fascism,” Angela Davis argued that fascism was already alive and well in the United States. In a 1971 essay written and published while she was in prison, Davis contended that the United States’ justice system had created a sort of “preventive fascism” that policed the “overt and latent-revolutionary trends among nationally oppressed people” (32-3).
On these foundations, the book’s second and third sections build out the fascism debate. Section II, “On Fascism Analogies,” is arguably the most compelling of the collection, and features arguments for and against the use of historical analogy as a means of understanding the recent ascendance of the far-right in the United States. Those keen to label the MAGA movement fascist point to its leader and his supporters’ rhetoric and actions, particularly the attack on Capitol on January 6, 2021. In the aftermath of January 6, Robert O. Paxton, a leading voice on the history of fascism, reversed his assessment of the former president and labeled fascist and by making comparisons to pre-war Europe (68-70).
Paxton and Tamsin Shaw, who compares former Attorney General William Barr to Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt—lean hard into historical comparison, but Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Peter E. Gordon adopt more nuanced arguments. Periodizing the evolution of authoritarianism, Ben-Ghiat argues that Americans need to accept that the Republican Party has embraced some fascist “values and practices” (57). But she is careful to point out that analyzing current events alongside historical ones is not the same as equating them. Gordon agrees and asserts that analogy serves to compare and contrast past and present (98). Like Ben-Ghiat, Gordon believes that American fascism, having learned from history, has taken on a new face.
Jan-Werner Müller and Richard J. Evans object to analogy on the grounds of historical specificity, but others like Victoria de Grazia and Samuel Moyn contend that fascist comparisons tend to mask the “Americanness” of Trump and the authoritarian populism he represents. Moyn, responding to Gordon, challenges the fascist analogy from this position, emphasizing that “abnormalizing” Trump permitted some of his enablers to rebrand as “Never Trumpers” (109, 112). Daniel Bessner and Ben Burgis expand on Moyn’s critique to argue that the demonization of Trump draws attention away from increasing authoritarianism enabled by bipartisan policymaking.
Section III, “Is Fascism as American as Apple Pie?” continues to engage with the titular question. Sarah Churchwell responded directly to Moyn by arguing that the United States’ rich history of bigoted right-wing movements is evidence enough of fascist tendencies, making Trump “neither aberrant nor original” (148). Robin D.G. Kelley agreed, pointing out that during the 1930s and 1940s, Black radicals like communist organizer Angelo Herndon framed their struggle against white supremacy at home as part of the global fight against fascism. But Kathleen Belew argued that the white power movement’s revolutionary turn and embrace of cell-style terror in the 1980s changed that struggle. The movement’s nebulous structure disguises the threat it continues to pose, particularly since its beliefs have entered mainstream discourse.
Jason Stanley takes these analyses of the American far-right one step further. Drawing from both Eco and Davis’s Black radical critique, Stanley describes fascism as a “set of practices” which the United States has long relied upon and even pioneered (156, 160). Stanley argues that disproportionately represented white social conservatives have long pursued their reactionary goals via fascist practice and weakened American democracy. Nikhil Pal Singh shares Stanley’s view in a rebuke to liberals who portend political doom by crying “civil war.” Singh aligns with Bessner and Burgis in their assessment that the real threat is an “increasingly predatory” state crafted by the minoritarian right and enabled by “feckless” liberals (170-1). But the reality of democracy which does not support its citizens is, Singh argues, far more difficult to comprehend than the threat of civil war.
Section IV, “Global Perspectives,” attempts to expand the analysis of fascism beyond Americentric and Eurocentric analogy. Leah Feldman and Aamir R. Mufti assess the intellectual foundations of the global “New Right” in an attempt to galvanize a transnational intellectual antifascism. But while Feldman and Mufti focus on European and American intellectuals, Faisal Devji questions the ability Western historiography to envision a truly novel future. Devji argues that the tendency to tell “conservative, provincial, and Eurocentric” histories of the present narrows our understanding of the far-right because of a tendency to view its ascendance as history repeating itself (209).
Priya Satia also adopts a critical approach toward Western historiography and notes how analogy can disguise imperial histories. In particular, she examines the British and American tendency to forgive their own imperialism by analogizing it against other, more brutal empires. This, Satia stresses, allows the U.S. and Britain to condemn the “worst excesses” of empire but not imperialism itself (217). Though Satia, like Gordon, emphasizes the utility of analogy, she encourages us to be more ethical in our use of it.
And what have we have missed, or perhaps mislabeled, in our assessment of “global fascism”? Pankaj Mishra and Marlene Laruelle close Section IV with analyses of India and Russia. Mishra, in his close examination of the rise of Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) argues that India is a perfect example of how home-grown fascism can take over “a deficient democracy” (236). Contrarily, Laruelle argues that Russia, while authoritarian, is not fascist and condemnation of it as such is more reflective of a Western desire for global hegemony.
The final, and most eclectic, section, “Has Fascism Taken on a New Form Today?” picks up the threads of some of the arguments made in Section III. Pointing to the far-right’s fixation on fossil fuels and their tendency to link pollution to immigration, Geoff Mann argues that this crisis of democracy is also intricately linked to the climate crisis. Recognizing fascism’s synergistic relationship with capital, Moira Weigel outlines an updated iteration of Adorno’s critical typology she believes would allow us to understand how the “pathologies of democracies under digital capitalism” produce fascism (264).
Like Weigel, Anton Jäger, in reference to Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000), argues that the fracturing and digitization of social and political life has weakened democracy and empowered capitalism. Hannah Arendt identified the threat of “social atomization” long before Putnam in The Origins of Totalitarianism, but Rebecca Pankova pushes back against what she characterizes as popular misinterpretations of Arendt’s classic work. Encouraging caution, Pankova suggests that Americans should not cry “totalitarianism” prematurely (297). Corey Robin agrees and sees in the United States’ current predicament more the Sisyphean struggle of a broken system than a Promethean authoritarianism (312). Udi Greenberg is more wary of the authoritarian threat, evidenced by his argument that the European far right’s successful appeal toward women indicates evolution. Greenberg’s assessment of the movement emphasizes the opportunistic “fuzziness” of fascist ideology and its appeal in a fractious and atomized society.
Did It Happen Here? does indeed make it clear that fascism is “fuzzy,” but that nonetheless, the far right—no matter how one labels it—remains politically dangerous. Contributors disagree on terminology, commensurability, and urgency, but throughout the book there is a vein of consensus: American democracy is diseased, maybe even dying. Some would argue that the United States was never a democracy at all. But none would discount the idiosyncratic national characteristics of the American far right. That argument is left to absent political commentators, such as the oft-referenced Madeleine Albright, who are cast as desiring a simple return to the inequitable status quo. Did It Happen Here?’s flaw, then, is that it sometimes relies on those voices guilty of abnormalizing leaders like Trump as foils. Readers attuned to the wider debate might fill in the blanks, but others might not.
But the struggle over what to call right-wing political movements may be, as Steinmetz-Jenkins argues, more revealing than any label (X). In attempting to define any right-wing other world leader, we—scholars, pundits, and the general public—betray a desire for certainty, and a perhaps unhealthy reliance on history to predict the future. Maybe, then, we should, as Steinmetz-Jenkins argues, put the “fascism debate” to rest (XX). But Did It Happen Here? neither settles that debate nor offers a solution to our political problems. Instead, this book adds to the growing historiography of the present, placing itself alongside the work of many of its contributors, as well as historians like Timothy Snyder and Gary Gerstle. Rather than revealing anything damning or otherwise about fascism in America, Did It Happen Here? helps readers understand some of the ways in which the present is being shaped by, but not doomed to repeat, the past. As Kathleen Belew puts it, studying the history of the present is not just about “decoding or explaining, but is fundamentally about creating space for new courses of action” (174).
Will Kirsch is a second-year PhD student at Northwestern University studying twentieth century American history, with a focus on the far right. His work examines whiteness in relation to working-class identity and the role of this relationship in the American white power movement. In particular, Will researches and writes about white power skinheads, using cultural ephemera to further develop a political economy and class analysis of both the subculture and the larger movement of which it was a part.