Has fascism arrived in America? In this pioneering book, Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Janet Ward have gathered experts to survey the history of fascism in the United States. Although the US established a staunch anti-fascist reputation by defeating the Axis powers in World War II, the unsettling truth is that fascist ideas have long been present within American society. Since the election of Donald Trump as President in 2016, scholars have debated whether Trumpism should be seen as an outgrowth of American conservatism or of a darker – and potentially fascist – tradition. Fascism in America contributes to this debate by examining the activities of interwar right-wing groups like the Silver Shirts, the KKK, and the America First movement, as well as the post-war rise of Black antifascism and white vigilantism, the representation of American Nazis in popular culture, and policy options for combating right-wing extremism.
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My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, joined today by just a fantastic guest, someone who I'm just getting to know, and that is Dr. Gavriel Rosenfeld, who is president of the Center for Jewish History in New York City, professor of history at Fairfield University, somebody who received his B.A.
in history and Judaic studies from Brown, and then his Ph.D.
at UCLA.
So I'll just say, Dr. Rosenfeld, thanks for being here.
Thanks so much for having me.
Well, we're here to discuss a new volume that you co-edited with Dr. Janet Ward of the University of Oklahoma, and that volume is called Fascism in America.
And there's just some incredible contributions in this volume of essays and just a lot to talk about.
I want to start here, and it's really where you and Dr. Ward start in the beginning, in the introduction, which is setting the kind of context for discussing fascism in America.
There have been many debates over the last, say, eight years.
I don't know, starting in 2015 for some reason.
Um, about whether or not fascism has come to America, whether it is rising in America.
And there have been historians, uh, scholars, political scientists on both sides.
Some you call alarmist saying, it's here.
Get ready because we are, we are in full of bone fascist, uh, America.
Others saying, actually, if you look at what fascism is and its historical definitions and iterations, we're not there.
I'm sorry.
And the intervention that you make is to say it would really help in this debate if we're trying to discuss fascism in America, if we historicize this, because lo and behold, there is a history here to fascism in the United States.
Why was it important for you to make that intervention to historicize fascism in order to perhaps add a dimension to this debate about whether or not it really has reached the United States?
Yeah, no, you framed the question very, very succinctly.
So I come to this topic, like so many of my colleagues, from the position of being a German historian, someone who, since the 1990s, has been really interested not only in the origins of Nazism in Germany, but the way in which the Nazi past has since been commemorated.
I guess we could say in the past generation in the phenomenon that we call the memory boom.
So we're all aware, of course, that societies have been confronting long buried past, whether it's, you know, during the 1990s, the former Soviet Union confronting the crimes of Stalinism, the United States confronting the crimes of slavery, or even the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and so forth.
So the whole field of memory studies has long been a field I've been part of.
And one of the main driving principles behind that field is never forget and always remember what happened so that would prevent any recurrence.
That had been such a mantra among German historians that it guides absolutely everything we've done.
And really up until I would say a term of Angela Merkel in Germany, after the turn of the millennium, our main focus was on Germany and whether the Germans had learned the proper lessons and what was Germany going to be potentially guilty of backsliding and going back towards a sort of non- Nazi or neo-Nazi stance.
Lo and behold, as you sort of implied a second ago in 2015, so many of us in the United States were surprised to, and mortified of course, to see that we had to start looking at our own backyard as opposed to overseas.
And so a lot of, could I call it retooling or recalibrating our agendas and our analytical orientations started to take place.
And Germans long habituated, German historians rather, long habituated into or long habituated Or I suppose I better said, inclined to focus on the lessons of history, wanted to shift their attention to the case of the United States, which as we know, since great commemorative events of the 1990s, has always been, many people here have always been talking about how we won the good war, we fought in World War II to defeat fascism.
And to say that such a tradition of fascism was actually part of this country's history was anathema.
And a wet against the mythologization of the last greatest generation good war phenomena.
And so we wanted to start addressing the darker side of American history to try and explain whether Trumpism, and in 2015 it wasn't really Trumpism, it was just Trump, whether there was some connection.
I want to just stop and note that you've been writing on these things for a long time.
If folks are listening and they want to understand where you're coming from, you wrote a book called The Fourth Reich, The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present.
That was in 2019.
You wrote a book called Heil Hitler, How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture.
That's from 2015.
Building After Auschwitz, Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust.
The World Hitler Never Made, Munich in Memory, I mean, the list goes on and on.
So you have been writing and thinking about these things for decades.
I want to stop and pause on a point that you just made, because I think it's one that listeners will be really interested in and will take away from this conversation, and that is this.
It sounds to me like what you're saying is somebody who, as I said, has been writing about these things for decades, that one of the barriers to discussing the history of fascism in America is the mythology that emerged after world war ii that we were the i mean we were the good guys let's just let's just do like the very third grade fifth grade version we were the good guys we stepped in we made sure that europe didn't all speak german because of the nazi regime we saved the uk from Sure, ruin.
We rescued France and other allies.
I remember going to the UK as a graduate student and a young, naive 20-something, and one of the first times you go to the pub, you have this talk with your new UK friends who are like totally reconfiguring that myth in your head because they're like, yeah, thanks for jumping in when you did.
It would have been nice if you would have come earlier, United States and so on.
And you start to think, I think the story that I've heard about World War II isn't Is it maybe the one that I should believe?
Now, as a Japanese-American, I can say, we never believe that because we all know about camp.
Nonetheless, here's what I'm driving at.
Would you help us understand that?
Is it true that the myth of the good guy, United States in World War II, has made it just very difficult to discuss any kind of presence of fascism in this country at all?
Yes, it's taken quite a while to start chipping away at that Good War myth, which in Britain, as you were indicating, has its equivalent in the so-called Finest Hour myth, and then the former Soviet Union, the Great Patriotic War, and so forth.
So, yeah, that has had, I don't want to call it a stranglehold on American consciousness for many years, but it's certainly been the dominant narrative.
And it's worth pointing out, as recent scholars have, that during World War II itself, the American public had a much more ambivalent understanding of why they were involved in this war, especially in Europe.
Obviously, with the attack of Pearl Harbor, most Americans were fixated on fixed theater and saw the Japanese enemy in much more racist, you know, Much more racist fashion.
In Germany, since obviously we didn't even get involved in the war in Europe until D-Day 1944, there was the sense that this war was somehow more remote and more distant, and only with the liberation of the concentration camps in the spring of 45 did many Americans retroactively see that the whole campaign was all for a moral purpose.
It wasn't at all seen in those terms.
Obviously, Jewish Americans saw it in those terms.
Probably some Polish Americans saw it in those terms.
But it's really a function of the post-war period, and especially the Reagan era, 1980s and 1990s, under Bill Clinton as well, when the 50th anniversary of the war became cemented as part of the post-end of the Cold War sense of American identity.
But in the process, of course, it was much more difficult for people to grasp that in the 1930s there were people like Father Coghlan and the Silver Shirts and the Christian Front and the Christian Mobilizers, which raises the whole question, which I know you've spent a lot of time focusing on in your own work, which I also admire, about the role of Christianity in the far-right And whether this is a Protestant thing, whether it's a Catholic thing, where the differences lie, and we can certainly talk about that as well.
But I think only since our own political moment in the present has become more ominous that people are willing to go back and see the roots of the present in the 30s and 40s.
It is seemingly timely to think about the ways that Germany and many Germans spent decades after the war coming to grips with what happened and facing it head on.
The United States seems to have just entered that period, if at all, in the last few years.
And even those of us who are trying to sort of do this in an academic and investigative way sometimes are met with skepticism.
I want to move to some of the contributions in the volume and some of the things that I found really helpful.
In one of the first chapters, Professor Alley provides what you call, I think very helpfully, portable definitions of fascism as a perennial set of options.
And I found this helpful because I think that it is easy, especially for us academics, to get caught in Strict definitions and wanting to match theory with data and examples in ways that are kind of really a seamless match.
And yet these portable definitions really give us just like outlines for the layperson to kind of think about as perhaps fascist elements in their own midst.
So let me list them and I'll let you react to that.
Number one, the desire to violently suppress and kill enemies rather than argue with them.
Number two, the preference for an authoritarian state over democracy.
Number three, the exclusionary idea of a nation against a pluralism that values diversity and difference.
How are those portable definitions helpful in your mind?
Well, I mean, I think one of the things we have to understand analytically, and that's, by the way, in contrast to talking about fascism rhetorically, because as we'll probably talk about later today, so much of the problem surrounding the discussion of fascism is that people use it in two different ways, as a way to explain a phenomenon, so much of the problem surrounding the discussion of fascism is that people use it in two different ways, And you've seen that in the war in Ukraine, by the way, in recent years, Vladimir Putin's campaign fascist or not fascist.
Well, if you call it fascist, it's going to galvanize people and make them pay attention more so that if you say, well, it's just some sort of skewed Eastern European version of a liberal democracy or authoritarian populism, which sounds like a lot of syllables and that doesn't have the punch of fascism, which we all can, of course, relate to.
But yes, I certainly think that fascism have to be described in contradistinction to other related movements on the right.
Populism certainly is one of them.
Nativism in an American context is certainly one of them.
I think the pivotal distinction there, of course, is violence and the tendency to use either state violence or more often, as is more often the case, paramilitary violence to intimidate enemies, perhaps to actually eliminate them physically.
And so when a society comes to that point of physical violence being the preferred method for solving conflicts, yes, you are in a fascist moment.
I think certainly, and we can talk later, I'm sure, today about whether our present day moment is akin to that moment.
And to put it very simply in our introduction to the volume, we made it clear that prior to January 6th, 2021, there was one academic perspective that seemed to be dominant.
And after January 6th, a lot of people changed their minds.
Which is not to say that everyone who might be in the MAGA wing of the Republican Party is a fascist, but there is no doubt there are fascists in the Republican Party, mostly associated with that wing.
So, yeah, that's the first thing I would say.
One of the things I really appreciate about this particular chapter and the way that it's framed is that it's articulated as a set of pressures that might create a fascist regime or lead to the creation of a fascist regime or so on.
And I appreciate that because sometimes I think Folks are inclined to think about fascism as in it is or it isn't.
It's here or it's not here.
The Trump administration as a whole, fascist or not, take a side.
Okay.
Which one is it?
Are you an alarmist?
Are you not?
Are you a, uh, whatever may be, are you too moderate on this question?
Uh, at the dinner party, you can see people getting upset, throwing their bread rolls at each other over this.
And what I appreciate about this is if we talk about pressures that might lead to, right, a fascist regime, then you can take away from this as a listener and think, well, all right, if there are people who want to violently suppress and kill enemies rather than argue with them in my local community, in a situation with a militia that is operating up the road with the way candidates speak to each other in a mayoral race or a state legislature race, huh?
Okay, I'm going to mark that down as kind of the kinds of pressures that might lead to the explosion of something like fascism.
If people are saying things like democracy is overrated, we need a Caesar.
We need a king.
We need, you know, you can start to clock that in your mind as somebody who's at a PTA meeting or who's talking with fellow parents at some sort of setting.
And if you think, hey, we just need one nation, one God, one people.
No more difference or diversity.
DEI?
That's a bad word.
I don't know.
Blah, blah, blah, blah.
I guess I just really appreciate the idea of these as pressures mounting rather than it's one or the other.
Take a side and tell us which one it is.
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the issues that's very important to focus on is the role of reigning elites in a society.
So, hypothetically, if dominant elites, and we can describe them as economic elites or political elites, if they feel under pressure, if they feel like their backs are up against the wall due to, again, it could be any number of things, Cultural radicals, political radicals, economic radicals today in the 1930s, whether they were in the socialist movement or the Communist Party or labor unions, if they feel that their interests are threatened, they may be inclined to crack down forcefully on those pressures to protect their economic interests.
And that's the classist Marxist theory.
Now, of course, one doesn't have to only crush those threats with fascist military force.
You could hypothetically just go with the army, create a military dictatorship, and that's one of the time-honored ways in which, say, Napoleon III in France In the early 1850s, stayed in power, ignored the democratic principles that were established in the revolution of 1848 and so forth.
And no one would say Napoleon III was a fascist because the term didn't even exist yet.
But I do think that as opposed to, say, staying in power through a military coup, which is obviously what, you know, Francisco Franco did in Spain.
And even though people like to call him a fascist, he actually excluded the grassroots lower echelon radicals in Spanish society that were fascist.
But if the elites don't feel that the army can save them or don't feel that the army is on their side, and we know on January 6th, the army was very much in the United States siding with the established state, maybe you do then seek your salvation in the militia types who have been hoarding guns.
And whether we call them the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers, you name it, those are the people you ally with in a sort of bottom-up, top-down, elite and militia relationship that That certainly was what you saw in Nazi Germany, where the very, very vulnerable Prussian young birds and the big businessmen look to the Nazis to stay in power.
And whether they truly believed in an imminent communist revolution or they just used it as a pretext, that's how they seized power.
They didn't go through the conventional military.
And in fact, the German army had to stand up on the sidelines throughout the 30s as the Nazis amassed more and more power for their private militia, the SA.
So I guess I would say that any society that has threatened elites who feel compelled to use violence to maintain their status, that in America, we brought that into the present.
I think it's safe to say there are many elites in the Republican Party who have ever since Barry Goldwater used the bait and switch strategy of cultural grievance and tax cuts for the wealthy to keep their coalition together.
I think ever since Trump ran in 2015, that's falling apart.
And the people who have hoped to get some red meat in the form of getting Roe v. Wade repealed or getting immigrants out of the country, they had never gotten any results.
They kept being, forcing their demands forward with Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.
And then they kept getting left high and dry by the established Republicans.
Only someone like Trump really put them in the position of getting what they wanted.
And I think they have gotten some of what they wanted up until now.
And that's obviously a dangerous situation.
My name is Peter, and I'm a prophet.
In the new novel, American Prophet.
I was the one who dreamed about the natural disaster just before it happened.
Oh, and the pandemic.
And that crazy election.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not bragging.
It's not like I asked for the job.
Actually, no one would ask for this job.
At least half the people will hate whatever I say, and almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy.
Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
But the job isn't all that bad.
I've gotten to see the country, and meet some really interesting people, and hopefully do some good along the way.
You can find my story on Amazon, Audible, or iTunes.
Just look for American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
So much there to talk about.
I've had other folks I've discussed these things with who've taken what you've just said and the lines you've just traced and talked about Christian fascism in the United States, and that's a whole different discussion.
I want to move on to a chapter by Thomas Weber that compares Trump directly to Hitler, and this is something that people have done, again, over the last eight years.
Some are saying, oh my gosh, I can't believe you would do that.
And others are saying, thank God you did that, because that's really appropriate.
But what Weber does in this chapter, I think is really helpful.
It makes the case that the two men share some things.
And I think that's worth identifying.
And then also says there's key differences between them.
So let's start with the similarities.
You know, what do they share?
What can we say that Hitler and Trump have in common?
Sure.
So just before I get into Tom's essay, which is marvelous, the 12 essays in this volume and the epilogue by Ruth Ben-Ghiott are all standalone pieces of scholarship that deserve a wide readership.
So I want to credit all of the contributors and my co-editor, Janet Ward, for putting this great project together.
I would love to take credit for everything, but far be it for me to do that.
And I know we're going to touch on some of the essays, but for obvious reasons, we can't touch on all of them.
But just to answer your question about Tom's essay, yeah, Yeah, he focuses primarily on the realm of foreign policy and looks at how Hitler and Trump on the one hand did share a common sense of the anarchic state of the geopolitical complexity of the world as a kind of Hobbesian state of nature, where it's basically every man for himself, grab what you can, where it's basically every man for himself, grab what you can, don't worry about It's a hyper sense of rail politic on steroids, if you will.
And that similar diagnosis is something that is the launching point for his essay, where he, of course, offers his intervention, I think, is to point out that, unlike the many, many critics who have said that Trump and Hitler are akin to one another in many ways, he says, and I think with some degree of justification, that while Hitler certainly chose to respond and I think with some degree of justification, that while Hitler certainly chose to respond to this anarchic world by embracing German imperial might, Weltkurschaft of world domination, subordinating clients to the securitization of German power,
subordinating clients to the securitization of German power, not only through a massive statist approach, but So it's both statist and racist at the same time.
He would argue, and he does argue in this piece, that Trump very, very differently wants to return to a kind of isolationist, non-interventionist stance for American foreign policy, not, in fact, trying to expand America's global footprint.
But in response to say the misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan shrink it in the spirit of the America first movement and the isolationist when the Republican party in the 1930s.
Not to mention the fact that Trump's own very, very pro-individualistic, hyper-capitalist, inquisitive sense of identity is so different from that of Hitler's, which had its left-wing socialist elements in terms of community investment in the race and whatnot.
And then finally, I guess the obvious point that Hitler got into politics as a jerk or a veteran of World War I who had no assets to speak of or to defend.
Trump, by contrast, whatever the net worth he ends up maybe perhaps having, and historians 10 years from now will know much better than what we think we know now about how much he was actually worth, his approach was, of course, to protect his financial interests, to not serve in the army, And to sort of amass even more wealth through crooked deals and probably through getting foreign investment from God knows you name it.
I'm really glad you brought up the individualist ethos of Trump.
We're recording this interview during the Trump Organization Fraud Trial, and the idea for Trump has always been to enrich Trump as well as to gain power.
I mean, you outlined it so well.
I just want to make sure, listeners, that you take away the point of this essay, which is, one of them at least, which is that what they share, Hitler and Trump, is this sense of the world and its geopolitical configuration is anarchy.
There's no structure.
There's no sense that as human beings, or as human communities, or as nation states, we might have some sense of inherent need, desire, or nature to work together, to build a sense of stability and peace.
That it's really a kind of sense of Hobbesian state of nature, as you said.
Either eat or be eaten, get or be gotten, and so you better figure it out.
And that's what they shared.
Now, the difference is you outlined so well, and I think those are really apt.
For the sake of time, I want to talk about your essay in the volume.
And it's a treat for me because what you do is you focus on kind of on-screen fictional depictions of fascism in America, and especially those that depict alternative histories.
And some of the series that you focus on are The Watchmen, The Man in the High Castle and The Plot Against America.
I've watched all three of those.
I rarely get to nerd out about them, so I'm so excited right now.
I found The Plot Against America to be quite compelling, and I thought it was somewhat interesting the way that it ended, and it was an open-ended question as to whether or not they were going to follow the book.
The Watchmen, I will be honest, this is just me showing my personal cards.
I recommend The Watchman to people because I think it is a truly creative means of storytelling and a way to get into issues of fascism, racism, white supremacy in a manner that I think the audience is not suspecting when they turn it on.
I'll stop there and stop nerding out and I'll ask you a serious question, which is this.
How do these series that have alternative histories, alternative accounts of how things might have gone, How might they anticipate some of what we're seeing now?
Like, do they help us maybe get a lens for thinking about what is happening in real time?
Is that one of their merits?
Sure.
So I've spent a long time talking about the genre of alternate history as well as counterfactual history.
I think I created my blog, The Counterfactual History Review, back in 2012.
2012.
So anyone who wants to see my ruminations on journalists and filmmakers and novelists are using this analytical and cultural medium to reflect on the past and the present, yeah, please do so.
But yes, for sure, alternate history is all about fears and fantasies.
And some of those fears and fantasies are projected backward so that we now know that, and this is oftentimes the most visible in Monday morning quarterbacking, if your team lost the night before, and you say something like, if only Jalen Hurts had, you know, run the ball if only Jalen Hurts had, you know, run the ball on fourth down instead of pass for an incompletion, We would have been better and we would have won.
That's a fantasy.
On the other hand, you can look backwards and say, well, if, you know, we hadn't turned that double play at the bottom of the ninth inning, we would have lost.
And then that's a nightmare, but it never happened.
So it makes you feel bad.
There's all kinds of social science literature on why we as human beings conjure fantasies and fears about what might have been, but they always can be used to articulate fears about the present and future as well.
Yes, to answer your question.
In the last, well, since 2015, eight years, there's been an enormous explosion of counterfactual streaming series on not network television so much as Amazon Prime and HBO and Hulu and so forth.
And whether it's the Stephen King 11-22-63 that explored the assassination of John F. Kennedy not taking place or whether it's any number of other topics like the HBO series that was never actually created by the Davids and the other one who did Game of Thrones.
But that was supposed to be about the Confederacy winning the Civil War, which caught a firestorm of protests, that was a firestorm, and was just canceled before it was even aired.
The Nazi period has always been the most popular.
And between 2015 and 2021, there have been four major series, including Hunter, starting Al Pacino, that have also explored what is really on the minds of countless millions of Americans these days.
And that is the possibility, not only of fascism emerging in America, but actually taking power in America.
So the first series, Imagine the HBO miniseries, The Plot Against America, was based on Philip Roth's 2004 novel, Imagine that Charles Lindbergh wins the election in 1940 and takes us into an alliance with Nazi Germany with dire consequences.
That was basically turned into a six-episode miniseries.
A couple of years ago, by contrast, the Man of the High Castle, based on Philip K. Dick's famous novels in 1962, was a four-season, long exploration of not only fascism emerging in America, but doing so in the form of the Nazis winning World War II and partitioning the country into three occupation zones, with the Japanese Empire in the west, the Nazis in the east, and sort of a neutral zone in the middle.
And what these two shows did and Watchmen and Hunters pointed out is that most of them have a very bleak view of how America would behave if there was a moment where fascism might take root.
Just to give you one example, even though the Nazis are tyrannizing the American population in the Man in the High Castle, more often than not, the domestic population collaborates with the Nazis, undermining the idea that we were all Democrats and went to fight against Hitler in World War II to save the world for democracy, pointing out, no, in fact, most of us would undermining the idea that we were all Democrats and went to fight against Hitler in
And it's a sort of pessimistic understanding of what perhaps the American DNA is politically, not endorsing the idea that we have some American exceptionalist narrative that we should be proud of, but saying, you know, we're just, it's kind of the same as anybody else.
But it's sending this message, this show and all the others, to make it clear that we still have time in reality, because these shows, of course, focus on what never happened, but what might have, we have the opportunity in reality to do something about this.
And we can talk about maybe what the unifying message is for all these shows, but it is telling that they all will more or less come down on the same point.
Well, they seem to do a lot of what we discussed at the beginning, which is they pose to the American audience the fact that, hey, this myth of World War II, this myth of the good guy, this myth of the you save the world and you would do it again a hundred times because you believe in democracy and freedom and equality and you are The city on a hill that shines to the world.
All of these shows sort of, they dig into the real lived experiences of what we might call ordinary people.
The suburban family living in New Jersey, the rabbi operating, right, in New Jersey or New York City, the soldier, the neighbor.
And they say to the, I mean, the law enforcement officer, the community leader, the mayor and the watchman, those kinds of figures.
And they basically say, There are historical moments that are turning points, and it is not a foregone conclusion that to live from a past that says America was always going to be the great anti-fascist hero of the middle 20th century, is in fact to ignore the real kinds of elements and turning points that make human history.
That there's always something at stake, and if we just read things backwards, As to what happened, then we're going to come away with a myth, as you've already said, and we're going to come away with a false sense of self because of that myth.
And so to me, that's the great merit of these, and I think you've articulated that.
And I think in some sense, and I would love your thoughts on this, they offer strategies for combating the rise of fascism because they remind us that, hey, if we see the kinds of pressures that we talked about earlier, if we see the kinds of elements starting to sprout in our midst, we are very susceptible.
To these kinds of movements being cultivated and gaining power in our local communities, in our larger state communities, in our nation, in our religious communities, in our families, you know, wherever we want to talk about these impulses in the human condition can take over.
and we have to exercise safeguards against them.
To me, that's one of the merits of them.
You've studied this much longer than I have.
You know a billion times more about all these alternative histories and what they do.
What does that look like from your view? - Well, for one thing, it's worth noting that one of the basic points of divergence of Toll of K. Dick's Man in the High Castle is that FDR gets assassinated in Miami in early 1933, which almost happened, of course.
And it does throw into stark relief the fact that he was the key backstop in American history in the decade of the 30s and 40s that kept the domestic fascist threats at bay, whether through the FBI, whether through, you know, using the legal system to crack down on Father Coughlin and Christian Fronts.
And the silvershoes, all of whom had planned at various junctures in the 1930s, as various scholars have shown, had been planning military coups, armed rebellions, they were stockpiling weapons and bombs and so forth.
And there are a lot of close calls in the United States.
But if a different president had been in office, more sympathetic to those types, and we can obviously extrapolate to the Trump administration and the Charlottesville episode of 2017 and countless other things, not to mention the absolute nightmare scenario of a 2024 world When there's further anger, more polarization, and an administration that's sympathetic to the militia types that exist in this country.
And by the way, as I'm sure you've thought about before, all of the chaos we've had in recent years has been more or less in a time period of 4% unemployment.
And God forbid we get into a Great Depression like economic calamity.
So in any case, I think it is important for us to not be complacent about how history ended up turning because but for this, that or the other contingency, it could have been much worse.
So counterfactual history, alternate history really does help us become aware of these choices that all individuals have.
But to answer your question just about what strategies emerge, I mean, from in my particular chapter, I really emphasize Striking back to each of these four shows that have been very, very popular.
And did I mention already that I think that Watchmen won 11 Emmys in 2020?
They've been extremely popular.
Millions of people have been watching them.
One of the key lessons is that you need to have multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-religious coalition to fight against a common threat.
So whether it's in the nature, the makeup of the hunters who are chasing In the 1970s, Nazi war criminals have been smuggled into the U.S.
and are trying to hatch a forthright.
It's notable that among the two Holocaust survivors, or in addition to the two Holocaust survivors who were in the band of hunters led by Al Pacino, you've got a Japanese-American who's traumatized by the experience of being interned in the war.
You've got a Catholic nun.
You've got an African-American woman who was afraid of fascism appearing in her inner city neighborhood.
And they see the common things that links them, like the resistance forces in San Francisco who are fighting against the Japanese in the Man in the High Castle, like the multiracial coalition in Watchmen, whether it's, you know, Sister Night and Looking Glass, the superheroes, one of whom's black, one who's white.
And so I think it's no surprise that when you think about how today in the political world, Any number of groups, Asian Americans, Jews, LGBTQ folks, people who are hated by a variety of far-right groups, they have to be able to see past their own differences to realize that by, you know, joining up, which by the way also happened in the 1930s in many respects, especially on the left, that's one way of combating this kind of threat.
I really appreciate you saying that because I feel as if I'll just be honest, I'm going to give a talk this week to a group of atheists and one of the things that I say often when I am asked to speak at atheist gatherings is it is easy for you to gather here as atheists and to talk about religious people as folks that you think are superstitious, believe things that they shouldn't believe, irrational, whatever you might want to do.
I understand that and you're totally within your rights to do that as a group.
However, when it comes to the political moment, it seems to me important that we recognize that, yes, you know what?
I'm not a religious person, and I actually think religion is something that I am quite critical of.
But it's not going to prevent me from building a political coalition with people that want to have a multiracial, multiethnic, pluralist democracy.
And so, yes, if there are Christian mainliners, if there are Jews, if there are, you know, folks here in the Bay Area, if there are Buddhists, there are Hindus.
I mean, we have such a diverse population, then I'm going to work with them.
I'm going to find ways to build a coalition that will really combat these pressures that we're seeing.
We need to sign off.
I want to ask you just one more question, and that's that I'm somebody who's always reminding my audience that we can look for North versus South.
People always ask me, are we going to have the next civil war?
And I said, well, we can look for North versus South if you want.
People ask me, are we going to have fascism in America?
And one of my responses is, it's better to notice the little fires everywhere, because if you look for North versus South or if you look for a kind of defining moment of fascism in the United States, you may never see it, or it may come without you realizing that it was coming all along.
So I see things like new polls telling me that this high percentage of Republicans don't trust democracy and think maybe we need to think about another way.
About Orthodox Christians in the Appalachians saying, I'm openly a fascist.
About militias gaining a majority of seats in Shasta County, far northeast California.
I could go on about the ways that I think we see some of those pressures we talked about earlier building.
I'm wondering if you see those and if this is the kind of lens we might employ given the work you've done in this great new volume that you've just edited.
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I've come to understand in kind of retooling in the last few years by moving away from European and German history more into American history is that, of course, there's so many parallels between the 20s, 30s, and 40s in Europe and the United States.
But one of the huge differences is that so much of what has been ugly in American history has varied from region to region.
So at one point in time, you can be in the Jim Crow South, the North at the exact same moment looks very, very different, where you have labor over demands, again, more progressive legislation.
By the same token, if you think about the history of the Northwest and the vigilante strings of history that feed into that, and the people who, you know, white airing resistance types who retreat to Idaho and Hayden Lake, I mean, I think you can actually have two things at the same time.
You can have terrible right-wing trends, and you see this in Roe v. Wade being repealed in certain states and not in others, and life looks very different in other ways.
So my main fear, which I don't think is gonna happen, would be that America would become a unitary fascist state where all 50 states have the same government and are both in lockstep.
I think the history of racism and white supremacy and Reactionary sentiment in the country has always varied from region to region.
In all likelihood, I think you're right that this idea of civil war would probably lead to a fracturing of the states into any number of states.
And one of the all-time, you know, most popular themes in alternate history literature is that the South wins the civil war.
But very rarely does the South end up, obviously, occupying the North and subordinate the North into a Southern way of life.
Instead, it goes its own way.
And then you have the North and the South fighting for decades thereafter.
And maybe, you know, it would have been better in some respects if the South had won the Civil War and just gone off on its own and the North would have turned into its own country.
You probably would have had three or four other countries between the Southwest and the Great Lakes States.
And, you know, I'm being somewhat facetious there, but we know that it's been an unstable coalition of states for over 200 years.
And when you see the gerrymandering trends that are going on in places like North Carolina and Wisconsin, whereas at the same time you're seeing incredibly progressive movements in places like California, you know, you have to sort of be watching multiple balls in the air at all times.
So yes, I'm 100% alert to various fires.
And because we're living in a political constitutional system where the minority gets to call the shots, Minority rule is, I think, what we're most likely looking at.
But in many ways, that's what we've had for many, many decades in American history.
And I would say that, maybe on the bright side, minority rule is not the same thing as fascism.
Fascism is much more centralized statism, imposing the will on all.
You know, that's certainly a hypothetical possibility.
I wouldn't discount it for a second.
But I think from my perspective, what I want to certainly encourage is the fact that, and I'm sure your listeners are the choir here and we're not preaching anything new to them, but, you know, to absolutely be on guard for the worst case scenario.
And to vote like the worst case scenario is possible, to be involved in your local city council debates and PTA debates about whether it's something as ostensibly small scale as books being, you know, allowed in the library or not. you know, allowed in the library or not.
It all does begin at the local level.
That was certainly true in Italian fascism where, you know, local rivalries between peasants and landowners spilled into this larger violent cauldron.
I do think that...
We have to be first focused on our locality, but to realize that there are more people, I think, who want to maintain the system that guarantees pluralism for every different religion, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, only by preserving that do we coexist.
Yeah, it's wonderfully said, and I hope, if anything, these last eight years have refocused many of us on our localities, on what's happened, because the local is the national, and those things really serve to build what is, in essence, this country.
And so we're seeing that with Moms for Liberty, taking over school boards and other places.
You realize just how important the local is, because it has a dramatic effect on your children, on your neighbors' children, on a generation of people learning, having books banned, and so on.
I could talk about that forever.
I need to stop.
So I'll just say, Dr. Gavriel Rosenfeld, thank you for your time and for this work.
And before we go, can you tell folks where they might link up with you if you have more work coming out, if there are maybe some events surrounding this book or other things that you're doing?
Sure.
So the Center for Jewish History, where I've been the president for the last year, we've really vamped up or rather wrapped up our public history dimension, I would say, by creating something called the Jewish Public History Forum, which brings scholars from all disciplines by creating something called the Jewish Public History Forum, which brings scholars from all disciplines to talk about issues that have relevance for Jews and non-Jews, both at
So we just concluded a major symposium called Fighting Fascism that dealt with the ways in which Jews and their sort of American allies in the 30s and 40s in the U.S. combated fascism and how the struggle continued in Europe as well, all the way up to the present day.
We had major scholars like Federico Finkelstein and Ruth Ben-Giad in five panels.
They're all up now on YouTube.
They can be watched.
We have a major symposium also on anti-Semitism, which will take place in late January of 2020.
That can easily be seen through any number of streaming options.
It's also something we're doing live in person.
So yeah, if you pay attention to our cjh.org website, you'll see countless great programs that we are sponsoring, as well as our five institutional partners.
And on that note, yeah, let's just always be aware of the ways in which we can enrich ourselves through public history education.
That's wonderful.
Thank you for sharing all of that.
As always, friends, you can find us at StraightWhiteJC, StraightWhiteAmericanJesus.com.
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Thankful to all of you who listen and support us.
Check out our month's recommended book list, and in November, which will come out next week, you will see this book, Fascism in America, on our recommended book list, so you can buy it there.
Look in the show notes for that link.
Other than that, we'll be back later this week with, it's in the code in the weekly roundup, but for now we'll say thanks for being here.
