I SPOTTED THIS in the window of Indigo Bridge Bookstore (rest in power, Indigo Bridge!) last March, and a quick scan of the table of contents--Corey Robin! Pankaj Mishra! Robert Paxton!--ensured that I paid my $28.99, plus sales tax, within the next three minutes.
I am a pushover for this sort of thing. I am also reading David Corn's American Psychosis and John Ganz's When the Clock Broke, as well as dispatches from the front lines by Rick Perlstein, Fintan O'Toole, Ezra Klein...I can't leave this sort of thing alone.
Steinmetz-Jenkins gathers a number of interesting takes on the question of whether comparisons of Trumpism to fascism are valid. Some answer yes, some answer no; Robert Paxton answered "no" before January 6 and "yes" afterward. Everyone has something interesting to say. For me, besides the pieces by Robin, Mishra, and Paxton, the perspectives of Sarah Churchwell, Udi Greenberg, Jason Stanley, and Kathleen Belew were especially illuminating.
"No" answers typically see some crucial difference between 1930s model and what Trump (or Modi, or Orban, or Meloni) is pushing. Churchwell has a succinct riposte:
American fascist energies today are different from 1930s European fascism, but that doesn't mean they're not fascist; it means they're not European and it's not the 1930s.
So, no uniforms, no fulminating about the USSR, no rallies staged by Albert Speer or films made by Leni Reifenstahl...but plenty of white supremacy, plenty of willingness to garrote majority rule and subvert constitutions, plenty of toxic masculinity, plenty of threatened and actual violence.
Steinmetz-Jenkins opens up the question helpfully with (1) a "Global Perspectives" section that reminds us the phenomenon is by no means confined to the United States and (2) a "Classic Texts" section with attempts by Reinhold Niebuhr, Leon Trotsky, and Hannah Arendt to understand 1930s fascism as it was occurring. But, what, no Georges Bataille?
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