Heather Cox Richardson:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is Now & Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman. Today we’re going to talk about a topic that in some ways has been in the news and in the public forum a lot in recent months, and I suppose even years, but not in a way that really makes a lot of sense. And by that I mean fascism. There are so many words that get tossed back and forth in political argument these days, and obviously we talked in the past about critical race theories having kind of a buzzword component to it. Fascism is another one, woke is another one, Communism, socialism. There are all of these words that get thrown around kind of deliberately without much of a meaning attached, and it’s the fact that they’re so amorphous that makes them so handy. They’re just kind of used as a generic slur.

But what we want to talk about today is essentially getting past that and get to the actual meaning of fascism, what it is, what it has been, how it connects in various ways to American history, and what all of that can do to help us better understand how people are using it today and what that might actually suggest about the current moment. I just want to say that we’re going to be quoting a number of people in today’s episode and some of the language, some of what we will be quoting will be disturbing. We were disturbed, Heather and I were disturbed in reading some of it. And we just want to say that so that you understand whatever we’re quoting today, we’re not saying it because heaven forbid we agree with it. We’re saying it because it represents clearly what fascism is. And for that reason, it needs to be exposed.

And I’m going to start where it’s a fine place to start, which is just with a really basic dictionary definition of fascism. And this is from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, which says, Fascism is a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I think it would also help when we think about what fascism is, to think about where it came from in its specific moment. Because one of the things that I want to get to when we talk about the larger meaning of fascism in American history right now is the trajectory that gave us this kind of a thought line, if you will, in American history. But fascism itself is born of a particular moment, the concept of fascism, and it comes from a really logical place in the 1920s. And the place it comes from is that Benito Mussolini in Italy, who had been a socialist, had the same problem that so many socialists had in the early 20th century. And that is that theoretically if the workers were accurately informed about the way the economy worked, it would only be a question of time until they would band together and take over the means of production and put in place a new socialist government.

But the reality was that that never worked that way, and so we got from that initial idea about where socialism would go, a number of different theories based now in what we would call Marxism about why the people don’t band together and take over the means of production. There’s a lot of really interesting threads that came out of that. But for people like Mussolini, he was enormously frustrated by the fact that people didn’t seem to get that if they worked together, they could take over the means of production. And he, like many others at the time, began to think about, well, maybe the problem is that people who work within a worldview can’t see it critically from outside.

There’s some of us who can see things critically from outside. He’s not the only one thinking that way. And then people like him looked at how enormously efficient the Italian government in his case got during World War I. And that sparked something in the sense that most people before World War I had not seen what a modern economy could do and what a modern government could do. And he looked at that and said, “Wait a minute. If we actually took over a government like that, those of us who really understand the way the world works, we really could weld together the people into a juggernaut, if you will.” And he began to theorize what that might look like.

The reason I wanted to emphasize that in this moment is that most people when they think about fascism jump to Hitler because Hitler of course, followed Mussolini, literally both in time and in ideas. And because of the extraordinary damage that Hitler wrought when they hear the word fascism, they associate it with the Nazis in Germany during World War II and before that, and they seem to see it frozen in amber. Where the actual idea of fascism comes from a specific historical moment, but it doesn’t come from nowhere. Mussolini doesn’t arrive from Mars and say, “Here I have a new idea.” He’s picking up a lot of trends in world history and putting a theory behind them.

And that’s kind of my thing today is I want to emphasize that fascism is a strand of thought, not simply if somebody calls you a fascist, they’re saying, “You’re just like Hitler in 1939,” because that I think is really easy to refute. But the larger idea of fascism of a political and economic, religious and social system that concentrates power among a very few people and ultimately in a strong man is one that certainly in America we’ve been dealing with for a very long time.

Joanne Freeman:

I want to add on to your point, Heather, about tossing off the word fascism and people immediately assume it means Nazi. When you’re tossing around the word Nazi, in a sense you’re saying that whatever’s happening is foreign, it’s not ours, it happened somewhere else. There were bad people somewhere else and now you’re acting like the bad people from somewhere else. That does also a disservice to this moment because the bundle of ideas and practices bound up in fascism, as you just said, Heather, they’re not foreign. They have evolved in different times, in different places, in different ways, but we have to own their roots in our past if we actually want to reckon with what’s going on in our present.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to go through some of the very basic pieces of fascism as we now understand it and recognize that central to the idea of fascism is exactly what Mussolini identified in his own approach to politics, that he thought some people were better than others. And if you believe, in fact, that some people are better than others, it of course logically gets you to the point that one person is better than all those other people. It logically takes you to the idea that you’re going to be ruled by a strong man.

Joanne Freeman:

I think there’s another component to that, and that is that those people are entitled to power and should be able to keep it. It’s not only the superiority, it’s about power and keeping and hanging onto power and not being challenged in your right to hold that power. So that in and of itself, it is antidemocratic.

Heather Cox Richardson:

If you are entitled to rule, why? You’re entitled to rule because you are following the right rules of the universe. And those rules are often religious. They are based in race, they are based in ethnic rules. And one of the things that Hannah Arendt wrote about when she wrote about totalitarianism, which is a place that fascism can go, is she pointed out that by emphasizing these what are perceived to be eternal rules, it dictates the power of the people at the top. Because if you follow those rules, you are promised paradise if you will. You’re promised a great future. If you don’t follow those rules, if you don’t keep your strong man in power, if you break those eternal rules, you’re going to hell in a hand basket.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, you are no longer the us, you’re the them and bad, bad things happen to the them under any kind of authoritarian regime.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And that’s the other piece of fascism that I think people turn to first when they think about it, is the way that you get ordinary people to sign on to this system is by warning them that other is undermining their chances, their nation’s chances of becoming this super nation, if you will. You create an other, and we’re all familiar with how effectively the Nazis said, “It doesn’t really matter who the other is, so long as we galvanize people against it.”

Joanne Freeman:

And they’re identifiable so that you can gang people together and pit them against the them, and you can meld together an us grounded on the power of your patriotic hate of the other.

Heather Cox Richardson:

One of the things that Arendt talks about is how people are willing to do that in a society that’s been destabilized either through culture or religion or politics or economics, because they might not have been involved in government before that or might not have cared that much about stuff. But this gives them an opportunity to be heroes. That if you’re part of this juggernaut, you too can be a hero even if your heroism consists only of dying for the cause.

Joanne Freeman:

Or just following the rules and being a good fill in the blank, whatever country you’re talking about. If patriotism is defined by following certain rules because they are for the best of the country, then following those rules is patriotic and attacking people who break those rules is patriotic, is good. You can see emotionally as well as politically where this kind of thinking leads.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And then when the leader turns on those people and urges you to turn on that other, there’s a psychological component of the worse you are to that group of people, the more you are welded to that leader. And that’s something that Eric Hoffer, who wrote in America in the 1950s, looked at a lot, is how paradoxically you would think that when a leader starts behaving in really extraordinary ways, people would back away and say, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, this isn’t what I signed up for.” And the reality is the worst the leader behaves to a marginalized population, the stronger the adherence to that leader gets, not the weaker. Very hard to break that because the worse somebody treats a marginalized population, the more they have to say, “Well, they deserved it. This is the way it should be.”

Joanne Freeman:

It’s the ways in which politics, this kind of politics, fascist politics, relies on yokes in shapes, warps and deploys this kind of emotion, this kind of extreme hate. That’s part of what makes it so powerful.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and then once you’ve got the population ready to join together against an other, how do you get them to move in a certain direction? And the answer to that is you put them together in military formation, you tie them together, you weld them into an organization that is militaristic because it’s highly regimented. People behave as they’re told, or that is regimented in an industrial system. Fascism ties together not only this emotional thing we’re talking about and the relationship between a strong man and ordinary people who want to be heroes against an other, however it’s been defined, but then the government brings them together into a highly regimented military formation and industrial formation, so you can’t dissent from that because again, you’re going to be hurting the state organization if you say, “Hey, wait a minute, I don’t want to salute like that because that’s actually an attack on that organization.”

But so now you’ve got this structure, this social structure and political structure, and you’re adding to it high regimentation of a military organization and you’re going to tie into it the economy and the economy is going to be run by again some of those people who are better than others and who work closely with the strong man leader. You end up with this elite both politically and economically tied to the strong man and running both the military and the economy.

Joanne Freeman:

And think about the sleight of hand underneath what you just said, Heather. Is that you’re welding the people into a united force in whatever way you choosed them to be welded. But as you’re doing that, you’re giving them the impression that they are being empowered, that on some level they now have more power than they’ve ever had before. There’s an individualistic component that it must feel like to people in that kind of regime, “Look at this, I feel powerful in a way I never felt before.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

Even though you as an individual have actually lost all your power, you are still seeing that organization that you’re part of exercising power over people you have learned to hate.

Joanne Freeman:

And for all of these reasons, you can see the ugly bond of steel running throughout fascist movements because they’re linking hate and politics, creating a logic of hate and then using that to keep certain people in power.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And then not always, but often there is an element of religion involved, particularly of course in 20th century fascism of Christianity. The idea again that you’re following an eternal rule and the eternal rule in that case is Christianity. T those elements together make up the political theory of fascism as it was articulated in the 1920s and played out in the 1930s and ’40s in Europe, and to some degree in America.

It’s worth emphasizing that once this theory is in place, killing your opposition is not considered a bad thing. It’s considered a good thing. In June 1924 when Mussolini consolidated his power, and he did so when his pro fascist groups killed the socialist opposition leader, he actually goes in front of parliament and he takes responsibility for the killing. And he goes in front of parliament and he says, “I declare before this chamber, before the world and before God, that I personally assume the whole political, moral and historical responsibility for what has occurred. I declare that if the fascists are an association of malefactors, then I am the head of that association of malefactors.”

Joanne Freeman:

That’s an amazing statement.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Statements like this always jump out at me when I think about where our politics are today and the degree to which people in 2022 have accepted as normal things that they would’ve seen in 2014 as absolutely unthinkable. And you and I have talked about this privately before, when people defended to me the idea of putting immigrant children in cages, to me, the ship had sailed.

Joanne Freeman:

The ship has sailed, and even more so was when I said… Silly me, I said something on Twitter about it just in a sense of it’s horrible to separate children from parents. And I was attacked. I was pounced on. I was called all kinds of names when so much has been normalized and we’re so accustomed to hearing and seeing all kinds of extreme things that no one seems to stand out anymore. You can also see how any kind of extreme movement has an easier time sliding into place when people are acclimated and ready to accept things in the way that we are now in a very different way from where we might have been 10 years ago.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And what you just said, Joanne, brings up one of the other crucial pieces of fascism, and that is control of the way people think about things. Mussolini said about his world, “The fascist conception of the state is all embracing. Outside of it, no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, fascism is totalitarian and the fascist state, a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values, interprets, develops and potentiates the whole life of a people. Fascism is a religious conception in which man is seen in his imminent relationship with a superior law and with an objective will that transcends the particular individual and raises him to conscious membership of a spiritual society.”

Joanne Freeman:

You know what’s striking about that passage is the way in which it’s basically saying fascism is this all encompassing belief that you are a member of a particular society and that there’s a superior set of laws. It’s describing something that, objectively speaking, is ugly, but it’s talking about a spiritual society, a religious conception. It’s making it sound as though it’s an elevation if you are moving towards this fascist conception of the state. It’s talking about all embracing in a good way, not in the negative way that if you have some detachment from it, you might see.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And the other piece of that is that because you are as a fascist putting in place eternal rules, you can rewrite your own history to prove what the rules are. You get from that idea the rewriting of history in such a way that it supports the movement of the day. And it was very clear that Germany especially rewrote a lot of its history to make it look as if the Nazis were following some traditional paths. But it’s also a hallmark of any society that is trying to do this. Then the great example of this of course, is George Orwell’s discussion of Winston Smith in 1984. People forget where we get the term memory hole, but Winston Smith’s job in 1984 was to rewrite history and throw the history that had been usable yesterday down the memory hole. His job was to rewrite history, to keep big brother in power.

Joanne Freeman:

To keep big brother in power, and to create a glorious golden past that can be held as a shining symbol of where people are headed towards now under this fascist regime. History that’s complex, history that acknowledges flaws and problems and sins and failings, that does not serve well as a golden glorious past to be seeking in the present. That does not serve the function that a fascist regime would like history to serve. As historians, we’re saying this, but it’s a way of understanding that sometimes the rewriting of history isn’t simply a matter of what we might now toss out into the world and say culture wars, it’s a lot bigger than that.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And writing certain people out of our history and writing certain people into our history as more important than they otherwise were is a way to cement a certain group of people in power, but it’s also one of the reasons that historians are always saying, “Wait, wait, what about… ” Or, “No, that’s not right.” It’s not that we want people to actually value necessarily our work so much as if you toss out our actual history some people get remembered and some people get forgotten, and we end up rewriting what actually happened, which always serves the people in power.

Joanne Freeman:

Rewriting what happened to serve the people in power and removing the actual roots of how we got to where we are.

If you’re looking for solutions, if you’re trying to understand where we are and how to get out of it, a past that is stripped of all of the complexity is not going to be very useful in offering you that kind of a ladder, a step ladder out of a difficult moment.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I started out, Joanne, by saying I was always uncomfortable with the idea that fascism has gotten so closely associated in the United States with the 1930s, especially, and the 1940s in Germany, because people feel like it’s not ours. That somehow if you say something is fascist, they’re like, “Oh, you’re calling me a Nazi.” But American history, from the way we have outlined it, has a lot of these same themes in it, and I think it’s pretty important to identify what they are.

By the 1840s and then the 1850s enslavers in the American South are already getting rid of the idea that all men are created equal. They’re willing to toss that idea overboard, and they start to talk about how some people are better than others.

Joanne Freeman:

One person who was very, very clear in stating this was a southerner, I guess you could call him a proto fascist, pro-slavery individual social theorist named George Fitzhugh. Now Fitzhugh wrote a couple of works in the 1850s, and he’s saying pretty bluntly what we’re saying here. We hear so much all the time like dog whistles. There’s no dog whistling here. This is just out and out saying things very bluntly about the lack of equality. He wrote a book called Sociology of the South in 1854, and in Sociology of the South, he says, “Men are not born entitled to equal rights. It would be far nearer the truth to say that some were born with saddles on their backs and others booted and spurred to ride them, and the writing does them good.”

Now, what’s striking about that quote is he’s flipping one of Thomas Jefferson’s last letters on its head. Jefferson writes… Might be his actual last letter, “That we are living in times where now people are realizing that men are not born with saddles on their backs and with others booted and spurred to ride them and that people have rights.” And here is Fitzhugh saying, “Oh, no, no. The opposite is true.” People are born with saddles on their backs and that’s precisely where they belong and it serves them good if they know their place.

He goes on in a similar vein in another work written in 1857 called Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters. “We do not agree with the authors of the Declaration of Independence that governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed. All governments must originate in force and be continued by force.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, the Black Codes of the 1850s and the 1860s don’t survive the Civil War. Immediately after the war, white unreconstructed southerners try to put in place first the Black Codes and then an economic system that continues to separate Black Americans from their white neighbors. By the 1880s with the Jim Crow laws falling into place, the legal establishment of different casts of people in the American South, and soon we’re going to talk about the American West, actually inspired somebody you’ve heard of.

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah. These reconstruction era and post reconstruction era Jim Crow, both customs and regulations in the United States inspired Adolph Hitler. Now, we’ve talked before in our September episode, Immigration defining us and them, about the fact that Hitler praised America’s 1924 Immigration Act, but he had more to say about white control of America, basically saying that the continuance of control of the United States by white Americans was admirable. He said, “In North America the Teutonic element which has kept its racial stock pure and did not mix it with other racial stock, has come to dominate the American continent and will remain master of it as long as that element does not fall a victim to the habit of adulterating its blood.”

As America’s preparation for World War II begins, it’s clear that the United States and Germany are going to be opposed to each other. Hitler now comes out with a very different statement about the United States. He says, “I don’t see much future for the Americans. It’s a decayed country and they have their racial problem and the problem of social inequalities. My feelings against Americanism are feelings of hatred and deep repugnance. Everything about the behavior of American society reveals that it’s half Judaised and the other half Negrofied. How can one expect a state like that to hold together?” Hitler is praising the not quite cutified but baked in racism initially in American society and then he backs away when he sees that there might actually be change.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Hitler turned against the idea of Americanism during the war because he believed it was a mongrel population fighting him, or at least he characterized it that way. But in fact, the Nazis did look at America’s baked in anti-black racism as inspiration for some of their own laws. In a book called Hitler’s American Model, the United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, law school professor from Yale named James Q Whitman found a series of transcripts from a meeting in June 1934 in which leading Nazi politicians and jurists met to create a theory behind the Nuremberg Laws. And the Nuremberg Laws were designed to create a legal basis to separate out German Jews and deny them different kinds of employment, and to ban intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews.

And at the meeting one of the leading Nazi judges, a man named Roland Freizler, explained how he and his colleagues had been inspired by American racism, but they were concerned that Americans did not have the same laws against Jews. At that same meeting, there was a doctor there, a Nazi doctor named Eric Mobius, and he and Freizler talked about this imposition of racial laws in America and in Germany. And Dr. Mobius said to Freizler, “I am reminded of something an American said to us recently. He explained, ‘We do the same thing you are doing, but why do you have to say it so explicitly in your laws?’ And Freizler answered, ‘Well, wait a minute here. The Americans put it in their own laws even more explicitly than we do.'”

Again, looking at the Jim Crow laws of the 1920s at that point. Another participant there at the Nuremberg Laws meeting was Heinrich Krieger. He was a Nazi law scholar who had been an exchange student at the University of Arkansas, and he wrote a series of articles on race law for American law journals. And when he did so he returned to Germany with a new understanding of how racist statutes could operate effectively, and he talked to the meeting about the laws in, at that point, the American West against intermarriage of different races.

He said, “Violations of these marriage prohibitions are threatened with both fines and imprisonment. Statues that provide for both forms of punishment sometimes permit both to be imposed, sometimes threaten them in the alternative. There’s a corresponding variation in the grading of the offense. For example, misdemeanor in Nevada, felony in Tennessee, felony in Maryland, and in the measure of punishment.” And of course in Arkansas, he’s looking not only at laws against intermarriage between white Americans and Black Americans, but the American West more generally had laws that actively graded different kinds of ethnic minorities and established rules for who could marry whom. Much more fully than just the ones that we tend to think about when we think about the race laws of the early 20th century.

One of the other pieces of American history that inspired the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s was America’s treatment of indigenous peoples. From the time he was young, Hitler was really interested in stories of indigenous Americans. His favorite author was Karl May. May was an Austrian born novelist who wrote adventures in a series of novels that is all about the interactions between white settlers in the American West and the indigenous tribes with whom they come in contact. May had never gone to America, but he wrote over 70 adventure stories.

His best known was Winnetou which was published in three volumes between 1876 and 1893, and talked about the friendship of Old Shatterhand, who was an American pioneer of German descent, and Winnetou, the noble Red Indian, as he was known, Chief. Hitler liked this book so much, he had 300,000 copies of Winnetou printed and delivered to German soldiers.

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah. Now, when we were preparing for this episode, this next fact that I want to mention in a sense it’s obvious, but it took my breath away anyway, A biographer of Adolf Hitler named John Toland talks about Hitler’s familiarity with aspects of American indigenous history. And Toland writes, “Hitler was very interested in the way the Indian population had rapidly declined due to epidemics and starvation when the United States government forced them to live on reservations. He thought the American governments forced migrations of the Indians over great distances to barren reservation land was a deliberate policy of extermination.

Just how much Hitler took from the American example of the destruction of the Indian nations is hard to say. However, frightening parallels can be drawn. For some time, Hitler considered deporting the Jews to a large reservation in the Lubin area where their numbers would be reduced through starvation and disease.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

It’s also worth pointing out that he and other Nazi leaders often referred to Jews, to Pols and to Ukrainians as Indians.

Joanne Freeman:

We said earlier that it’s tempting to think fascist means Nazi, means other, means, not us, but what we’re talking about here is Adolf Hitler himself looking to the United States and being inspired by the United States in forming some of his ideas and some of his policies. What we’re talking about, if we move beyond the actual word fascism and talk about what constitutes it, what composes it, we’re talking about its roots in the United States. We’re talking about the fact that you can understand aspects of America’s past that might contribute in the future to a kind of behavior that leans in this direction.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And yet what we haven’t really identified in what the Nazis were looking at in America, is a strong connection between business and the government. And yet that is also in our past. And it was something that Franklin Delano Roosevelt often spoke of when he talked about the rise of fascism in America as an example of the relationship between private business and centralized business getting far too powerful and having far too much of a say in the US government. Because of course that’s the fear when you have a strong centralized economy, is that it’s only a question of time until those people either buy up the government or work so closely with the government that essentially the government and business work hand in hand.

In April 1938, in a message to Congress about curbing monopolies, he said, “The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism, ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”

Of all that we have talked about today, Joanne, I find I think the FDR quotation the most illuminating for where we are in America today. The idea that the concentration of economic and political power in FDR’s view anyway was a devastating threat to democracy.

Joanne Freeman:

Because it placed all kinds of power in a very few hands.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Of all the things we’ve talked about, that’s the one that just jumps out to a political and economic historian as could we not say that about the present?

Joanne Freeman:

On this day after Elon Musk bought Twitter. And the thing is talking about these powers of various kinds being given to very few hands and being given to them with seemingly little way to remove that kind of power. In many ways, that kind of thinking is obvious as it is it’s worth saying, is the direct opposite of democratic thinking. Democracy, if you think about it, is about competition. It’s about clashing views, it’s about compromises, it’s about contests, it’s about change and an element of unpredictability.

Democracy relies on the idea, however flawed we might be in carrying it out, that the people have the privilege and the responsibility for giving power and taking it away. Everything that we’ve been talking about today in that sense is not just undemocratic but anti-democratic.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I’m not going to ask you to take a stand on whether or not we are currently in a fascist moment in America, although maybe we’ll get there, but it does seem like it would be worth highlighting some of the things that have happened recently that are disturbing to those of us who study these movements. And we’ve both talked about some stuff, but there’s some things out there right now that are especially troubling.

Joanne Freeman:

And there has certainly been an onslaught, a focused loud, not contradicted antisemitism from loud public figures. As a matter of fact, the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks antisemitic behavior nationwide, found 2,717 antisemitic incidents in 2021, which is a 34% increase from the year before. And now just in the recent past, it’s off the charts just in the last few weeks. One of the most famous antisemitic comments of course came from Kanye West who was suspended from Twitter for saying in a post that he was going to go, “Death Con 3 on Jewish people.”

And in response to that antisemitic groups hold that quote and began using it in building on it. For example, in LA, on an LA overpass, I think above the 405 freeway, an antisemitic Group hung banners down, and one of them said, “Kanye is right about the Jews.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

One of the things that jumps out to me about this moment in terms of the antisemitism, and I wonder what you think of this, is that the right wing in America has made it very clear for those of us watching for a long time that they believe some people were better than others, makers and takers and all that. But really we have had the overt construction of that since at least the summer of 2017 with the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the continuing language about Black Americans and disabled Americans, migrants, all the things that the usual marginalized populations that have become the targets for those on the right.

But the extraordinary rise of antisemitism right here before this election, and I want to see what you think of this because I am not a historian of antisemitism specifically, but I am a student of politics, and what this has said to me is that this is an overt attempt of the American right to link to the Nazis. This is a pathway directly to say to people in their base, “We’re not dancing around this any longer. We are embracing the same ethnic hatreds as the Nazis did, that we are deliberately trying to take on that mantle of German fascism.”

Joanne Freeman:

That’s really interesting. I hadn’t even gone that far. My reasoning about what was happening now partly had to do with the nature of the Jews as a target at moments like the one that we’re in where there’s unrest or the economic instability or whatever, that there’s always racism, there’s always white supremacy. The Jews stand out as a target because they appear to be a tight group that’s cohesive in some way, that has their own weird beliefs. They deal with each other, they’re in enclosed communities, they close other people out. Seemingly, what you hear now in a lot of the antisemitic comments going around is that there’s some kind of network or conspiracy. The Jews control everything.

Attacking Jews, antisemitism is perfectly suited if you’re trying to target strategic hate with a seeming legitimacy. There’s a legitimacy, or a seeming legitimacy, to targeting people who seem powerful and different and weird. They deny the divinity of Jesus. They are off on their own. If there’s conspiracy thinking going on, the Jews fit right into that as well. To me, that’s what I’ve been thinking about this moment is, wow, that’s traditionally speaking, in hundreds and hundreds of years, that’s part of the function that the Jews have served. They always serve as that kind of target at moments like the present.

The fact that we’re seeing the spike in antisemitism, that’s what I attributed it to, but it links right with what you said, Heather, in that making it that kind of target at this moment in this direct way is making a statement. I would just add onto that that attacking Jews in a sense, or at least in the way that they’re being attacked, attacking Jews, is attacking people with power. And so also at this moment, for that to be a prime advertising point, “Look at these people. They have power. We need to attack them. They don’t belong,” among people who in many ways are trying to erode and overturn a political system. That fits in quite well.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah, that might even be more of a accurate way to think about it, that this is part of the whole project of tearing down traditional society and they are seen as part of that traditional society.

Joanne Freeman:

As part of the power holders.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Part of the power holders. That’s right. It is worth pointing out as well that the Republican Party has changed dramatically in this moment, at least in terms of what they are avowing in public. And that is that the Republican Party, as it was reconstituted under Ronald Reagan, talked a lot about getting rid of the power of the state, getting rid of government regulation and getting rid of taxes and getting rid of the social safety net and making the state much smaller.

Today’s Republicans, MAGA Republicans as President Joe Biden has called them, are talking about a strong state. They’re once again talking about using the state to impose their will on others, and they’re not just talking about the economy at all. A certain of the Republican leaders are talking about using that strong state to impose religious views, to impose social views, and crucially for what we have been talking about, to impose their own version of American history on our youth, if you will.

Joanne Freeman:

For example, a recent pretty controversial essay by John Davidson, the political editor of the right wing outlet, The Federalist, pretty much said the quiet part out loud, and a number of people have highlighted this including our friend Will Bunch, who was recently on this in an episode of Now & Then. This is just a little bit of a quote from that essay, “The Conservative Project has failed and conservatives need to forge a new political identity that reflects our revolutionary moment. Put bluntly, if conservatives want to save the country, they are going to have to rebuild and in a sense refound it and that means getting used to the idea of wielding power, not despising it. Why? Because accommodation or compromise with the left is impossible. The left will only stop when conservatives stop them, which means conservatives will have to discard, outdated and irrelevant notions about small government. The government will have to become in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life, and in some cases a blunt instrument indeed.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

An essay that could have come straight from the 1920s or the 1930s.

Joanne Freeman:

Absolutely, and it truly, it’s so in your face. This for all of those reasons, this is the precise moment when we need to rise above the words. We need to rise above the word fascism and we need to look at precisely what’s happening. All of the things we talked about today, obviously in one way or another, we’re talking about them because they tie to the present in some way and with what we’re seeing. It’s important that we see the nature of what’s happening, that we see how the Republican Party or what was once the Republican Party, is changing, is standing for different things, is making strong points in a different way than they might have in the recent past. And that all of that means something. Throwing around the word fascism, as much as that’s a buzzword that has a real power behind it, let’s be sure that we look underneath that rock to see exactly what’s happening in today’s politics.