‘Fascism Comes to America’ Review- It’s Always Happening Here

The contrast with communism is striking. “The United States routed the fascists militarily but not the communists,” he writes. “Yet fascism has remained alive in American
imaginations long after its eclipse in 1945.” Movies reveal popular sentiments in ways policy analysis does not. Hollywood’s use of farce to portray fascism illustrates a problem at the heart of this book. Hollywood did produce a few movies that mocked communism. One was “The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!” (1966), a comedy starring Alan Arkin about the misadventures of a Soviet submarine crew stalled off the coast of New England. Another was “Red Heat” (1988), with Arnold Schwarzenegger (Soviet) and Jim Belushi (American) as “buddy-cops” catching a Georgian drug kingpin. Such communist-based farces vanished once the Cold War ended.

The opposite was true for fascism. During the days of Mussolini and Hitler, the Marx Brothers (“Duck Soup,” 1933) and Charlie Chaplin (“The Great Dictator,” 1940) poked fun at fascism and succeeded at the box office. After the defeat of the Axis powers, fascism remained an object of derision. For instance, Billy Wilder’s “A Foreign Affair” (1948) featured Marlene Dietrich as a former mistress of a high-ranking Nazi whose allure, Mr. Kuklick writes, “hinted at the bizarre erotic possibilities that National Socialist women” had for American men. “Stalag 17” (1953) rendered Nazi soldiers as “central fools” inside a POW camp. The success of that movie paved the way for one of the strangest successes in American television history, “Hogan’s Heroes,” which aired from 1965 to 1971. Jewish actors who had fled Nazi Germany played Col. Klink and Sgt. Schultz. Only two decades removed, these fictional soldiers were little more than hapless stooges.

Midcentury historians writing shortly after the war’s end, Mr. Kuklick shows, didn’t see fascism around every corner. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., in “The Vital Center” (1949), and Richard Hofstadter, in “The Age of Reform” (1955), contrasted America’s liberal polity with extremes of right and left. Both advocated what now looks like a pompous and naive consensus liberalism, but neither categorized politics outside the mainstream as fascist.

Their reticence didn’t last. The Vietnam War and the crisis of Watergate stoked American historians’ obsession with fascism. A younger generation of scholars looked back to the 1930s and ’40s to find parallels with contemporary America. For them, Mr. Kuklick writes, fascism was “a political expletive” not “an investigative concept.” American policies on Native Americans conformed to definitions of genocide, in some historians’ judgments. George Washington, in another study, qualified as an instigator of fascism. Jacksonian democracy’s “völkisch” dimensions adumbrated the Nazis. Theodore Roosevelt’s imperialist foreign policy leaned fascist.

Intimations of fascism persisted among the creative class and journalists. Tony Kushner’s play “A Bright Room Called Day” (1985) compared Ronald Reagan to Hitler. The 1993 movie “Falling Down,” starring Michael Douglas as a former engineer for the defense industry, explicitly evoked America’s “fascist flavor” when the psychologically unstable protagonist shoots a gun-store owner. Meanwhile, conservative writers like Jonah Goldberg, in “Liberal Fascism” (2008), and Dinesh D’Souza, in “The Big Lie” (2017), used fascism to explain the American left.

It didn’t take much prodding, after Donald Trump’s election in 2016, for fascism’s explanatory power to grow. Two scholars who refrained from characterizing the United States as fascist, Columbia University’s Robert Paxton and Yale’s Timothy Snyder, stood out for independent judgment. Mr. Paxton’s essay “The Five Stages of Fascism” (1998) described political processes that escaped ideological conformity. Mr. Snyder’s “Bloodlands” (2010) recognized important affinities between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Yet after the 2016 election Mr. Snyder wrote essays and books about a fascist takeover, and after the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Paxton a piece in Newsweek headlined “I’ve Hesitated to Call Trump a Fascist. Until Now.”

Readers may need whiskey to accompany that popcorn when they come to Mr. Kuklick’s brief excursus on American government and the Founders’ “agony” over democracy. He surmises that Americans’ obsession with fascism is the flip side of a collective inability to reckon with the calamitous gap between the Founders and contemporary America. The “Constitution’s republicanism” has given way to democracy, the very polity the Founders hoped and planned to avoid. Repeating “democracy” as a benediction and “fascism” as an epithet obscures the contradiction between American reverence for the Founders and ignoring the limits they placed on democracy. We “are estranged from them, and they ought to be strange to us,” Mr. Kuklick warns. The author’s point is simply that “an unthinking dedication to democracy” prevents Americans from learning from the Founders or acknowledging changes in their government.

His final observations about Mr. Trump may point the way forward. For Mr. Kuklick, the former president fails to qualify as a fascist because of an isolationist (not expansionist) foreign policy and domestic programs that favored federalism and localism (not nationalism). Moreover, Mr. Trump had “only modest electoral support” and was “disliked by well over half the voting public.” None of this was true of Hitler and Nazi Germany. The author could well have added that Germany’s intellectual class praised Hitler in contrast to American intellectuals who despised Mr. Trump. Mr. Kuklick thinks contempt for Mr. Trump is justified. But calling him a fascist, he rightly insists, is an awful way to express it.

Mr. Hart teaches history at Hillsdale College and is the author of “Benjamin Franklin: Cultural Protestant” (2021).