Fascism's Roots in America

Last week one of the U.S.’s leading scholars and thinkers on fascism announced his intention to leave his country, which he said was “tilting toward authoritarian dictatorship.” Jason Stanley will be leaving Yale and taking up a post at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs. 

Stanley has been warning about the threat and rise of fascism in the United States since Donald Trump’s first term – his work notes the throughline between American Jim Crow and the Third Reich, fascism’s reliance on the identification of internal enemies, and why fascism rests upon the promise of restoring a mythic past. 

Stanley is a longtime professor and his latest book is titled ‘Erasing History, how fascists rewrite the past to control the future.’ He joins the show to discuss his decision to come to Canada as an academic refugee, and situate fascism in the broader continuum of American history.

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