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2min chapter
American Fascism: Then and Now
TALKING POLITICS
The Myth of the Civil War
One thing that I think almost everyone associates with European fascism is the centrality of antisemitism. But by that point, it's 70 years earlier. So it's a much more mythologized event. It's not in people's living memory, except, you know, very old people. Do we think of antisemitic as in some sense, definitional of fascism? Because a lot depends on how far we can push the term.
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Speaker 2
But by that point, it's 70 years earlier. So it's a much more mythologized event. It's not in people's living memory, except, you know, very old people.
Speaker 6
So it's not this kind of active incitement to reclaim the sense of a of your own former glory, but rather of a fantasy of a former glory. So it's a bit more attenuated, much more mythologized, but it absolutely works in the same way that there was this sense that, you know, make America great again, right, that there was this imaginary time when America was a homogenous place where everybody lived in harmony. And basically, there weren't all of these troublesome, you know, black and immigrant and native communities causing problems, right? And so this very, very simplistic fantasy
Speaker 2
that the Civil War ruined everything for white people, basically.
Speaker 4
Talking politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books. I'm going to ask this to both of you, maybe Helen first. You can choose who wants to come in. One thing that I think almost everyone associates with European fascism is the centrality of antisemitism. And of course, particularly in the case of Nazism and antisemitism, and it's very very touched on it, is a big part of the American story too. And it is right up to today. Helen, when you think about how to characterize fascism, does antisemitism have to be its essential feature in your mind? I mean, it's one of those, another difficult question. Do we think of antisemitism as in some sense, definitional of fascism? Because a lot depends on the answer to that as to how far we can push the term.
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