by Max McCoy

Why are Americans increasingly seduced by fascism?

That’s the question I pondered for this, my 100th opinion essay for the Kansas Reflector, a milestone (or perhaps millstone) that invites deep contemplation of where we’ve been as a country in the last four years and where we might be headed.

My first piece appeared July 26, 2020, during the inaugural summer of COVID. It was about a 22-year-old high school teacher — just a kid himself, really — who had enlisted in the Army and within weeks died of influenza at Fort Riley during the 1918 pandemic. It was a column that made connections between history and current events, something I’ve done often since and which the Reflector’s opinion editor, Clay Wirestone, has dubbed “late-breaking history.”

It’s a fair name for what I do and a description I now claim, with Wirestone’s permission. I’ve been doing it now for a century of Sundays. From Fern Meek’s death from influenza to the rise of homegrown Nazi sympathizers to a political hack pushing junk medicine who nearly became governor, there have been plenty of historical connections to be made. Even my edgier stuff, about the Confederate-flag fliers and violent white supremacists, has had ample historical context. “Late-breaking history” is my attempt to make sense of a contemporary political and cultural landscape that seems to defy reason.

So now I turn to the most challenging question in my notebook of column ideas, the issue that might be the hardest to tackle, the one requiring perhaps the broadest view: Why are Americans more willing to embrace fascism now than at any time in living memory?

This is not a question posed for the sake of shock value, though the facts supporting it are shocking enough. Take a look at what historian John Ganz and others recently had to say about American fascism, or consult this Gallup poll on the country’s sharp move to the right since 2021, or the presumptive Republican nominee for president’s increasingly authoritarian rhetoric.

Like many, I believed the threat to democracy would abate after we managed to survive the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, when the country seemed to have been shaken out of its long national nightmare. Surely, I thought, our polarization would diminish and we would set aside animosity in favor of healing and creating a new American middle ground.

Instead, the threat has grown and the cultural divide has only deepened.

Worse, the global situation has so deteriorated that the New York Times has felt it necessary to produce a series of opinion pieces, “At the Brink,” explaining the risk of modern nuclear war and illustrating in graphic format what the dropping of an American bomb on a city — any city — would do to its inhabitants. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, World War III seemed a remote possibility. Now, with the Israeli-Hamas war, an emboldened North Korea threatening “military” action, and tensions in the Taiwan Strait heating up, the chances of a global conflict are much greater.

Not since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 has there been such an overt threat of a nuclear annihilation, yet few Americans seem to grasp the danger. Instead, our national dialogue is dominated by a cultural war on women, minorities, and immigrants. It’s difficult to pay attention to what’s going on in the world when you are under constant attack at home.

More Americans are embracing authoritarianism than at any time since the 1930s. Then, a significant portion of the population believed Adolph Hitler was someone to be admired for his nationalist spirit, strong man approach, and blaming Jewish peoples for most of society’s problems. Rachel Maddow explains this well in her book, “Prequel.”

Americans are again flirting with fascism.

Fascism, as described by the Holocaust Encyclopedia, is a far-right political philosophy that prioritizes the nation over individual rights. It is characterized by a “fixation with national decline (real or perceived) and threats to existence of the national community.” Violence is accepted, or even celebrated, and “often has a redemptive or purifying quality.”

While few Americans are likely to self-identify as fascists, the description fits a broad swath of current political activists, apologists, and right-wing sympathizers. Some, like Klan-friendly Missouri gubernatorial candidate Darrell Leon McClanahan, are open about their views and disowned by their party. But GOP-controlled statehouses across the land are working to gut civil liberties in a rush to far-right extremism. Yet, the majority of Republican voters don’t seem alarmed. What would make otherwise rational individuals embrace such hurtful and even hateful political views?

As Susan Sontag put it, fascism is fascinating.

The fascists also have better uniforms.

In 1975, Sontag skewered Leni Riefenstahl — the Nazi propagandist who had 40 years earlier directed “Triumph of the Will” — in the New York Review of Books. Riefenstahl was attempting to make a last-act comeback as a photographer with a book of photos of the Nuba tribe in Africa, but Sontag was having none of it. The new book was the “final rewrite of the past,” Sontag said, just as history for fascists wasn’t fact but theater.

In the same piece, Sontag also contemplated the appeal — both in style and fetish — of Nazi uniforms, and SS uniforms in particular. Designed by Hugo Boss for the Nazi party’s elite guard, the uniforms were high fashion, modern in form and bold in function.

“Why the SS?” Sontag writes. “Because the SS was fascism’s overt assertion of the righteousness of violence, the right to have total power over others and to treat them as absolutely inferior.” Compared to the stylish black SS uniforms, the drab uniforms worn by American GIs were boring.

And although Sontag was writing about Riefenstahl’s attempt at rehabilitation and the postwar sexual fascination with Nazi regalia, she hints at something that has been true about fascism since its inception: the seductive but false promise of style, power and sexuality.

Violence has an aesthetic.

The beginnings of fascism came in 1909 with a manifesto by Italian poet F.T. Marinetti, who was writing not about authoritarianism but about futurism. Even so, Marinetti’s work, which was published by the influential Parisian newspaper Le Figaro, was a foundational work for Italian Fascism and an influence on European authoritarianism in general.

In the Manifesto of Futurism, Marinetti wrote a love letter to fast machines, recklessness, and youth. He also dismissed learning, devalued women and embraced violence.

“We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind,” he declared. In another tenet: “We will glorify war — the world’s only hygiene — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.”

He never explains why women should be scorned.

He describes how injustice will shine radiantly in his followers’ eyes.

He says that he is not yet 30, and hopes to be discarded by a new generation of artists by the time he is 40.

“Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.”

Futurism was such an important and shocking movement that the manifesto was widely reported in American newspapers. The movement spread not only to literature but also to visual arts and architecture. The most famous futurist painting is likely Tullio Crali’s 1939 “Nose-dive on the City,” a frightening view from the cockpit. For an antidote to Crali, consider Picasso’s 1937 “Guernica.”

In 1920, Marinetti joined the Italian fascist party of Benito Mussolini. In 1936, Marinetti declared the Italian invasion of Ethiopia was a victory for futurism, the Associated Press reported. He died in 1944, at the age of 65, while working on a collection of military-themed poems.

While Futurism was a significant movement and influenced many styles of early 20th century art, as well as politics, its importance diminished after World War II because of its association with fascism. It’s also important to note that not all practitioners of Futurism were fascists.

But Futurism’s exultation of fast cars, airplanes, disruption and violence was a seductive call for those who would oppress others. All empires require an aesthetic, and Futurism provided one ready-made for Mussolini. Hitler, who came after, added his own refinements to fascism — including those stylish SS uniforms.

In America today, the authoritarian call to oppression and violence is using all the old tricks — a call to nationalism, an appeal to patriotism, the tacit approval of violence, the scapegoating of migrants and others as being the poison that is supposedly killing our culture.

When Donald Trump talked in December about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of America, he was echoing Hitler. The term is used in Hitler’s manifesto, “Mein Kampf.” Trump denies ever having read the book, but certainly he knew what he was doing in using such rhetoric.

He’s also promised if elected to be a dictator on “day one,” to build detention camps for undocumented immigrants, and to purge the government of those not loyal to him. This is the American political equivalent of cigarettes. Used as directed, the result is death.

But ultimately, Trump is not the problem.

The problem is us.

We’ve allowed ourselves to forget the lessons of 80 years ago, that the fascist path ultimately leads not only to death camps for perceived enemies but also to self-destruction. We are shredding the political and cultural norms that have kept Trumpian despots in check for a lifetime and are now flirting with the idea that perhaps disruption and violence are good things, creative things. That injustice and scorn for others and catering to a death wish is a coherent strategy for gaining and keeping power.

The majority of us know better. But we’re not speaking up yet in the numbers it will require to avert disaster. We must talk less about a candidate’s age and more about their integrity. We must stand up for those more vulnerable than ourselves, call out those who use scorn and injustice as weapons, and provide a vision of America free of concentration camps and political purges and full of the kind of civil liberties for all people that we would want for our own children.

You won’t find the word “fascism” in any party platform. But fascism is manifest in the actions and ambitions of Trump and his pantheon of far-right actors. From the disenfranchisement of persons perceived as “other” to the assault on libraries and museums and education, it’s all there. And most telling is the scorn of women and the devaluing of their right to control their own bodies. Fascism is all about the bodies of others — how to control them, how to contain them, and ultimately how to destroy them.

The stakes are high, and considering the modern nuclear threat, perhaps higher than they were in the 1930s. As president, Trump and his poorly controlled impulses would make the world immediately less stable. But condemning those who support Trump for their self-destructive and unreasoned beliefs is unproductive. Nobody was ever talked out of a death wish by shaming. They are in the grip of the reptilian brain deep inside our heads, the seat of our primal emotions and the source of our deepest subconscious conflicts. All of us, at one time or another, by going on buying sprees or having too many drinks, surrender reason to the demands of the lizard brain.

The way to reach Americans seduced by fascism is through understanding. To heal, we must recognize the humanity in those who would oppress us — and appeal to it. Yes, we must fight to preserve our civil liberties, but we must also engage in conversation while we still can.

We must share the secret that art is not violence, cruelty, or injustice — but is instead a reason to live, to get up in the morning and once again draft a poem or work on a painting or write one more column that just might add something of value to the collection of human knowledge and experience.

So let’s stop fooling around and get serious about democracy before our homegrown fascists start designing the kind of stylish uniforms that will be fetish objects 70 or 80 years in the future.

Originally published in the Kansas Reflector. Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence.