Fascism As Action Through Time or How It Can Happen Here

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.
net/publication/315954737
Fascism as Action through Time (Or How It Can Happen Here)
Article in Terrorism and Political Violence · April 2017

DOI: 10.1080/09546553.2017.1304757
CITATIONS READS
6 2,356
1 author:
Jean Rosenfeld
University of California, Los Angeles
8 PUBLICATIONS 45 CITATIONS
SEE PROFILE
All content following this page was uploaded by Jean Rosenfeld on 17 October 2018.
The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Terrorism and Political Violence
ISSN: 0954-6553 (Print) 1556-1836 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ftpv20
Fascism as Action through Time (Or How It Can

Happen Here)
Jean E. Rosenfeld
To cite this article: Jean E. Rosenfeld (2017) Fascism as Action through Time (Or
How It Can Happen Here), Terrorism and Political Violence, 29:3, 394-410, DOI:
10.1080/09546553.2017.1304757
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2017.1304757
Published online: 04 Apr 2017.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 281
View related articles
View Crossmark data
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ftpv20
Download by: [74.203.89.165] Date: 28 August 2017, At: 23:14

Terrorism and Political Violence, 29:394–410, 2017
Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0954-6553 print=1556-1836 online
DOI: 10.1080/09546553.2017.1304757
Fascism as Action through Time (Or How It Can

Happen Here)
JEAN E. ROSENFELD
Retired Academic Researcher, University of California at Los Angeles,
Los Angeles, California, USA
The purpose of this paper is to discuss how fascism may be identified by its actions,
the stages through which a fascist rule takes power, and how to recognize it before it
does so. The thesis is that a fascist takeover of a democratic government is rapid and
Downloaded by [74.203.89.165] at 23:14 28 August 2017
unexpected. Its goal is a revolutionary reversal of representative government in the

name of the people, while it accomplishes the opposite: a single-party corporate
regime that replaces individual liberty with subtle, bureaucratic, and overt types
of coercion. Rather than generate a generic definition of the many types of fascism,
it is more useful to study how it affects the lives of ordinary people, the milieu out of
which it develops, and what its precursors look like. Understanding fascism entails
studying it from the point of view of those who lived under it and recorded their
experiences, as well as from the analytic perspectives of social scientists. As Robert
O. Paxton observes: ‘‘The fascist phenomenon was poorly understood at the begin-
ning in part because it was unexpected.’’1 We are facing the question again in 2017
with the surprise election of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United
States by a minority of the popular vote and the evident support of the white
nationalist milieu. Paxton proposes a five-stage theory for understanding fascism
in its many varieties. A developmental sequence is proposed against which current
events in the United States may be assessed.
Keywords Alt Right, apocalyptic, charismatic, crossover, cultic milieu, fascism,

radical dualism, traditionalism
Indeed, evil socialist Democrats and the news media are on the losing side
against the forces of good, which will surely prevail under the leadership
of Trump, a real president of the United States—not an imposter like
former president Barack Obama, who spent 8 years tearing down our
country (italics added).2
Seven days after the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as forty-fifth president of

the United States, a supporter invoked radical dualism, the defining characteristic of
an apocalyptic mindset—the certainty that war is imminent between the forces
of good and the forces of evil. Apocalypse, or the cyclical myth that reveals divine
truth, has always connoted war. In the ancient world, signs of the apocalypse were
cosmic reversals where the crooked is made straight, the mountains brought low, as
well as images of the battlefield where smoke turns the moon to blood and darkens
Address correspondence to Jean E. Rosenfeld, University of California at Los Angeles,

Los Angeles, 90095, CA, USA. E-mail: jeane@ucla.edu
394
Fascism as Action through Time 395
the sun. The image of fascism, a militant solidarity, is the phoenix rising from the
ashes, palingenesis,3—the new world order under a savior after the cosmic battle
between good and evil has ended. It is a transcendent vision that presupposes a
dynamic, immutable force inherent in the loyal cohort, the people. In a fascist regime
the notion of populism as vox populi is embodied in one man, a leader, an actor, who
alone can fix the world as the soteriological incarnation of the people.
Benito Mussolini makes clear in ‘‘The Doctrine of Fascism’’ that it is a spiritual
movement. As such, fascism demands total loyalty to the authority of the messianic
leader. The disloyal cannot be part of the new order; one must (with a nod to
St. Paul) put on ‘‘the new fascist man’’ and become, sacramentally, part of the
corporate whole: ‘‘the only way to make them assume their places in Utopia is by
force. Utopianism always leads to terror.’’4
In this paper I can only touch on a few aspects of an evolving field of study,5 one
that emerged from the ashes of two world wars that defined the twentieth century.
Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of fascism is action: fascism as movement
toward a common destiny in a Darwinian war with enemies, and fascism as a rapidly
unfolding blitzkrieg of coercive political change. It unfolds in developmental stages.
We want to learn from its witnesses and history to anticipate how fascism happens,
how it transforms a democratic government into a fascist regime, and why a democ-
racy is perhaps more vulnerable to the transformation than other types of govern-
ment. In his novel of a fascist takeover in America, It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair
Lewis suggests that the ordinary citizen sees it, experiences it, but does not in real
time assess it as something radically other. It is only hindsight that affords us
20=20 vision.6
Robert O. Paxton departs from a conventional structural analysis, which defines
fascism as a doctrine like other political ‘‘isms.’’ Instead, Paxton examines ‘‘fascism
in motion’’ and distinguishes ‘‘the five different stages of fascism in time.’’7
1. The initial creation of fascist movements;
2. their rooting as parties in a political system;
3. the acquisition of power;
4. the exercise of power;
5. radicalization or entropy.8
Paxton’s rudimentary scaffold identifies the political development of fascism in a
generic sense; it is based on only two historical cases, Germany under National
Socialism and Italy under the Partito Nazionale Fascista. Fascism is commonly
considered a twentieth-century innovation of Benito Mussolini, an Italian socialist
who created an alternative ‘‘third way’’ to unify all national institutions under one
party. It is hard to apply the comparative method, as Paxton counsels, to only
two instances of a phenomenon, but fascist action is evident in a milieu of groups,
parties, and organizations that predate and postdate the German and Italian cases.
Our main concern is to recognize fascism at Paxton’s earliest stage and to prevent it
from ever reaching stage four, given its intent to wage war unceasingly against the
enemies of the nation and to define ‘‘nation’’ in exclusive, racial terms. Mussolini
makes clear that fascism is the enemy of democracy and that the individual has
no liberty outside the fascist state.9
Scholars try to understand fascism by examining its features, development, agents,
and context—the big view. However, there is another aspect, or viewpoint—that of the
impact on the person who experiences fascism over time: the recruit, the dissident, the
396 J. E. Rosenfeld
convert, the member of society who must live each day within the reality of a function-
ing system imposed upon all by the will of the leader. If we consider fascism across the
range of its action through time, as a milieu—a sequence of entities in which related,
but not identical ephemeral movements arise and fall in succession—then we might
discern how it causes people to behave and its regime to persist (stage five) or, more
often, to fail.10 Paxton observes that,
A further problem with conventional images of fascism is that

they . . . omit the solid texture of everyday experience and the complicity
of ordinary people . . .. Fascist movements could never grow without the
help of ordinary people, even conventionally good people . . .. To under-
stand fully how fascist regimes worked, we must dig down to the level
of ordinary people and examine the banal choices they made in their daily
routines. Making such choices meant accepting an apparent lesser evil or
averting the eyes from some excesses that seemed not too damaging.11
One such ordinary person is an Italian woman from an old family who became a
German citizen during the fascist era, and whose intimate connections with some of
the people who tolerated Nazism is revealed in her life story, Tre Volte Il Cielo
‘Three Times Heaven’12 She is Enza Tomassi, and her second husband was my
mother’s older brother, John. As an Italian, Enza had to satisfy Nazi regulations
for marriage to her first husband, a Prussian military officer. She obtained papers
attesting to her Jew-free bloodline, and she attended a youth labor camp. After
she married Konrad von Heuduck, she spoke in whispers about their friend, Count
von Stauffenberg, who was executed after his plot against Hitler was exposed.13
Although she was in Munich in 1935, she discussed Oktoberfest, not the rising fascist
movement or, later, Kristallnacht. Their social circle consisted of artists, doctors,
businessmen, military officers, admirals, a prince or two, and included a
Jewish-German family with influential contacts that protected them for a while.14
She gave up her Italian citizenship to live in Germany, claiming she was the only
Italian woman to marry a German officer, and then lamented that Italy would
not restore her citizenship after the war.
Enza Tomassi’s stories of the behavior of ordinary people and their choices—
instinctive reactions, actually—do convey how violence and fear lurk and transform
adult behavior in fascist surroundings. The closest she herself came to harm was at
the age of nine on October 28, 1922, the founding date of the Fascist regime:
Mussolini and the fascists entered Rome when Mima [her grandmother]
was alone in via Condotti. On seeing the name Bretschneider, not
knowing it was an Italian firm, a ‘Blackshirt’ named Salvarezza, took
possession of our flat by force and occupied a few rooms on the first
floor . . .. Salvarezza had brought several arditi [paramilitaries] and a
number of women with him, the very dregs of fascism. Salvarezza used
to go around the house with a large whip in his hands and . . . I got a slap
from Musi [her stepmother] once for walking behind Salvarezza’s back,
unseen by him, thumbing my nose.15
What comes across is a child’s sense of normal mischief; what registers on the
page is the indelible slap, not the terror her stepmother must have felt.
In 1930 her father, an artist, was commissioned by ‘‘an important rich fascist’’ to
paint frescoes in ‘‘an old church at Monterotondo.’’ The frescoes included the
romantic figure of Il Duce on a white horse ‘‘in fascist style.’’ At the gala inaugur-
ation of the frescoes, Mussolini called for the artist, who was pushed forward on
the shoulders of the rowdy crowd. Meantime, her father’s frightened assistant mason
hid behind the main altar, ‘‘being small, frail and an antifascist.’’ It is that cowering
figure that stands out, not the one in the fresco, which was obliterated after Musso-
lini was executed.16
One can analyze the uses of fear and violence in fascist regimes, but Enza’s
stories show us how they pervade the consciousness of even the most inconspicuous
person during an unavoidable chance encounter, ensuring compliance. Thus, the
nation is bound, not only by loyalty, but also fear that one’s life, work, family, could
be erased with impunity by the authorities.
We talk about the ‘‘normalization’’ of the abnormal when it appears in our
quotidian world. We look back on Enza’s era now and mark the normalization of
the monstrous. At the time, however, the ordinary person acts only from her impera-
tives. To bind the individual to the corporate state in Germany, boys and girls were
prodded to attend Hitler Youth camps, the Arbeitsdienst. Camp attendees eventually
assisted military troops, but they began as a means of helping the rural, impover-
ished class. When she was twenty-two, Enza spent a year in Berlin as a guest of
the family of a man who headed ‘‘an important organization during Nazi times.’’17
During a whirlwind of parties, horseback riding, and balls, she met and fell in love
with Konrad von Heuduck. ‘‘I had no intention of leaving Berlin, the life of pleasure
I was leading, and most of all I did not want to stop seeing Konrad! What should I
do?’’ she writes.18 What she did was attend the Arbeitsdienst, but she also published
an article about it three years later for an Italian newspaper, in which she praises the
‘‘main purpose of the Reich in establishing’’ it: ‘‘that the entire German youth
should practically and spiritually help in reconstructing the State, and this appren-
ticeship should help the spirit of unity and equality, to which the entire soul tends,
take root in the people’s heart (italics added).’’19 Her account led to a job at the
Ministry for the Press and Propaganda in Rome, where she delighted in earning a
salary by summarizing German books for possible translation into Italian. We may
regard this as a complicit step too far, but she describes the job only as ‘‘interesting.’’20
Returning to Paxton’s stages of fascism, take note that stage two, ‘‘their rooting
as parties in a political system’’ is a parallel in the larger sense to the rooting of the
fascist experience in the people’s heart in a smaller sense; both function to unite
the body politic at the civic and personal levels. Enza experiences the transcendent
purpose, which in fascism—unlike conventional political regimes, democratic or
authoritarian—strives to create a new order. Not only is fascism fundamentally
different from other ‘‘isms,’’ it demands self-sacrifice, discipline, absolute loyalty
from each citizen in its drive to expand into territories to which it is entitled and
to win in perpetual struggle with competing systems.21
Had we been in Enza’s shoes we might also have maintained a lifelong indiffer-
ence about our early enthusiasm for the Arbeitsdienst. We might hide our thoughts
about the purges, executions, and waste of human lives on the battlefields, hoping
that our loved ones would not be singled out for disloyalty to the regime. Her few
encounters with Jews in Germany during the war are sympathetic, but she professes
no contemporaneous knowledge of the concentration camps. She moved in elite and
military social circles. Her husband was lost on the Eastern Front in 1945, and his
398 J. E. Rosenfeld
body was never recovered. Much later, after love, war, death, struggle, and survival,
Enza responded to her granddaughters’ criticism, ‘‘You do not say what you felt,
what you thought, or what others thought during the war’’ (italics added). She
replies, ‘‘During the war nobody spoke his mind openly. Konrad and I never knew
what our friends thought nor did they know what we thought.’’22 To think too much
is dangerous.
We cannot assess ‘‘complicity’’ from Enza’s closely guarded stories of families,
social gatherings, youth camp, officers’ quarters, and letters from the North African
and Eastern Fronts, as well as from Headquarters in Prussia. What seizes us
about this careful and, at times, carefree memoir is that she could live normally in
abnormal times and survive. All else has been whited out. Three Times Heaven is
a textbook example of normalizing a life lived under fascism in two regimes from
childhood to widowhood.
It is not surprising that virtus ‘manliness’ is the fascist ethos, since Mussolini
admired ancient Rome’s mythic past glory. The fasces ‘Roman Lictors’ rods’ symbo-
lize the binding of individuals to the corporate state. Citizens are not only bound by
fear of individual harm, but by collective enthusiasm for risorgimento ‘completing
the destiny’ of the nation: turning decay into greatness, recovering lost territories,
exalting the race, executing vengeance on enemies, rising from the ashes of decline
and chaos. The enthusiasm of the crowd is a type of ecstasy, revealed in the mass
rallies, soaring architecture, and spellbinding oratory of the two artists, Hitler and
Mussolini, who stunned their contemporary world. A predecessor, Gabriele
D’Annunzio, furnished Mussolini’s National Fascist Party with the device of Politics
as Theatre, with ‘‘ceremony, uniform, harangue, chanting.’’23
Symbols are assigned arbitrary meaning in specific contexts. The experience of
binding body and soul, praxis and spirit is conveyed in the iconic bound sheaves
of grain and an ax, which connote ‘‘unity, strength, and justice.’’24 The Swastika
‘reversed broken cross,’ was adopted by Germany from Buddhism and was said to
symbolize the sun, as well as the origin of the Aryan race.25 The symbols and trap-
pings are ethnically specific to the varietals of fascism, which is why Paxton identifies
fascism as ‘‘ambiguous’’ and prefers not to give it a structural definition.26 It is not a
coherent political philosophy, true to its words; but as it develops, it abandons its
early programs as it consolidates power by unifying all classes, organizations, and
estates in the service of the leader’s will. What makes fascism different from Marxism
or liberalism or democratic socialism is that action is prior to explanation in its
historical occurrence. It is not logical; it is driven by emotion.
When in . . . March of 1919 . . . I summoned in Milan . . . interventionists

. . . who had followed me ever since the foundation of the Fasci of revol-
utionary action in January 1915, I had in mind no specific doctrinal
program . . .. My doctrine during that period had been the doctrine of action
(italics added).27
Mussolini’s revolutionary groups were gathered into a formal national party—

Partito Nazionale Fascista—on November 9, 1921. From 1922 when King Victor
Emmanuele III legally handed power to Mussolini until 1943 when Mussolini was
overthrown, his party ruled Italy. Fascist paramilitaries had attacked landowners
and socialists before a coherent political doctrine or national party was developed.
Initial objectives of the early Fascist movement, such as women’s voting rights
and labor rights, were eventually abandoned as the party consolidated power. What
mattered was the soldering together of all interest groups and classes, institutions
and the Church, business, futurists and traditionalists into one corporate state.
After taking power, ten years passed before Giovanni Gentile, the first Minister
of Education, and Mussolini published ‘‘The Doctrine of Fascism’’; it is not a mani-
festo or even a philosophical argument so much as an exhortation. Its language
reveals the emotion that propelled Mussolini. The most frequently used adjective
is ‘‘spiritual’’ (22 instances), followed by ‘‘spirit’’ (19), ‘‘moral’’ (15), ‘‘ethical’’
(12), and ‘‘religious’’ (and ‘‘religion,’’ a noun) (9). ‘‘Soul(s),’’ ‘‘faith,’’ and ‘‘creed’’
are also mentioned in conjunction with The Doctrine, which is not really a doctrine,
but a dogma.
It presents us with a movement that worships a new state united by a moral and
ethical set of imperatives that bear no relationship to Catholicism, the national
religion, except for its functional parallels: the Incarnation (the leader), the Mass
(partaking of the leader’s Spirit), martyrdom (the soldier who dies for the regime),
salvation (collective with the nation). One does not question religious imperatives
when the only choices are reduced to yes or no, good or evil, membership or
isolation, approbation or demonization. Little wonder that ‘‘ordinary people’’ lived
their lives under fascism with heads down and opinions shuttered, feelings numbed,
memories censored.
Protestant theologian Paul Tillich lived during the rise of National Socialism in
Germany. After serving as a chaplain in World War I, he experienced disillusion-
ment with conventional Christianity. During World War II, he was expelled by
the Nazi regime from his university position, and he was hired by Union Theological
Seminary in New York. As a theologian, he saw in the fascist states an ‘‘idolatrous’’
god, one that demanded ‘‘ultimate concern’’ from its citizens, absolute fealty and
faith, willingness to die for the corporate body and uncritical commitment to its
authority.28 He defines faith as ‘‘the state of being ultimately concerned’’ and as
‘‘an act of the total personality’’ (italics added).29 Tillich knew that the fascist state
had purloined authentic faith from the worshiper of the infinite God, ‘‘the Ground
of Being,’’ and redirected it falsely toward the finite corporate state instead. A
person’s ultimate concern may be transferred from the infinite to the finite in any
context by changing the object of worship from a deity to a regime, a race, a leader,
a people. Ultimate concern may be misapplied to a concrete, finite object anywhere
under a certain set of conditions. Tillich’s understanding is derived from his own
experiences with war, decline of the state, and the emergence of an idolatrous regime
in midcentury Germany. Like Enza, he also survived, but as an uncommon, not an
ordinary, person.
The identity of a people usually derives from its common ancestry and
occupation of territory. It is expressed in holi-=holy days through retelling of what
happened on those days, and the nation ritually reenacts those events at sites set
aside for such celebrations. Fascism appropriates or modifies national symbols in
a Politics of Theatre: mesmerizing performances that evoke a collective enthusiasm
that Emile Durkheim identified as exceeding the sum of each participant’s emotion
to achieve a participatory ecstasy in the moment. According to Tillich,
Nationalistic ecstasy can produce a state in which the subject Is

almost swallowed by the object [of faith, the nation]. The inescapable
consequence of idolatrous faith is ‘‘existential disappointment,’’ a
400 J. E. Rosenfeld
disappointment which penetrates into the very existence of man! The

ecstatic character of even an idolatrous faith can hide this consequence
only for a certain time . . . finally it breaks out into the open.30
Fascism claims for itself the act of faith that is owed to God in the European,
Christian context. This is why Tillich views misdirected ultimate concern as idol-
atrous. Since faith is central to Christianity, it may be that the surrogate faith claim
of fascism is not operative in fascist-leaning states that are not monotheistic, but since
fascism is a type of unbridled nationalism, its roots are planted in a nation’s religion.
One could be a Hindu in India or a Muslim in Iran and feel no contradiction between
loyalty to the regime and observance of one’s religious tradition, particularly when the
state appropriates the symbols and trappings of the nation’s glorious past.
Robert Paxton cautions us to ‘‘observe [fascism] in daily operation . . . since it
is not static, one must understand it in motion, through its cycle of potential . . .
stages.’’31 Several years ago, after reading Kerry Noble’s account of the mutation
of a Christian sect into a fascist threat, I posited a sequence of fascism’s development

through time that might help us recognize it if it emerged in mainstream American
politics.32 As Paxton remarks, fascism presents itself differently in each occurrence,
because the outward trappings are borrowed from the specific ancestral nation.
Likewise, Walter Laqueur, Paxton, and others have warned that neo-fascism exists
and proto-fascism existed prior to the Italian and German cases.33 Because fascism
can emerge unexpectedly in a democratic setting, identifying it at an early stage by its
behavior is critical to preventing it.
Can it happen here in the United States? Sinclair Lewis thought so, as have other
American writers, including Philip Roth.34 Walter Laqueur believes that fascism
originated in America in the post-Civil War Ku Klux Klan.35 The United States
exhibits a continuing milieu of nativism in which the Christian nation is identified
with the white race. The history of American ‘‘eliminationism’’ is recounted by David
Neiwert, a contemporary observer of proto-fascist behavior.36 Leonard Zeskind has
contributed a detailed, scholarly treatment of the white nationalist milieu in America
from 1955 to 2009.37 But its roots go back to the Klan’s quasi-religious secret society
that lynched African Americans to instill fear and submission in black citizens of
southern states. Until the late twentieth century, however, there was little possibility
of either a fascist political party or a fascist regime attracting enough support to
emerge as a national threat. Neiwert and Zeskind chart the deliberate attempts of
fascist organizations to spread their ideas to the mainstream in the United States
via the use of print media and talk radio since the mid twentieth century.
In Religion and the Racist Right, Michael Barkun records the mutation of an odd
but harmless sect from abroad, British Israelism, into Christian Identity, the religion
of Aryan Nations, a white supremacist center in Idaho.38 Christian Identity was
founded by Klansman Wesley Swift among defense industry workers in Los Angeles
county after World War II. An obscure group of Christian survivalists in the Ozark
Mountains under a charismatic prophet, James Ellison, adopted Christian Identity
and reached out to a fascist outlaw group, The Order, which had assassinated a
Jewish talk show host in Colorado. The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the
Lord, Ellison’s group, built a mock ‘‘city,’’ amassed weapons, and practiced war
games. Most chillingly, they plotted to bomb the Murrah Federal Building and
FBI headquarters in Oklahoma City, but were thwarted; and the plan was executed
10 years later by Timothy McVeigh, a right-wing revolutionary.39
Many observers of contemporary America believe that the year 2000 stimulated
apocalyptic fever among white nationalist groups, as well as society in general.
Because fascist groups already regard their societies as decadent and have already
targeted political liberals, non-white citizens, Jews, and their collaborators
(professors, office-holders, judges, educators, et al.) as responsible, they readily
adopt radical dualism and an apocalyptic mindset, expecting an imminent war,
one they sometimes try to incite.
There are two noteworthy recruitment texts among fascist=white supremacist
groups in America. The Turner Diaries, a neo-nazi apocalyptic novel, was penned
by William Pierce. Part of it was found in McVeigh’s car when he was arrested.
The ‘‘14 Words’’ of David Lane, a convicted murderer and member of The Order:
‘‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White Children’’
expresses the central tenet of white nationalism, including Richard Spencer’s
rebranded ‘‘Alt Right’’40 (see below and endnotes 50 and 51). My copy of Lane’s
book is inscribed by him with a variation on the Marine Corps motto, ‘‘Semper
XIV.’’ He wrote and illustrated the book with the intention of binding the divergent
ethno-nationalist milieu under one unifying purpose.
In the 1980s The Turner Diaries motivated Timothy McVeigh to commit
terrorism and inspired a secret society of anti-government supremacists to form a
real version of the book’s fascist vanguard, The Order. The Covenant, the Sword,
and the Arm of the Lord (CSA) was harboring members of The Order when it
was surrounded by the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team in 1985. The survivalist settle-
ment was composed of families. Danny Coulson, head of the HRT, wanted to arrest
the leaders without loss of life. Unlike the disastrous Waco critical incident eight
years later, which precipitated the Oklahoma City Federal building attack in 1995,
the CSA standoff was peacefully resolved in 5 days. Kerry Noble, one of the leaders,
assisted Coulson in convincing James Ellison to stand down and surrender to autho-
rities. After serving time, Noble returned to his Christian roots and dedicated himself
to warning others of ‘‘seduction into right-wing extremism.’’
After Noble wrote his memoir, I recognized the potential for the racist right
milieu to mutate into a larger movement:
The case of CSA illustrates what could happen in the United States if
the neo-Nazi movement, which justifies genocidal violence but has very
few followers, crossed with the Christian religion, which has millions of
devotees.41
That could be accomplished by a ‘‘crossover,’’ the adoption of the essentially

fascist worldview of Ellison’s group, The Order, and other militant groups across
the country by the numerous fundamentalist Christians like Kerry Noble who were
convinced that the USA was declining rapidly, becoming too racially diverse, and
that the Apocalypse was just around the corner. James Ellison had set the date of
the coming war—Racial Holy War in David Lane’s ideology—in 1979. When that
date passed, CSA did what nearly all apocalyptic groups do: they double down on
their expectation. Most important, CSA members set up a ‘‘Silhouette City’’ by Bull
Shoals Lake, where they amassed weapons and tanks and prepared to defend them-
selves against expected hordes of non-white city dwellers. Then, influenced by
Randall Rader, a defector from CSA who joined The Order and later became a
government informant, Ellison, Noble, and others planned assassinations and a
402 J. E. Rosenfeld
bombing. By this time Ellison had converted to the Christian Identity religion shared
by many groups in the racist right religious milieu.
A principle of Jewish hermeneutics, qal v’homer, holds that what obtains in the
smaller case will obtain in the greater instance. CSA in microcosm provides us with
a data-rich case of what could happen under a national charismatic leader who
subscribes to fascist perspectives, primarily the conviction that America is in dark
decline and only the leader can fix it by radically altering society and decreeing
loyalty to himself and conformity to the state. The white supremacist milieu in the
United States was small and divided in 1985. Aryan Nations held conferences at
its Hayden Lake settlement in Idaho for Ellison and other attendees, but citizen
activists pushed back, forming anti-fascist organizations like the Montana Human
Rights Network and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which won a lawsuit in
2000 that bankrupted Aryan Nations and its leader, Richard Butler, who died in
2004.
David Neiwert was a local journalist in Idaho during the rise of Aryan Nations.
He became a recorder of fascism writ small in the Pacific Northwest, pinpointing its
1990s resurgence in ‘‘an economically disenfranchised rural America.’’42 The heart-
land of America became a seedbed of radical right ideas for two reasons: a) the farm
crises of the 1970s led to foreclosures and ‘‘rational suicides’’ that were ignored by
the national press and government, increasing rage against the mainstream media
and federal government among a large, spread out population;43 b) outside of the
major metropolitan areas on the coasts, talk radio was dominated by right-wing
shows and fundamentalist=evangelical preaching, giving rise to groups like the more
recent ‘‘Sagebrush Rebellion.’’44 Most presciently, in 2009 Neiwert recognized that:
The current para-fascist phenomenon represents a different kind of mech-

anism, one in which the political space is created within one of the major
parties, not apart from them. This tendency has finally metastasized into
a genuinely dangerous situation, one in which the GOP has become host
to a totalitarian movement that exhibits so many of the traits of fascism
that the resemblance is now unmistakable (italics added).45
The ‘‘crossover’’ of supremacist ideas into a large, disillusioned cohort of

Christians who became convinced that only a total reversal would redeem America
from the targeted enemies within became likelier over time with exposure to radical
dualism and apocalyptic views. The larger case of fascism breaking into mainstream
politics also became likelier over time. What was lacking until the election of
2016 was a charismatic national leader of a major political party who could win
the presidency. As Neiwert foresaw, fascism awaits a ‘‘crisis in democracy’’ in ‘‘an
economically disenfranchised rural America.’’46
Using both fear and enthusiasm, a fascist leader exercises Herrschaft, the power
over ordinary people, ‘‘the power to compel them to obey.’’47 Max Weber developed
his theory of the charismatic leader from his study of Napoleon, and contrasted
Herrschaft with the bureaucratic (rational, legal) power of traditional leaders, who
have a defined period in office. Because a fascist leader is also a charismatic leader,
his or her power is impermanent. As long as the leader is perceived to be successful
by his followers, his will rules the state. If the leader fails in the eyes of the followers,
others will challenge his rule, or he will be rejected. Unlike bureaucratic power,
Weber explains, charismatic power does not have a determined tenure. It depends
upon the success of the leader’s actions in the eyes of his supporters. Mussolini was
overthrown after Italy was invaded by the allied powers and executed as he fled
toward Switzerland.
So we ask again: Can fascism happen in the United States? Or more to the point,
is it happening now? With the unexpected election of Donald Trump by a minority
of votes on November 9, 2016, the question of fascism has been raised across media
and social networks because of his slogans, dark vision, and acts.48 Yes, the country
is polarized. Radical dualism is on the rise. The new administration incites fear of
foreigners and takes rapid action to ‘‘protect’’ our borders and deport the ‘‘illegals’’
in our midst. There is talk of a ‘‘deportation force’’ to expel them, and Immigration
and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is conducting raids in neighborhoods and places
of business. An executive decree, viewed by many as a ‘‘Muslim Ban,’’ barred entry
of immigrants from seven Muslim countries, suspending constitutional rights for
several days before the courts enjoined it. Trump’s Inaugural Address was scripted
by two aides from the self-identified Alternative Right, Stephen Miller and Steve
Bannon. It painted a dark present and foreboding future unless we put America first
and ‘‘Make America Great Again.’’ Trump’s campaign slogan, America First, calls
up memories of the committee by the same name that supported Charles Lindbergh
for president during the 1930s and inspired Philip Roth’s novel of an imagined
Lindbergh presidency. In 1934 William Pelley’s Silver Shirts were meeting in South-
ern California in imitation of the Blackshirts in Europe.49 Gerald L. K. Smith was
conducting an anti-Communist ‘‘Christian Crusade’’ and Henry Ford was distribut-
ing a serialized and re-titled edition of ‘‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’’ the
infamous anti-Semitic false text, through his nationwide network of car dealerships.
One approach to answering the question, ‘‘Is it happening now?’’ is to map
unfolding events against a developmental framework for analyzing a fascist takeover:
. The small-scale white nationalist milieu acquires a large number, but still a
minority, of supporters among the ranks of disaffected citizens and a charismatic
leader who promises to purge the existing regime [Paxton’s stage one].
. It becomes a nationwide movement marked by aggressive rhetoric and its convic-
tion that the leader is the only authoritative source of truth.
. The movement and the leader attack the conservative political party and main-
stream religions. The movement needs to appeal to a prevailing sense of dissatis-
faction among a plurality of voters and convince them that only a new regime can
restore the nation to greatness.
. Simultaneously, the movement tries to delegitimize political opposition, and con-
vince the body politic that the existing liberal government is both weak and
headed in the wrong direction, that only the movement can govern the future
and seize control of history going forward.
. The movement becomes the government with only a minority of the total number
of votes. It founds a new political party or takes over an existing political party,
which enables it [Paxton’s stages two and three].
. After defeating the liberals and neutralizing the conservatives, the new regime
divides the citizenry into the enemy cohort and the loyalists. It claims a universal
mandate to rule under the sole authority of the new leader and his party.
. The leader replaces bureaucratic officeholders with his own loyalists, particularly
in key power posts, such as domestic security, the military, the justice system, and
the intelligence establishments [Paxton’s stage four].
404 J. E. Rosenfeld
. Along with the paradigm shift in leadership and realignment of bureaucratic insti-
tutions, the movement conducts a war on dissenters in the press, legal organiza-
tions, and any other source of opposition. It seeks to control the press, as well
as other authoritative sources of information, and replaces their expressions with
its own propaganda. It elevates an alternative press.
. The message of the regime relies on intrinsic American nativism and
Know-nothingism, excluding any voices that do not concur with the leader and
any science or source of information that questions the leader, who claims to
embody the will of the people to make the nation great again.
. The regime unites the nation under a xenophobic fear of enemies: foreign
nationals, who constitute an endemic threat to the homeland, and foreign states,
unless they formally align with the leader and acknowledge their subordination to
America. Disloyal elements within the regime are purged to ensure unanimity of
purpose.
. Ultimately, the regime changes the means of succession to national office, giving
total power to the charismatic leader, setting the stage for the longevity of
one-party leadership, and extending fascist control in the future [Paxton’s stage
five].
On the one hand, it is highly unlikely that any movement or cabal within the
United States could complete this series of steps, because of our unique consti-
tutional political system based on a tripartite division of power among the federal
courts, Congress, and the executive branch, whereby each segment can ‘‘check’’
another segment to keep the three-legged stool in balance. Moreover, the right to
resist is built into the Bill of Rights, which protects dissenters against the excessive
use of political power.
On the other hand, fascism took over governments in Italy and Germany when
the majority ceded its legal authority to a movement with a minority of supporters. It
also moved fast, convincing bureaucratic leaders that violence would break out if
they did not concede. Mussolini and Hitler employed violence against political
opposition in the Po Valley and Munich, respectively, well in advance of their rule,
establishing their reputation for coercive action, including murder, and encouraging
their opponents to relinquish power in order to preserve domestic tranquility.
The United States’ constitutional system also makes it possible for a candidate
to win the presidency without a majority of votes if he or she obtains more votes
from the Electoral College, but fewer votes at the ballot box. In the election of
2016 the presidency was legally obtained by a sizeable minority of the popular vote,
creating the possibility of a fascist takeover.
By calling his base a ‘‘movement’’ not a party, Donald Trump has distanced
himself from the two major political parties, implying that his is a ‘‘third way.’’
After assuming the presidency, he issued a blitz of decrees, and instructed GOP
representatives to pass legislation within an unrealistic time frame. He nominated
cabinet members who in some cases oppose the departments they will head. Specific
departments known for policies to which Trump is opposed have been ordered to
deliver the names of employees who are working on those policies and their sources
of funding.
His closest aides, appointed and not subject to congressional confirmation, are
people associated with the Alt Right,50 along with a general, Michael Flynn, whom
the DIA dismissed for rogue behavior. Flynn resigned his position as Trump’s
National Security Advisor after just twenty-four days following reports that he had
improper conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States. Trump,
it appears, was reluctant to let him go.
One could counter that Franklin D. Roosevelt acted similarly to ensure execu-
tive power over at least one other co-equal branch when he tried to ‘‘pack’’ the
Supreme Court, which had struck down policies he was trying to institute. After
war broke out in 1941, the Supreme Court supported his indefinite internment of
Japanese-American citizens and aliens. He was a Democrat who accrued power in
the presidency, used his charismatic gifts and radio to increase his support, and
engendered such a sense of threat in his opponents that they plotted a coup d’état.
Yet, his opponents, not he, were associated with fascism, and he was elected four
times by a majority of the popular vote. It is worth noting that a fascist leader
may embrace socialism or conservatism, but his unwavering mode of expression is
ethno-nationalism, and all actions are directed toward the goal of national resto-
ration. Roosevelt could have become a dictator, perhaps, but he never embraced
ethno-nationalism, nor did he try to ensure his election by illegal means.

The Trump administration’s attempt to delegitimize the mainstream media and
functionally substitute the Alt Right media, such as Breitbart News and Infowars, is
perhaps their most alarming move so far. To amass and retain power to compel the
people, it is necessary to gain control over what people receive as ‘‘truth.’’ The use of
false assertions, conspiracy theories, discrediting slurs, and unreliable news sources
to cast doubt on the legitimacy of intelligence agencies, scientists, statesmen, journal-
ists, and incontrovertible databases by Donald Trump and his staff is a unique
departure in the history of governing in America.
In many respects, the ambiguous movement of Donald Trump resembles the
ambiguous movement of Mussolini. Il Duce was not an anti-Semite initially; he sat-
isfied the ‘‘social needs’’ of disaffected syndicalists, socialists, and war veterans; his
audiences were ecstatic and his rhetoric filled them with a sense of religious fervor for
the once and future glory of Italy as a martial, expansionist state. An undercurrent of
violence accompanied his vision of Italian risorgimiento, as an undercurrent of viol-
ence accompanied the rallies and tweets of Donald Trump in his improbable rise to
the presidential nomination of the Grand Old Party. In effect, the billionaire
businessman executed a hostile takeover of the conservative American party by har-
nessing the rage of people with a case against the ‘‘swamp’’ of Washington, D.C.,
and the ‘‘elites’’ of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and the coastal cities.
Fascism creates the ‘‘new man’’ literally by enshrining masculine traits and rele-
gating women to procreation and the home. Neo-Nazis pledged their support for
Trump51 and his comments about women, past and present, stimulated a worldwide
mass protest the day after the Inauguration.
History does not repeat itself in the particulars, but only in a general sense.
Human group behavior is patterned. Time marches on and with it the mutations
and permutations of ideas carried in a cultic milieu. In this sense, fascism is not so
different from any other set of animating ideas espoused by people who are deter-
mined to change the world in the short space of their lifetimes. Rapid social changes
stimulate innovative movements, which react to them, attempting to steer history in
a preferred direction by will power, rhetoric, and coercive action.52
Fascism has many variations. Every nation has a storehouse of excitatory sym-
bols that leaders use to bind their people into a compliant union under a system of
total control. One cannot compare fascisms in their specifics, but one can recognize
406 J. E. Rosenfeld
them in their actions, all of which serve the need to compel, control, and dominate
through fear and force every aspect of individual, ordinary lives.
Fascisms appear on different scales, from outlier cells to political parties. Their
level of threat to a bureaucratic system of government depends largely on their scale
of operation. A fascist political party poses the greatest threat to democratic systems,
but the key to success appears to be the charismatic leader, which is why perhaps the
most ink is spilled in trying to understand the personality of the leader, what his intent
is, and if there is a means of thwarting his uncanny ability to impose his will on the body
politic. Time will tell whether or not the United States is exceptional enough to modify
the fascist inclinations of a charismatic leader and the rage of his core supporters
against the status quo. Watch what he does. Watch how ordinary people react.
Events are unfolding fast: blitzkrieg applies to politics, as well as the battlefield.
There is no space here to examine in depth the vision—it is not really a coherent
philosophy—that informs the Trump phenomenon, but the Trump-embracing Alt
Right is a type of postwar fascism that seeks in Italian Fascism its resonant ideas
of ethno-nationalism, expulsion of foreigners, and replacement of the old order by

a glorious reorganization of society under a one-party corporative state. The pre-war
Italian Dadaist and Fascist, Julius Evola, is barely mentioned in a number of schol-
arly treatments of fascism, but his ideology of Traditionalism is animating the
young, brash, tech-savvy, elite-bashing, shock-jock generation that the Alt Right
represents and recruits from.53
A self-defined Alt Right movement has emplaced itself in the administration of
our forty-fifth president, who promises to ‘‘make America great again’’ under the
Old Right slogan, America First. Donald Trump’s presidential campaign ‘‘move-
ment’’ emboldened white supremacists and separatists to hail the new administration
and its determination to expel foreigners and build a wall to keep them out. The Alt
Right name for ethno-nationalism was proposed in 2010 by Richard Spencer, a
neo-Nazi, although members of the Alt Right span a range of adherents from isola-
tionists and nativists to fascists and white supremacists.
Spencer’s re-branding of the white nationalist movement has persisted with the
ascension of Special Advisor to the President Stephen Bannon, former editor of
Breitbart News. MSNBC commentator Lawrence O’Donnell has referred to Bannon
as ‘‘Trump’s Brain.’’ Bannon has incorporated a number of Alt Right ideas into his
self-termed ‘‘economic nationalist’’ political dogma: clerical fascism; neo-apocalyptic
theory promulgated by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their book, The Fourth
Turning;54 Samuel Huntington’s ‘‘clash of civilizations’’ hypothesis; and the Tra-
ditionalism of ultra-fascist intellectual, Julius Evola, who has been resurrected by
the radical right in Europe—with whom Bannon professes common cause. As editor
of Breitbart News after the death of its founder, Bannon opened the site as a plat-
form for the Alt Right. Briefly, Bannon and his youthful coterie in the White House
believe that American society is experiencing steep decline and they must close its
borders, expel ‘‘illegal’’ immigrants, stimulate a national economy, and rebuild its
greatness by ‘‘deconstructing’’ its government. Bannon has stated that he wants
nothing less than a ‘‘revolution,’’ and that it will not occur without a fight against
the news media.55 Like Mussolini, Bannon regards his revolution—a ‘‘global Tea
Party movement’’—as a quintessentially spiritual movement that will return the
West to its ancestral (‘‘Judeo-Christian’’) culture.56
For insight into Trump’s eminence grise, Steve Bannon, google his entire face-
time interview with Benjamin Harwell, head of the Human Dignity Institute during
a 2014 conference in the Vatican57 and his rendering of Shakespeare’s play, Coriola-
nus. For an overall view of the Alt Right, google ‘‘An Establishment Conservative’s
Guide to the Alt-Right,’’ by Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannapolis, on the web.58
There are numerous media sources that indicate that the current administration is
proceeding in a fascist direction as a uniquely American ‘‘third way,’’ but space
and time prevent my detailing them here. What is needed to make the diagnosis
are two things: the complete transformation of the United States into a one-party
state and the declaration of war against an external enemy in order to save our civi-
lization. If fascism takes root in the United States, it will also take its own form. I’m
indebted to David C. Rapoport for observing that there is a significant difference
between the economies of Italy in the 1920s and the United States of 2017; that
the opposition to Trump is greater than any opposition was to Mussolini in 1922;
and that the Italian political system was both much younger than our 250-year-old
democracy and more unstable. Soon a more comprehensively researched paper on
the Alt Right’s takeover of the Republican Party and perhaps the United States
government will need to be written, entitled, ‘‘It Can Happen Here.’’
Addendum
This postscript attests to the fact that we cannot know what direction the current
administration will take, whether Donald Trump will complete his four-year term
(or more), and if his transformative objectives will succeed or fail. This paper can
only offer a framework for considering rapidly evolving events. Writing a history
of unfolding events is a bit like making instant coffee: you know it is coffee, but it
is not cappuccino.
Notes
1. Robert O. Paxton, ‘‘The Five Stages of Fascism,’’ in Fascism: Critical Concepts in
Political Science, edited by Roger Griffin, vol. I (2004), Chapter 14, 305–26.
2. Letters, USA Today, January 27, 2017, p. 9A.
3. Roger Griffin in Kevin Passmore, Fascism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002), 20.
4. Ibid.
5. For a comprehensive treatment of fascism by myriad scholars see the five-volume
study, Fascism: Critical Concepts in Political Science, edited by Roger Griffin with Matthew
Feldman (London, New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2004).
6. See Ellen Strenski’s review of It Can’t Happen Here (Garden City, New York: The
Country Life Press, 1935) in this edition of Terrorism and Political Violence. She compares
aspects of the novel to the election campaign and administration of Donald J. Trump.
7. Paxton, ‘‘The Five Stages of Fascism’’ (see note 1 above), 311.
8. Ibid. See also Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2004), passim.
9. Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile, ‘‘The Doctrine of Fascism’’ (1932), http://
www.worldfuturefund.org/
10. The useful concept of the ‘‘cultic milieu’’ was developed by Colin Campbell, ‘‘Cults,
the Cultic Milieu, and Secularization,’’ in A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain, vol. 5
(London: SCM Press, 1972). It has been applied to historical cases of new religious movements
by several scholars, including Michael Barkun, Jean-Francois Mayer, Jeffrey Kaplan,
Catherine Wessinger, and myself. It is not part of ‘‘cult theory’’ or a ‘‘brainwashing’’ assertion,
but describes a stigmatized tradition that persists in producing groups through time that are
symbolically related and that are usually stigmatized as ‘‘fringe,’’ heretical, or ‘‘extremist.’’
11. Paxton, Anatomy (see note 8 above), 10.
408 J. E. Rosenfeld
12. Vicenza Francesca Benedetta Maria Tomassi von Heuduck Kiskis, Tre Volte Il Cielo,
Three Times Heaven (Memoirs of a Great-Grandmother). Unpublished copy.
13. Ibid., 41–42. Claus von Stauffenberg came to dinners at their home and her husband
and he drove together often to headquarters in East Prussia. He was ‘‘the officer who tried to
kill Hitler with dynamite powder on 30th. June 1944.’’ Her husband later intimated that he
may have talked to von Stauffenberg about the plot.
14. Ibid., 22. She attended a dinner dance at a Wannsee villa owned by the Arnhold
family, and seems to confuse the name with the nearby Arnold von Siemens Villa that later
became the site of the infamous Wannsee Conference, where the ‘‘final solution’’ was planned.
Although the Arnhold=Kuhnheim family was protected for a while, they would have been
killed after the Nazi victory, according to the Wannsee Conference plans, had they not moved
to Switzerland.
15. Ibid., 14.
16. Ibid., 15–16.
17. Ibid., 18.
18. Ibid., 23.
19. Ibid., 25.
20. Ibid., 28.
21. ‘‘We want our place in the world because we have a right to have it . . ..’’ Mussolini,
speaking of annexing Fiume and Dalmatia in Fascism, edited by Roger Griffin (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995), 35.
22. Tomassi (see note 12 above), 92.
23. Wikipedia, ‘‘National Fascist Party,’’ https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=
National_Fascist_Party&oldid-763222923
24. Mussolini and Gentile, ‘‘Doctrine’’ (see note 9 above).
25. It is also found in Hinduism, Jainism, and may reach back to Neolithic times.
26. Paxton, ‘‘The Five Stages of Fascism’’ (see note 1 above), 307. As fascisms evolve, so
do their symbols. See A. J. Willingham, ‘‘These Are the New Symbols of Hate,’’ February 21,
2017, 8:37 a.m. ET, www.cnn.com/2017/02/21/us/hate-symbols-changing-trnd/ in which
Mark Pitcavage, senior researcher for the Anti-Defamation League, keeps track of the
re-brandings and modified images, as well as the coded behavior of the neo-fascist milieu.
27. Mussolini and Gentile, ‘‘Doctrine’’ (see note 9 above). Two distinguishing features of
this unique document are Mussolini’s conception of Fascism as a religion and Fascism as
action.
28. Paul Tillich, The Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), 11–18.
29. Ibid., 4.
30. Ibid. 11–12.
31. Paxton, ‘‘The Five Stages of Fascism’’ (see note 1 above), 318.
32. Kerry Noble, Tabernacle of Hate: Seduction into Right-Wing Extremism, 2nd ed.
(Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2010).
33. Paxton, Anatomy (see note 8 above), 44–49; 172–205. See Walter Laqueur, Fascism:
Past, Present, and Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 93–215; positing a
‘‘fascism minimum’’ in identifying neo-fascism, 7. See also Jeffrey Kaplan and Leonard
Weinberg, The Emergence of a Euro-American Radical Right (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1998), regarding neo-fascism
34. Philip Roth, The Plot Against America (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2004). John
Steinbeck wrote a propaganda novel, The Moon Is Down (New York, NY: Penguin Books,
1982, first published 1942 by Viking Press) about the Norwegian resistance, which was later
made into a movie of the same name. Ray Bradbury’s classic, dystopian novel, Fahrenheit
451 (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1953), does not mention fascism, but takes place
within a regime that has banned books and maintained a compliant population through the
use of advanced video entertainment, terror, and minute surveillance technology.
35. Laqueur (see note 33 above), 224. The first KKK was a regional, southern terrorist
group. The twentieth-century Ku Klux Klan revival by contrast was a nationwide network.
See David Bennett’s history of nativism in America, The Party of Fear: From Nativist
Movements to the New Right in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1988).
36. David Neiwert, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right
(Sausalito, CA: PoliPoint Press, 2009).
37. Leonard Zeskind, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement
from the Margins to the Mainstream (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).
38. Michael Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press, 1997). See also Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions
in Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
39. Noble (see note 32 above), passim. This remarkable and informative account of how
fascism can transform Christian fundamentalist apocalypticism is a cautionary tale, written by
a participant who witnessed and recorded the phenomenon. Laqueur (see note 33 above) cites
cases of ‘‘clerical fascism’’ and fascism and Christianity elsewhere also, 147–69.
40. David Lane, Deceived Damned & Defiant: The Revolutionary Writings of David Lane
(St. Maries, Idaho; Wotansvolk 14 Word Press, 1999). Spencer’s new name for the white
nationalist movement was coined by him in 2010.
41. Jean Rosenfeld in Noble (see note 32 above), ‘‘Introduction,’’ xxv.
42. Neiwert (see note 36 above), 237.
43. See Joel Dyer, Harvest of Rage: Why Oklahoma City Is Only the Beginning (Boulder,
CO: Westview, 1997).
44. Jonathan Thompson and Brooke Warren, ‘‘Graphic: The Hidden Connections of the
Sagebrush Insurgency,’’ High Country News, February 2, 2016. http://www.hcn.org/issues/
48.2/the-hidden-connections-of-the-sagebrush-insurgency/
45. This is the conclusion of a book that presents copious evidence of the breakthrough of
a stigmatized milieu into the mainstream bureaucratic system and is stated by a journalist who
has witnessed firsthand the rise of Aryan Nations and the ‘‘Sovereignty’’ or Freeman move-
ment in the American Northwest and his own living space.
46. Neiwert (see note 36 above), 236–7. In 1942 sociologist Talcott Parsons analyzed
fascism as the only effective political response to social yearnings for traditional institutions
of family, patriotism, a core set of values, and a ‘‘national culture,’’ stating that fascism is a
‘‘quasi-religious’’ phenomenon, a ‘‘substitute for religion.’’ See Parsons in Griffin, Fascism
(see note 1 above), 277–8.
47. Christopher Adair-Toteff, ‘‘Max Weber’s Charisma,’’ Journal of Classical Sociology
5, no. 2: 189–204, http://jcs.sagepub.com (accessed July 24, 2009). See also Jean Rosenfeld,
‘‘Introduction,’’ in Noble (see note 32 above), xix-xxiii
48. See Michael Barkun, ‘‘Donald Trump Mainstreams the Fringe,’’ Terrorism and
Political Violence
49. ‘‘Another [Nazi group] was a local chapter of the Silver Shirts. The group operated in
22 states, numbering between 15,000 and 50,000 members, with Southland chapters in
Baldwin Park, Huntington Park, Inglewood, Long Beach and Los Angeles . . .. Propaganda
was distributed nationwide from L.A.’’ Cecilia Rasmussen. ‘‘Rustic Canyon Ruin May Be a
Former Nazi Compound,’’ Los Angeles Times, September 4, 2005, p. B2.
50. For an informed discussion of the changes from the Old Right to the current
iteration, see Jeffrey Kaplan, ‘‘Red Dawn Is Now: Race Vs. Nation and the American
Election,’’ Terrorism and Political Violence, this edition.
51. Richard Spencer, the neo-Nazi who asserted in 2010 that the white supremacist milieu
should now be called the Alternative Right ‘‘Alt Right,’’ and David Duke, the white national-
ist politician from Louisiana, publicly declared their support for candidate Trump. The South-
ern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, reported a significant rise in their
number in 2016, from 892 to 917: Sara Ganim, Chris Welch, Nathaniel Meyersohn, ‘‘‘A
Resurgence of White Nationalism’: Hate Groups Spiked in 2016,’’ www.cnn.com/2017/02/
15/politics/hate-groups-spiked-in-2016/. The FBI reported ‘‘a total of 5,818 hate crimes in
2015—a rise of about 6 percent over the previous year’’: Eric Lichtblau, ‘‘U.S. Hate Crimes
Surge 6%, Fueled by Attacks on Muslims,’’ The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.
com/2016/11/us/politics/fbi-hate-crimes-muslims.html/. Both organizations attribute the
rise to the nativist rhetoric of the Trump campaign, especially regarding Muslims.
52. A motivating feature of the Alt Right or neo-Traditionalist movement is its expressed
reaction to ‘‘modernity’’ and globalism. It has, however, embraced and used the new tech-
nology in our era of rapid social change. See J. Lester Feder, ‘‘This is How Steve Bannon Sees
the Entire World,’’ BuzzFeed, http://www.buzzfeed.com/, November 15, 2016, 11:40 a.m. ET.
410 J. E. Rosenfeld
53. Bokhari and Yiannopolis, ‘‘Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,’’

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/.../an-establishement-conservatives-guide-to-the-
alt-right/ call the ethno-nationalism mindset ‘‘natural conservatism,’’ an attempt to re-brand
its politics. As they describe it, national conservatism includes separation of ethnic groups,
expulsion of non-whites to avoid ‘‘demographic displacement’’ in the West, and to avoid
apocalyptic race-based violence: ‘‘You’ll often encounter doomsday rhetoric in alt-right
online communities: that’s because many of them instinctively feel that once large enough
and ethnically distinct enough groups are brought together, they will inevitably come to
blows. In short, they doubt that full ‘integration’ is ever possible. If it is, it won’t be successful
in the ‘kumbaya’ sense. Border walls are a much safer option.’’ The Alt Right agenda seems
to be working, as a generation grows up without any memory of World War II and the
Holocaust=Shoah; and CPAC, the conservative political action wing of the GOP, welcomes
Alt Right supporters and ideas in its annual 2017 conference.
54. William Strauss and Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (New
York, NY: Three Rivers Press, 1996).
55. Time and space do not allow me to elaborate on Bannon’s and the Alt Right’s fascist
rhetoric and actions, but his views were broadcast on the Internet and throughout the news
media during and after Donald Trump’s election. He has rapidly become the bete noir of
the new administration’s critics. See Emily Bazelon, ‘‘Department of Justification,’’ The
New York Times Magazine, February 28, 2017, https://nyti.ms/2m1Mcb7
56. Feder, ‘‘Bannon’’ (see note 52 above).
57. Feder, ‘‘Bannon’’ (see note 52 above), passim.
58. https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/.../an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-
the-alt-right/
View publication stats

Fascism As Action Through Time or How It Can Happen Here

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

Fascism As Action Through Time or How It Can Happen Here

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Fascism As Action Through Time or How It Can Happen Here

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

Fascism as Action through Time (Or How It Can Happen Here)

Article in Terrorism and Political Violence · April 2017

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

ISSN: 0954-6553 (Print) 1556-1836 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ftpv20

Fascism as Action through Time (Or How It Can

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2017.1304757

Published online: 04 Apr 2017.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 281

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

Download by: [74.203.89.165] Date: 28 August 2017, At: 23:14

Fascism as Action through Time (Or How It Can

unexpected. Its goal is a revolutionary reversal of representative government in the

Keywords Alt Right, apocalyptic, charismatic, crossover, cultic milieu, fascism,

Seven days after the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as forty-fifth president of

Address correspondence to Jean E. Rosenfeld, University of California at Los Angeles,

A further problem with conventional images of fascism is that

When in . . . March of 1919 . . . I summoned in Milan . . . interventionists

Mussolini’s revolutionary groups were gathered into a formal national party—

Nationalistic ecstasy can produce a state in which the subject Is

disappointment which penetrates into the very existence of man! The

of a Christian sect into a fascist threat, I posited a sequence of fascism’s development

That could be accomplished by a ‘‘crossover,’’ the adoption of the essentially

The current para-fascist phenomenon represents a different kind of mech-

The ‘‘crossover’’ of supremacist ideas into a large, disillusioned cohort of

ethno-nationalism, nor did he try to ensure his election by illegal means.

of ethno-nationalism, expulsion of foreigners, and replacement of the old order by

government will need to be written, entitled, ‘‘It Can Happen Here.’’

53. Bokhari and Yiannopolis, ‘‘Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,’’

View publication stats

You might also like