During Trump’s presidency, “America First,” a slogan once associated with Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee (AFC) (1940–1941) to prevent US participation in World War II, returned to the center of American political discourse. This chapter argues that the AFC’s anti-interventionist foreign policy and proximity to mimetic fascist groups such as the German Bund is distorted by the labels “isolationist” and “populist.” Instead, by tracing the history of the slogan to the 1880s, this chapter restores the short-lived AFC and more recent iterations since 2016 to the longue durée history of American nativism and nationalism. The slogan “America First” has endured because it offers answers to perennial American questions about national identity and action: both ‘who are we?’ and ‘how should we act in international affairs?’ The chapter defines the America First tradition as an expression of a fascist politics of national identity rooted in American history and not merely a copy of twentieth-century interwar European models. Challenging diffusionist theories of fascism, it contributes to theoretical discussions of fascism as a global, diasporic, and living political tradition.

Whether or not the USA has its own fascist tradition is not merely a political but also a cultural question. This chapter examines America’s fascist potential by exploring how it has been depicted in popular alternate history television shows, including The Man in the High Castle (2015–2019), The Plot Against America (2020), Hunters (2019–2023), and Watchmen (2019). Echoing older fears of domestic fascism in American history, the four shows reflect growing concerns about America’s political future in the Trump era, and arrive at a common set of conclusions: they insist that fascism poses a serious threat to the United States; they pessimistically depict Americans passively accepting, or actively collaborating with, fascist rule; they urgently advise the targets of fascism – Jews, African Americans, and other minorities – to combine forces in combating it; and they explore the vexing question of whether using violence against fascism is ethically permitted or is itself “fascist.” These alternate histories show how universalizing the fascist past can foster a sense of political solidarity among groups threatened by fascism in the present.

This chapter argues that looking at how Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler approached the state of nature brings to the fore where the two political leaders converge and where they diverge. Sharing a belief in the existence of a quasi-Hobbesian state of nature, they disagree how to respond politically to that state of nature. Whereas Hitler thought that domestically the state of nature could be overcome through a strong state and through strong communitarian bonds holding people together, and whereas internationally he believed peoples simply had to live with the continued existence of an unregulated state of nature, Trump’s conclusions are different. He puts little faith in the existence of the state. Yet he believes that both domestically and internationally the state of nature can be tamed through an intricate web of power relationships within groups as well as between groups that creates a relatively stable system. Trump is part of two quintessential American traditions rather than of fascism: the Mafia subculture of New York City and the extreme individualism of Ayn Rand. The concept of fascism thus ultimately distorts our understanding of today’s America.

How might histories of fascism in interwar Europe help us today? Languages of “fascism” are now constantly in play – as warning and slogan; as emotional rallying-point; as rhetorics of recognition and abuse; as a boundary of legitimate politics – but rarely as carefully informed argument. For effective politics, though, we need historically grounded analysis that can avert tendentious and direct linkages that may be emotionally satisfying, but fail to capture fascism’s distinctiveness as a type of politics or explain how it comes to power. What might be consistent across such vastly variable contexts as the early twentieth century and now? Fascism silences and even murders its opponents rather than arguing with them; it prefers authoritarianism over democracy; it pits an aggressively exclusionary idea of the nation against a pluralism that values and prioritizes difference. So what are the circumstances under which fascism builds its appeal? What makes it desirable as an “extra-systemic” solution, as an alternative to the practices of democratic constitutionalism? What kind of crisis brings fascism onto the agenda? What is the character of the fascism-producing crisis?

This chapter situates the present rise of far-right intimidation and attacks against social justice movements in Oregon within the state’s history of white supremacist violence. Utilizing archival research, it elucidates the presence of vigilante activity at the heart of Oregon’s early development, from the genocide of Indigenous peoples to the exclusion of Black people and the persecution of people of Chinese origin. The article then sheds light on a leading exponent of those efforts to create a “white utopia”: the Klan’s idea of securing a white supremacist “Realm” through a complex understanding of vigilantism that includes policing groups, bodies, and space. The chapter further discusses the subsequent development of the City of Portland’s large fascist movement during the 1930s. Lastly, the chapter shows how the growth of the post-war Patriot movement out of the failed interwar fascist movement developed along the same porous boundaries between policing and vigilantism, on the one hand, and Conservative and fascist, on the other, enabling paradoxical partnerships engaged in an increasingly conflictive relation to the state.

This chapter explores the impact of William Dudley Pelley, leader of the Silver Shirts or Silver Legion, and the Legion’s place within the broader field of Interwar American extremism, when an undergrowth of xenophobia and antisemitism overtook the landscape of domestic politics. This chapter addresses a previously unknown genocidal dimension of American fascist rhetoric – which, in its violence and its visibility, went further than what even the Nazi regime was advocating at the time. The leading Silver Shirt dailies, most particularly The Liberator, and published interviews with William Pelley in other outlets are examined to reveal the precise nature of this rhetoric, which goes beyond emotional frisson to detailed proposals for programmatic, genocidal action. Genocidal antisemitism was not just the purview of German National Socialists, but was a concept autonomously articulated by fascists on both sides of the Atlantic. What this speaks to is a shared set of agendas: rather strikingly identical ideological precepts rooted in similar national, racial, and particularly religious cultures.

This chapter looks to the early postwar period to explore some of the early legacies of black antifascism. While many scholars have examined the antifascist aspects of radical movements like the Black Panthers, this chapter focuses on this earlier moment of transition in the midst of growing bipartisan Cold War opposition and the alliance between anti-Communism and massive resistance. It explores which aspects of the black antifascist tradition endured and informed postwar struggles. As Du Bois noted shortly after German surrender: “We have conquered Germany but not their ideas.” This chapter explores the critical intellectual response to postwar shifts in domestic and foreign affairs and shows how it circulated in the press and civil rights rhetoric, and among everyday African Americans. Antifascism shaped local practices of militant protest, armed resistance, and self-defense, particularly among African American veterans disillusioned with the false promise of democracy and freedom promised to them with Allied victory. This chapter provides a new perspective on an understudied aspect of the long civil rights movement and postwar far right.

In the late 1960s, Angela Davis and other Black activists asserted that racism was a fundamental component of fascism, and thus fascism became term and framework that Black activists used to describe the federal and state policies and practices that fostered racial inequities or obstructed Black people from achieving justice and equality. Despite the term’s origins in Europe, Black activists, such as Davis, used terms such as “fascism” and “genocide” as both a rhetorical tool and analytical framework which they hoped would wake up and compel the American public to demand an end to policies, both within and outside the American federal and state governmental apparatus. This chapter explores the contours of Black of antiracism and antifascist activism in the 1960s to the 1980s – from struggles against white supremacist collusion with the FBI and local police to assassinate black activists to the fight against state policies, such as forced sterilization of poor Black and Latina women, or the “ghettoization” of Black people in the 1970s.

This chapter examines the American elected officials who publicly supported fascism in the 1920s and 1930s and the impact of their actions on public discourse and policy alike. American politics in this era provided fertile terrain for fascist ideas, ranging from the country’s aggressive immigration restriction laws to eugenic sterilization laws, racial segregation in the South, and hysteria over the threats posed by Communism. It was not hard for Hitler’s elected allies in Washington, DC, to find Nazi policies to admire. The Nazis weaponized these sentiments in the late 1930s through an “active measures” operation based on Capitol Hill that eventually ensnared two dozen Members of Congress. Unsurprisingly, many of these figures later became deeply involved in the America First movement. American sympathy for fascism extended far into the halls of Congress, creating circumstances under which a fascist-friendly regime might well have come to power under counterfactual conditions. In so doing, the chapter shows that fascism was not only a phenomenon of street rallies and populist rabble-rousers, but of the American ballot box.

The epigraph focuses on answering the volume’s question, posed in the Introduction, regarding the degree to which the concept of fascism can be deemed essential or peripheral to the American historical experience, and how serious the threat actually is. The reader comes away from this book with a clear sense of the fascist origins and affiliations of the extremist forces that continue to threaten American democracy. In Fascist Italy, having participated in the March on Rome gave you a special status. The same is true for January 6 and all who conspired in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election and assault the Capitol, which is why many Republicans who attended the rally and breached the Capitol are now running for office, many with Trump’s endorsement. The epigraph examines the way in which this volume relates the history of fascism to America and abroad: every iteration of fascism is different, but the removal of rights and the advent of a climate of fear and violence is the constant. That is the lesson of this timely and invaluable book.