Nationalism, Nativism, and the Fascism Question, 1880–2020
from Part I - Strategic Thinking about Fascism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 September 2023
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.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.