Revisiting Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here in the wake of Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency, this chapter argues that the novel is still valuable for gauging the distinct contours of American fascism. On the one hand, the novel provides a remarkably prescient reading of the complex class dynamics and populist coalitions that remain crucial to understanding white nationalist politics and successful neofascist movements. It also strikingly captures the nature of American fascist rhetoric and how it is registered by those outside the fascist “base.” On the other hand, in projecting white Midwestern farmers as the main site of resistance, the novel shows the serious limitations of the early twentieth-century socialist populism that animated Lewis’s political imagination. The chapter concludes with a reflection on possibilities and constraints of populism as an antifascist political frame.

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 surveys the American literary reaction to global warfare in the early twentieth century – primarily World War I – as military events that conditioned, simultaneously, backlashes of political-cultural despair as well as hopes for social regeneration. While it considers well-known classics of the Lost Generation and the malaise shaping its fallout with the mobilization for World War I, it simultaneously problematizes racialized and gendered aspects of those writers’ complaint while examining the war’s differently inflected impact on writing by lesser-known working-class, proto-feminist, and African American novelists. It also considers the advance of modernist interest beyond the Great War into the antifascist struggles of the Popular Front, as well as anticipating the “late” and “post”-modern developments of later war-oriented periods.

Since the 1970s, the campaigns of animal protection advocates have been met with increasingly draconian government response, reflected in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s post-9/11 classification of animal rights activists as the “number one domestic terrorism threat.” Animal advocates—who have never harmed a human being—have been targeted by expanded federal and state anti-terrorism legislation, disproportionate prison sentences, sweeping new surveillance powers, and experimental prison units, among other attacks. This article explores how, and why, the civil rights and civil liberties community have largely ignored—and in some cases even embraced— the carceral logic of criminalizing animal rights activists as “terrorists.”

By the 1950s, the SED had to compete with an independent West Germany for international recognition, while also contending with the global politics of human rights emerging out of the Third World. On the one hand, the SED created the Committee for the Protection of Human Rights to campaign against abuses in West Germany, including the imprisonment of Communist Party members who had been deemed a threat to the constitutional order. On the other hand, legal scholar Hermann Klenner developed a philosophy of “socialist human rights” in response to the Third World’s struggle to place self-determination at the centre of the UN agenda. Klenner integrated the idea of self-determination into a Marxist interpretation of rights, claiming that state socialism, human rights and the realisation of state sovereignty in opposition to the imperialist West were, in fact, a singular unified political goal. By the mid-1960s, the Committee for the Protection of Human Rights – using Klenner's new ideological formulations – shifted its focus from West German prisoners to international human rights campaigning.

World War II differed from preceding wars on account of the fact that the mass killing of civilians was a strategic objective of the war. Nowhere did Axis forces kill more enemy civilians than in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union. This chapter gauges the nature of Nazi violence by illuminating the impact that German killings of Soviet civilians had on the Soviet war effort. Germany’s war against the Soviet Union rested on a transgression of the moral norms of humanism, which Nazi leaders purposely disavowed to justify the promotion of a particularist racial ethic and the mass annihilation of racial foes. Both the moral provocation that defined the Nazi project and its cruel effects for people who were defined as antithetical to the “Aryan race” registered profoundly with Soviet observers. They seized on the nature of German violence to build a moral case about their own war effort, expressed in the antithesis between “Soviet humanity” and “fascist barbarism.” This narrative, replete with detailed information about German atrocities, was paramount in mobilizing Soviet people to fight Nazi Germany. While Stalin disavowed universal ideals after the war, this did not diminish their wartime vitality and reach, or the Soviet Union’s decisive contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Extremist right-wing parties pose one of the most notable challenges to liberal democratic systems. This book breaks new ground by examining the organizational development of some of the most extreme parties in Europe at the local, rather than the national, level. The systematic analysis of evidence from hundreds of local branches and thousands of local activities demonstrates that even these highly centralized parties display notable subnational variation in how they develop. In some local settings, these really extreme parties have been particularly successful, and in others they have miserably failed. To account for the remarkable differences in local organizational life, this study explicates and then tests an analytical framework for understanding the local organizational development of extremist rightwing parties. It systematically examines how endogenous and environmental factors affect the capacity of these parties to penetrate local societies. This book builds on and pushes beyond the voluminous literature on the European far right parties and contributes to the broader literatures on political parties, social movements and militant democracies.

This chapter borrows insights from the extant literature on the far right and the broader literatures on political parties, social movements and militant democracy to develop a theory of local party development. It explicates a theoretical framework examining how endogenous and environmental factors shape the development of extremist right-wing party organizations, at the national and, more importantly, at the subnational level. It first looks at how internal party characteristics shape the capacity of extremist right-wing parties to grow roots in local societies. It then focuses on environmental factors: it examines how electoral, institutional and societal factors affect local party trajectories.

This chapter discusses the findings of this study and its distinct contributions to the analysis of far right parties, party organizations, social movement and militant democracy.

This chapter explores the origins, development and applications of Aron’s theory of totalitarianism from the 1930s to the 1950s. It begins by discussing how Aron’s earliest theorisations of totalitarianism and political religion emerged from critical dialogues with the works of Élie Halévy and Carl Schmitt such that by the eve of the Second World War Aron had arrived at an understanding of totalitarianism as a pathology of modern democracy. The chapter then considers how Aron’s theory of totalitarianism developed with the onset of the Cold War and how this impacted on his understanding of the meaning of modern democracy as a constitutional, pluralist, multi-party regime. It concludes with a discussion of Aron’s theory of totalitarianism in relation to that of Hannah Arendt, explaining how and why Aron came to de-emphasise notions of totalitarianism and secular religion in his work following the death of Stalin in 1953.

This chapter examines the development of Raymond Aron’s distinctive understanding of the intellectual’s role in public life. In contrast to existing accounts of Aron’s intellectual development, it shows that his earliest political engagements as a student had a lasting impact on his intellectual ethic of responsibility. The chapter explains how Aron’s involvement in revisionist socialist and pacifist movements during the late 1920s and early 1930s informed his understanding of political realism. Situating Aron within the context of broader debates over intellectual responsibility and irresponsibility involving authors such as Julien Benda, Paul Nizan, and Max Weber, it then examines Aron’s response to the crisis of French democracy in the 1930s. Here the chapter shows Aron to have been a staunch critic of organised intellectual anti-fascism who was sympathetic to the radical right’s critique of French democracy. Thc chapter concludes by explaining how Aron’s politics in the 1920s and 1930s shared many of the anti-liberal characteristics of the nonconformist milieu in which he was politicised, while at the same time he adopted the reconciliatory historical vision characteristic of the French liberal tradition.