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.

Although Plutarch is often regarded as a historian who believes in the power of providence and its influence on the lives of his protagonists, there is considerable evidence that his concept of history was more complex. His Parallel Lives feature numerous techniques of sideshadowing which confront the reader with the idea of history as a contingent, not a determined process. These narrative strategies, by means of which Plutarch frequently alludes to different possible outcomes of past events, offer short glimpses on what else might have happened.A comparison with Polybius shows that Plutarch drew upon concepts and techniques which had already been established in Hellenistic times and which presented a contingent past. But he did not simply copy these techniques, as is evident from a comparison with Polybius. He developed them further and took them to a new level by adapting them to the needs of his comparative approach to the lives of famous Greeks and Romans.

Paralleling the developments in evolutionary biology, cultural anthropologists abandoned the model in which modern Western culture was the goal of development, recognizing the diversity of cultures around the world. Archaeologists realized that different cultures had been shaped by different technological innovations. Thinkers from a range of backgrounds began to see social evolution in Darwinian terms, as a process driven by occasional innovations that were unpredictable on the basis of any general trend. H. G. Wells popularized a view of history on similar foundations, openly acknowledging the parallel with Darwinism. He and others suggested that the linkage of science and invention that had occurred in the West and led to its dominance was an example of such an unanticipated breakthrough. Counterfactual histories imagined worlds in which the key transformations had come out differently. It was now recognized that the ongoing flood of new technologies was transforming society at an accelerating rate, making it hard to predict the course of future progress.

This chapter analyses the survival of aristocratic elite families in European polities during the nineteenth century. I show that aristocracy and monarchy survived and even prospered by adapting to modern politics until the beginning of World War One. Certainly strong liberal, nationalist and socialist forces challenge hereditary power but they were only successful in Britain and France. The Central European, Ottoman and Russian monarchies and aristocracies were ousted only because of their defeat in World War One. The capacity of monarchies and aristocracies to survive even in the century of modernization means that the idea that kinship and political order are incompatible is weakened further. It is possible to have modern states ruled by elite families and legitimated by hereditary rule. However, it is not possible to build democracies on such foundations.