The Book<\/h4>\n
Did it Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America<\/p>\n
The Author(s)<\/h4>\n
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins has edited a book which he hoped would finally put to bed the hotly contested Fascism Debate that arose from Trump\u2019s 2016 candidacy, and which has found itself renewed intermittently, depending on election cycles or new political crises. A PhD student of Samuel Moyn\u2019s at Columbia University, so far in his career he has followed closely in his Doktorvater\u2019s intellectual and political footsteps. His polemical takes on social media will likely be familiar to those who follow him on Twitter. This book \u2013 or rather, its introduction \u2013 constitutes a no less polemical intervention. So closely has Steinmetz-Jenkins followed his mentor\u2019s lead, it has even been suggested that Moyn plopped the assignment in Steinmetz-Jenkins\u2019 lap.[1]<\/a> One can perhaps imagine why; it is rare for a collection of essays on a topic to have as explicit an agenda as this one. As Steinmetz-Jenkins puts it in his introduction, he seeks to \u201cput the fascism debate to rest.\u201d The sheer quantity of endorsements for this volume, from the elite circles of American academe, would seem to add weight to an apparently decisive blow that Steinmetz-Jenkins sought to land with this volume.<\/p>\n Little did Steinmetz-Jenkins know that, within a year of its publication, his volume would go from being a triumphant coup-de-grace against the liberal tyrannophobes, to an artifact of the shortest victory lap ever taken. Trump\u2019s decisive acts since his second inaugural \u2013 from deporting resident aliens without due process; to mass firings within the federal bureaucracy; to populating the leadership of that bureaucracy with a gallery of ideologically-driven appointments wholly lacking in experience or expertise; to initiating the end of birth-right citizenship \u2013 have astonishingly led the most trenchant critics to finally concede that yes, Trumpism is fascism. Where actual experts of fascism like Robert Paxton waited no longer than J6 to \u201ccall it,\u201d self-identified leftist intellectuals like Moyn or Corey Robin, whose expertise lay elsewhere but whose social following is much larger, were insistent right up to January 2025 that Trumpism could not be fascism. Within five days of each other, in March both Robin and Moyn threw in the towel.[2]<\/a> Their much more pugnacious satrap, Daniel Bessner, more petulantly declared that he was \u201cexiting\u201d the debate. Within a few weeks, two of the most persistent voices of the \u201cIt Can\u2019t Happen Here\u201d side of this running argument of ten years duration joined the \u201cIt Has Happened Here\u201d side. The raison-d\u2019\u00eatre of this volume vanished. Steinmetz-Jenkins was left holding the bag.<\/p>\n The body chapters of this collection are all pre-published, and one presumes Steinmetz-Jenkins curated his list based on what he perceived \u2013 largely correctly \u2013 to be signal contributions to a broader debate about what fascism historically meant, how it was defined, and whose interests it serves. Classics of leftist analysis are thrown in \u2013 not least Trotsky and Angela Davis \u2013 along with what seem to be seminal contributions to the current debate, such as those of De Grazia, Gordon, and Evans. While the selections on current events are meant to lend the appearance of balance, the weight of the contributions tilts very heavily, with only Churchwell\u2019s and Stanley\u2019s chapters unambiguously stating that Trumpism is fascism. And the \u201clast word\u201d of each section favors Steinmetz-Jenkins\u2019 own side. Curiously, some of the pieces make no mention of fascism at all, preferring instead to launch jeremiads against liberalism. Imagine a volume on the politics of female bodily autonomy edited by the American Life League which makes a putative attempt to include both sides of the debate but concludes with a chapter by Clarence Thomas. The results here are similarly orchestrated and similarly predictable.<\/p>\n The real question to be asked is not how Steinmetz-Jenkins\u2019 mentors finally changed their minds, but what kept them so long? A clue was offered by Moyn, a contributor to this volume, who tweeted after Paxton declared J6 to be fascist: \u201cFWIW, my reluctance was and is rooted less in the analytical propriety of the term as in my sense of the likely political consequences of certain framings.\u201d<\/p>\n To wit: if we call it fascism, we declare the wolves have indeed arrived and we must do all we can to stave them off. Including coalescing with the very \u201ccentrist\u201d liberals that socialists viewed as their main ideological adversary, ever since Senator Hilary Clinton voted for the Second Iraq War. Leftist scholars like Robin, Moyn, Bessner, Steinmetz-Jenkins and others found in Jacobin Magazine a focal point for articulating this vision. As Jacobin contributors saw it in 2016, Bernie Sanders was their opportunity to tear down a Clintonite, neoliberal status quo; liberal warnings that Trump was a fascist had to either be overreactions or knowing deceptions meant to stifle their burgeoning movement.<\/p>\n This political posture then informed the scholarly takes. When Dylan Riley, for instance, insisted in 2015 that \u201cDonald Trump is not a fascist, and yes it matters very much that he is not one,\u201d the cat of leftist scholarship on this question was let out of the bag: \u201cIn historical terms this process of disintegration opens up opportunities for the Left. The collapse of a major US political party, if it were to happen, can only be welcomed. In this context we\u00a0should reject absolutely the hysterical lesser-evilism implicit in calling him a \u2018fascist\u2019; it is both historically inaccurate and politically disastrous because it plays into the logic of supporting whomever emerges from the\u00a0Democratic Party primary.\u201d[3]<\/a> Without perhaps intending to, Riley at that early point gave the game entirely away. Until Robin and Moyn finally signaled their concession that Trumpism was fascism \u2013 because their particular Rubicon of fascist praxis had finally been crossed \u2013 this politically overdetermined agenda united leftist scholars and led to some very tortured scholarly positions. Whether it was Moyn deciding that historical comparison was now methodologically suspect; or Robin insisting that for something to be fascist it must have absolutely no precedent; or Steinmetz-Jenkins explaining away as \u201cneurosis\u201d the entirety of meticulous scholarship on Trumpism as fascism, the contortions were self-evident. The possibility that fascism historically rears its head as a set of articulated demands before it turns to the \u201cpraxis\u201d of violence was always discounted in these arguments; such critics would have proclaimed Hitler not a fascist after the Beer Hall Putsch, since it failed. Outside this volume, Riley made an even more outlandish claim that Trumpism couldn\u2019t be fascism because the Soviet Union no longer existed.[4]<\/a> This was only one particularly strained effort at a sort of \u201coriginalism,\u201d akin to being told that a Sunday mass couldn\u2019t be Catholic because it wasn\u2019t delivered in Latin.<\/p>\n We must consider the possibility that self-described socialists in this debate so strenuously denied that Trump is a fascist, not because they didn\u2019t see it, but because it got in the way of their politics. As published intellectuals with followings on social media, they saw an opportunity to become \u201ccitizen scholars\u201d and convince their following that here was an opportunity to strike a blow against capitalism. Rallying around Clinton or Biden threw up a barrier to this deeper objective. In this framing, Trumpist racism, xenophobia and misogyny became epiphenomenal to the question of class \u2013 the symptoms of bigotry could not be treated without dealing with its perceived roots in neoliberalism. Pausing the struggle against liberalism would forfeit what they saw as a real moment of opportunity. If Trump was publicly acknowledged as a fascist, this eschatology would be compromised. So, the argument had to be refuted; politics had to overrule evidence. Underneath this insistence, for many it was hoped that Trump would be the trigger for a Marxist resurrection.<\/p>\n Occasionally, the anti-anti-fascists did let slip. In a since-deleted tweet from November 12 2020, volume contributor Nikhil Singh expressed the view: \u201cI don\u2019t care if Trump is personally fascist. I may even agree that his political sympathies run in that direction. I do not agree that we\u2019re in a political situation devolving into fascism; such descriptions at [sic] do not illuminate our actual political challenges.\u201d<\/p>\n Here was something of a confession: yes, it\u2019s fascism. Where others denied it could be, Singh at least conceded it was. Daniel Bessner, in a since-deleted tweet three days after J6, stated: \u201cI don\u2019t see liberals as the far right; I see liberals as more of a threat to democracy and the general well-being than the far right.\u201d<\/p>\n Here again was a bald statement from a volume contributor that the fight against Trumpism was at best a distraction. Liberals were the greater danger.<\/p>\n That socialist voices couldn\u2019t agree as to whether Trumpism was fascism, or that it was but that this didn\u2019t matter, reveals a deeper tension. Do we deny Trump is fascist, or openly admit we don\u2019t care? Denying Trump\u2019s fascism would have its utility, since this would be a necessary step to overcome the \u201cneurosis\u201d being generated by liberals who were abusing the f-word as part of their own ploy to snuff out the Bernie challenge. Calling it fascism but adding \u201cliberalism is worse\u201d sounded calamitously partisan and emotionally dissonant. But all that quickly became irrelevant with Moyn\u2019s and Robin\u2019s volte-face<\/em>. Bessner, for his part, has indicated that he has \u201cnothing more to say\u201d on this question. Which leaves only Steinmetz-Jenkins, who two weeks after Moyn\u2019s concession was still mocking the \u201ceternally annoying fascism debate\u201d \u2013 presumably not a judgment on his own work on this volume. That his own mentor has now joined the neurotics, however, gives us pause to consider whether Steinmetz-Jenkins\u2019 characterization wasn\u2019t perhaps a case of projection.<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> https:\/\/www.unpopularfront.news\/p\/what-happened-here<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> \u201cI have since turned out to be wrong. They have set off multiple conflagrations. And I have been shaken out of my skepticism.\u201d https:\/\/www.wnycstudios.org\/podcasts\/otm\/articles\/mahmoud-khalil-and-a-new-red-scare-plus-press-freedom-under-threat<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2015\/12\/donald-trump-fascism-islamophobia-nativism<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> https:\/\/newleftreview.org\/issues\/ii114\/articles\/dylan-riley-what-is-trump<\/p>\n Richard Steigmann-Gall is Associate Professor of History at Kent State University. He is the author of\u00a0The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(Cambridge UP), which has translations out or forthcoming in Portuguese, Italian, Spanish and Polish. His academic research and publishing concern church and state under Nazism, religion and fascism, and the religious roots of \u201cscientific\u201d racism. His current research and publishing has led him to Transatlantic comparisons, with recent work including articles on \u201cStar-Spangled Fascism<\/a>\u201d and \u201cThe Genocidal Vision of the Silver Shirts<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Book Did it Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America The Author(s) Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins has edited a book which he hoped would finally put to bed the hotly contested Fascism Debate that arose from Trump\u2019s 2016 candidacy, and which has found itself renewed intermittently, depending on election cycles or new political crises. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":236551,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12032],"tags":[2708,3744,3917,23524,7378,13658,4459,87484,87485,6085],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-236550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-history","tag-america","tag-book-reviews","tag-daniel","tag-fascism","tag-happen","tag-perspectives","tag-richard","tag-steigmanngall","tag-steinmetzjenkinss","tag-wolves"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/s-usih.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/RSG-1.jpg\")
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<\/p>\nAbout the Reviewer<\/h4>\n