A short list of essential readings on fascism
Concerned about the incoming Trump administration? Welcome to the club. Back in 2016 many asked, “Is this fascism under construction in America?” Today by any reasonable measure it’s no longer open to question.
Some academics and various branches of the left continue to split hairs over what type of governing power or social movement can legitimately be called by the term, or whether there are differences between “fascism” and other sorts of authoritarian rule like “military dictatorship” and “police state”, or if those differences matter at all.
Nonetheless, there’s a solidifying consensus—from right to left—that we are now witnessing American fascism under construction. We heard from Trump’s former administration cronies describing him as a fascist during the campaign; Kamala Harris agreeing in an interview; the New York Times editorializing along those lines; and here’s what AOC said recently: “We are on the eve of an authoritarian administration. This is what 21st century fascism is starting to look like.”
But as Karl Marx put it in the eleventh “Thesis on Feuerbach”, “The philosophers have interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” In other words, it is up to democratic socialists and other progressives to understand fascism so that we can build the broadest possible principled coalition to resist and defeat it.
No predictions necessary
It’s a one hundred percent safe bet that this administration will not be good for the working class, particularly immigrants, whom Trump has made clear will function as his number one scapegoat and first test case for the destruction of society’s civil liberties. This has already begun.
Trans people and queer culture are number two in line. The left, whom Trump has castigated as “vermin”, may not be as present in his day-to-day rhetoric, but fascism never leaves socialists and communists far down the list of enemies—indeed, defeating the left is fascism’s historic origin and ongoing role. Assaults on women’s right to control their bodies launched by Trump appointees on the Supreme Court will continue and likely expand. Expect the multiracial working class to be under assault in numerous ways—all without calling these aims and actions by their actual names.
Institutions that are meant to be bulwarks of democracy are targets. Any mass media that don’t toe the line are disparaged as “fake news”. Libraries will endure shelf-clearing, school curricula that tell the truth about American history will be attacked, and the federal government will saw off and sell off as much of the public sector as it can. (Here’s where fascism and greed merge in the Trump administration.) There will be an attempt to split and weaken organized labor, peeling off the more conservative union leadership while isolating the more militant unions. If that gambit fails, we can expect more direct efforts to crush labor and working class militancy.
Behind all these expected actions is the threat of violence to enforce them, whether from extra-legal right-wing militias, or now, the captured security apparatus of the federal government. And don’t discount a growing collaboration between the two with Trump’s encouragement, beginning with his pardon of the sixteen hundred January 6th far right conspirators.
Finally, as I noted a year ago in California Red, “Ultimately a fascist movement, usually perceived by the capitalist class initially as a threat, becomes the defense of that class, as the upstart party entrenches itself in state power, and a significant fraction of the holders of economic power, used to operating under the fig leaf of political democracy, figures out how to make their accommodation with this more direct form of violent domination of the other social classes.”
Accommodations by big capital to fascism
Recent capitulations to Trump by leading members of the ruling class notably feature representatives of Silicon Valley capital, including formerly anti-Trump capitalists like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, among others. Each of these oligarchs control major media platforms, as does the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, who, like Bezos, in the waning days of the presidential campaign last year, instructed his managers to squash editorial opposition to Trump. Thirteen of Trump’s cabinet appointees are billionaires. In other words, we are witnessing the accommodation of formerly skeptical sectors of big capital to fascism as it climbs to power.
The good news: fascism usually only lasts for so long; society eventually grows sick of the lies, the destruction, the lack of liberty, the erosion of humanity. But it takes understanding as soon as possible the nature of the beast, communicating that to as many people as we can, building the biggest coalition we can, and the courage to engage in collective action together.
The more we know about how fascism works the better we can combat it. In that spirit we share the annotated bibliography below.
Fascism reading list
Books
Bray, Mark. Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, Melville House Publishing, 2017. An historical and global look at what resistance to fascism has looked like from the early twentieth century to (close to) the present day, including discussion of tactics, strategies and historical lessons, through the prism of anarcho-syndicalism.
Guerin, Daniel. Fascism and Big Business, Monad Press, 1973. Originally published in 1936 by a left-wing journalist and updated in the 1960s, this is the classic overview of developments in Germany and Italy, informed by well-honed Marxist analysis.
McLean, Nancy. Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, Viking, 2017. How did the Republican Party move from a conservative alternative to the Democratic Party to the carrier of fascism in America? McLean tells the story of James Buchanan, whose right-wing libertarian playbook was adopted and backed by the Koch brothers.
Paxton, Robert. The Anatomy of Fascism, Vintage, 2005. In fascism studies all roads lead to—or at least touch on—Paxton. A non-marxist but synthetic overview of the field. If you are going to go for the deep dive this is essential reading.
Stanley, Jason. How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, Random House, 2018. Not as rigorous or concerned with definitions as Paxton or Guerin, this short, readable discussion, concentrating on cultural factors, describes the ways fascism becomes normalized in a democracy.
Stanley, Jason. Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, Simon and Schuster, 2024. A continuation of the arguments of his previous book, How Fascism Works, Stanley shifts the lens from fascism in culture to how fascists destroy a democratic commons of the mind by privatizing the public sector and controlling the content of schools, universities and libraries.
Toscano, Alberto. Late Fascism, Verso, 2023. A short (160 pages), brilliant, but densely argued effort to summarize theories of fascism as they shed (or don’t shed) light on the present moment. Not for the Marxist beginner.
Articles, websites and podcasts
Burtin, Olivier. “Fascism Has an American History, Too”, American History, V. 49, No. 3, September 2021. Argues that the previous consensus for an American exceptionalism—no fascist movement of any consequence has ever occurred in the USA—is wrong. The Ku Klux Klan in the nineteenth century is analyzed as a proto-fascism.
Churchwell, Sarah. “American Fascism: It Has Happened Here”, New York Review of Books, June 22, 2020. A similar argument to Burtin’s, but focusing more on later Jim Crow society, and how fascism will appear in a culturally endogenous way here.
https://convergencemag.com/articles/block-and-build-2-0/
“Block and Build 2.0” is an updated (January 15, 2025) strategy document by the editors of Convergence.
Fletcher, Jr. Bill. “Labor Now Needs to Be an Anti-Fascist Movement”, In These Times, November 8, 2024. A few suggestions on how to organize resistance to the new fascist regime.
https://convergencemag.com/podcast-shows/block-and-build/
Block and Build: A Weekly Roadmap for the Left. Examines political developments from a movement perspective. Fascism-specific: “Checking the Barometric Pressure of Creeping Fascism”, December 13, 2024
https://www.fascismbarometer.org
The Fascism Barometer. Podcasts, toolkits, Instagram posts on various approaches to stopping fascism.
https://democracytoolkit.press
Democracy Toolkit. Resources especially for journalists, but anyone interested in defending a free press dedicated to reporting fact-based news in a democratic society.
