Why Didn’t Americans Take Fascism Seriously Until it Was Too Late?

Or, The Price of Grandiose National Myths of Exceptionalism

There’s a question that’s been echoing in my head. One I think that history will ask. Why didn’t Americans take fascism seriously until it was too late?

Perhaps that sounds harsh, maybe even absurd to you. So let me qualify it a little. “Fascism”. Friends, when a head of state wants to hold military parades — and not clapping is treason —LOL — is there another word, idea, or concept that fits better? Isn’t it then a willful denial of reality to say that such a watershed moment in a nation’s history is, if not outright atrocity, at least not the glittering spark of fascist implosion?

“Until it was too late”. There are many ways it can be “too late”. Until nothing can be done about it — or until, at least, the phenomenon itself occurred. Here, I mean the latter. Americans didn’t take fascism seriously until, at last, it (quite literally) paraded itself before their very eyes — and demanded they applaud on pain of treason. Sieg Heil! And maybe they still don’t. How funny. How strange.

Now that you understand my question perhaps it seems a little less extreme. Or maybe it still does. Maybe that reflects the times we live in. “Why didn’t Americans take the possibility of fascism seriously until it trumpeted down Constitution Avenue, letting the whole world know it had arrived?” Either way, let us try to derive an answer.

Now. The first way a nation might fail to take fascism seriously is trivial: there was no one left to warn of its dangers. But in America, at least a few of its thinkers did. They were sidelined, blacklisted, and deliberately erased. So the question then becomes: why did it become a taboo to even discuss the rise of fascism as a remote possibility — if not a likely probability? Every single major media outlet spent all of election year publishing pieces warning us not to use words like “fascism” and “authoritarianism” and “Hitler” and “Mussolini” — when they weren’t doing puff pieces on sympathetic Nazis. So there was a problem not of a lack of information in America — but of a strange, bizarre, glib kind of willful ignorance. A nation made itself blind, and now the authoritarians march and demand…