My thanks to NetGalley and Cambridge U Press. A much needed scholarly work on fascism in America, from the '30's to today. A collection of essays by various experts, I read many of the pieces. I mostly read the historical pieces. Fantastic Notes and Bibliogrpahy! Read alongside Maddow's "Prequel", and they fit well (hers is less scholarly).

Fascism has been back in the news for the past few years for political reasons. It’s always good to both go back to the sources and reconsider the presence and role of fascism in America since the 1920s.

Such is the goal of Fascism in America: Past and Present (galley received as part of an early review program), a collection of essays on this theme.

The editors first weigh in on whether DJT was/is fascist. They do well at exploring the historical complications with any kind of easy parallelism, recognizing fascism in Europe came at a particular time under particular circumstances, but also shows how DJT manifests authoritarian and fascistic tendencies.

Many essays reassess the role and presence of fascism in America in the historical era. For all sorts of propagandistic reasons it proved convenient to tell a narrative in which America was always antifascist. In truth there were many fascist sympathizing organizations in America, some of which were directly sponsored by the Nazis. The story of a Nazi ghostwriter used by some politicians in the 1930s is told. These essays demonstrate how a sizable minority of Americans found fascism sufficiently alluring.

Two Black contributors assess antifascism in the Civil Rights Movement and whether and how they associated their opponents with fascism. One essay explored the rise of counterfactual narratives in which the Nazis or fascists prove successful and take over power and what their presence and reception today says about the current environment. Fascism in far right movements today is also considered and what can be done about their influence.

This is a timely collection of essays which do well to remind us how some views which we would like to think have no heritage in our nation…do.

This collection presents a number of important analyses of trends towards fascism and right wing (often hateful) expression in our country. The authors help us reach beyond the headlines to try to understand how the ground was readied for so much success from these tendencies and efforts. Quite disturbing.

Without a doubt this is a timely and needed volume that looks at the intersection of US history and fascism. Numerous experts in a variety of fields offer a collection of chapters that explore American history and question to what extent we can lean on the framework of fascism to explain both events during the early twentieth-century as well as the recent Trump administration. Some of the chapters offering theories and ideas in development, others lean on established work and positions, and some discuss more original research that helps readers, academics, and policy experts think about the possibilities open to them when it comes to leaning on comparisons to fascism and how to address growing right-wing animosity, rhetoric, and violence. Personally, I found myself in agreement with the idea of 'fascism' as a mobile, moving target that is in part influenced by the time and place in question. The US will never find itself in a similar situation to Italy, Germany, Spain, or Japan in the inter-war period, yet all experienced a level of fascism. So it will be impossible to point to exact parallels and know when we are staring in the proverbial face of US fascism. However, looking at the US and our current political environment means appreciating both how historical US racism influenced the rise of German fascism and vice versa. As a transcontinental phenomenon, fascism should not be viewed in isolation but always contextualized and historicized with room left for taking into account future development based on transmitted ideas and the influence of successful policies. Thus there is certainly room for calling reactionary, right-wing policies fascistic, and personalities fascists, even if they do not perfectly line up with what happened in 1930s and 1940s Germany. They are an evolution that has built on previous authoritarian, racist rhetoric and actions and are abusing and subverting our current democratic system with the aim of turning it into something that will certainly taste the same, even if the recipe is different from what we know as 'fascism.'

Rosenfeld and Ward's "Fascism in America" is a necessary collection of essays detailing the history of fascist movements in the United States, changes in the past decade, and where we can go from here. From an academic history of the concept of America First to a history of black antifascism, the authors involved weave a cogent narrative while also finally providing a handful of responses to things that be used to counter far-right growth through things being done elsewhere.