From the Flag to the Cross: Fascism American Style
Edited by Zachary Sklar and Michael Steven Smith, OR Books, £12.99

THE threat of fascism or neofascism in the US since the fall of Nazism has been an uncertain subject of discussion within the left. The Communist Party’s leadership with its warnings, “Five Minutes to Midnight,” confused more than assisted the left that rallied to Henry Wallace before being pursued ruthlessly by the FBI and other repressive forces. It did not help to exaggerate the immediate danger.

The same has been true, I believe, since the rise of the Reagan Following in the 1980s. Did Orange County, California’s ardent racists or Anita Bryant’s orange-juice-hyped anti-feminists bespeak a coming shutdown of unions and civil liberties? Not really. A veteran of the Old Left, Bertram Gross, penned a pamphlet entitled Friendly Fascism and that seemed to hit and miss the threat perfectly. Goldwaterism wasn’t really fascism but did it offer an opening to fascism?

The issue is anything but moot today. The Introduction by Jim Lafferty puts the important point up front: Trump Part One was merely awful, Trump Part Two is something different and, of course, worse. I am drawn to authors who explain who they are, where they came from.

Notable essayist Chris Hedges tells us that he grew up the son of a Presbyterian minister (we Congregationalists could not help thinking of them as a higher social class than ourselves). His college mentor, James Luther Adams, has the distinction of first calling out the “Christian fascists” during the 1980s. Hedges, the divinity student, later New York Times journalist, attended Right to Life weekends and Creationist seminars in Reagan’s day, concluding that powerless people are prey to the right, and after a while, concluding also that the corporate coup d’etat had really succeeded in the US. After attending student rallies over Israel/Palestine in the last year or two, he found young people who understood about capitalism’s “creating a kind of global envrionment ... where genocide becomes an acceptable weapon, especially with mass migration because of the climate crisis.” 

Not all the essays are so strong or so personal. Some of them even seem, to the gimlet-eyed reader, to be advertisements for past books written. Never mind. Veterans of union struggles, like Dianne Feeley (a longtime editor of the magazine Against the Current) speak from experience about the need to “developan alternative society that’s based on securing people’s rights, a communal society... solidarity, not just for our own family but for the larger community and the larger environment in which we live.” 

That is surely the spirit. Henry Giroux points to the rise of the “American Homeland Security Campus” and the need to rally students and faculty to struggle for their rights and their lives against unprecedented pressures. The events of Spring 2024, revealed both the courage of young people and the ferocity of repression, the lengths that university presidents have been willing to go in order to appease Trumpians and long-standing vested campus interests.

Bill Mullen writes eloquently about the history of black struggles, going back to the 1940s-50s and Popular Front organisations like the Civil Rights Congress, struggling hard before succumbing to McCarthyism and resilient racism. Margaret Kimberly (a co-founder of the Black Agenda Report) urges us to understand that the racist support of Trump policies is real and attractive. And on the other side of things, that the Democratic Party remains stubbornly unwilling to get out of line with traditional parliamentary practices, in ways that Republicans in Congress consider their own god-given right. Or embrace righteous causes as obvious as the plight of Palestinians — any support for them by mainstream Democrats viewed even now as a kind of Third Rail of politics, impossible to embrace.

Kimberly concludes: “We are the ones who have to create grassroots movements for change, and they have to be independent of electoral politics.” This seems to be the leading note for the parting note of the book, an essay by Kshama Sawant. A Seattle City Council member for more than a decade, she has taken on local Democrats as well as Republicans. Warning against the presumed failures of Bernie and AOC, she has also proven considerably less than helpful for socialists who have chosen the path of Zohran Mamdani in New York, for intervention within sections of the Democratic Party — even when first appearing to give Mamdani the benefit of the doubt after his victory.

Can we walk away from any political opportunities for popular anti-fascist interventions? This reviewer does not think so. But From the Flag to the Cross is an eminently useful book. I hope it will be widely read.

Paul Buhle is a retired historian, and co-founder, with Scott Molloy, of an oral history project on blue collar Rhode Islanders.