Fascism in America: Past and Present

Fascism in America – Past and Present with Dr. Gavriel Rosenfeld and Dr. Janet Ward

Refuse Fascism Episode 172

Sun, Sep 24, 2023 2:53PM • 40:59

Dr. Janet Ward 00:00

I think our book is trying to be the generator of multiple approaches for conceptualizing and defining American fascism, so that people can recognize what’s going on now. And contextualized origins of fascism in the United States and draw lines of connection that might not have been made apparently as clear as they might have been.

Dr. Gavriel Rosenfeld 00:21

One of the issues that our book deals with is not only chronicling and interpreting the activism and misdeeds and very ominous plots of fascist movements in the 30s, up to the present, but we’re also talking about the discourse around fascism as it has also existed in America since the 30s. In other words, there’s the reference, there’s the objective existence of fascism, and then there’s the the way that people talk about it.

Sam Goldman 01:07

Welcome to Episode 172 of the Refuse Fascism podcast, a podcast brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and a host of the show. Refuse Fascism exposes, analyzes, and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in the United States. In today’s episode, we’re sharing an interview with Dr. Gavriel Rosenfeld and Dr. Janet Ward, discussing the new book which they co-edited, titled Fascism in America: Past and Present, which features the contributions of experts in the field of the history of fascism in America.

Sam Goldman 01:45

Thanks to everyone who goes the extra step and reads and reviews the show on Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen. If you appreciate the show, and want to help us reach more people who want to refuse fascism. Go on over and write a review and drop five stars wherever you listen to pods. Tell the good people out there in podcast land why you listen and make sure to subscribe bellow so you never miss an episode. And of course, keep up all that great commenting and sharing on social media and the Youtubes.

Speaking of YouTubes I wanted to share a comment on our episode from last week on the episode Stop Cop City from RonL0507 who wrote “thank you for your dedication and bravery. Keep it up. It is not only disgusting that Atlanta wants to spend $90 million on a militarized police training facility, but to do so they’re going to destroy 285 acres of city forest land and by doing so, they are killing hundreds of animals and millions of insects and organisms. One more time mankind shows no respect for nature.” Thanks, Ron L for listening and for sharing your thoughts.

Yes, thanks to everyone who writes me. I do read your emails, and as proof, here’s one of them from Antonia who wrote me off of listening to last week’s episode. She wrote Cops City is a veiled excuse to build a Gestapo training center like ones my mother watched in Berlin, Germany in the early 1930s. Every day of her last two years of life, she lamented seeing so many similarities she saw happening in our country that had terrified her in her childhood. She became a US citizen in 1959. And they still made her jump through hoops questioning her right to vote. In 2020, she won the right of finally being allowed to register, then didn’t live long enough to actually do so thanks to voter suppression in Texas.”

Thanks, Antonia for writing to me, and for sharing that story with us. Your mother was not alone in seeing those similarities. We’ve tried to feature that perspective regularly on the show. I want to give thanks to our patrons and show sustainers. We could not do this without you. Become a patron for as little as $2 a month over at patreon.com/refuse fascism.

With all that good business out of the way. I want to get right into our interview this week. Here is Dr. Rosenfeld and Dr. Ward. I mentioned recently on an episode that we’re on the road to atrocity paved with “it could never happen here; that people aren’t, or couldn’t ever become that bad. We are confronted by the most dangerous myth in world history, that pernicious American exceptionalism that deludes itself into thinking we can’t, we wouldn’t, we aren’t, even though this is the same country that did and is and only exists because of all that. This is the nation birthed from genocide of native people, a country that gained its wealth from chattel slavery, and its standing in the world through constant wars for empire. We know the outcome when good people choose to ignore these fascist movement. It’s hoping they will be exempt from the violence, or that someone else will stop them. And those outcomes are uniformly horrendous.

Today, I’m glad to be speaking with Dr. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Dr. Janet Ward, about their book Fascism in America: Past and Present, which explores the history and present threat of fascism in the United States. This book’s timely exploration was reviewed by a frequent guest and friend of the show, Dr. Federico Finkelstein, who wrote, “this book is an essential contribution to debates and the history of fascism in the US and its relationship to the present. It is a must read for all those interested in the issues facing democracy today.”

Gabriel D. Rosenfeld is President of the Center for Jewish history and Professor of History at Fairfield University. He’s the author or editor of eight books on the Nazi era, including The Fourth Reich: the Specter of Nazism since World War Two. Dr. Janet Ward is an American Council on Education Fellow at Yale University and Brammer Presidential Professor of History and Faculty Fellow for Strategic Initiatives at the University of Oklahoma., and President of the German Studies Association. She is the author or co-editor of seven books, including Post Wall Berlin: Borders, Space and Identity and the forthcoming Sites of Holocaust Memory. Welcome, thank you so much for joining me.

Dr. Gavriel Rosenfeld 06:29

Thanks for having us.

Sam Goldman 06:30

I want to start with what is fascism? On our show, we discuss fascism as a qualitative change in how society is governed, when, once in power, fascism’s defining feature is the essential elimination of the rule of law and democratic and civil rights. Fascism foments and relies on xenophobic nationalism, racism, misogyny, and the aggressive reinstitution of oppressive so-called traditional values. Truth is obliterated, fascist mobs and threats of violence are unleashed to build their movements and consolidate power.Is there any more you think we need to discuss about what fascism is in order to inform our discussion going forward?

Dr. Gavriel Rosenfeld 07:14

Well, if you had seven or eight hours, we could really get into the thick of it, because one of the things– I’ll just speak for myself here — that at least I went into this project wanting to do is not reduce fascism to an easy set of identifying features, but to point out that academics and journalists have been debating what fascism actually is, ever since fascism first came on the scene in Italy in the early 1920s. To keep our readers engaged, one of the things I think we tried to do was problematize different kinds of definitions of fascism, have our 12 contributors and the very esteemed scholar who has been [on this podcast] and who wrote our epilogue, engage in this question of what fascism is, how do you identify it, because only if you can understand its origins, vis a vis other right-wing authoritarian movements.

Here, of course, in the United States, we would want to probably position it next to nativism, which dates back really to the founding of the country; other forms of authoritarianism, whether represented by the Ku Klux Klan, or outright self-identifying movements that were fascist in the 1930s, like the Silver Shirts. For analytical reasons, I think it’s important to create dividing lines, although I would hasten to add that for reasons of public enlightenment, and let’s say activism, sometimes those scholarly micro divisions probably should be set aside, because you want to galvanize people based on the idea that we have a serious threat to contend with.

If we’re spending all our time parsing distinctions that aren’t really that different, then we could maybe lose sight of the forest for the trees. I would certainly say that the essential ingredient of fascism, from my perspective, is the use of violence, whether you can find the desire to reinforce patriarchy, or blur the distinctions between church and state, or whether it’s about authoritarian, election rigging or whatever, you certainly have those kinds of things and movements that are on the right that aren’t fascist. But when you start having stormtroopers, they don’t have to be wearing uniforms, by the way. They can be just marching on the Capitol. But if you have people who are using paramilitary violence to achieve their goals, that’s when you’re all of a sudden in a fascist orbit.

Sam Goldman 09:20

Dr. Ward, did you want to add something?

Dr. Janet Ward 09:21

Yes. I think our book is trying to be the generator of multiple approaches for conceptualizing and defining American fascism, so that people can recognize what’s going on now and contextualize origins of fascism in the United States, and draw lines of connection that have not been madeas clear as they might have been. And I think we’ve done a pretty good job, thanks to the contributions of our authors, to offer both that combination of something that is providing original research into origins of American fascism throughout the 20th Century andnow 21st, butalso something that, for me personally, is about bringing together scholarship with activism in a way that speaks to something that Tim Snyder said inOn Tyranny, where he wants us to do something local, do something that means something for us personally, to find our corner of genuine engagement, to do whatever is special for us in our lives to make a difference during these times. It’s not just — as Gav just said — that we’re entering an era or have entered an era where violence has been normalized toward multiple communities, but also where these things are being codified legally. And that is kind of where we are right now as a society.

Dr. Gavriel Rosenfeld 10:42

Can I actually just jump in on a quick question about the American exceptionalism issue? I think it’s really a central thing that that we have to deal with as a country. And you see, of course, all politicized debates at the state legislature level, whether in Florida, or in terms of how American history standards are supposed to be reinforced, or the debate about the 1619 Project. I totally agree that the idea of American exceptionalism has made a lot of people oblivious to the fact that we do have fascist movements in our history that we really need to come to grips with.

My hope would be, and this is sort of against the baby and bathwater analogy, just like the editors of the 1619 Project, The New York Times wanted to hold up in an idealistic sense, the best of America’s liberal principles that we should aspire to, and we should realize for all communities. By the same token, I do think that the myth of the “greatest generation” and the fact that World War II was the “good” war and that America defeated fascism. It’s not wrong 100% It’s only part of the story.

If we can make people realize that defending democracy is part of living up to that heritage. And if that, you know, it doesn’t mean that we’re 100%, obviously, exceptional. But if we can tweak that and make it work for pro-democracy activists, I would at least say that that’s the best way to hold two truths in our minds. At the same time, American exceptionalism has distracted attention away from our crimes, but the liberal, anti-liberal dialectic in our nation’s history shouldn’t lose sight of the things that we’ve done well, and that we need to keep doing much better.

Sam Goldman 12:13

I wanted to move into your book itself. Your book is structured into three sections: strategic thinking about fascism, which is that conversation that we started off with; homegrown Nazis, white anti- democratic violence and Black Anti-fascist activism, and the last section countering fascism in culture and policy. I was hoping you could tell us about some of the essays included in your book, and the questions that you see them addressing.

Dr. Janet Ward 12:44

If I could start with white, anti-democratic violence and Black anti-fascist activism. We brought together three contributions from Anna Duensing, Alexander Reid Ross and Ousmane Power-Greene, we clustered them together because they deeply contextualize examples of as Gavriel was just indicating, the history of violence used in the Pacific Northwest, by vigilantes, specifically in the history of Oregon.

And then with the continuum, historically speaking,between Anna Duensing’schapterand Power-Greene’s chapter, we gain deep insights into Black anti-fascist resistance to the experience beyond Jim Crow and through the Civil Rights movement toward the present day, particularly with Ousmane Power-Greene’s chapter so that we understand specific values and changemakers among African American activists who’ve been busy fighting fascism and understanding this country from that very perspective for many decades. It would often come as a surprise to white liberals, when Trump was elected, that some things felt very new, but there wasn’t a single African Americanactivistfor whom this was new.

Dr. Gavriel Rosenfeld 13:59

Yeah, and what the book structure tries to do is march chronologically from the 30s up to the present. Each of the chapters honestly does ping pong back and forth between inter war or war time, right-wing /fascist movements, and present day similarities; some differences as well, of course, comparisons, analogies and whatnot. But in terms of the four sections, while each of them goes from the 30s, up to the present, I think Geoff Eley’s very important essay kicks us off by theorizing what fascism is. So you know, while we couldn’t possibly do justice to a very important original question, Geoff deals with the larger issue that historians have been debating for quite a while: whether fascism is a word that really best describes the crisis of Europe and other western states between 1918 and 1945, or whether there’s some fascist essence that is transferable to subsequent eras, that we can obviously identify and maybe find constellations of events that would make it likely to recur.

So that’s a very theoretically oriented piece whereas some of the subsequent ones in that section, most notably the one on America First by Matthew Specter, Varsha Venkatasubramanian. That is an essay that takes one of the most notorious phrases from the interwar period. It makes it clear that it’s actually an older phrase that dates back to the 19th Century, and one of course that was more recently revived by Trump and has been inherited by what we can call MAGAism as a movement. The second section maybe just to leave off with that, really gives us three amazingly powerful case studies of how the fascist movements of the 1930s were distinguished from say, the Ku Klux Klan.

Linda Gordon’s essay makes the case that the lines may be blurry. But there’s still a difference between the limited violence that the Klan, the second Klan here in the 20s was willing to use and the much more outright violence that later factors in the 1930s use, whether that’s a distinction that we should take overly seriously or whether we want to see them as part of a continuum of right wing violence that’s open certainly for discussion. But then I think what’s fascinating with Bradley Hart’s essay, is that the fascists that were on the scene — I’m talking about American domestic fascists, and then outright Nazis from Germany — they had a lot of sympathizers among the elites in the United States, whether congressmen, senators, people in heavy industry and big business.

While Linda Gordon’s piece talks about the rank and file of American fascists, who, you know, maybe because of their dominant status in the era of the Great Depression, wanted to migrate to violent paramilitary movements that would scapegoat minorities for the sake of trying to make America great again, elite level sympathy for fascism was extremely widespread. And so that bottom up and top down relationship to fascism, I think, is very much reinforced in that second section.

Dr. Janet Ward 16:49

So for example, with Cynthia Miller-Idriss’ final contribution, we see someone who regularly testifies on the Hill, and runs a center at American University, toward recognizing and retraining any instances of American youths’ turn toward polarization and extremism. Cynthia Miller-Idriss’ contribution is a useful final utterance, so to speak of the volumes’ chapters, because she’s immediately turning toward putting this blend of scholarship and activism into practice, in that she helps any parent in the United States whose child is turning toward extremist behavior, with materials that can be distributed to parents and teachers, and so on.

So there are ways in which as I mentioned earlier, I think every single one of our contributors, whether it’s through op-eds, whether it’s through this kind of blended applied scholarship, and activism, is doing something toward communicating historical events and truths in contemporary context that make it understandable to the broader public as best as we can.

Dr. Gavriel Rosenfeld 17:54

Yeah. And also, just to add to that, I think the educational angle is super important. I would make a small addition to say that in my own essay, the role of popular culture in perpetuating an anti-fascist message is also extremely effective. So in the chapter that talks about the very popular HBO and Amazon Prime streaming series that deal with Nazis in America, and how, say in The Man in the High Castle, American society could have been totally taken over by a victorious Nazi regime in World War II, or Philip Roth’s Plot Against America that was an HBO miniseries, or the Quest to Fight Nazis in the 1970s, with hunters, or even the very, very sci fi tweak on this premise with Watchmen which won 11 or 12 Emmys a couple of years ago, also focusing on the effort by multiple groups.

I think this is the interesting common theme in all these shows, that whether one defines the enemy as Nazis, fascists, white supremacist or whatever, they are targeting many different groups in America. And the only way we have any hope of combating this right wing extremism is by those groups banding together across racial, religious, ethnic, gender, sexuality lines. I think that is a very powerful message of allyship. That is something that pop culture can really disseminate, in addition to school teachers, educational manuals, and so forth.

Sam Goldman 19:14

I really appreciate that addition into our conversation, because when on the show, we’re talking about education, we’re including, typically, the media and entertainment and culture and those can be educational for good and bad that they can be part of inspiring beliefs, inspiring action, and that can go in multiple directions, sometimes. It’s also how people can get insight, even if it’s kind of subtle, into something like American complicity during the Nazis reign, something like Transatlantic. I think that there’s incredible power there and I was glad to see culture as part of your book. Overall, I’m really excited to read it and I’m excited for people to use it and to see that creative ways that people will use it.

Dr. Janet Ward 20:02

You mentioned culture as a portal. For me, someone originally trained in literature as well as then history, I often would imagine that many teachers would feel exactly the same way: you cannot teach anything historical without a portal that invites first-person experiential transference of some kind of empathy — something that activates your imagination of “this could happen to me,” or “this did happen to someone like me.” And so the narratives that we use as teachers in the classroom have to have that degree of accessibility at all times. Something like graphic novels, anything that is a digital product, for example, a video game, a movie, this is how the next generation — and ultimately our book is for that next generation — through the mediators of culture and history that are our teachers in our schools across the country and beyond: without those portals of empathy-building stories and images, we’re stuck.

This is why I think Gav’s chapter is so useful in the volume because he immediately intuits that there’s been a rise in the continual obsession with fascist representation in all media since the middle of the 20thcentury, but [recently] there’s been a particular rise in interest. And that does not necessarily only reflect that we’re in that phase of American or collective memory that obsesses with memory because we are leaving that first-person generation of people who’ve experienced the war and the Holocaust behind, that too. But it also, sadly, portends an obsessive imaginary use of it for the new purposes of the new era in which we live, where things are being repurposedand historical truths that we thought were in place are now up for grabs, and being utilized by the extreme right, as we saw with the march on Charlottesville, Virginia, where slogans were used, but they were being positioned for a new era and a new generation.

Without understanding the sheer power of these cultural versions of fascism that have gone on since the middle of the 20thcenturyin our broad imagination, it’s impossible to understand identity, collective memory, motivation for good and also therefore for bad. For all of us, I think, who teach the history of the Holocaust and the significance of America’s role in the Second World War, and how that has sort of whitewashed so much of American identity into disassociating ourselves from these currents that our book tries to elucidate — this is where we must, I think, focus our attention.

Sam Goldman 22:51

I wanted to ask you about what motivated you to write this book, to edit this, but to put this together now, why the origins of American fascism, now? Why what moved you as individuals and beyond academic curiosity?

Dr. Janet Ward 23:04

I’m just going to say I wish some of our contributors could be here so I could thank them. The contributors to our volume inspired me, because I see and saw then, when we first got together — literally like your podcast and your wonderful activism got together at a certain point in time, so too did we; when I think of a contributor like Marla Stone with her ACLU activism;I think of many of our contributors who regularly contribute to often difficult contemporary debates, like Thomas Weber, for example, on television, on radio — they do so much.

We wanted a way to bring the AmericanHistory narrative together with what Gav and I have more obviously represented in our disciplinary background, which is German and Jewish analyses of the Second World War together into combination with understanding American history up to the 21stcentury. And it’s that combination of perspectives, understanding thatfascism and the whole issue of it not being a threat from without:it’s acombined series of influences from within. We can take the standardization in education, immigration, law, medicine, and bioethics, and understand that our eugenics-based standards of the early 20th century were of enormous interest and influence for Nazi lawmakers when they were creating their own versions of eugenics laws.

Indeed, as is, of course, well known, they were influenced by the codification of Jim Crow laws before they created the Nuremberg race laws. We’ve got crossover happening historically, that happened in such a way that these are not two separate kinds of histories. We may have been separately trained to be, as academicians, people who teach AmericanHistory, people who teach GermanHistory, people who teach JewishHistory, but ultimately this is a combined narrative. The contributors to our story that we tell in this book showcase that this is one textured web of influences going back and forth.

It’s the nuances that reveal the complicity of what we consider to be more innocent American identity. Those nuances are shown in the book historically and judiciously — and calmly! — by our contributors. And I think it’s that way of combining access to primary sources with an activist mindset that can, I hope, empower readers of the book to use some of the same materials, when they contribute instances in American history to a wide variety of audiences, including K-12.

Dr. Gavriel Rosenfeld 25:46

Yeah, and I would just add to that, you know, what Janet just really put in perfect terms. The fact that so many of us in the field of German Studies, since German reunification in 1990, had been wanting to learn the lessons of the Second World War from a German perspective, and make sure, at least that was my experience for many years, that the Germans had truly taken away the importance of democracy from their catastrophic experience. And that in a way, all German historians were sort of monitoring post 1945, and, of course, post 1990 Germany, to make sure that those historical lessons have been learned.

None of us, I don’t think until 2015, ever thought we would start worrying more about our own country than about Germany. And of course, based on most indexes of democratic well-being, Germany, is outpacing the United States. So I think in the best sense of the word of presentism, we want as scholars to apply the lessons we’ve been focusing upon Germany for so many years to our own country. And by the way, not, and I’m here, preempting, any right-wing talking points that would say, oh, liberals hate America, and we don’t want to be proud of who we are.

But we can’t be naive. And we can’t be blissfully ignorant of the dark sides of our history. Frankly, every country has its dark sides, and its more idealistic, positive sides. It’s just that we’ve been top heavy in recent years towards focusing on the democratic and progressive elements and have forgotten about all the things that, or at least haven’t spent as much time focusing on the things, that cast us in a bad light. So here, I mean, I’m sure Janet, you probably feel the same way. We’re trying to have a “both, and” approach, not a demonizing America approach.

But of course, there’ll be people on the right who would say that’s the only thing the liberals want to do is drag down America, defame America, in the eyes of the world. And frankly, that’s what all right wing nationalists do in any country, whether it’s Russia, Germany, Hungary today, Poland. History can only be triumphalist, history can only be inspirational, history can only be the bright sides, we’ve never done anything wrong. That’s something we’re trying to counteract, but in a balanced way, as best we can.

Sam Goldman 27:50

I wanted to come back to the idea of fascism and shaming that you were just speaking to Dr. Rosenfeld, the possibility or likelihood that just by putting the words America and fascism in any proximity, the attack from the right of your demonizing the United States or something along those lines. And I wanted to ask you why you felt that it was significant to name the beast as American fascism. Instead of labeling it you know, something that’s common American authoritarianism, past and present, or I call it a euphemism, and I mean that no disrespect. I just think it is a euphemism when used by the media, American extremism past and present. Why did you go the direction you went and why does that matter? What is the benefit of that? And what is the cost when we don’t when we’re reticent to do?

Dr. Gavriel Rosenfeld 28:45

So one of the issues that our book deals with is not only chronicling and interpreting the activism and misdeeds and very ominous plots of fascist movements in the 30s up to the present, but we’re also talking about the discourse around fascism as it has also existed in America since the 30s. In other words, there’s the reference there’s the objective existence of fascism. And then there’s the the way that people talk about it, and I’m doing some new research on this topic.

It turns out ever since the 1930s up to the present, every single United States president has been accused of being a fascist by those presidents’ opponents in the media. I mean, even the blameless figure like Jimmy Carter was called a fascist, and Dwight Eisenhower was called a fascist. FDR was called a fascist by his GOP opponents. So because the term carries such weight as the epitome of at least 20th century Western political depravity, it’s easy to sling around as a slur to discredit your opponent and of course, like so many hot button rhetorical terms, it’s been overused countless times by people all across the political spectrum, most notably by people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who will claim that COVID mandates are a sign of the American government turning fascist.

One has to disentangle what I would call bad faith invocations of something being fascist with good faith invocations motivated in genuine concern by activists that we actually are approaching a fascist tipping point. The problem is in any social scientific observation experiment, you can’t identify something without using language. And because the terms we use are already contaminated by prior usage, we have to really be judicious when we use the terms. But the peril to answer your question, the peril of being too judicious is that we underestimate the threat. And we don’t give it the gravitas it deserves. At the same time, we know there are countless examples when people cried wolf, and said that, for example, taking the Tea Party instance of calling Obamacare, like the Nazi euthanasia campaign T4 back in the early 1940s. And that the American government can create death panels to bump off grandma and grandpa, and that we’re facing a new Nazi tipping point.

There were people on the right who either believe that or just claimed it out of bad faith. And so you know, you get these Nazi comparisons becoming ubiquitous in the public media world. And that’s why I think so many scholars jumped into the fray to say no, no, no, here, this comparison of policy x by administration y to fascism is absolutely beyond the pale. Whereas Marla Stone in her essay in our volume, when we’re talking about kids in cages, the people being detained from Latin America at the border, it was a huge event where those concentration camps are not.

Sometimes I think it’s most productive for us to have the debate by having the terms sensational as they may be to be in the mix, so that we talk about where we are, because there are gradations of evil in the world. There are gradations of right wing violence. I think the reason why everyone uses fascism is no one wants to be caught, unawares, and using terms that are under- estimating the threat.

So to be safe, most times people use the most powerful terms, which paradoxically oftentimes creates this phenomenon that we are well aware of called the overreaction paradox, where if you use a term to diagnose a threat with the most sensationalistic terms, and then the threat turns out to have been no threat at all, you will claim victory because only through your intervention, did you preempt the threat. And if you somehow underestimate it by just calling it extremism, or you name it, you might let the thread metastasize into something worse. So I know this sounds a little bit inside baseball. And you know, it’s about gamesmanship and how the words get used, but I think a lot of us today are willing to err on the side of being extra cautious, and seeing the true fascist aspects of present day right wing activity.

Dr. Janet Ward 32:46

Absolutely, Gav, if we quote someone like Jason Stanley, who has said so many useful things since the accession of Trump to power, one of the things that I find useful is his phrase that “the logic of fascism is GreatReplacement theory.” We have, for example, Linda Gordon’s chapter, “The American Fascists,” that goes into great detail to explain that these belief systems then can be recognized again during the Trump era. She’s not mincing her words: after all, it was the second KKK that helped forge the US electorates’ widespread support for the 1924 Immigration Act, and then morphed into the more fully articulated fascist organizations in the 1930sin this country.

We have legislation that is anti-LGBTQ in this country today that bears clear resemblances to other forms of legislation that have been passed in other erasbefore,most notably of course in Nazi Germany. We have scholars who haven’t contributed to our volume like Jason Stanley and Doug Moses that we use as points of reference on a frequent basis, because it’s about the way in which we take analysis of historical terminology and context and turn that into reference points for advocacy and need today. If you don’t, then you’re not fully utilizing the knowledge you have, as comparative scholars historically, for contemporary situations.

We are understanding that we’re seeing a mass normalization of racial and anti-gender bigotry and so on. But how do we actually communicate that there have been previous pathways that have done this before, that have in a way constituted the belief systems of hate today? That’s our job.

Sam Goldman 34:34

As we close out this conversation, I wanted to give you the opportunity to speak to anything that we didn’t get to that you really want listeners to know, whether it be about your book or about refusing fascism more broadly.

Dr. Gavriel Rosenfeld 34:51

My simple plea would be well beyond understanding the history of fascism or in the global context or the history of American fascism. We all have to really appreciate the importance of studying history more broadly. It’s so awful what we see going on in not only K through 12 education, but higher education with the assault against the humanities, the politicization of the humanities, the turning of historical knowledge and literacy into a political football primarily by the right, I would say.

Although we have presentism, and all types, and I personally favor some more than others. But the fact of the matter is, is history is becoming a casualty of the cultural wars. And I think that for anyone who wants to be able to be equipped to tackle any pressing social issue today, whether it’s about race relations, voting rights, LGBTQ issues, environmental policy, historical mindframe is absolutely critical. And so to fight against the diminution of history as an important discipline is something I think all of us are well advised to promote.

Dr. Janet Ward 35:53

Thank you, Gav, I can only echo that, and to end perhaps with some thoughts from our very first essay by the historian Geoff Eley, who says that, obviously, over his long career, his role as a historian has morphed with responses to other kinds of major events such as the fall of the Soviet Union and the advent of the internet and social media throughout his life. But what we do in the present (andhere I’m echoing Geoff) must always inform the questions we ask about the past. And I think your efforts with Refuse Fascism, Samantha, and the way that you serve as a conduit to broaden discussion and response is part of how we’re all addressing this now, with an increased sense of urgency. We know what we’re facing with the next presidential election. And we know that we can be of use and good, toward protecting democratic institutions that wevalue.

Sam Goldman 36:46

We’re going to thank you both for your book, for taking the time to chat with me about it, for taking the time to share your expertise, your perspective, and insights. And for listeners, you’re going to be able to find the link to the book to learn more about it, to find it to get it in the show notes. And if folks want to read more from you, or follow your your work, what should they do? Where should they go?

Dr. Gavriel Rosenfeld 37:12

We’ll put our homepage links into your show notes if you have room for them. Obviously, Janet and I are both combining our teaching. our research, our op-ed writing, and so forth as best we can with our other obligations. But we don’t want to not be part of this larger, very, very crucial point in history. So all your listeners who are interested, by all means follow us on social media, check out our home pages, and we’re very grateful to be part of this Refuse Fascism program.

Sam Goldman 37:42

I do want to let people know that Dr. Rosenfeld has put together I’m sure with many, many other people, a program that I’m very excited to attend virtually, that’s taking place next month, titled Fighting Fascism a Symposium on Jewish Responses from the Interwar Period to the Present Day. It’s happening Sunday October 15 10-5 in person at the Center for Jewish History, right? And then also, virtually as well.

Dr. Gavriel Rosenfeld 38:11

Yep, we have many of the nation’s leading thinkers on the topic of fascism, past and present and engaging in very, very accessible conversations, tracking the ways in which people responded to fascism in the 30s all the way up to the present. Jews in particular, but also in allyship with other groups from the liberal to the left wing part of the political spectrum through political engagement, economic boycotts, popular culture and media and so on and so forth. So it’s not really enough, I think we’ve emphasized in this conversation already, just to talk about the origins of fascism, it’s what do people do about it? So this can be well worth being aware of October 15, Sunday at the Center for Jewish History in New York City.

Sam Goldman 38:51

And a link to that event will also be in the show notes. Thank you so much.

Dr. Gavriel Rosenfeld 38:54

Thank you, Samantha.

Sam Goldman 38:56

Thanks for listening to refuse fascism. Got thoughts or questions off this show? We want to hear some ideas or topics for guests? Yes, please send them to us. Have a skill you think could help we want to know all about it? Reach me at the site previously known as Twitter @SamBGoldman or drop me a line at SamanthaGoldman@Refuse Fascism.org We’re also on all the socials we could think of: Mastodon, Threads, Instagram, BlueSky. I need to be posting there more @RefuseFascism om all those places.

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Thanks to Richie Marini and Lina Thorne for helping produce this episode. Thanks to incredible volunteers, we have transcripts available for each show, so be sure to visit refuse fascism.org and sign up to get them in your inbox. I’ll be off next week but Coco Das will be guest-hosting, so you don’t want to miss it next Sunday. Until then, in the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America.