Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the word “fascism” has moved from the historian’s archives to the editorial pages of newspapers. The point of comparison has generally been drawn from European history, but drawing our analogies and checklists from the trajectory of fascism in Europe obscures both the connection between what is happening now in American politics with the history of racism and racial capitalism in this country, and the manner in which we might be seeing an entirely new form of fascism emerge. Alberto Toscano argues that to understand the contemporary form of fascism in the US, we are better served by looking at the history of black radicalism, from Black Panthers to the contemporary prison abolitionist movement.

How does studying that history change our understanding of fascism?

In this episode, we discuss the following thinkers/ideas/texts/etc.:

• Alberto Toscano’s essay “The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism” from the Boston Review

• George Padmore 

• W.E.B. DuBois’ Black Reconstruction in America 

• George Jackson

• Angela Davis

• Angela Davis’ interview of George Jackson 

• Ruth Wilson Gilmore

• Jairus Banaji 

• Alberto Toscano’s “Notes on Late Facism”   

• Jean Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason 

• Settler Colonialism

• Michel Foucault’s interview with Cahiers du Cinema about the representation of fascism in film

• Johann Chapoutot

• Amiri Baraka 

• Hitler’s American Model  by James Q. Whitman

• Franz Neumann’s Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944

• Hannah Arendt 

• Herbert Marcuse 

• Prophets of Deceit by Norbert Guterman and Leo Löwenthal 

• Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany  by Dagmar Herzog 

• Eric Fromm

• The Authoritarian Personality  

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