DETROIT – For years, I’ve been irritated by people, especially Americans, who called anything they didn’t like “fascist.”
In my experience, the vast majority of the time, people who use that word have no idea what fascism really is. This isn’t something new; George Orwell, who spent his short life fighting both fascism and muddled language, once wrote “the word fascism has now no meaning except insofar as it signifies ‘something not desirable.”
Orwell knew what fascism really was; he got a fascist bullet through his throat in Spain. But nearly a century later, most of us don’t. Ten years ago, I couldn’t have imagined respected Michigan lawyers and judges coming together to hold a mock trial to debate the question “Fascism: Can It Happen In America?”
But then again, while I grew up imagining a nuclear war, I could never have imagined a mob storming the Capitol to try to overturn the results of an election and hang the vice-president just for doing his job and certifying the results of a free and fair election.
Nor could I dream that the mob would be egged on by a defeated President who refused to leave. Four years later, facing multiple indictments across the country, that same man, Donald Trump, is going to again be the Republican presidential nominee. If he wins, and the polls now say that’s quite possible, he’s vowed to be a dictator “for a day, close the border and drill, drill, drill.”
Suddenly, the question about fascism in America didn’t seem so far-fetched any longer. A few months ago, SOAR, a prominent seminar and lecture group in Southeast Michigan decided to hold such a trial this month, invite a large audience to serve as a jury, and asked me if I would participate as an expert witness.
They wanted me to talk about the history of such movements in America, and the factors that might lead to something that might actually resemble fascism taking power here.
I said I’d be happy to, but, remembering Orwell, said we needed a definition of what fascism was. While there was some debate, eventually we modified a Wikipedia entry to agree that “Fascism was an authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition.”
Historically, that has often involved imposing strict restraints on women and other minority groups, but I thought the key factors were substituting a dictatorship for democracy, refusing to accept the results of Democratic elections and ignoring America’s traditional checks and balances on any one man’s power.
Could that actually happen here?
Robert Sedler, a distinguished and now retired professor of law who has twice argued before the United States Supreme Court, argued that our traditional checks and balances would prevent a dictatorship from ever happening. The audience listened attentively. But in a troubling sign, when Sedler said we could count on the U.S. Supreme Court to protect our rights and freedoms, many in the audience broke into derisive laughter.
It hasn’t been a good year for the high court. Later, some mentioned reports that Justice Samuel Alito had an American flag flying upside down on his lawn after the 2020 election, usually a sign that whoever lived there did not accept President Biden’s election as legitimate. When the audience was allowed to ask questions, several women in the audience asked the professor how he could say the court would protect their rights when it had overturned Roe v. Wade.
On the witness stand I was asked, as an expert on America history, why we should be worried when fascism had never gotten much traction here during the movement’s zenith, with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were in power.
I said that in fact there had been thousands of enthusiastic fascists in this country then, some of whom held a huge pro-Hitler rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939.
Aviator Charles Lindbergh was an open Nazi sympathizer as well. But no leader of either the Republican or Democratic parties talked about becoming a dictator, and then-President Franklin Roosevelt was hugely popular and strongly anti-fascist.
There was one serious threat to democracy then: A potential alliance between Father Charles Coughlin, the anti-Semitic, pro-fascist “radio priest” with a nationwide following, and Huey Long, who ran Louisiana as a dictator.
But Long was assassinated and the church eventually silenced Coughlin. The difference today, I noted, was that for the first time we have had, and may have again, a President who has seemed willing to discard democracy when things didn’t go his way.
When the jury of the audience, mostly well-educated retirees voted, 209 people said that yes, America could become a fascist country; only 64 voted that it could not.
When I heard the results, I certainly hoped the majority were dead wrong, though I had a sinking feeling that they may be right.
What I know is that whatever our partisan politics, we should all do what we can to make sure that even the possibility goes away.
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Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
