The word fascism evokes images from Mussolini’s regime in Italy or Hitler’s in Germany: the propaganda films, the mass rallies and book burnings, the concentration camps and death camps, the swastikas, jackboots, and marches. Yet we make a mistake when we see fascism as foreign or assume that it must be an exact copy of the fascism that came before. Fascism is adaptive, flexible. It is a chameleon shifting with the light—now a White supremacist’s shriek against the stranger, now an oligarch’s handshake with power, now an immigrant kid getting snatched off the street and sent to a secret prison beyond the reach of the law. Millions of people look away, ignore the threat, downplay it—and thus fascism proliferates. Fascists create a legal black hole where people are erased—literally dehumanized—while expanding a monstrous surveillance state and machinery of terror that continues to ensnare new victims.
Fascism exists in many forms in the United States: the neo-Nazis ready to commit murder tomorrow, the militias and gangs that harass minorities, members of the MAGA movement who are focused on immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the country or women having too many rights, voters who want a technological autocracy or a traditionalist Christian nation, intellectuals who feed birthrate theories of race, conspiracies about the elite, and legal strategies for consolidating executive power. Technology amplifies fascism and helps it reach young people directly.
After the economic crisis of 2008, I noticed many of my fellow male millennials moving to the far right. I began to study the history of fascism. I was especially intrigued with the question of why so many young Europeans drifted toward fascism after the First World War. One of the early answers I found was surprising: The fascists knew how to throw a good party.
