I am teaching a course this coming semester called “The American Fascist Takeover Novel.” That is, I’ll be teaching it provided that there hasn’t been an actual fascist takeover in America by then. (And provided my institution is still open.) As an astute young Sunrise activist commented to a reporter, during their sit-down protests in Congressional offices on Capitol Hill, the only thing worse than climate change is climate change + fascism. And climate chaos would serve as a dandy excuse for authoritarians to impose order -- sort of an ever-burning Reichstag fire.
The American Fascist Takeover Novel is a legit subgenre. This fact is not surprising, given the cultural and historical context. The American colonists rebelled against a government that was turning increasingly autocratic (and about whom they harbored paranoid suspicions). The debate on the Constitution was shadowed by the fear of a new autocracy. The “founders” had a keen awareness of Roman history, and knew it was easier to turn a republic into an autocracy than an autocracy (back) into a republic. U.S. writers have always fretted that an authoritarian would seize power — right back to the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers, then on through Tocqueville, into the twentieth century, and up to the present. By the late nineteenth century, it seemed apparent that the United States had not reverted to autocracy — it had become an oligarchy instead. That is the name Jack London gives to the ruling elite in his not-so-very-far-in-the-future speculative novel The Iron Heel (1908). Trotsky supposedly said it predicted the coming of fascism. Be that as it may, the book does present us with a quasi-feudal surveillance police state, in which the working class has been reduced to serfs, despite the best efforts of an heroic band of socialist organizers. The introduction and “footnotes” are added by a fictional historian hundreds of years in the future, after the Brotherhood of Man has been achieved — this only after numerous failed attempts, including the main characters' in the body of the novel. By the 1920s, fascism had a name, and by the early 1930s, it had control of Germany. This fact prompted some of the more acute observers to wonder if the same thing might not happen here. With Charles Lindbergh and other prominent Americans expressing sympathy for Nazism and promoting isolationism, with the “gold shirts,” the Bund, and other fascistic-leaning organizations on the rise, an authoritarian American state seemed not so farfetched — though not something most Americans considered seriously. Thus the ironic title of Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here (1935). Just as Americans didn’t take Hitler seriously, neither do they regard the populist demagogue Buzz Windrip as much of a threat. He’s a kind of aw-shucks, down-home neighborly version of D.J. Trump, and Windrip, too, is surrounded by scheming, ambitious minions. Once he wins the presidency, he starts instituting something that looks very much like what was happening contemporaneously in Germany. Our hero, a mild-mannered small-town newspaper publisher, is outraged -- and scared -- and has to decide how to respond. Philip Roth takes up a similar premise for The Plot Against America (2004), in which Lindbergh becomes president and institutes pro-German, Nazish policies. In this novel, our protagonist is a big-city Jewish kid who also has to decide how to respond. A final novel from the 30s (and maybe the most interesting) is Mari Sandoz’ Capital City (1939). Sandoz is best known for her Catheresque tales of Plains pioneers, but in the 30s, everybody felt like they had to “speak out” and “take a stand.” The novel is set in the city of Franklin, the state capital of Kanewa (KANsas-NEbraska-ioWA -- get it?), which is also a college town (not unlike Lincoln, NE). The book’s twist is that the fight is between a labor front and a business-backed cadre of right-wing goons, not for the nation as a whole, but for a state (in particular, its capital city). It is a regional class struggle, in other words — one that will resonate with anyone living in capital cities or college towns in the corn belt. ____________________________________ Wednesday: The contemporary (climate-inflected) Fascist Takeover Novel.
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |