Thread by @sarahchurchwell

I’m truly not sure what the people just discovering that Trump’s rally looked like the 1930s think they have been watching since 2015. I wrote a whole book about these parallels in 2017, which came out over a year ago.

Maybe now they’ll stop calling us alarmist for saying if it talks like fascism and acts like fascism we should probably treat it like fascism.

American fascism is a historical reality. One of fascism’s most respected theorists, Robert Paxton, noted back in 2004 (Anatomy of Fascism) the case to be made that the first Ku Klux Klan, in the 1870s, could be viewed as the world’s first fascist movement.

Here is what Paxton said:

Or consider Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, from 1935. Here is (some of) what he thought about the possibility of American fascism:

There's an abundance of evidence, & some good books being written on American interwar fascism. @rauchway reviewed a couple in last week’s @TheTLS, noting rightly that now it looks as if postwar America should have been more concerned with rooting out fascism than communism.

@rauchway @TheTLS And now let the willful blindness in the responses commence. I have one thing to say to those who will come flooding into this thread with their denials: "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” FIN