Above photo: Police surround pro-Palestine student encampment at University of Southern California.
The Law and Disorder radio program has immortalized selected recent interviews as it expands into print media with a new book, From the Flag to the Cross: Fascism American Style. This compact collection draws a portrait of fascism that does not dwell on lurid images and horrors of fascist history, concentration camps, prison gulags or wars ravaging the planet, led by fascist governments. Instead, it delves into the structural foundation of fascism, how to identify it, and ideas about organizing to resist it.
For two decades, Law and Disorder has reached a large number of devoted listeners with its weekly broadcasts on 140 stations across the United States and its podcasts. Its interviews have greatly deepened our understanding of complex world events.
Like genocide, fascism is a controversial subject. Popular cinematic images of it, featuring merciless jack-booted specters barking murderous commands, terrified our parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Although the world has changed vastly in the last century, the structural elements now taking shape in the U.S. are similar enough to give it the same name. The book is subtitled Fascism American Style. It is crucial for every one of us to recognize its features in order to learn how to step outside the system of mainstream politics to resist it.
The opening interview is by Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist, author and Harvard Divinity School graduate Chris Hedges, who grew up “in the church….steeped in the Bible.” Hedges compares the role played by religion and the powerful magical imagery it commanded in the German prototype with similar features of American fascism today. They both developed in wastelands of despair. One derived from the economic catastrophe of WWI, and the latter from deliberate government policies. These created wage stagnation, a cruel healthcare system, profit-seeking privatized utilities, inexorably rising food prices, addiction, job loss and replacement by machines, evictions, and the resultant rage at the simultaneous spectacle of millionaires growing swiftly into billionaires.
In Germany, fascism was intimately intertwined with the German Evangelical Church. Its leaders substituted an image of the Teutonic warrior and the Aryan cult for the Chosen People of God. And they substituted Hitler as the Messiah—an all-powerful embodiment of the dictatorial Führer Principle—for semitic Bible figures. Known as the “Nazi church,” the Martin Luther Memorial church in Berlin features Nazi images, including a Nazi storm trooper carved into the baptismal fountain.
American fascism mirrors Goebbels’s admonition that to manipulate people you must rely on emotion, not reason. Stimulating anger and resentment at every opportunity, it uses simple terms and frequent repetition in its persuasive oratory. The MAGA movement has become a cult of true believers with a cult leader and unitary executive who can break laws at will, unchecked, and do no wrong.
Hedges also notes a darker theme in American Christian nationalism: End Times. Half of the U.S. population and a significant number of Congress members and other government office holders believe the Apocalypse is upon us. The U.S. ambassador to Israel discusses the Rapture with rabbis.
Hedges writes, “These people really hate the world outside the Church and want to see it destroyed. They share an apocalyptic vision that is very frightening.”
This is a shocking statement. But I have personally heard it from the mouths of loggers, who asked why we were trying to stop a timber harvest: “Why do you care about these trees? They’re all going to be burned up anyway, because the world is about to end!” The prospect of Apocalypse, strengthened by our helplessness in the face of catastrophic climate change and increasingly ferocious wars, has dispirited even less magically-minded people and has weakened the resistance to fascism. Hedges concludes that “these people who have been marginalized and pushed aside, especially through deindustrialization, will either be reintegrated into American society or we are finished.”
In his interview, Richard Wolff, University of Massachusetts Professor Emeritus of Economics and author of the book Understanding Capitalism, quotes German playwright Bertolt Brecht: “To understand fascism you have to understand capitalism from whence it springs.” Capitalism generates vast inequalities, which inevitably evoke anger and resentment among the poorer and oppressed. The propertied class, anxious to protect its wealth, then creates and arms the police, the military, and ICE. “When that process goes far enough, you call it fascism…under capitalism, fascism is always lurking.”
Wolff points out that only three percent of the U.S. population consists of employers, whereas the rest of us are employees. The minority three percent have turned our political system into a contest between two political parties, both of which they finance. Both parties praise capitalism and prevent all third parties from succeeding. Wolff sees both parties easily falling prey to fascism. He holds out hope for popular movements like Occupy, Black Lives Matter and Palestine support organizations, if they can recognize that they share common goals and can cooperate to develop strategies.
Activist Dianne Feeley, a retired autoworker and editor of Against the Current, also talks about the trap of the two-party system in her interview—she favors a Workers Party. Racism is a powerful divisive force, and male supremacy offers an atavistic vision that echoes the fascism of the 1930s and ’40s. “The home is seen as this romantic place, in which the woman is the queen. She doesn’t have any rights, but she’s there as a romanticized figure.” This archaic vision that Feeley calls “geriatric capitalism” is outlined in the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, where all regulations are cast aside. She asserts that it must be replaced by solidarity at all levels, and quotes economist Ernest Mandel: “We’re at the foot of the Himalayas, without adequate tools, but we have to climb up.”
Brutal attacks on students and student protests are a hallmark of fascism. In Nazi Germany, the clandestine student group White Rose organized a leafleting campaign against the Nazis to expose German atrocities on the Eastern front, just as U.S. university students have protested mass murder in Palestine. White Rose leaders were guillotined four days after they were captured. In the U.S., some student protesters have been roughed up, kicked out of college and left with drastically changed futures.
The interview with author Henry Giroux explores the ongoing assault on education and free speech. He holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest, and is the Paolo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. Universities are being challenged “in ways unlike anything we have seen before.” He recalls George Orwell’s remark that whoever controls education has the power to shape the future. He, too, acknowledges those of the younger generation who have shown impressive courage and willingness to make personal sacrifices as they protest. They are challenging the suppression of their support for Palestine and opposing attacks on teachers and students, invasive campus security patrolling, and censorship. They are also connecting local efforts to a broader questioning of capitalism, colonialism and racism, and are realizing that these are not the only options for civilization.
Activists are also forging connections they make with students in other countries into an international force. They are turning into Mario Savios, putting their bodies upon the gears, learning from the successes of labor movements. Giroux says, “We need a mass collective movement to stop these institutions from working.” He emphasizes the basic weakness of democracy: “You can’t have a democracy without informed citizens, or without institutions that nurture critical thought.”
Author and African American Studies scholar Bill Mullen is a Professor Emeritus at Purdue, and co-founder of the Campus Anti-Fascist Network. He discusses the role played by the law in the implementation of fascism. “The law is not always our friend when it comes to fighting fascism.” He notes Hitler’s admiration for American Jim Crow laws, and the use of them as a model. He identifies the doctrine of “legal originalism,” which limits the Constitution to the seven original Articles and questions the legality of the Amendments.
He reviews the history of fascism throughout America’s racist history, and cites Martinique activist Aimé Césaire: fascism is “simply the tactics and techniques of colonialism coming home to roost against the white population in Europe.” He concludes: “Because of the very nature of oppression of Blacks in the U.S.A., Black resistance will be at the heart of any anti-fascist movement here. What we need is mass mobilization…. People out on the streets and organizing from below.”
Activist commentator Margaret Kimberley, co-founder and Executive Editor at Black Agenda Report, notes that the Democratic Party has played no role in any popular opposition coming from the streets. She compares the weakness of the German opposition to Hitler with our feeble resistance to the currently looming American fascism. She cites many examples of Democrat Party failures. Then she describes a white-supremacist parade in Lincoln Heights, Ohio, where Black activists seized the marchers’ flags and burned their swastikas. “[The Democrats have] all these debates about fascism. Do we have it? Don’t we have it? All this wringing of hands, and the people of this little town…didn’t wait for members of Congress…or some public intellectual to say what they thought they should do. They took care of themselves and their community.”
The final interview of the book features economist and former Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant, the Council’s first socialist member, and founder of Workers Strike Back. In her opinion, “The illusions about the Democratic Party are the single most crucial obstacle to overcome if we are to build the militant movements we need to improve the lives of working people … This is not a culture war, it is a class war.”
In spite of massive public support for programs such as eliminating student debt, food stamps, Medicare for All, the Democrats, the “Squad,” and even Bernie Sanders (“who has betrayed working people because he was never willing to pose a challenge to the Democrat Party”), have refused to enter the fray, even when they had majorities in both houses of the Congress. So Sawant is running for U.S. Congress. Her message: “Go to City Hall, blast the Council members in public, energize working people!”
It is a challenging prospect to transform a collection of radio interviews into a book. But the flow of these conversational interviews makes these experts’ thoughts widely accessible for all readers. Like the White Rose leaflets in Germany, perhaps this book will flutter down everywhere and help us all recognize the formidable structure of fascism and its perils.
As Law and Disorder radio co-host and activist attorney Jim Lafferty remarks in the book’s Introduction: “The Trump regime will no doubt severely test the resolve of the American people.” All of the authors agree about the need to organize protests and get people out in the streets. As Chris Hedges observes, “We have the numbers.”
But governments have a history of ignoring or manipulating the numbers (World Trade Organization 1999), and diabolical technologies wielded by drones and rapidly developing communications and information systems may soon make numbers irrelevant.
In 1789, when the elite royal French Guard defected to support revolutionary opponents of France’s privileged clergy, nobility, and absolute monarchy, they stormed the Bastille political prison. A similar movement, but hopefully nonviolent, is a prerequisite to creating truly alternative options for our future.
From the Flag to the Cross: Fascism American Style: Edited by Zachary Sklar and Michael Steven Smith, Introduction by Jim Lafferty. OR Books, 2025
Prolific writer and activist Ellen Taylor is the author of War Crimes, From Nuremberg to Ukraine. She lived in Nuremberg at a young age and attended the war-crimes tribunals when her father, General Telford Taylor, functioned as the Chief Prosecutor. A long-time peace activist, Ellen Taylor is also involved in anti-logging efforts in California.
