People are talking about fascism. After a New York Times article was published today, I heard both from people who are baffled that we did not been speaking of fascism more and earlier, and from people who want to know what it means — and from people who want me to explain why fascism is bad. I am on the road, so I took ten minutes to make a little video about all of this. I hope it helps. As I’ll be driving around the country for the next ten days or so, I will likely do more of these. Let me know if you like the format. And please share!
Some the ideas I talk about are expressed at greater length in this op-ed.
In my remarks I refer directly or obliquely to these books:
Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works
Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands
Timothy Snyder, Black Earth
Timothy Snyder, Road to Unfreedom
Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century
Zeev Sternhell, Les anti-lumières
Robert Paxton, in Anatomy of Fascism, offers this pragmatic definition of fascism: “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
Why is fascism bad, Professor?