WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT FASCISM

Anna Duensing

History and Theory 63, no. 1 (2024)
Review of Bruce Kuklick, Fascism Comes to America: A Century of Obsession in Politics and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022)

Bruce Kuklick's Fascism Comes to America: A Century of Obsession in Politics and Culture offers a compact, accessible, and broad-reaching survey of “the linguistic career of fascism” in the United States. The book charts the widespread use of the term “fascism” across US political, cultural, and intellectual discourse from the early 1920s up through the present, arguing that rampant, uncritical overuse, outright abuse, and other hyperbolic deployments of the term have purged “fascism” of its analytic value and effectively negated its meaningful critical capacities. Moreover, Kuklick contends that this US “addiction to fascism” as a way to malign ideological and political enemies and express anxieties about the fragility of US democracy impedes accurate assessment of legitimate problems with the country's political system and traditions. This review essay offers a critical assessment of Kuklick's approach, interrogating what his narrow analytic focus on rhetoric and ideas misses and what nuance gets lost in declaring “fascism” a “political swear word” and little else. This thoroughly researched accounting of fascist invectives succeeds in showing that the term has consistently lacked reliable and substantive meaning, but as a survey, the book falters in collapsing its contexts, treating each and every usage of the term as equal and equally meaningless. Engaging with new scholarship on fascism, antifascism, and the modern US Right, as well as with Black radical political thought on fascism since the 1930s, this review essay challenges Kuklick's conclusion that the term “fascism” should be purged from public and intellectual discourse. In turn, it proposes a set of approaches for how we might continue our engagement with greater precision and analytic care.