To Defeat Fascism in 2024, Get Creative

A few pieces of advice from Heather Cox Richardson

To prepare for the tumultuous year ahead, I asked Heather Cox Richardson about the rise of fascism in the U.S. and how Americans have resisted it in the past. In her words, “We are living in another time of testing.” Her advice? Stay focused and get creative.

Heather is a professor of U.S. history at Boston College. She’s the author of Letters from an American, the most popular Substack newsletter, which chronicles current events in the larger context of American history. Heather has also written seven books on history and politics, including most recently, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, the subject of our conversation today.

A condensed transcript edited for clarity is below. You can also listen to the audio of our conversation, which includes further discussion on the roots of conservatism, how lies came to define the media landscape in the late 1980s, why history is essentially just gossiping about dead people, and more:

We dwelled for a moment on American architecture

Ben: Heather, thank you so much for being here.

HCR: I am totally thrilled to be here.

Ben: Thrilled to have you! Today, I’d like to trace the rise of fascism in the U.S. — and how to push back against it. 

To begin, you connect the modern rise of fascism here to the New Deal. Can you explain more, please?

HCR: I argue that the problem that we face today — where a very small group of Americans have taken over our society and are trying to legislate in ways that benefit them while forcing the rest of us to put up with it — started as a backlash to the New Deal. 

The New Deal made it clear that a government only serving big business wasn’t going to work, and it had four pillars. First, it regulated business because it was pretty clear that the Depression came from unregulated business. Second, it provided a basic social safety net because it was clear that people needed something to allow them to grow old without starving in the streets. (Literally, the guy who came up with the idea of social security looked out his window one day and saw elderly women eating out of the garbage and said, this is not good for society.) Third, the New Deal promoted infrastructure because private investment wasn’t going to make things like electricity widely available. And fourth, to a small degree, it also protected civil rights.

The New Deal was enormously popular among ordinary Americans. It also quickly drew the wrath of the obvious people: businessmen who didn't like regulation. Allying with racist Southern Democrats, in 1937, they drafted a document called the Conservative Manifesto, outlining opposition to any form of regulation and to a safety net that would cost them tax dollars. They argued infrastructure was better managed by private business and, of course, that the government should stay the heck out of any kind of civil rights protection.

Ben: Regarding that last, very important point, you summarize, “The expansion of rights to women and Black and Brown Americans, as well as to other minorities, set in motion the undermining of democracy that is still underway.”

HCR: Yes. How did we get here? Well, when our government tried to expand democracy to include people of color, there was a backlash from racists and businessmen who, in a sense, made an unholy alliance. We are still grappling with that alliance today.

Ben: On the flip side, you argue that more often than not, “Those articulating the nation’s true principles have been marginalized Americans who demanded the nation honor its founding promises.” What do you mean by that?

HCR: I started the book with a question: why didn’t the U.S. succumb to fascism in the 1920s? After all, we had a very active neo-Nazi movement before World War II, and many countries around the world gave in to similar movements. 

In the 1950s, scholars theorized that Americans were just... different — that they were more middle-of-the-road and just didn’t fall for the things fascist dictators said — which is a lovely idea, but also clearly false. 

Ben: Saying we’re inherently more immune to fascism is like saying we have larger cracks in bathroom stalls because we're inherently more generous.

HCR: Ha! Right. And what I came to believe is that marginalized Americans who were excluded from the principles enumerated in the Declaration of Independence — the idea that everybody has a right to be treated equally before the law and that everybody has a right to a say in their government — well, from the beginning, marginalized Americans said hey, those are great ideas. What about us? By continually pointing out that people were being excluded from those principles, they kept those principles alive. 

The radical right, especially under former President Trump, imagined American history as preserved perfectly in the past, almost as if we had sprung fully formed from the head of George Washington. But there's never been a perfect moment in any society, let alone in the United States. I mean, the Europeans who later formed the U.S. were concerned about how much they'd fallen from perfection before they ever set foot on the North American continent. They sat off the coast in a boat at one point and went, oh boy, we're in trouble — 

Ben: — and does anyone know how to get off of a boat?

HCR: Ha, but actually. 

So it’s not a question of going back to a perfect past, or of ignoring the extraordinary oppression under which so many Americans have lived. It’s a question of reclaiming our agency. Marginalized Americans’ fight for equality reveals that American democracy is, and has always been, a work in progress. 

Ben: As you (and many others have noted), a history that looks back to a mythologized past as the country’s perfect time is a key tool of authoritarians. 

During World War II, U.S. intelligence listed other tools that Hitler employed. One that I found really interesting (and alarming, and resonant) was “never allow the public to cool off.”

HCR: Yes, the idea of creating chaos and remaining the center of attention is a well-established tactic of strongmen. Trump advisor Steve Bannon has always recommended chumming the water with as much crap as possible so your opponents are one step behind.

People ask me all the time, what can we possibly do going into the 2024 election when things are coming at us faster and faster? The answer: don't react instantly. It’s like phishing on the Internet. Anyone who says I need to have an answer from you immediately because your credit card's been compromised, or because your bank account's been broken into does not wish you well. 

I think we can do the same thing with news and say, whatever horror show I heard about today, I'm going to back off and wait two days. Often those stories shake back to normal. At the same time, totally unplugging and backing away is exactly what an authoritarian would like to happen.

Ben: Toward the end of the book you conclude that “in Lincoln’s era, democracy seemed to have won.” Yet, “Americans did not root out the hierarchical strand of our history, leaving it there for other rising autocrats in the future to exploit with their rhetoric and the fears of their followers.”

What message would you give to readers and young people who, understandably, feel like that hierarchical strand of our history — the idea that some people are inherently more deserving of power than others — continues to gain ground, no matter what we do?

HCR: Since its inception, a pendulum has swung in the U.S. between the protection of rights on one end and the protection of property on the other end. You might say, well, that’s fine — the pendulum swings. But the pendulum does so much damage in those swings. We should not have the extraordinary rates of maternal death that we have in this country. We should not have this many children living in poverty. I could go on. 

We need to stabilize the pendulum. Historically, at these moments when it looks as if the hierarchical strand of our history is going to win out, the answer has been to get creative. For example, the period after the Civil War gave us new forms of literature. We still have around us the buildings, the murals, the sculptures, and the art of the 1930s and the New Deal. There are examples of extraordinary creativity from every inflection point in our history.

You can see similar dynamics unfolding today. I think I gave somebody a coronary the other day when I called out Taylor Swift for launching a multi-generational female cultural experience. That’s a big deal! There are new voices on current events; new ways of thinking about politics; new combinations of ideas that young people are pioneering that I could never dream of.

So I get being discouraged, but you can’t focus on the terror to the exclusion of the creation. We are living in another time of testing, and the bottom line is if we don’t create the future, somebody else will.

Ben: A lovely, sobering note to end on. 

Heather, thanks so much for your time. I hope to discuss a more obscure area of your expertise once fascism is defeated later this year.

HCR: I look forward to it. It's been a real pleasure.