Henry A. Wallace | The Danger of American Fascism

FyreByrd, I wanted to revisit your thread, considering the outbreak of American fascistic tendencies in the news recently, thanks to the Trump Triumph in the GOP.

I grew up in America in the 1950s-60s. It was a grand time, if you were white and middle class. America had defeated the Nazis in Germany (reminder that Nazis were White Supremacists, not just an enemy who declared war on us). Back then, the far right, extremist John Birch Society was born, but back then even the Republican Party warned against them.

But the ideology of White Supremacy never was defeated in America, even after a Civil War. In the mid 1970s, I had bicycled to a business in a poor white suburb of Los Angeles. As I stood outside waiting, I noticed across the street an older home, surrounded by a high chain link fence, with a man standing on the front porch, with a German Shepherd at his side. He was dressed in full Nazi regalia, standing under the swastika Nazi flag. It was a scene straight
from Germany under the Third Reich.

My father was an American soldier in Germany in WW2. He helped defeat the government, but ideologies take time to defeat. I hoped he would never have to see this place, as it was such an affront to all the veterans of that war.

America's homegrown White Supremacist ideology had surfaced as the KKK. Even in the 1970s when I moved to a small California town, their local KKK group staged a march, complete with hoods, again a scene straight out of another place. In the 1980s the Aryan Nation would become the face of American White Supremacy ideology.

When I now hear what Trump and his followers have to say, I see that the American White Supremacy ideology is resurfacing. I remember George Wallace's presidential runs; what the Democratic Party rejected was picked up by the GOP. Ideologies are hard to kill, whether it be from Daesh or the GOP.

When this White Supremacy fear is used for political gain, we have fascism. As Henry Wallace said

...always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination against other religious, racial or economic groups.


The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism........They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

The extremist, right wing ideology of White Supremacy must find no safe harbor in any political party. This ideology must no longer be spread.

Americans must reject homegrown fear mongering, spurious political doublespeak, and the fascistic need for an authoritarian cult leader to save them. Either we are a country for all or a country for none. The divisiveness that has been stirred up in America via religion and politics must end. Enough!