Concerning the Migration of America’s Fascist and Nazi Movement Over Time Across the American Political Landscape

 

2,356 words. Approximate silent reading time: 8 minutes to 13 minutes

 

The United States has a deeply troubled history of racism and hate. That, of course, is a vast understatement. The source of all that racism, bigotry and hate is a ground-into-the-carpet, active and vital American fascist and Nazi movement. The historically interesting part - and the point of this writing - is to document the migration of that fascist and Nazi ideology over time across America’s political landscape.

Antebellum southerners and Confederates were the Nazis before there were Nazis. A century before the rise of the Nazi party in 20th century Germany, southern Whites originated, defined, and shaped Nazi ideology. From racism and bigotry right down to slave labor camps, southerners developed the ideologies and practices the German Nazis later adopted, applied, and expanded.

Through much of the 19th and 20th centuries, America’s fascist and Nazi movement was the southern wing of the Democratic party. The democrats were a party divided. A northern wing largely supported slavery’s existence. A southern wing was relentlessly committed to the continuation and expansion of slavery.

When post-Civil War Reconstruction ended, southern fascists went right back to work. Evil doesn’t stop being evil just because the good guys go home. They stripped voting and civil rights from Black Americans, formed terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan to enforce White supremacy, and even reestablished a form of slavery that wasn’t finally stamped out until six years after World War Two.

Most of those Confederate memorials we’ve heard about so much in recent years were not established in the post-Reconstruction 19^th century but in the 1920s as fascist poison was renewing itself domestically and spreading across the globe, finding new places to take root in post-World War One’s busted-up empires.

The source of that poison was the United States of America.

As German Nazis formed the legal underpinnings for the persecution of Jews – called the Nuremberg Laws – they modeled those laws on racial exclusion statutes in the United States. Germany’s Nazis drew great inspiration and guidance from America’s Jim Crow laws. The German propaganda press reported approvingly about lynchings in the American South: how the South’s good “Aryan” citizens were merely protecting their race and civilization from “negroid” or “mongrelized” people.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler expressed great admiration for how “Aryan” America had cleared the North American continent of the “natives” to make room for “racially pure” settlers. It inspired his plans to expand Germany into eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to make Lebensraum (“living space”) for Germans. Hitler and his Nazi buddies came to refer to the areas into which they sought national expansion as the “wild East.” However, the original genocide to create “living space” was perpetrated in the American “wild West” on Indigenous Americans by the U.S. Army and people driving covered wagons – a genocide that was later fictionalized in a thousand Hollywood movies.

Anot  her idea German Nazis imported from the United States was the forced sterilization of mentally or physically disabled people. From the late 19^th century until decades after World War Two more than 30 states legalized the practice and most engaged in it robustly and enthusiastically. Hitler and his buddies were actually late to the party in 1933. In the United States, more than 60-thousand disabled Americans were forcibly sterilized.

As German Nazis were in the process of destroying the democratic Weimar Republic, America’s financial and industrial elites were busy with what came to be known as The Business Plot. This was a plan early in FDR’s presidency to organize a half million strong army to march on Washington DC, depose FDR, and establish a German/Italian style fascist dictatorship. The dictator was supposed to be a retired Marine Corp major general, Smedley Butler. He perhaps was not the wisest choice for the role of despot: a highly decorated survivor of many conflicts, including World War One, he wore on his chest two awards of the Medal of Honor. He took his information to Congress.

Subsequent hearings in the House of Representatives established that the plot was real: wealthy businessmen had indeed planned such a fascist coup, although what point the plot had reached before exposure was uncertain. But the plot to impose by force a fascist dictatorship on America was genuine. Could those conspirators have put together a force of half a million to attempt the destruction of American democracy? The fact that in 1925 KKK terrorists numbering about fifty thousand (out of a total membership at the time of about three million) gathered in Washington DC – sheets, pointy hats, and all – is evidence that such a force was perhaps within the realm of possibility.

Donald Trump’s attempt to destroy American democracy in January 2021 was a bush league version of The Business Plot. Trump clearly came up short on putting together a half million terrorists on the fly to attack Congress. Of course, America being America, none of those wealthy Business Plot conspirators were ever held to account for their sedition. Neither was Donald Trump.

But The Business Plot represented an evolution, and a northward migration, for fascism in America.

In the Antebellum South, those who owned and profited from the slave labor camps (the euphemism is “plantations”) learned quickly just how wealthy one could become when hundreds of enslaved humans produced wealth all day long without having to be paid for their labors. Profits like that could make a person without a moral compass (and in the Antebellum South Christianity was nearly universal, but moral compasses seem to have been in short supply) a big believer in the idea that some humans aren’t really humans after all and were rather just beasts of the field. This concept advanced by southerners - that people with dark skin were not really human beings - preceded by centuries the Nazi concept of the Untermensch: literally “sub-human”: people who were not really human, but merely animals in human form.

By contrast, The Business Plot saw mostly northern economic elites panicking at the thought that FDR and a Congress full of democrats could result in working Americans keeping slightly more of the wealth they produced – enough even to find some small measure of economic prosperity - at the cost of America’s wealthy becoming ever so slightly less wealthy. But in both cases, this fascist totalitarianism was sourced from America’s moneyed elites: either southern agrarian slavers or northern capitalists.

As war again approached in the late 1930s, America’s fascists and Nazis worked hard to keep the U.S. out of the war and even to keep military aid from those fighting Hitler. They wanted the destruction of liberal freedom and democracy in western Europe. Their organization, called America First (sound familiar?), held large fascist and Nazi rallies across the country. Donald Trump’s fixation on a Madison Square Graden rally before the 2024 election was not merely some random whim. He was recreating the Madison Square Garden pro-Nazi, pro-Hitler rally of February 1939, with himself in the role of Führer. The marquee outside MSG announced an "All American Rally".

In the end, it was only Japan’s self-defeating attack on Pearl Harbor that allowed a liberal and anti-fascist (antifa) American government to bring the United States into the war on the side of the Allies, guaranteeing eventual victory for freedom and liberal democracy.   

The migration of America’s fascist and Nazi movement continued after World War Two. Imagine coming home from overseas: having either fought Hitler directly in Europe or his Japanese allies in the Pacific. You’ve just had the worst imaginable experience - your life and relationships disrupted, your very existence in constant jeopardy, witnessing your buddies maimed and killed – but you won through, survived, and took the big boat home. But although Hitler had put a bullet in his own head in a Berlin bunker, on your return you find Nazi ideology and practice alive and well and living in the American South!

Many historians believe it was that shock on the part of so many returning American veterans that put wind under the wings of the Civil Rights movement. The northern wing of the Democratic party slowly (shamefully slowly) got behind the struggle Black Americans had already long been fighting for their civil, legal, and voting rights.

After World War Two the Democratic party was increasingly an unwelcoming place, so America’s fascist and Nazi movement realized that it needed a new political home.

A truly remarkable sea change happened in American electoral politics in the 1960s and 1970s. Within just a few electoral cycles the American South went from being almost monolithically democratic for more than a century to being almost monolithically republican. The fascist and Nazi movement had found its new home, and the South changed from blue to red almost as if a switch was thrown. The GOP simply told White southern bigots – these are the same people who had screamed and spat at black children on their way to integrate formerly all-White schools, who had set up segregation academies after the Brown v. decision, who had bombed Black churches and murdered civil rights workers – We’re now the new GOP, and if the democrats won’t help you hate Black people anymore then just put us in office. We’ll get the job done. And that’s what they did and have been doing ever since.

The GOP didn’t really invite in the fascists and Nazis. It was more a matter of the fascists and Nazis decamping from the democrats and gradually taking control of the GOP. Dwight Eisenhower was a two-term republican U.S. president in the 1950s. Previously he had been the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War Two. It is difficult to imagine General Eisenhower extending a cordial invitation to fascists and Nazis. The granular details of how this gradual relocation took place are impossible to recount with any brevity. But one can look at some milestones.

Certainly, Ronald Reagan’s election and reelection as president were major victories for fascists and Nazis seeking to insinuate themselves into the GOP. Ronald Reagan, contrary to GOP mythmaking, had deeply racist and bigoted bona fides. In August 1980, as GOP candidate for president, Reagan traveled to Neshoba County, Mississippi, near the site where KKK terrorists had taken hostage and murdered three civil rights workers in 1964. But Reagan didn’t use the occasion to praise the heroism and sacrifice of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. Rather, Reagan pandered to southern bigots by parroting “state’s rights” and “Lost Cause” racist fantasies.

Post-Reagan, the GOP teamed with Rupert Murdoch to do what Rupert Murdoch has spent his life doing: establishing fascist media outlets. Fox began broadcasting in October 1996, and republicans have been able to use that outlet, and many others, to disseminate fascist propaganda in the guise of “news” for more than a generation now.

After Hitler took over as Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, the Nazis’ first organized anti-Jewish initiative was a one-day nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses. Most ordinary Germans paid no attention or even made a point of supporting and patronizing their Jewish neighbors' businesses. The bridge between a mostly ignored antisemitic boycott in 1933 to 1938’s Kristallnacht – the nationwide campaign to violently terrorize Jewish people - was paved with five years of vicious and unrelenting antisemitic propaganda. American fascists and Nazis in the 1990s GOP had learned that lesson about the critical importance of relentless propaganda.

You might wonder what Trump’s and the GOP’s obsession with the elimination of birthright citizenship is about. The concept was established in one of a triad of post-Civil War Constitutional amendments – the Fourteenth, with the three enacted by a Congress in the firm control of liberal republicans – enacted primarily to bring Black former slaves into full citizenship. That fact alone makes understandable the visceral hatred racists and fascists have for the concept. And as the German Nazis demonstrated with their Nuremberg Laws: if you can take away a person’s citizenship and legal protections then you can do anything to them. Even murder them.

Habeus Corpus – the rule of law guarantee that individuals are not powerless and at the mercy of the government – is another liberal concept America’s republican fascists and Nazis are absolutely salivating to gut, just like the Nazis did in 1930s Germany.

By killing the federal Department of Education and putting control of education at the state level, America’s fascists and Nazis – just like the German Nazis in the 1930s – can use the schools to engage in the religious, ideological, and partisan indoctrination of children across vast swaths of the country.

So, America’s fascist and Nazi movement has completed its journey to a new home. The difference is that in the past it had been just a wing of one political party, its power blunted by intra-party machinations. Today, it wholly owns one of only two major political parties in America.

I feel such regret considering how far America could have progressed from that deeply troubled origin of racism and exploitation and hate had America’s fascists and Nazis not spent the last two centuries - all day every day right up to today - keeping all that racism and bigotry renewed and alive. They are always identifying and defining new groups to make into objects of hate, into “Them” groups. Transgendered people are just their freshest targets.

Eighty years ago, more than 400-thousand Americans gave their lives to help deliver the world from fascist and Nazi totalitarianism. In each of the last three presidential elections tens of millions of Americans walked into voting booths and voted for republicans and Trump. You may be one of them. If you are, then how terribly you’ve desecrated the memory of our honored World War Two dead and their heroic labors and sacrifices. On January 20, 2025, Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito finally won World War Two.

Edward R. Murrow was an American journalist of the World War Two and post-War era. He aired many radio reports from a London that almost every night for eight months in 1940 and 1941 suffered under a rain of fascist bombs dropped by the Nazi’s Luftwaffe. I’ll conclude as Mr. Murrow had always signed off his broadcasts: “Good night, and good luck.”