Can Fascists Still Be Shamed?

Christopher Mathias is a veteran journalist who has spent years covering America’s far right. His new book “To Catch a Fascist,” which hits stores today, is an in-depth look at the real world activities of the antifa activists who unmasked many of the most notorious neo-Nazis and white nationalists of the past decade. The book is a vital corrective to the “antifa” boogieman created by right wing politicians—and a foreboding exploration of the fascist cultural roots that have now grown, triumphantly, into Trumpism.

I spoke to Chris about American fascism, the uncertain power of shame, and the creeping reclassification of dissent as “domestic terrorism.” Our conversation is below.

How Things Work: It feels like many people still can’t agree what “fascism” means. You have a useful definition of fascism in your book. What is it?

Christopher Mathias: So there are a lot of academic definitions out there which I found really helpful, but my kind of working definition, and the one I use in the book, goes something like this: I see fascism as a right-wing politics of domination, often taking the form of ultranationalism, that situates a particular subgroup of people atop a social hierarchy and targets already marginalized groups for expulsion or death, all in an effort to “cleanse” or “purify” the nation, restoring it to a mythical (nonexistent) past of ethnic or cultural homogeneity.

Researching this book, though, changed my whole way of thinking about fascism. I think so much punditry over the last ten years has been fixated on what we are experiencing as precisely analogous in this or that way to Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy—that only after key thresholds are crossed can we actually say it’s happening here—eliding the ways in which America has always been fascist. Langston Hughes brought home this point in 1937 when he said at the Second International Writers Congress in Paris: “Negroes in America do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.” Robert Paxton, the famed scholar of fascism, has described the Ku Klux Klan as the proto-fascist group. And then you have the fact that the Nazis looked to Jim Crow for inspiration for their own race laws.

If you were a black American swept up in mass incarceration