In the latter half of the twentieth century, the word “fascism” was little more than a political epithet in everyday discourse and a category assigned to certain regimes, with long-running but arid debates over which governments met that standard besides Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. More recently, critics such as Umberto Eco have stressed that “fascism had no quintessence” but should be understood as “a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage... a beehive of contradictions.”

This roundtable recognizes that fascism is not a fixed category which may or may not apply to a particular historical instance. What matters is that the past decade has seen a remarkable revival of governments and movements displaying many of the tactics and tropes associated with fascism, including appeals to violence, contempt for legal and constitutional requirements, and xenophobic blood-and-soil nationalism. Sociological, philosophical, and journalistic analyses have proliferated about this new model of far-right politics in Hungary, India, Brazil, Turkey, the Philipines, Israel, and Russia, alternatively dubbed illiberal democracy, white nationalism, or authoritarian populism. In the United States, scholars have relied on the concept of white (or white Christian) nationalism to characterize the rise of Donald Trump, while pundits and journalists simply use the shorthand of “MAGA.”

This roundtable goes beyond these topical analyses to ask a more elemental question: is fascism, however defined, now a real possibility in the U.S., and if so, what are its historical origins? That a large, highly mobilized movement has pulled the Republican Party sharply to the right is indisputable. Whether that movement is moving towards fascism is an open question.

Our roundtable will interrogate this question as a series of related questions, including but not limited to:

• How did we get to the point that the rule of law is so seriously threatened?
• Is there a legacy of fascism rooted in the Jim Crow South, as W.E.B. Du Bois asserted in the 1930s?
• What is the historical relationship between white settler colonialism and herrenvolk democracy, in the U.S. and elsewhere, to fascism?
• Over the past century, the United States has seen a range of explicitly fascist organizations develop—what have been their connections or alliances with mainstream conservatism, whether of the Old or New Rights?
• How would a fascist United States actually function, versus current norms of electoral democracy, independent jurisprudence, and free speech?
• Did the January 6, 2021 attack on Congress embody a fascist impulse, however disorganized?
• Does fascism produce distinctive patterns of gender relations, and how have those developed inside U.S. society?
• If the U.S. turns further to the right but not fascist, how should we characterize it?
• Are there or will there be clear tipping points by which one could conclude the answer to our question is “yes,” or is this a process overdetermined by history, to be known only in retrospect?

The presenters and co-chairs are scholars with a deep engagement with these questions, and we expect an audience drawn from all parts of the discipline.