Or fascism is still around us, sometimes in plain clothes.

It would be so much easier for us if there appeared on the scene somebody saying,

I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the black shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.

Life is not that simple. Ure-Fascism can come back under the most

innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and point the finger at any of its new instances,

every day and in every part of the world. Umberto Echo in his 1995 essay,

UreFascism.

Welcome to the history of the 20th century.

Music Episode 273, The Anatomy of Fascism.

In the first two episodes of this series, we examined the social and political origins of fascism

and the ideology of fascism. Today, in this third and final episode in the series, I want to talk about how fascism

operates in government.

Fascist movements emerged in a number of countries during the 1920s and 1930s, even in the

three major Western democracies, France, the United Kingdom,

and the United States. The fascist movements in those countries were never able to secure

sufficiently broad support to make them serious competitors in the political process,

although you could imagine a counterfactual in which a fascist movement

gained enough traction to make a serious bid for power in any one of them. And indeed, some

writers have done exactly that. For example, you have Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel, It Can't

Happen Here, and more recently, Philip Roth's 2004 novel, The Plot Against America,

among many others.

Sinclair Lewis wrote his book to make an overt political point, a rebuttal of the argument

...