“That’s absurd. The United States isn’t a fascist country; at worst, it is a bourgeois democracy.”
This was the sort of class-reductionist response I encountered after I presented on a recent conference panel about strategies to fight the far right in the U.S. and the Black anti-fascist tradition. So many of the attendees—largely left-leaning activists, organizers, and scholars—were in disbelief, disagreeing that the United States was and still is a fascist project despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. To many of them, fascism is understood as a uniquely European political tradition—a claim squarely at odds with the truth.
This complacent outlook is no longer sustained by any facts on the ground, either in the national political context, or—just as urgently—the decisions of the unelected justices of the U.S. Supreme Court delimiting our freedom and rights. With Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the devastating high court ruling last week to overturn the nearly fifty-year-old year old precedent in Roe v. Wade—the landmark decision establishing a woman’s constitutional rights to determine whether or not to have an abortion—the specter of authoritarian control over the most intimate and foundational condition of bodily autonomy is no longer the stuff of dystopian fiction.
Roe, after all, had been more than a simple vindication of the right to abortion access—which is why it had been a priority target for right-wing activists and politicians almost from the moment it was decided. The decision marked a major advancement for the women’s rights movement, reproductive freedom, privacy, and overall bodily autonomy of women and uterus holders.* The passage of Roe helped pave the way for safer abortions and greater abortion access, which is in direct conflict with the American fascist project.
Patriarchy and the control of women’s and uterus holders’ bodies and human reproduction are key pillars of fascism. As a result, since Roe’s passage, right-wing Christians have mounted a sustained, well-funded, and wide-reaching effort to overturn the decision in the name of Christian morals and “pro-life” sentiments. And with Trump’s appointment of three right-wing justices during his tenure, the GOP and far right had finally cemented a viable Christo-fascist scheme to overturn Roe.
Fascism has always been a deeply racist and sexist political movement, grounded in appeals to preserve and extend white supremacy and racial purity. The fascist playbook reliably seeks to bolster or “purify” the white or “Aryan” race, while simultaneously repressing and commodifying all non-white human life. In an effort to institutionalize these discourses of racial and biological control, many fascist regimes directly target the rights of women and uterus holders, specifically as they relate to reproduction. This mandate also spawned draconian state crackdowns on who prospective child-bearers are allowed to associate and maintain intimate relationships with, to marry, and procreate with. Under the Nuremberg and Italian racial laws, for example, Jews were forbidden to employ German women, and interracial marriage (including unions between Jews and Italians or Jews and Germans) was outlawed. These laws directly undermined the foundations of women’s social and intimate lives, while drastically curtailing their ability to gain employment and support themselves and their families.
The undoing of Roe shows that America is indeed continuing to uphold its fascist roots—meaning that women and uterus holders’ will once again bear the devastating material and visceral consequences, as the far right rejoices in what its leaders are already calling a “historic victory for white life.” Moreover, the natalist ideology of “the great replacement theory”—a racist doctrine harking back to the French fascist novel The Camp of the Saints that motivated the shooter in the racist massacre in Buffalo this spring—makes the sometimes coded racist appeals to “purer” breeding among Roe opponents an explicit right-wing rallying cry.
Charismatic right-wing leaders and failed insurrections ultimately don’t carry the same weight as the law and legal precedents.
The specter of fascism has long festered within our nation’s fabric. To begin with, the regime of forced motherhood enacted in European dictatorships and resurrected by the Dobbs regime is deeply rooted in the practice of coerced childbirth for enslaved mothers in the antebellum South. And in a more parallel historical alignment, the work of legal historians like James Whitman has demonstrated that many central features of European fascist governance were drawn directly from American legal sources. In particular, the dual application of the law—the tiered system of citizenship, rights, and liberties that denied such protections to those who had been racially and ethnically subjugated—served as the inspiration for Hitler and Mussolini’s fascist legal doctrines. And the American tradition of dual application was in turn anchored in still older legal discourses such as slave codes, Jim Crow laws, and early settler colonial laws and treaties aimed at dispossessing indigenous peoples. All these measures were fascistic in their outlook and legal application, since they were singularly aimed at unjustly marginalizing, displacing, disciplining, punishing, disenfranchising, and exterminating people based on race (largely anti-Blackness) in the name of white supremacy and right-wing nationalism (forces now recognized as pillars of fascism).
Black radicals such as Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Angela Davis, George Jackson, Claudia Jones, and Huey P. Newton have long named the United States as a fascist nation because so much of the Black experience has been about surviving and resisting in the face of authoritarian terror as it morphed into new legal, institutional, and political guises across time—from enslavement, lynchings (a mode of terrorist intimidation with clear genocidal aims), segregation, disenfranchisement, political repression, mass incarceration, to an overall national culture of anti-Blackness. In a July 1937 speech to the International Writers Congress, Langston Hughes charged, “we [the American Negro] are the people who have long known in actual practice the meaning of the word ‘fascism’—for the American attitude towards us has always been one of economic and social discrimination . . . . Yes, we Negroes in America do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know.”
This is a clarion call we do well to heed as we face down the new threats to our autonomy and freedom in the post-Dobbs era. For all the shock and awe of the January 6th coup attempt and former President Donald Trump’s brazen appeals to white nationalist dogma, charismatic right-wing leaders and failed insurrections ultimately don’t carry the same weight as the law and legal precedents. Fascism is at its strongest when it’s baked into the law—either via its affirmative legal directives or intentional and malicious absence of protections within the law. Legal codifications of fascist policy aims demand the complicity of everyone—from public officials and law enforcement to everyday citizens across race, gender, and class.
The undoing of Roe is already raising a direct threat to any American rights and privileges that hinge on substantive due process, as proposed by Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in the Dobbs ruling. This legal repudiation of the core doctrines embodied in the constitutional amendments ratified during Reconstruction era’s “second founding” illuminates a terrifying path forward for the far- right and illustrates how the law and courts continue to be instrumental to the American fascist project.
Part of the reason why many attendees at that conference I participated in—and many Americans beyond them—reject the notion that we are indeed a nation built on fascist precepts and rapidly entering an overt mainstream fascistic moment is because we cling dearly to the belief of American exceptionalism and romanticized notions of only-in-America democratic sovereignty. We often continue, against steadily mounting evidence to the contrary, to view fascism as something of the past and distinctly foreign. In our misguided and rigid efforts to identify and resurrect a broadly democratic and liberal state of “normalcy”—particularly in the face of existential challenges such as Trumpism, the Covid-19 pandemic, and rampaging racial injustice and socioeconomic inequality—we stoutly repress any suggestion that fascism might just be a robust and homegrown American political tradition. The illusion of the American Dream has tainted our gaze, allowing fascism to steep and stew for generations. The truth is that fascism has been at work in this nation since its violent, forced birth. It is now working in overdrive to not only undo Roe and ban abortions, but also to destroy any past civil rights concessions and residual allegiance to the substantive advancement of democracy in our political tradition.
We must heed the wake-up call of the Dobbs ruling to recognize that American fascism is alive and well, and coming for the rights of all non-white cis heterosexual men. And then white men, too, without means and land, will face a backlash of their own. The time of just voting and hoping that a political party or leader will save us has come and gone. This, too, is a familiar state of affairs for Black folks—seldom have those within the two-party system fiercely addressed anti-Black racism head-on. But we have had generations of insurgent Black activists and organizations who have modeled marronage and mutual aid, community care, and resistance—all vital alternatives to the failed approaches of fascist control from the top down.
The greatest work we can do at this moment is to employ the remaining levers of democracy to push aggressively for transformational changes that clearly name and counteract current forces of a fascist takeover. This would require Democrats in Congress to remove the filibuster and actually push bold and urgent policies that the majority of Americans have long cried out for, from true racial and socioeconomic justice to climate change mitigation. We will also need many more people working outside of election cycles and government bodies, organizing and investing in grassroots mutual aid networks, and from community-run food pantries and kitchens to abortion funds and support systems to housing cooperatives. We will have to train ourselves and one another in community self-defense and care, and amplify our counternarratives via the press and art–and, should our national condition progress to the worst stages of fascism, we will have to prepare and coordinate efforts to leave our locales in the event of a white nationalist insurrection.
So sound the proverbial alarm. Light the beacons! Embrace anti-fascism as a transformational political and organizing tool, and prepare for the acute state of democratic breakdown that Octavia Butler cautioned against in the Parable of the Sower. The undoing of Roe is just the start of the more overt American fascism to come–a movement that will spread beyond the ongoing legacies of anti-Blackness to become more mainstream, aggressive, corrupt, depraved, and violent.
*I use the term “uterus holders” to recognize those who may not identify as women but also give birth or have uteruses. Terms like birthing people and womb holders are also intended to include those across the gender spectrum who have also been adversely affected by the overturning of Roe.
Jeanelle K. Hope, Ph.D. is a cultural critic and scholar of Black studies, focusing on social and cultural movements, political thought, Black girlhood and Black representation in media. She is co-author of the forthcoming book, The Black Anti Fascist Tradition (Haymarket Books).
