Featuring John Ganz and Gavriel D. Rosenfeld

Hitler’s attempt to wrest control of the German state and end Weimar democracy from the cellar of Munich’s Bürgerbräu beer hall in 1923 failed spectacularly and landed him in prison for the better part of a year. Of course, Hitler also used his trial and imprisonment to raise his political profile. In Landsberg prison, he composed Mein Kampf, full of antisemitic myths about the perfidy of Jewish Bolshevists (not to mention Jewish capitalists) and loathing of democracy.

Recent years have seen an intensification of old debates about whether fascism is a useful category to apply to contemporary political movements centered around personality cults, a restoration of past greatness, and disillusionment with democracy. While no such movement has succeeded in dismantling the administrative state or procedural democracy in the United States, some astute observers have pointed out that the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 rhymes historically with the failed putsch of 1923 as a premature grasping for power by a movement that might still prevail.

As co-editor of the volume Fascism in America: Past and Present, historian Gavriel Rosenfeld has made a critical intervention in this debate by focusing on the actual history of fascist groups in the interwar United States. In several books focused on counterfactual history, most recently, The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from WWII to the Present, he has also examined how fear of Nazism still functions in our politics and discourse. The writer John Ganz has also engaged with the concept of fascism in contemporary politics on his popular Substack Unpopular Front. His first book, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s traces the genealogy of America’s current political crises to the supposed populists who arose in US politics after the end of the Cold War. Unsurprisingly, antisemitism plays a significant role in both their studies.