Could fascism happen in the USA? It already did

philebersole

May 30

After reading The Oppermanns, a novel about a Jewish German family facing the rise of Hitler, my novel-reading group wondered: Could it happen here?

It already did, once.

The Ku Klux Klan was a forerunner of, and also an inspiration for, the Nazi movement. The KKK had three iterations - as a terrorist movement that reestablished white supremacy in the former Confederacy after the Civil War; as a nationwide movement in 1915-1944 attacking black people, Catholics, Jews, Communists, atheists and sexual immorality; and as a terrorist movement to fight racial equality in the 1960s on.

The Klan never achieved national power, but, at the peak of its popularity in 1924-25, it claimed 4 million to 5 million members and had recruiters in every state. Its members included Senators, Governors and a future Supreme Court justice.

Ku Klux Klan parades in Washington, D.C., in 1925

Now, violent racism, anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism were nothing new in the USA. The Klan's innovation was to create an "Invisible Empire," a hidden structure of power behind the nominal structure of government and business.

The Klan was a secret society. Nobody except its members knew who was in it. Klansmen appeared in public wearing robes and hoods that concealed their identity.

You might be dealing with a policeman, judge or banker, but you would have no way of knowing whether he was a Klansman or taking orders from someone who was a Klansman.

Adolf Hitler respected the USA for its racism. He approved of the Jim Crow segregation system, the ethnic cleansing of the Indians and U.S. experiments with sterilization of persons designated as biologically unfit.

Like the Klan, the Nazi party set up a parallel (though not hidden) structure of control. The organization of government and business seemed the same after the Nazi takeover, but behind those structures was the Nazi party hierarchy, giving the orders.

When characters in The Oppermanns got into trouble with the Nazis, they were not arrested by police and taken before a judge. They were arrested by a Nazi brownshirt and taken to a Nazi-run prison or camp. In the same way, an average German might think, or be able to pretend to think, everything was normal, just like an average white Protestant American in a Klan-dominated town secretly dominated by the Klan.

That is why the established German militarists and plutocrats were unable, as they had hoped and expected, to control Hitler. He didn't rule solely by virtue of his position as Chancellor. If he had been, he could have been checkmated by other members of the Cabinet. Instead he checkmated them while his followers created their new power hierarchy.

Today's Klan is marginalized and infiltrated by the FBI. Few people would admit to being white supremacists. But what if conditions change?

What if the United States, like Germany in 1932, was suffering under a major economic depression, which is likely, combined with the humiliation of defeat in war, which is very possible?

That is a topic for another post.

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