Rachel Maddow’s recent book, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism, purports to uncover a forgotten historical episode: the fight against fascism within America’s own borders in the 1930s. Unfortunately, Maddow is a systematic falsifier of history, and her book is little more than a theoretical blueprint for lesser-evilism. Distorting the historical record, she attempts to prove that liberals and capitalists played the principal role in “containing” the fascist threat.
It is no accident that the book was released in December 2023—just in time for the Democrats’ latest scaremongering campaign. They never tire of calling Trump a fascist, and they argue that only voting Democrat can prevent dictatorship. While Maddow makes no reference to Trump in the book itself, she has appeared on press junkets, drawing comparisons between Trump’s alleged “fascistic rhetoric” and the “playbook of fascists.”
Like most liberals—and even some self-declared Marxists—Maddow throws around the term “fascism” freely. She sees it as an abstract hodgepodge of bad, right-wing ideas, rather than a concrete reactionary regime based on a definite class balance of forces. This obscures the true nature of fascism.
During the interwar years, the European working class was strong and well organized. But due to a lack of revolutionary leadership, it had failed to take power in a series of unsuccessful revolutions, including in Italy and Germany. The capitalists remained in power, but saw the strength of trade unions and workers’ parties as a threat to their continued rule. This explains their turn to fascism. When fascists take power, the ruling class leans on crazed middle-class elements to physically annihilate working-class parties and organizations.
As Trotsky explained: “The historic function of fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organizations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery.”
Clearly, the American bourgeoisie was not in this position in the 1930s and is not in it today.
In her book, Maddow highlights several figures and groups that either fought fascism—Leon Lewis and Denis Healy—or were themselves fascists—the Christian Front and Father Charles Coughlin. She embellishes the work of Lewis and Healy, portraying them as more consequential than they really were. Maddow frames these episodes as small examples of how some Americans advocated for fascism and others fought against it. Hers is not a story of the American fight against fascism, but of petty-bourgeois individuals and government officials who had concerns about fringe fascist groupings and acted against them.
Maddow’s fairy tales have a clear political purpose. If the fight against fascism was historically led by the middle class and the bourgeois state, then the fight against Trump’s right-wing populism—which Maddow falsely equates with fascism—must be led by the same social forces. Since they have run out of arguments in favor of lesser evilism, liberals must resort to historical revisionism.
Maddow’s fairy tales have a clear political purpose. Since they have run out of arguments in favor of a lesser evilist vote against Trump, liberals must resort to historical revisionism. / Image: The Epoch Times, Flickr
But lesser evilism as a political strategy begets the greater evil. Reformists in Germany adopted this strategy in the 1932 presidential elections. The Social Democrats supported the German nationalist, Paul von Hindenberg, as a “lesser evil” to Adolf Hitler. Less than a year after winning the election, Hindenburg appointed Hitler as chancellor. This is the ugly legacy of lesser evilism!
Today, workers are under lesser-evilist pressures from politicians and media mouthpieces like Rachel Maddow. The real danger is not fascism—but lesser evilism. However, it’s a harder case for liberals to make than ever before. Democrats argued for months that Biden was the lesser evil to Trump, then they lost confidence in their own candidate. After an embarrassing display on the debate stage, the Democrats put pressure on “Genocide Joe” to drop out of the race. Suddenly, the longtime “lesser evil” was no longer acceptable. Now, the Democrats have switched out Biden for Kamala Harris, exchanging one genocidal imperialist for another.
At the end of Prequel, Maddow concludes her history of the “American” fight against fascism with an appeal: “If we learn it, and we choose it, we can inherit their work.” We agree on the need to learn from history, but we disagree on whose work we should inherit. The Revolutionary Communists of America draw on militant class-struggle traditions of the Spanish workers in the 1970s and the American communists in the 1930s. Events such as the struggle against the Franco dictatorship and the communist-led Minneapolis Teamsters’ strike in 1934 are an inspiration to us and a guide to action.
America is not heading toward fascism, but toward revolution. Every communist must be prepared. We study this history, we have chosen it, and we are its true inheritors. Our past proletarian struggles, it turns out, have a sequel—the Third American Revolution.