Topical though its title may sound, Harold Brodkey’s 1992 essay “Notes on American Fascism” probably couldn’t be published today. Reading it, one can almost hear the inevitable editorial demands that its argument be “sharpened” (premised upon the assumption that an argument, rather than notes, is what it offers), or at least that the words of a geopolitical expert or two be shoehorned in to gin up a bit of academic-journalistic gravitas. Not that the essay seems to have been publishable even when Brodkey first wrote it, given that it only appeared several years later in his collection Sea Battles on Dry Land, published a few years after his death from AIDS in 1996. Nevertheless, when revisited more than three decades on, its torrent of portentous observation and speculation about the decline of the kind of liberalism Brodkey calls “the primary American tradition” now seems considerably less disposable than the many anxious prophesies of a fascist United States published more recently, during the reign of Donald Trump.
By the early Nineties, as Brodkey sees it, the gods of “ethnic diversity” (summoned by “the failure of the melting pot to work”) and “the new federalism” (no longer denoting a dynamic between the federal and state governments but between the U.S. and the entire world) have both failed, neither having produced “a new sense of community” or “a workable sense of America.” Real estate is “now so expensive that it is very difficult for people in the lower tier to buy a house, or very much of a house, even if they have inherited money.” The government “does not support American manufacturing or American exports except in very sophisticated ways closed to outsiders.” The uninspiring Democratic program comes down to “a demand for order, for more government, more centralized government”; the Republicans have their perpetual interest in “looting,” but no “overt program beyond the slogans of American greatness and American supremacy.”
Read the whole thing at The Point.