{"id":6030,"date":"2025-11-06T19:03:25","date_gmt":"2025-11-07T03:03:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=6030"},"modified":"2025-11-06T19:04:38","modified_gmt":"2025-11-07T03:04:38","slug":"the-point-harold-brodkeys-notes-on-american-fascism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=6030","title":{"rendered":"The Point: Harold Brodkey&#8217;s &#8220;Notes on American Fascism&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-full\"><center><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"575\" height=\"388\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/The-Point-Harold-Brodkey.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-6031\"\/><\/center><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Topical though its title may sound, Harold Brodkey\u2019s 1992 essay \u201cNotes on American Fascism\u201d probably couldn\u2019t be published today. Reading it, one can almost hear the inevitable editorial demands that its argument be \u201csharpened\u201d (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 <em>Sea Battles on Dry Land<\/em>, 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 \u201cthe primary American tradition\u201d now seems considerably less disposable than the many anxious prophesies of a fascist United States published more recently, during the reign of Donald Trump.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">By the early Nineties, as Brodkey sees it, the gods of \u201cethnic diversity\u201d (summoned by \u201cthe failure of the melting pot to work\u201d) and \u201cthe new federalism\u201d (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 \u201ca new sense of community\u201d or \u201ca workable sense of America.\u201d Real estate is \u201cnow 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.\u201d The government \u201cdoes not support American manufacturing or American exports except in very sophisticated ways closed to outsiders.\u201d The uninspiring Democratic program comes down to \u201ca demand for order, for more government, more centralized government\u201d; the Republicans have their perpetual interest in \u201clooting,\u201d but no \u201covert program beyond the slogans of American greatness and American supremacy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Read the whole thing <a href=\"https:\/\/thepointmag.com\/politics\/notes-on-american-fascism\/\">at The Point<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Topical though its title may sound, Harold Brodkey\u2019s 1992 essay \u201cNotes on American Fascism\u201d probably couldn\u2019t be published today. Reading it, one can almost hear the inevitable editorial demands that its argument be \u201csharpened\u201d (premised upon the assumption that an argument, rather than notes, is what it offers), or at least that the words of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6030"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6030\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6034,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6030\/revisions\/6034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}