Another Week: Number 70

How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley

A little over a month ago I finished that Hitler book. To follow it, I turned to How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, by Jason Stanley. This 2018 title and its author got a lot of airtime on MSNBC during the Trump administration, and at some point, I bought it — but never started reading it until about a month ago.

Although it’s only 240 pages, it was a slog. Based on the title, I expected a kind of diagram identifying the components of fascism as you would, say, the parts of a motorcycle, and showing how they fit together to make a working machine.

Instead, Stanley offers a box of parts and a bunch of real-life examples, but assembly is left up to the reader. You start to get the feeling that fascism is more like a “flying machine” than a motorcycle. It might be a glider, or it could be a helicopter. All we get is parts — and the principle of lift is never addressed.

Each of the book’s ten chapters is supposedly devoted to one of fascism’s main components — “Unreality,” “Hierarchy,” “Victimhood,” etc. But the second chapter is called “Propaganda” and I swear it barely mentioned propaganda. Stanley writes like he’s going through pockets filled with notes that he hasn’t bothered to organize.

A good many of his examples are solid classics — there’s plenty of Hitler here. Many others, though, are more contemporary to the book’s writing during the Trump administration. Stanley is rightly alarmed by the parallels, but all this time later, he comes off as a bit of a Cassandra by underlining them. At one point, he warns us about Paul Ryan. Can anyone living today even recall who Paul Ryan was?

In the end — especially as America now seriously flirts with a fascist future — I think this book is useful. It’s just that the title is misleading. There is no diagram. Instead, this is a collection of examples and warning signs and you get to do the math.

You may remember the old Jeff Foxworthy premise, You Might Be a Redneck If … ?

This book should be called Your Country Might Be Turning Fascist If …

Deliver Me From Nowhere, by Warren Zanes

A year ago (!) there was a CBS Sunday Morning segment featuring Bruce Springsteen back in the bedroom where he wrote his dark and isolated 1982 solo album, Nebraska — considered a masterpiece by many. A book about that album, Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, had just been published.

A month later, that book’s author, Warren Zanes, guested on WTF with Marc Maron.

More recently, there has been news of the book being made into a movie starring Jeremy Allen White (of The Bear) as Springsteen.

I have been known to let books sit on my reading list too long, so I figured I had better tackle it before any more years go by. It was a deeply rewarding read.

Yes, there’s plenty of the behind-the-scenes rock and roll stuff you would want out of such a book — backstage stories, dinner parties, studio tension, geeky technical details. There’s plenty of context considering Springsteen’s previous album, The River, and Nebraska‘s fraternal twin, Born in the USA. There are documentary-like opinions of Nebraska from other musical artists.

On a deeper level, though, Zanes weaves all of these surrounding elements together around the more central question of Springsteen the artist — where he came from and where he was going. He takes you inside the crumbling home of Springsteen’s grandparents, where Bruce spent his earliest years. He considers the cautionary tale of Elvis Presley, Springsteen’s childhood idol. He describes America’s disturbing descent into isolation — and Springsteen’s personal retreat into what Joseph Campbell would call “the belly of the whale.” In fact, Zanes draws a parallel to Odysseus that Joseph Campbell would love.

Deliver Me From Nowhere is a brilliantly structured piece of writing that ultimately delivered a much-needed glimmer of insight as I sit here isolated in America, alone in my crumbling house with my acoustic guitar.