The Biggest Lie:
The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818-1915
by Joseph Kelly (Bloomsbury USA)
This book is a historical retelling treating fascism as a formula that arose out of, is equivalent to, or even was defined by, American history, and more particularly the history of the treatment of Black people in the United States. In particular, the author looks at the notion of herrenvolk democracy, a description of apartheid states where the disenfranchisement of some groups works along with the liberation of others. In this form of government, the discrimination is not bug but feature. This maps well with the southern U.S., most notably during the post-Reconstruction period.
The book works as a sort of counterfactual. Descriptions of fascism treat it as a 20th century creation, having historical analogs (and itself requiring a sort of malignant nostalgia) but built from Nationalism and technology. This book plays with it as realized much earlier. Racism and racialized government is more calculated than mere bigotry here to advance the purposes of the upper class, or a trench of it.
The writing is strong in a compositional, creative non-fiction sense of building up a historical narrative. The individual deep dives into aspects of history are great, particularly the discussion of Thomas Dixon Jr., author of the book (The Clansman) that would become the movie Birth of A Nation. There is an odd parallel to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle here, where it feels like, to paraphrase Sinclair, Dixon aimed for the heart and hit the gonads. Unfortunately, the strength of the writing can work against the thesis to the book. I ended up being thrilled by the reading, but pausing to not see how it worked for the book as a whole. There is a sort of odd twist where the author makes the historically traceable decisions to end up in an unequal racist society so tactile that it frustrates the thesis. Looking at all the exits that the nation could have taken from a racist structure, that so many treated as a foregone conclusion, ends up more a story about how Not Racist people were. I did feel some Gell-Mann at some of the science-y, specifically around eugenics, which has become something of a hobby for me*. There were wobbly descriptions of things, accurate but disingenuously framed, that make me a wary about some of the other text. None of it is sufficient to derail the book, but it bothered me.
The ugly bit is much the same as Chain of Ideas. History writing is not Scooby-Doo, we do not get to rip off the mask of social ossification to reveal the Capitalism underneath for the oligarchs to say that they would have gotten away with it, if not for those leftist historians, as the people start singing. I do not mean to overstate the overstatement here. There is evidence, some quite dramatic and visual evidence in this book, of the ways that racism and nationalism and imperialism is meant to plaster over economic subjugation and make people feel good despite feeling bad. But it bleeds with a sense that surely, it is mere ignorance at work. Surely, people are just not aware of the work of racism in preventing labor from rising up. Surely, this next sentence must be the one that will cause people to experience a class consciousness. Surely this this sentence will strike fear into the elites. Or this next one. Or this next one.
My thanks to the author, Joseph Kelly, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Bloomsbury USA, for making the ARC available to me.
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* – Author’s note: do not put this in your Hinge profile.
CITATION HEEDED 