Is It Happening Here?

Guy Miller

From the Flag to the Cross
Fascism American Style
Edited by Zachary Sklar and Michel Steven Smith
Introduction by Jim Lafferty
OR Books, 110 pages, 2025, $18 paper, $10 e-book.

EDITED FROM POCASTS originally aired on “Law and Disorder,” From the Flag to the Cross weighs in at 110 pages — the length of a short book or a long pamphlet. FTC consists of seven short essays plus the editorial voice of retired attorney Jim Lafferty. All are well known voices on the American left.

Collectively, these short, easily accessible essays resemble separate pieces to a jigsaw puzzle more than a sustained political argument. But if there is an overarching political subject, it is given away in the book’s subtitle: “Fascism American Style.”

Here’s how the editor Lafferty poses the question on the first page: “Is there a special brand of American Fascism, and if so, what direction is it likely to take, and how, can it be resisted?”

In order to include all eight voices in FTC, I’m forced to only offer brief highlights from each essay. For a more complete appreciation, buy and read the book.

• First up to the plate, to answer Lafferty’s question, is journalist and author Chris Hedges. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School and son of a Presbyterian minister, Hedges examines Christian Nationalism in his contribution, “The Rise of American Fascism!” According to the Public Religious Research Institute, 10% of all Americans are Christian Nationalists, and another 20% are its sympathizers. These millions are the infantry of Trump’s army.

Hedges, echoing Hannah Arendt, notes that the Christian movement engages in magical thinking. This thinking often preys on despair and rage. It ends in cultism. In short, writes Hedges, “Trump functions more as a cult figure than a political figure.”

• Next up is Richard Wolff, a Marxist Professor Emeritus at UMASS, Amherst. Wolff’s “When Capitalism Morphs into Fascism” points to two recurring flaws in capitalism: inequality and crises. Both help pave the road to fascism.

Inequality acts as a corrupting agent that eats its way under the surface, resulting in what Wolff calls “…enormous social tension in the mass of people.” This subterranean conflict periodically explodes in violence. In turn, violence, or even the mere perception of violence, leads to the demand for protection: police, prisons and military.

The second built-in flaw of capitalism, Wolff notes “…sometimes it’s called an economic downturn, a recession or depression.” Regardless of severity, these disruptions bring hardships that can make fascism seem a viable solution.

• Dianne Feeley, an editor of Against the Current and a retired UAW member, adds to the conversation with “Unions Must Lead the Fight.” Feeley stresses the need for unions to play a central role in opposing authoritarianism and stresses their potential to unite workers across race and gender divides.

“Unfortunately,” she notes, “the top leaders of the major unions are still very wedded to the Democratic Party.” There is no better example of mistakenly viewing Democrats as friends of labor than to witness Joe Biden’s use of the Railway Labor Act to break the U.S. railroad workers’ strike. As do all the book’s authors, Feeley stresses the need to break from the two-party duopoly.

She warns of the rise of authoritarianism in what she calls geriatric capitalism, because it is at the end of its life! Yet until labor takes up the fight to replace it, we’re left with Gramsci’s dilemma: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born.”

Education and Democracy

• Next up is Henry Giroux from McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. He adds the education pieces to the jigsaw puzzle, emphasizing that without informed citizens democracy is impossible. As co-author of the recently published Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy, Giroux has thought deeply about this dynamic.

A friend of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, Giroux concludes that learning how to think critically is the essential building block to opposing authoritarianism. Why was Freire targeted in Brazil’s 1964 coup? Giroux answers: “Literacy itself was seen as dangerous — a threat to the powerful.”

• Bill Mullen, a Professor Emeritus at Purdue University, chimes in with “The Law Won’t Serve You.” Much of his contribution takes up how American history and law are intertwined with the evolution of fascism.

As the co-author of The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition and author of We Charge Genocide: American Fascism and the Rule of Law he provides a summary of repressive movements in American history.

Mullen brings his understanding of how African Americans have been in the forefront of both analyzing it and organizing resistance from Ida B. Wells connecting pogroms in Eastern Europe to lynching in the United States; to W.E.B. Dubois’ fact-finding trip to Nazi Germany in 1934; to the Black Panther Party’s United Front Against Fascism in 1970.

• Margaret Kimberly is an executive editor of Black Agenda Report. In the opening paragraphs of her essay, Kimberly turns her attention to the debacle of the Biden reelection campaign and how it morphed into the disaster of following Harris’ nomination.

Kimberly next catalogues the pathetic Democratic response to Trump. She writes: “Their (the DP’s) loyalty is to the permanent government and maintaining the status quo more than it is speaking to the people.”

She cites the historic Black small city of Lincoln Heights, Ohio as a better model for fightback. In February 2025, white supremacists made threatening, racist gestures aimed at Lincoln Heights. The community responded by organizing disciplined armed safety patrols.

• Last up is Kshama Sawant, described as a socialist economist. In 2013 she shocked the country when she was elected to the Seattle City Council, becoming the first militant socialist to do so in a century.

Despite pressure from the Democratic members of the City Council, Sawant maintained her independence for a decade. Although a labor leader tied to the Democratic Party insisted they could only win a $11 minimum wage, Sawant held firm for $15. She won, and now Seattle has an indexed minimum wage so that today it stands at $20.76, making it the highest in the country.

In her article, “A Fighting Strategy for Community-Based Action,” Swant describes her role on the City Council as similar to that of a union’s shop steward. And in outlining a political program including “Medicare for All,” she emphasizes that “illusions in the Democratic Party are the single most crucial obstacle to overcome” in order to build movements for change.

These essays from today’s cross-section of the American left provide ample material for thought and debate: a project well done!

March-April 2026, ATC 241