Fighting Fascism: An Unequal Guide

Hank Kennedy

The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism
By Sue Coe and Stephen F. Eisenman
OR Books, 2025, 180 pages, $23 paperback.

WITH MY OWN youth rapidly fading, I am not the target audience for Sue Coe and Stephen F. Eisenman’s The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism. Still, the title conjured up images of Silver Shirts, Black Legionaries, German-American Bundists, Klansmen, Proud Boys and Patriot Fronters, alongside perhaps a brief history of each group and some of their activities.

That would be a book I would happily read and recommend to those who think “it can’t happen here.” Unfortunately, it was not the book I got.

Eisenman, an art historian who regularly contributes to CounterPunch, has written a few text pieces that accompany around a hundred of Coe’s pieces. Eisenman’s introduction is written in a conversational, easy to understand language.

There is nothing wrong with trying to teach younger people about fascism. The fight against the recurrence of fascism will take all of us, the young and the not so much.

It is imperative, however, that this education be factually correct. Eisenman makes a few glaring errors. He writes of “the isolationist and anti-Semitic” America First Committee. The Committee was not, on its face, an antisemitic organization.

While obvious Jew haters like Henry Ford were prominent America Firsters, so were Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas and Progressive Party stalwarts Phillip and Robert LaFollette. No one can reasonably accuse them of being antisemites.

Similarly, Eisenman claims the Committee “was formed by [aviator] Charles Lindbergh.” This is incorrect, as Lindbergh joined months after the group was formed, although he became its most prominent spokesman.

Fascism: What Is It?

Eisenman’s diagnosis of fascism is messy and more likely to confuse than to enlighten. While he answers his own rhetorical question, “isn’t fascism — or its rudiments — already here?” by saying that the United States is still a democracy worth protecting, he also states that the “roots of current American fascism may be found in the country’s origins.”

This slippery definition of fascism pervades Eisenman’s introduction. Slavery, McCarthyism, the ethnic cleansing of the Native Americans, the meat industry, the Lavender Scare, and much more are all deemed fascist.

One recalls theories that attempt to explain everything and end up explaining nothing. If everything is “fascist,” then nothing is.

However, his recounting of the story of Klaus Barbie, the Nazi war criminal recruited by U.S. intelligence agencies, is commendable and epitomizes how fascist movements can be such useful tools for the powerful.

The present volume offers five suggestions as to how to fight fascism. These are a decidedly mixed bag.

The first suggestion, “Vote for Harris and Walz in November,” is so dated as to become laughable. This book released in 2025, so barring time travel, this would have been impossible when released and has not gotten any less so in the year since.

Others are more reasonable: protest for peace and join a political organization. A few are just generally good advice for living: talk to neighbors, eat healthy foods, exercise, take time to appreciate the arts.

Uncompromising Artwork

The rest of the book is taken up with Coe’s artwork. She is a regular contributor to the annual comics anthology World War 3 Illustrated, and has appeared in publications ranging from The Nation to Entertainment Weekly. Coe and Eisneman previously collaborated on The Ghosts of Our Meat and Zooicide, titles dealing with animal rights.

Coe’s work is obviously indebted to some of the great Weimar-era political artists, people like John Heartfield, Otto Dix and Kathe Kollwitz. Her work is visceral and immediate. It leaves no room for misinterpretation. As befits her interests, animals are a recurring motif: dogs, pigs, cows, even the lowly bumblebee.

That said, some contextualization would have been welcome. Not because anything is difficult to parse, as Coe is never a confusing artist. Rather, I’m interested in the origins of some of these pieces.

Why, for example, did she caricature Henry Ford hawking copies of the Dearborn Independent and its serial “the International Jew?” As a native Michigander, I’m always curious why one of our most infamous sons is again the topic of conversation.

Was this caricature for a book? A newspaper? A magazine? Did it accompany an article about Ford? Unfortunately these are all questions the text does not answer.

Despite Eisenman’s statement that Coe uses “humor or irony,” allowing viewers to gain emotional release from her work, this is few and far between. More often, Coe focuses on the grotesque, the horrific, and the tragic. She more resembles fellow World War 3 Illustrated contributor Seth Tobocman than the more ironically inclined Peter Kuper.

To take a comparison away from the realm of visual arts, Coe’s pieces remind me of the discography of UK peace punks Crass, with their matching black outfits and iconic band symbol combining the cross, swastika, and ouroboros.

Dedicated to pacifism, feminism, nuclear disarmament and vegetarianism, the group’s members even made the cat living at their commune try out a vegetarian diet.

Crass were uncompromising in their politics. Releases like “Do They Owe Us a Living,” “You’re Already Dead” and “How Does it Feel?” left little doubt where they stood. Even a listener who finds little to disagree with in their messages can find themselves bludgeoned and numbed to what they are saying. Unlike the Clash or Phil Ochs, Crass never let up on the attack.

Much like Tobocman or Crass, I find Coe’s work difficult to take in such overwhelming doses. Her single-minded approach is admirable, but also limiting. She is unlike the great Art Young, who varied his approaches even when confronting some of the worst of the human condition.

The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism is a flawed work. Its definition of fascism is too broad, and often disconnected from the art pieces. If the point is to show the long history of fascist ideas, more of the pieces should be focused on the past rather than the present. Nonetheless, despite my complaints parts of Eisenman’s history are worth reiterating and Coe’s artwork has an overwhelming power to it.

July-August 2026, ATC 243