Fascism: A Warning

By Madeleine Albright

New York: HarperCollins, 2018

The term ‘fascism’ gets bandied around easily these days. The 1935 political satire, It Can’t Happen Here, in which Sinclair Lewis warned about the prospect of fascism in the United States, is enjoying a revival now. Borrowing Lewis’ title directly in Can It Happen Here?, Cass Sunstein compiled recent essays on fascism by various scholars. Many other similar works on fascism currently make the Amazon best sellers list. So, one might mistake Madeleine Albright’s new book as just one of many clichéd warnings about fascism. But the current political situation in the United States isn’t quite a case of never-cry-wolf. The wolf is really there, and the cry has only been a collective whimper, at least for now.

This fresh warning comes from Albright’s own experience fleeing fascism. She spent part of her childhood exiled in London during the Nazi occupation of her native Czechoslovakia, returning only for a few years until the Communists took over, prompting her family to emigrate to the United States. Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Joseph Stalin read like characters in her own biography. These early fascists, along with Francisco Franco, may have differed in style, but they were all too similar in the ruinous effects they had on their countries and others.

Albright is well poised to comment on fascism as a scholar and diplomat. She was US Ambassador to the United Nations and then Secretary of State—the first woman appointed to that position. While serving President Bill Clinton, she met with Kim Jong-Il and Vladimir Putin. Her interview notes with them will raise hairs. The parallels between these and other recent fascists like Hugo Chávez, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Viktor Orbán grow more evident through the pages. Are they all really fascist by label? Albright doesn’t address this question, which is perhaps merely academic. Much like their forebears, however, these leaders are all undoubtedly nationalistic and authoritarian, if not totalitarian. One worrying lesson is that democracy has hardly been a bulwark against their power.

Albright cautions readers with these historical and contemporary cases of fascism before turning to the United States under the Trump presidency. America’s current flirtation with fascism strikes Albright as particularly alarming, if not paradoxical. The United States is not only turning away from the defense and promotion of democracy abroad just when it seems more necessary than it did thirty years ago. But the United States also appears to be turning away from these values at home. Many Americans, Albright argues, aren’t the champions of democracy they once were: “We have tossed the measuring-sticks we used in the past into the waste bin. Our attention spans are shorter today, our expectations higher, and we are less likely to overlook flaws that have become ever easier to detect.”

Without plumbing the depths of the partisan divide too deeply, Albright appeals to Americans’ core democratic values to reverse this trend. She concludes by offering questions any citizen or political observer should answer to identify lurking fascism. By the time enough Americans indeed spot the wolf, their cry for genuine help might be too late.