What is fascistic is the desire to organize society as if we are at war for purposes other than war. Getting people to lay aside their individual pursuit of happiness, their policy disagreements, their consciences, and fall in line like good soldiers is the very heart of fascistic propaganda.
And two of the key ideas deployed to cultivate this mass consciousness are nationalism and ethnic solidarity. Not all forms of nationalism are ethnically based. Fascist Italy was very nationalistic—duh—but it wasn’t ethno-nationalism in part because the kind of biological racism that drove so much of Nazism just wouldn’t work on Italians for a bunch of reasons (Italian culture is different, Italians are ethnically very diverse, etc.). Even Mussolini condemned Nazism in 1934 as “one hundred per cent racism” (at least he said it in an essay under his name). But civic nationalism can still play a similar game. Mussolini definitely wanted to cultivate a kind of “Italianism” that would operate much the same way as ethno-nationalist appeals.
One of the reasons Italian Fascism failed to become as totalitarian as Nazism (even though Mussolini coined the word “totalitarian”) was that many Italians never shed (to this day) their local attachments. For most of history, Italy existed only as a geographic term, i.e., the Italian peninsula. For millennia Sicilians would laugh at the idea they were the same “people” as the Romans or Venetians, and vice versa. Many of these kingdoms and city-states didn’t speak the same language or have the same cuisine, and, not unimportantly, often went to war with each other. Most Italians didn’t speak standard Italian at home until the introduction of television. When Italy was unified in 1861, estimates of Italian fluency ranged from 2.5 percent to at most 10 percent. Nationalism eventually conquered the formal pluralism, but the informal cultural pluralism endured.
I bring this up because there have been similar efforts to create an Americanism the way Mussolini tried to create an Italianism. This effort is one of the main reasons I argued in Liberal Fascism that America under Woodrow Wilson looked awfully fascistic. The Wilson administration had the first modern ministry of propaganda in the West, the Committee on Public Information, headed by George Creel.
What we had to have was no mere surface unity, but a passionate belief in the justice of America’s unity, but a passionate belief in the justice of America’s cause that should weld the people of the United States into one white-hot mass instinct with fraternity, devotion, courage, and deathless determination. The war-will , the will to win, of a democracy depends upon the degree to which each one of all the people of that democracy can concentrate and consecrate body and soul and spirit in the supreme effort of service and sacrifice. What had to be driven home was that all business was the nation’s business, and every task a common task for a single purpose.
He led what he called “the fight for the minds of men, for the ‘conquest of their convictions,’ and the battle-line ran through every home …”
Fear, as Creel explained elsewhere, was “an important element to be bred into the civilian population. It is difficult to unite a people by talking only on the highest ethical plane. To fight for an ideal, perhaps, must be coupled with thoughts of self-preservation.” For the Wilson administration, the fear wasn’t just of the Hun, but of the hyphenated American, the socialist, the anarchist, and others who spread disharmony.
Which brings me back to the Creelish creepers running the Department of Labor’s social media campaigns. It’s full of paranoid prattle about not letting “the globalist” win and how “Americanism will Prevail” against them. It bleats about how Andrew Jackson beat the British, so you need to “Remember who you are, American.” There are countless references to “one American heritage.” The DOL’s apprentice program sometimes reads like the comms jabroneys are trained by watching Starship Troopers. “Your Nation Needs YOU! Build the future of your Homeland.” “It’s Monday. Patriots are in control. Let’s get to work.”
Now, compared to the Wilson years, never mind the Third Reich, this is little more than trolling and digital cosplay. But one thing you cannot deny: The people in charge want you to take this stuff seriously. And some of it is quite serious. The Department of Labor, and the Trump administration writ large, loves to tout the claim that 100 percent of job growth in its first year in office went to “native-born Americans”: “President Trump is the ONLY President in the 21st century to ensure ALL net-job growth goes to NATIVE-BORN AMERICANS. HISTORIC.” Trump himself has made this boast repeatedly.
Put aside the fact that this almost surely isn’t true. They want you to think it’s true and that is something to brag about. About 15 percent of the U.S. population is foreign-born. Some of them are here illegally. Most are not. And over 20 million of them are naturalized citizens. Again, the claim is bogus, but this administration and its new right fans like the idea that the Department of Labor is working for so-called “heritage Americans.”
That’s un-American. And the way it’s celebrated feels pretty fascistic to me. It’s certainly, shall we say, anti-anti-fascistic.
As I’ve discussed before, this “heritage American” crap is gross, and I don’t have the room to recount all the ways it offends me. But it’s worth pointing out that the Founders did not consider themselves members of “one people,” never mind “one heritage.” Sure, they wanted a homeland, but for a long time that word would better describe their state, not the United States.
I do think there is something we can call an American heritage to be proud of and embrace. Suffice it to say it is not meaningfully represented by a bunch of 20-something white dudes who look like they’re posing for German eugenics posters. My understanding of American heritage is the American experiment. And the American experiment is the generational effort to expand liberty rightly understood and the pursuit of happiness, regardless of your race, ethnicity, or country of origin.
But here’s my specific problem with this social media campaign and the broader messaging of this administration and its apologists: It’s validating the worst arguments of the worst elements of the left. One of my primary motivations for writing Liberal Fascism was my sincere anger at having modern conservatism routinely described as fascist. Limited government, free markets, constitutionalism, property rights, free speech, etc., are not fascistic. But the people who claimed conservatives didn’t really believe that stuff—that it was all façade for racism, imperialism, nationalism, antisemitism, sexism, and so on—now have a perfectly good reason to look at all this crap and say, “Told you so!” I don’t think that’s right. But, man, it makes it harder to argue with.
To illustrate the point: Conservatives once insisted that it was slander to call America an empire or to claim that we went into Iraq in a war for oil. Just two weeks into 2026, this president committed an act of war expressly for the purpose of seizing oil and has insisted that our national security requires seizing Greenland by force if necessary. How many conservatives—me included—got endless mileage out of “The Life of Julia”? It was one stupid cartoon. This administration issues more grotesque memes in an hour than a thousand Julias.
But back to my main point. This “one heritage” garbage is just another example in this dismantling of American conservatism and vandalism of the American experiment. The administration’s ethnically colored war-mobilization rhetoric—“the enemy within!” “poisoning the blood!”—is a feature of fascistic nationalism. That doesn’t mean America is a fascist country. But it makes it harder to defend against the charge. How can I say otherwise, given what I have said for years about the Wilson administration and the New Deal? Nationalism and socialism are essentially different brand names for the same worldview. Trump is nationalizing industry at a greater clip than any president in our lifetime, and if a Democrat did anything of the sort, every Trump cheerleader would call it socialism. The identitarianism of the left was pernicious and contrary to the ideals of the American experiment, and to the American creed that constitutes our true and glorious heritage. The identitarianism of the new right is no better.
The issue isn’t how inconvenient this stuff is to me as a pundit. The hard left, and large swaths of the broader cultural and academic left, never convinced conservatives or most Americans that “Amerikkka” was a fascist, racist country. But they did convince themselves to one degree or another. As liberal philosophers like Richard Rorty or Christopher Lasch would argue with a lot more sophistication, this severed many progressives from the real American heritage. As I wrote in Suicide of the West, the Howard Zinn crowd tried to make the gold of the American story radioactive and untouchable by supposedly serious people on the left. Remember how after 9/11 Katha Pollitt told her 13-year-old daughter she couldn’t fly the American flag, because “the flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war”? Pollitt was wrong. But this administration is making her seem less so.
By hijacking the language of patriotism for this nationalistic, statist, militaristic horseshit, the right is picking up the baton of the left by signaling to millions of Americans that America’s heritage—and the people who talk about it—are precisely the kinds of people who see the American flag the same way she did.
