24/10/2024 10:39
Is It Fascism? A Leading Historian Changes His Mind. - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/magazine/robertpaxton-facism.html
Is It Fascism? A Leading Historian Changes His Mind.
Robert Paxton thought the label was overused. But now he’s alarmed by what he sees in global politics — including Trumpism. By Elisabeth Zerofsky Elisabeth Zerofsky is a contributing writer for the magazine who has reported extensively on European and American politics. She is currently at work on a book about the rise of the far right. Oct. 23, 2024
The historian Robert Paxton spent Jan. 6, 2021, glued to his television. Paxton was at his apartment in Upper Manhattan when he watched a mob march toward the Capitol, overrun the security barriers and then the police cordons and break inside. Many in the crowd wore red MAGA baseball caps, while some sported brightorange beanies signaling their membership in the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group. A few were dressed more fantastically. Who are these characters in camouflage and antlers? he wondered. “I was absolutely riveted by it,” Paxton told me when I met him this summer at his home in the Hudson Valley. “I didn’t imagine such a spectacle was possible.” Paxton, who is 92, is one of the foremost American experts on fascism and perhaps the greatest living American scholar of mid-20th-century European history. His 1972 book, “Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944,” traced the internal political forces that led the French to collaborate with their Nazi occupiers and compelled France to reckon fully with its wartime past. The work seemed freshly relevant when Donald Trump closed in on the Republican nomination in 2016 and articles comparing American politics with Europe’s in the 1930s began to proliferate in the American press. Michiko Kakutani, then the chief book critic for The New York Times, was among the first to set the tone. She turned https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/magazine/robert-paxton-facism.html
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