From the Flag to the Cross: Fascism American Style

This brilliant collection of essays by some of our most revolutionary thinkers lays out how we got here and where we go now.

Every so often you come across a book that appeals directly to your revolutionary heart. From the Flag to the Cross: Fascism American Style, a collection of seven relatively short radio interviews brilliantly edited and transformed into essays by Zach Sklar and Michael Steven Smith is such a book.

As you open the book, you see a page written by Colin Robinson, the publisher of OR books worth reproducing here in full.

“‘Gangster capitalism.’ That’s how Henry Giroux describes the system where a billionaire class controls the institutions that shape our lives—the media, corporations, universities, courts, and government. But does this centralization of power on behalf of the super-rich mean that fascism has taken over the United States? Certainly, the signs are there: Individuals not charged with a crime are picked up on the street by masked police and “disappeared.” Right-wing strongmen like Javier Milei of Argentina or Nayib Bukele of El Salvador are embraced warmly on the steps of the White House. The aptly titled Trump v. United States  Supreme Court ruling just handed the president broad immunity for “official acts.” And Elon Musk, the president’s unelected scourge of government inefficiency, gave repeated fascist-style salutes at Trump’s inauguration rally. His DOGE has fired tens of thousands of people, and illegally seized private personal data on millions of Americans.

So is this fascism, oligarchy, authoritarianism—or all of the above? Is there a special brand of American fascism? And, if so, what direction is it likely to take, and how can it best be resisted? In From the Flag to the Cross: Fascism American Style, seven prominent American socialists explore these questions. They come at the issues from different angles in an enlightening spectrum of opinion. But on one point, they are in unison: Trump is not the disease. He’s the symptom. The real threat is a violent, deeply embedded system—fueled by capitalism, white supremacy, Christian nationalism, and authoritarian rule—that long predates the 47th president.”

In the following excellent introduction by Jim Lafferty, he quotes Chris Hedges, “The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin called our system of governance ‘inverted totalitarianism’, one that kept the old iconography, symbols and language, but had surrendered power to corporations and oligarchs.” Let that sink in.

In the essay titled “The Rise of Christian Fascism” Hedges is uniquely qualified. He grew up in the church. His father was a Presbyterian minister, and his mother was a a seminary graduate. Chris went to Harvard Divinity school before becoming a war correspondent for the next 20 years. Hedges declares, “The social pathologies that have pushed people into the arms of these very frightening figures are not being addressed—the mercenary nature of the health care system, skyrocketing utilities in our towns and cities which have been sold off to private interests, rising food prices, the wage stagnation, the refusal to raise the minimum wage significantly, the breaking of unions. These are the conditions that create fascist totalitarian movements, and we’re ignoring them.” He continues: “We’re not addressing the root causes that cause people to embrace these Christian nationalist figures and rally around cult politicians like Trump. If it wasn’t Trump, it would be someone else. Too often the liberal class or liberals tend to demonize Trump as if Trump is the problem. Trump is the symptom,not the disease. And we’re not addressing the disease.”

In this brilliant analysis, Hedges exposes with meticulous clarity root causes of the fascist totalitarian state and of our democratic train wreck.

In his last year at Harvard, Chris Hedges studied with 80-year-old James Luther Adams, who had direct experience of Nazi Germany and who, as Hedges writes, “joined the underground confessing church that was the church run by Martin Niemöller, Karl Barth, and Albert Schweitzer.”  Hedges recalls, “I remember him saying to me that when we were his age, we would all be fighting the Christian fascists. These are people who have sacralized the worst elements of white supremacy, American capitalism, American imperialism, by distorting the biblical message. These are heretics.”

Closing his essay, well worth careful study, he writes, “So we have to begin to see through the propaganda that is spewed out over the airwaves about a system that no longer represents our interests but serves the interests of the billionaire class and the military-industrial complex. And I think that kind of consciousness and that kind of organization is where hope lies.”

In the essay by the brilliant socialist economist Richard Wolff, “When Capitalism Morphs into Fascism.” Wolff explains that fascism is always inherent in a capitalist system and points to the massive inequality between the wealthy class and the rest of us; when that inequality bubbles up into discontent and anger, fascism finds and exploits its chosen scapegoats.

In his introduction, Michael Smith writes, “In Germany then, the Jews were blamed. In the United States now it is immigrants who are scapegoated. The demagogue Trump, like Hitler, is a captivating speaker and a very effective cult leader who is now poised to take the power of the government and turn it against us.”

Wolff explains, “That’s what the Trump administration and Project 2025 are all about. These are the steps capitalists take when the inevitable inequality and instability of their system threaten its sustainability. Then they turn to force, to violence, in a word to fascism.” Both Democratic and Republican Parties support the billionaire class and have only tokenism for the working class. Wolff talks about the need for and potential support for a socialist party but laments, ”We have a duopoly, a system of politics that makes it impossible for third parties to get off the ground. It’s carefully orchestrated for the public like kabuki theater.”

Solutions do exist. “The countervailing forces that could potentially fight fascism in this country are fairly weak, but they exist. There’s an upsurge in the union movement. The Palestine solidarity efforts are remarkable. We had the Black Lives Matter movement and the Occupy movement. This brought about the popular notion of the 1 percent as opposed to the rest of us, the 99 percent. And more recently we had the Bernie Sanders phenomenon—socialism is no longer a dirty word in America.”

This book is organized so well as essays follow logically. The next chapter, “Unions Must Lead the Fight” is by Diane Feeley, a former union auto-worker.

Feeley discusses in depth the strengths, weaknesses and potential of unions. “A union is not an insurance company, it’s a membership organization. And therefore, it’s about what we want in terms of our wages, working conditions, and benefits … and it’s also a very democratic or potentially democratic place …” Pointing out the need for universal solidarity, she writes, “All of this really teaches us solidarity, not only with our co-workers, but with other people. We can’t just be concerned about our own selves; we live in this larger world. That sense of solidarity, that sense that we are all human, operates against the idea of fascism where only some are humans—and others are sub-humans.”

The essays are each preceded by an introductory overview by Smith that is informative and enlightening, no less valuable than the essays themselves. Introducing “Militarized Education and the Assault on Free Speech” by Professor Henry Giroux and referring to the horrific genocide in Gaza, Michael writes, “The response of American students and faculty across the country was magnificent. Tent encampments sprang up in several hundred college campuses. They became the focal point for a full-throated discussion of the realities in Gaza and American complicity in the ongoing genocide. Demands for ceasefire were raised. Demands that the universities divest themselves of investments in Israel and American arms manufacturers were put forward. The history of Zionism as a settler colonial project was articulated. It was understood that white European Zionists intended from the beginning to overwhelm and displace the Palestinians.

“This manifestation of critical thinking came to a crashing end. The wealthy and their servants in Congress and in the mass media accused the students of being anti-Semitic and of supporting terrorism … University presidents were fired. Professors lost their jobs. Students were expelled from schools. The great campus uprising was closed down.”

Professor Giroux opens, “With the suppression of the Palestine Solidarity Movement, the campuses have become a focus of American Homeland Security. Particularly considering the protests against Israel and its slaughter of the Palestinian people, free speech is now being responded to not by dialogue or an attempt to understand the issues that students raise. Instead, students are now met with snipers, checkpoints, violent police crackdowns. What we are seeing is militarized policing as a response to dissent.”

He goes further. “What’s happening on campuses in the United States, and in some cases, a number of other countries, is that the role of education in a democratic public sphere is being challenged in ways unlike we have ever seen before. Billionaires are supporting repressive policies and the police are being called in to suppress dissent. Students are being beaten and faculty are being arrested. We have not seen anything like this since the 1960s.”

He says, “Public education is under attack. Books are banned, and certain parts of our history are no longer taught or even mentioned in textbooks. History is erased. Education is never neutral. It is always a political act. Education either serves to liberate or to domesticate, either to empower or to subjugate,”

This essay is remarkable both for Giroux’s philosophical insight and for the brilliant clarity of his prose. You can read this essay many times over and, like Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” never tire of it.

Giroux speaks of his close friend, Paulo Freire, “the Brazilian educator and revolutionary, (who) believed that democratizing education is the core of political resistance.”

Giroux  writes, “He opposed education that denied people their history, didn’t give them the skills to read, write, and think critically, and prevented them from examining the conditions that suppressed them.” Giroux gives us some history directly relatable to today’s experience: “In 1964 a military coup in Brazil labeled Paulo Freire as a dangerous figure. Why? Because literacy itself was seen as dangerous—a threat to the powerful. Then, as now, those in power fear an educated populace capable of understanding the true meaning of democracy and holding them accountable.”

As we read Giroux’s essay we come to understand exactly how dangerous the fascist repression of students and teachers and the cooptation of universities is. If we lose our history and freedom of speech, we are well on the road to Orwell’s understanding that “whoever controls education has the power to shape the future.”

Bill Mullen is an author and a professor emeritus at Purdue University. His latest book is We Charge Genocide! American Fascism and the Rule of Law. In this essay, ominously titled, “The Law Won’t Save Us,” he mentions previous fascist movements in the United States and what they’ve had in common. “We’ve never had a full-blown fascist state in the United States, but we’ve had a regular stream of fascist movements … All of them are unified by a form of authoritarian white supremacy, misogyny, and anti-democratic politics, combined with street-level fighting forces. So, since the 1930s, we’ve always had some fascist current or movement alive in the United States.”

He writes about Black anti-fascist struggles including the great editor and publisher, Ida B. Wells. “She was what we call a premature anti-fascist, because she understood the relationship between racial violence, racial terrorism, and the role of the state …  in 1917, 1918, 1919, in her own newspaper, in addition to writing about lynching, she was pointing to the parallels between lynchings in America and the pogroms taking place in Ukraine and Poland against Jews.”

The brutal elements of fascism go way back. “This was well before the rise of formal fascism, but we argue in our book The Anti-Fascist Tradition that Black radicals especially, who’ve always been attuned to racial violence, oftentimes anticipated fascism before other groups,” Mullen tells us.

Professor Mullen makes a compelling argument in this essay that a key element in fascism was always racism – in particular since colonization. He writes, “In 1915 during World War I, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about the kinds of techniques being used in the colonies that he later understood to be templates for the rise of fascism.” He contends later in the essay that “fascism is always an anti-Black ideology. The trajectory toward fascism began not just with the events of the 1910s and 1920s, but with colonialism.”

In kind of an ominous wakeup call, he writes, “Angela Davis said in 1971, fascism is a process, not necessarily a product. Clearly, Trump is part of historical processes which he has exploited to advance the potentiality of fascism in the United States. As for Trump’s second term, the first thing we should realize is that the courts are not going to save us. The lawyers are not going to save us. The cops are not going to save us. The legal apparatus is not going to save us. We must also recognize that the Democratic Party is not going to save us. They’re an enabler of the far right. They have stood by while the right has grown and strengthened itself. The Democratic Party has aligned itself with corporate power, the police, and with the war against Palestinians. The closing down of the campus encampments was done with the full support of the Democratic Party. In the 2024 presidential campaign, the Democrats were lionizing people like Dick Cheney, a war criminal who legitimated the torture of inmates at Guantanamo. The Democratic Party has made it clear that they’re comfortable with racial violence and state power. We should put no stock in the Democratic Party as a brake on the increasing move to the right in this country.”

For the next chapter, “The Duopoly and Liberalism Led to Trump” by Margaret Kimberley, Michael Smith says in his introduction, “We, as ordinary people, are experiencing a profound change in the nature of who holds power in America today. Our constitutional democracy, however limited by race and class, is being replaced by an oligarchy, the rule by the super rich few over the many. The separation of powers between the Congress, the Executive, and the Supreme Court has all but been eliminated. We are getting what the oligarchs wish for, ‘a unitary executive’ where Trump is attempting to rule by executive decrees.”

Margaret Kimberley begins by analyzing the 2024 election in which Trump won the popular vote and the electoral college. She notes that in the 2024 election he garnered considerably more votes than in his races in 2016 and 2020.

“We should acknowledge that Trump has a very large reservoir of support. People continue to be surprised that millions vote for him despite the fact that he’s a con man, that he’s declared bankruptcy six times but marketed himself as a great success, that he’s openly racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, and that he’s an impulsive, vindictive man who punishes people because they’ll say Gulf of Mexico and not Gulf of America.”

Kimberley feels that Trump is “a reflection of a huge sector of the U.S. population.” But as she explains, it’s more than that. In the essay she details the failure of the Democratic Party and of liberalism itself. She writes, “The Democrats did not do what they said they were going to do to help people. I believe that was a big reason why Kamala Harris lost … I think it’s a mistake to explain her defeat by saying people are just racist. There was another biracial person who got to be president of the United States, so we can ignore that as an explanation. Some people say the voters are misogynistic, that a woman can never be elected president. I’m not convinced of that.”

Margaret Kimberley is one of my favorite New York writers. Always truthful, direct and down to earth as a person, a speaker, a writer and a revolutionary, she is a treasure. Covering much ground in this one essay, from community self-defense to the complicity of the duopoly to the oligarchy that didn’t start with Trump, but gave him all the anti-democratic weaponry he needed.

“People are the ones to bring about change. Lincoln Heights, Ohio, is one example. But we also have to talk about who crushed Occupy Wall Street? It was the Obama administration. Who crushed the demonstrations in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd? It was the Trump administration. The reaction around the country is to build cop cities like in Atlanta, a city run by Democrats.

“We have to be careful and understand that the duopoly is not our friend. Too many people still see the Democratic Party as a tool for positive change. But I’m optimistic as long as people understand that it comes down to us. We are the ones who have to create grassroots movements for change, and they have to be independent of electoral politics.”

Socialist revolutionary thinker, writer and organizer Kshama Sawant’s essay is aptly titled “A­ Fighting­ Strategy­ for­ ­Community-Based­ Action.”

Michael Smith says in his intro, “It’s one thing to wring our hands in despair over the re-election of Donald Trump and decry his out-of-the-gate authoritarian, neo-fascist assault on U.S. democracy. It’s quite another to offer a comprehensive strategy for combating the new Trump administration and also advancing a political ideology that challenges conventional wisdom over what is needed to make a truly democratic country . …  Kshama Sawant, a socialist economist who served 10 years on the Seattle, Washington, City Council, presents a radical vision of what is needed to defend against Trump’s dictatorial moves and legislative plans. In a vastly more profound way, she also offers pragmatic approaches to bring about the end of the unjust and exploitative capitalist system in America and replace it with an equitable and democratic system of governance.”

Sawant opens by telling us of the Workers Strike Back-organized National Fight the Rich Organizing Conference, with 300 in-person attendees and over 200,000 on the livestream.

“We agreed on the following demands: Fight the rich and the billionaire class and their system; workers need a $25-an-hour minimum wage; good union jobs for all; stop climate catastrophe; take big energy corporations into workers’ ownership; fight racism, sexism, and all oppression; stop mass deportations; Medicare for All and quality affordable housing; tax the rich; end the genocidal war on Gaza, no military aid, no occupation; bring down Trump, the billionaires, and their two parties. Last but not least, no more sellouts. We need a new mass party. Obviously, we are not going to be able to win all at once, but it is important for us as socialists to lay out a political program as a compass to guide the movement to success.”

Sawant, like others in this book, has no illusions about the Democratic Party, “Throughout the 10 years that I served in the Seattle City Council, I saw the Democratic Party oppose virtually every progressive issue that we brought forward. Our 15 Now movement, which I launched right after I took office in early 2014, won the first major city $15-an-hour minimum wage. We also won inflation increases. So today, the minimum wage in Seattle for all minimum-wage workers is $20.76, which is by far the highest in the nation.”

Medicare for All is an issue that Sawant supports with more than political lip-service as many so-called progressive do. She is an organizer and thinks and acts in strategic ways.

The only way to win is to build and leverage the power that working people have, which is withholding our labor. I don’t believe that Medicare for All can be won without a serious strategy of mass protests, civil disobedience, and workplace shutdowns. That needs to start somewhere. … it’s a contagion of emboldening that the ruling class does not want to see. Understanding this idea enabled me to know how to traverse the treacherous terrain of city hall, of politics under capitalism. Rule number one was I didn’t go there as a City Council member thinking these Democrats are my colleagues. I went there to use my office to wage class war on behalf of the working class against the ruling class.”

In the last part of her essay, Sawant tells  us about Workers Strike Back, “an independent movement organizing on the streets and in our workplaces against the billionaires and their political servants.We stand against the genocidal war on Gaza and for a permanent ceasefire. We’re fighting for an end to the brutal occupation and all U.S. military funding for Israel.

“Workers Strike Back is starting small. Today we have 900 members [now at least 901; I just joined]. We still have to grow much bigger. In the meanwhile, we have to pick battles that we can win—like Medicare for All. To build a nationwide push for Medicare for All, we believe a concrete strategy would be to put forward a ballot initiative fight in Seattle where we have the biggest forces for Workers Strike Back and use that as a stepping off point … that’s the power of winning in one place. It really sets in motion the possibility of winning elsewhere.”

Sawant, like the good organizer she is, does not hesitate to give a pitch for Workers Strike Back: “If anyone would like to get involved in Workers Strike Back, they can go to the website,workersstrikeback.org, for more information.

From the Flag to the Cross is a crucially important set of well written and engaging essays, essential for understanding and dealing with “fascism American style.”

You can order From the Flag to the Cross from OR Books; you will find many other worthy titles from this publisher at orbooks.com.