Fascism in America

Is “American Fascism” an oxymoron? Or, to paraphrase Malcom X, is Fascism as American as apple pie? Was the Capitol Insurrection the work of marginal extremists? Or the eruption of a neo-fascist movement? The answer depends on how one defines “fascism” and how one connects recent events to the American past. Join the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU and the Working Group on the Global New Right for a conversation about the current state of fascism in our society with Sarah Churchwell, Samuel Moyn, Melissa Murray, and Jason Stanley. Phil Gorski will moderate the conversation. Sarah Churchwell is Chair in Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study. She writes on American cultural mythologies, especially of the interwar period, most recently in her book Behold, America: The Entangled History of America First and the American Dream (2018). She is finishing a book on Gone with the Wind and a collection of essays on the question of American fascism. Samuel Moyn is Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and a Professor of History at Yale University. He has written several books in his fields of European intellectual history and human rights history, including The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010), and edited or coedited a number of others. Melissa Murray is the Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law at New York University and Faculty Director of the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Network. She was formerly the interim dean of the UC Berkeley Law School. Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Before coming to Yale in 2013, he was Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University. His latest book is How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (Penguin Random House, 2018). Philip Gorski is a comparative-historical sociologist at Yale University. His research focuses on the interaction of religion and politics in early modern and modern Europe and North America. He is the author, most recently, of “American Babylon: Democracy and Christianity Before and After Trump” (Routledge 2020). With Sam Perry, he is currently completing a book titled White Christian Nationalism: A Primer.