People are shocked at the cold-blooded killings of Alex Petti and Renee Nicole Good. They should be shocked. ICE shot Petti multiple times as he was attempting to help a person whom they had thrown to the ground. Renee Good had just dropped her six-year-old at school before taking bullets to her face, head and chest. But killing Americans or denying them of basic rights because they’re different or protesting injustice is not nearly as un-American as we like to tell ourselves. It is part of who we are. And unless we understand its recurrent threat, we will never realize our chance to achieve a genuinely diverse social democracy.

In the MAGA universe there are only two kinds of real Americans: straight white Christian Alpha males and their straight white Christian tradwives. When Alex Petti and Renee Good had the audacity to take a political stand and protest the ICE assault on their neighbors, they challenged MAGA political norms and threatened MAGA identity norms. The White House instantly unleashed its lies exonerating the killers and painting the victims as leftwing terrorists who got what they deserved. Trump’s right-wing echo chamber followed his lead by releasing an avalanche of misogynist, homophobic, and ideological attacks on the victims.    

Thanks to Donald Trump, fascism has arrived in America. And we can say this because a key strategy of fascism is the use of state power to enforce homogeneity and suppress dissent. Almost a century ago Sinclair Lewis’ novel, It Can’t Happen Here, provided a blueprint for how we have arrived at this fascist state. His book showed how it lurked close to the surface. In con men demagogues, the rightwing corporate rich, militarism, street violence, extremist preachers, racism and antisemitism, and media genuflection to state power. All are features of the current scene. Sinclair sensed that, for all its embrace of liberal democratic values, the American tradition included other strands, strains that included fascist possibilities. And he knew that capitalism was no bulwark against rule by strongmen. Economic and social insecurity feed popular doubts about the governing capacity of political institutions. Simple feckless answers become appealing. Strong men emerge to provide them. Get rid of the bureaucrats, legislators, intellectuals, journalists, all the traitors who ruined our national greatness! Get rid of the human filth, immigrants and lunatic subversives who infect our once great nation! Crush dissent, achieve unity. The fascist political formula is raw, direct, and accusatory. 

Whether through legislation or through violence, previous administrations have also sought to expunge pluralism and diversity to achieve a coercive homogeneity of American life. Systematic genocide of indigenous people and denial of civil rights to ex-slaves, denial of women’s rights, workers’ rights; closing American borders to Asians as well as to eastern and southern Europeans; and ICE’s currently reigning xenophobia are all part of a continuing tradition of coercive homogeneity. No less a figure than President Harry Truman’s Attorney General, Tom Clark, memorably expressed the idea back in 1948: “Those who do not believe in the ideology of the United States,” he declared, “shall not be allowed to stay in the United States.” For adherents of coercive homogeneity, there is presumably only one way to be and to believe as an American.

In the words of the ‘60s Black activist H. Rap Brown, “Violence is as American as cherry pie.” Yes, the Left has used violence too. Anarchist bombings in the pre-WWI era, Weathermen bombings in the 1960s. But these are actions by aberrant groups, not the government-sponsored violence employed against indigenous peoples, slaves, immigrants, women, labor, dissidents in general, and now by ICE in our major cities. Equally important, though less violent, have been repeated ideological campaigns against dissenters, such as the A. Mitchell Palmer raids following WW I, the McCarthyite anti-communist blacklists of the early 1950s, and the current purge of DEI in universities, law firms, philanthropies, and corporations. These ideological attacks are tools of the right-wing to keep dissidents in line.

No less a fascist than Adolph Hitler himself was impressed by America’s legalized racism, its compulsion toward enforced homogeneity. Nazi lawyer Carl Schmitt defined democracy precisely by its need for homogeneity. “Democracy,” he wrote “requires…first homogeneity and second – if the need arises – elimination or eradication of heterogeneity”. This is coercive homogeneity. This is why the brass knuckles Trumpian approach to immigrants and those would defend them – pulses with fascist implications.

To be clear, we do not think that capitalism requires or demands compulsory homogeneity. On the contrary, capitalism thrives on forging multiple social strata and statuses within the working and middle classes, all the better to divide, control and exploit them. But when capitalist economies fail to deliver the goods, they can provoke a fascist-like cultural politics to grow and flourish, a politics of coercive homogeneity. Not for nothing does a portrait of President Andrew Jackson, who hated indigenous people, hang in the oval office of a President, who abhors “shithole countries” and the people who inhabit them.

For too long, students of American political culture have treated the enforcement of homogeneity as an extreme fringe, not a central feature. If it is seen at all, it is viewed as an outlier, a repulsive but only occasional force, an infrequent, inauthentic eruption. It is, in short, an exception to American exceptionalism. Such marginalization is itself dangerous. At a time when masked federal militiamen –   Trump’s own Gestapo – assault and murder dissenters, to understate the power of this very American tradition is politically dangerous, even lethal. 

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