I’ve never been much for calling the United States (U.S.) “fascist,” something that a significant number of my fellow leftists and progressives like to do in a half-serious way. What do such progressives mean when they use that loaded and ugly term to describe the contemporary U.S.? In their more serious moments, the factors mentioned include a merging of corporate and state power; suppression of unions; a culture and vast apparatus of imperial militarism; celebration of violence and cruelty; nationalism; hostility to equality and democracy; demagogic appeals to a frustrated middle class; hatred of the weak and poor; attachment to tradition and hierarchy; the systematic subordination of racial and ethnic minorities; militarized policing; mass incarceration; the devaluation or erosion of basic civil liberties; and hostility to intellectuals, modern science, liberalism, and socialism.

I would be the first to acknowledge that all of these and other reactionary and authoritarian features and tendencies are all too terribly present in the contemporary U.S. I would add that certain American current events can take on a distinctly fascistic feel, as when paramilitary police crushed the Occupy encampments in Oakland, California and New York City in the fall of 2011 and terrorized locked-down Boston and Boston area residents after the Boston Marathon bombings in April of 2013; when Civil Rights protestors in Ferguson, Missouri faced graphic military-style police repression last summer; and when New York City police accused civil rights protestors and New York City’s liberal mayor of contributing to the murder of two NYPD officers last December. One could mention other examples.
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