The Fascist Game

Since 1984, when the prominent scholar of French interwar politics Serge Berstein diagnosed France as “allergic to fascism,” historians of the French popular Right have led a revolution in the study of fascism. On the way to establishing the now-dominant view that France suffered a severe case of fascism in the 1930s, historians of the French popular Right have reimagined the very nature of fascism. Rather than see fascism as an ideology, as Berstein did, these historians have turned to treating fascism as a form of political behavior, predominantly a form of popular politics. Rather than a question of whether political actors in depression-era France possessed a fascist ideology, the question has become whether political actors in depression-era France performed the political practices that form fascism.1 During the same time span, the depressions-era U.S. Right has not drawn any comparable historiographical attention. Though a generation of works on the making of the U.S. modern Right means that twentieth-century American conservatism is no longer the historiographical orphan that Alan Brinkley described in his seminal 1994 essay, “The Problem of American Conservatism,” the depression-era Right has remained understudied. The great outburst of works on the U.S. modern Right since Brinkley's essay has largely imagined it as a postwar project. The classic account of the depression-era American Right remains Brinkley's Voices of Protest, which appeared in 1982, two years prior to Berstein's diagnosis of France. Like Berstein, Brinkley understood fascism as an ideology; also like Berstein, Brinkley concluded that his country of study had remained largely immune to fascism.2

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  Open Access•Tom Arnold-Forster•Journal of American Studies•2022

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