Has the U.S. Always Been Fascist?

Fascism can be selectively deployed against specific populations in specific places. The genocide of Native Americans and the institution of slavery are the two most notable examples of domestic fascism in the United States but they are not the only ones. Outside its borders, the U.S. has carried out similar forms of repression—from military occupations in Central America, to mass bombing in Vietnam, to the so-called War on Terror in Iraq and Afghanistan. Critics of the United States point out that these are not isolated events; they reflect a long-standing pattern of imperial violence, often carried out in the name of freedom or security, but experienced by many as terror and domination. To ask whether the U.S. might become authoritarian in the future ignores how U.S. state violence has already shaped the lives of many people—especially Black, Indigenous, and other colonized or marginalized communities—for centuries.

Many Americans tend to think of fascism as something external—a foreign threat or sudden crisis. In many ways, this website adopts that framing by relying on measurable shifts in institutions and civil liberties. But scholars of critical fascism argue that fascism can exist within liberal democracies, not just in opposition to them. For example, immigration detention centers, even before the use of Central American prisons, operated as legal exceptions—spaces where normal rights and protections are suspended, and targeted populations are subjected to extreme state control. In the view of these scholars, fascism is not a break from American democracy but a feature embedded within it.

U.S. foreign policy further illustrates this concept of embedded fascism. For decades, American military power has shaped global life and death. From the Cold War to the post-9/11 security regime, the U.S. has used drone strikes, secret prisons, and indefinite detentions as tools of unaccountable violence. These are not just war tactics; they are instruments of terror. For those targeted by them, the supposed line between American democracy and fascism disappears.

From this perspective, the question isn’t whether the U.S. might fall into fascism—it’s how deeply fascism is already woven into its foundations, and how those logics may now be expanding to reach people who once believed themselves safe. Fascism doesn’t always arrive with tanks in the streets. It can spread quietly, selectively, often justified through the language of law, order, and national security. But the impact—displacement, surveillance, imprisonment, death—is just as real.

That said, the authors of this site recognize that this project is designed to offer tools and language that are broadly accessible, including to people unfamiliar with or skeptical of critical theories of fascism. For many, describing the present as an expansion of an existing fascist regime may feel more confusing than clarifying. We believe there is value of grounding our analysis in a pragmatic framework. For those reasons, we have not adopted the language and framework of critical fascism scholars even though we find it compelling.

Still, any honest engagement with the question of American fascism requires us to look beyond the idea that this is a new or unprecedented moment. Instead, we must see it as an escalation of long-standing systems of racialized and imperialist violence. The difficult truth is that the danger today may lie not only in what's changing, but in what has already been normalized.

We must also recognize the people who have long lived under these conditions—people whose lives have been shaped by surveillance, policing, displacement, and state neglect. Their experiences, struggles, and resistance offer insight into what fascism looks like from below. Their knowledge should inform how we understand and respond to the present.