“Who Goes Nazi?” In 1941, journalist Dorothy Thompson asked that question about the guests at a hypothetical American cocktail party. She assured the readers of Harper’s magazine that her reporting in Europe had given her a keen eye for “the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers.” And those who would never, as long as they live, go Nazi. As the far right gathers strength today, we’ve had plenty of time to play the same “macabre parlor game.” Call it: Who goes fascist?
Unlike Thompson, we can’t point to a single cataclysm that spiritually shook loose an entire generation, like a world war. What we have is, as Stuart Hall would say, a conjuncture: many phenomena crashing into each other simultaneously. We could point to the failures of American wars abroad, the 2008 economic collapse, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the repression of left-wing uprisings, as well as more generalized instability produced by threats to patriarchy, mass immigration, globalization, labor precarity, and climate change.
We recognize Thompson’s portrait of a sort of American whose “body is vigorous” and whose “mind is childish,” who “has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions.” In our day, that image fits neatly within a virulent consumer culture in which we’ve become addled by the scale of technological intervention in our communicative lives. What Neil Postman once called the “information-action ratio” has spun way out of control. We consume more information than we can do anything with and fight for primacy in an attention economy that profits from our confusion.
Thompson sees the tendency toward Nazism as principally a matter of character: “kind, good, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi.” We are watching, in real time, as people become desperately unkind and insecure (“gentlemanly,” we’ll leave to Thompson). While fascism is bound up with white supremacy and patriarchy, sympathy for it can crop up among people of any race, class, or gender. America’s promised meritocracy has been a bitter disappointment for many, but taking it as a matter of individual insult rather than collective oppression marks where one breaks fash.
Cocktail parties not being what they once were, we decided to survey the street at a No Kings protest to see who we can count on and who’s flipping hard. Yes, we’re in Manhattan, but for a place to people-watch and observe simmering class resentment, one could do worse.
Rushing ahead of us past the protest is A, who doesn’t join it. She just left her millionth doctor’s appointment this month, and once again, the doctor was dismissive and condescending about her research. A is convinced that her home is blooming with toxic mold, and now her insides are, too. She used to be so healthy — she has 500 hours of yoga teacher training — but now she can barely hold a plank. Her husband is also experiencing fatigue and weight gain; her children are listless and have constant runny noses and coughs. Her sister’s youngest son has autism, and yet they refuse to test their home for mycotoxins. The only people she can really trust are online. She’s relieved that there is finally someone in government who is willing to put a stop to everything making our bodies so impure, but she isn’t thinking too much beyond that. Not that that’s her fault — she has terrible brain fog from all the mold. She and her spores have already gone fascist.
B is at the edge of the crowd, rolling his eyes at the gay couple next to him with a “No Human Is Illegal” sign. B is an autodidact raised by hard-pressed immigrants himself, and his unease among moneyed liberal intellectuals is hardening into contempt. He’s an active left-wing poster, but his online confidence gives way in real life to awkwardness. His political elevation of the good old-fashioned working man belies a discomfort with women in general and a feeling that anyone not dedicated to football, cars, having children, and other “normal” things is a deviant without whom socialist politics would be on better footing. He would join a fascist administration’s labor bureau in the name of getting something good for the working class.
One half of that gay couple is C, who owns a wine bar with rainbow-hued block-printed napkins and a sign in the window that says “all genders, all races, all nationalities are welcome here,” but all of them had better have disposable income because small plates start at $18. C is out at the march with his husband because of the LGBTQ book bans and stuff, but increasingly, his political concerns are centered on the encampments near his restaurant, which keep coming back despite regular police sweeps. C used to let an unhoused man (the proper term, right?) use the bar bathroom, but he abused that privilege, and C, regretfully, had to call the cops about it. Half the waitstaff quit in protest, but what do they want him to do? C has recently joined the board of the local Business Improvement District, so fascism is on the tastefully rustic table.
D came out because she got a lot of emails from Indivisible. She was the first in her family to attend a four-year college, and she became an administrator in a big law firm. She made sure her family lived in a part of the city with good public schools and, through diligent supervision, got the older kid to test into the city’s best magnet school. The kids are in college now, giving her a lot of time to watch the news. She’s furious at the government takeover by incompetent grifters, people who make a joke of all her hard work. How can anyone take them seriously when they can’t form a coherent sentence? She hates the fascists and she’ll never join them — her bland professionalism is useless in the world they’ve created.
E is protesting the government for the first time at the ripe age of 72. When he was a preppy college Republican, they called him a fascist, and he smiled sheepishly. When he called for invading countries and spreading American freedom at gunpoint, they called him a fascist, and he smiled sheepishly. He knew he wasn’t a fascist. He knew he wasn’t anyone special, really. He had been born in a happier time, raised on certain durable values by loving parents whose very specific worldview he dutifully accepted and worked to perpetuate. When he talked about family values, he really meant it; he valued the quotidian comforts of his family and wished the same for everyone, however naive that might have sounded. And when he had the opportunity to go fascist, to nearly everyone’s surprise, he didn’t.
This is F’s last time protesting the government. She thought this was supposed to be about Trump, but she’s upset to see someone in a kuffiyeh further up the protest. Everyone is supposed to be welcome at No Kings, but how can she be welcome when someone is wearing that terrorist scarf? Like, yes, she thinks Trump is a sexist pig, but maybe it’s actually not such a bad idea to say these antifa protesters are a threat to our safety. A small voice inside her says that at least Trump is taking antisemitism seriously. That voice is going to get louder until it drowns out everything else.
G has his back to the protest while his bro films him. G is an influencer who blew up fast, talking real talk about American politics — the floundering DNC brought him on as a political consultant at age 23, and he felt important. After Trump’s victory, he’s not such a hot property, and he can feel his audience losing interest in his defense of boring libs. A big pivot is in the offing; he’s fash-curious. Maybe that’s what the people want?
H is on her smoke break trying to stay out of the frame of G’s camera. She’s a waitress at a hotel restaurant popular with tourists where she helped win a bruising unionization campaign six years ago. Growing up she spoke Spanish with her parents and English in school and (exhaustingly) became the de facto translator between the workers in the kitchen and the front of the house. Her rent has gone way up, and her new collegiate colleagues slumming it in temporary service jobs irritate the shit out of her. But she lives and breathes union just like her parents, and she’d go to the mat for the most annoying teenage hostess. She hopes these marchers show the same solidarity when they tip. She’ll never go fascist.
J is just in the city for the day to see the sights of Midtown with her husband, an officer in the Marine Corps Reserve. He wore his dress uniform at their wedding, and he’d never looked so handsome. J works in sales for a medical device company, considers herself an Independent, and says she hates the Democrats and the Republicans equally. She’s really excited South Park is back on TV. She’s not racist, she says, but she’s really tired of how people drive when they learned how to do it in another country. Today, as she snuggles up to her husband in their carriage ride through Central Park, she feels like the luckiest girl in the world. The chants from the protest barely reach them. Soon they’ll move to a cheaper, redder county, further from the city, to a bigger house on several acres. She’s already gone fascist, but she doesn’t think of it like that.
Watching the whole scene from above is K, high up on a scaffold. He’s not going fascist, but he isn’t going to do anything about it, either. He says he gets along with everyone and hates when his kids call him a bigot. They don’t get that he’s old school — he’s union and feels like one of the last of the old guard who still is (even if his reps are a bunch of knuckleheads). He doesn’t go in for these new guys working the open shop jobs for nothing, and god knows if any of them are here legally. He believes that everyone deserves a fair shake but doesn’t like people asking for handouts. Speaking of, he doesn’t like Trump — he’s worked for a hundred Trumps, and they’re all a bunch of friggin’ idiots. But did he vote for the man? That’s private.
L is also high above the crowd. He’s a bazillionaire shortseller, feet kicked up on his bookshelf, back to the wall of windows that look out on the protest. He’s called Scott Bessent twice today, and he’s mad he can’t get through, but not too mad — Bessent is one of their own. In public, he’s rabid about his kids “going woke,” spoiled brats who went to Harvard on his dime. But there’s no world in which he doesn’t race toward power — and Trump’s chaos hasn’t tanked the markets yet. Call L a fascist of convenience.
M is leaving a Botox appointment in a nearby building. M is not an idiot, even if she plays one on the podcast circuit; she knows, at 27, that the ingénue act is wearing thin, and every week brings a new Perfectly Imperfect profile of a buzzy 22-year-old e-poet. She’s pitching her voice up on the live stream. She’s wearing a hair bow to the reading. Her small but dedicated subreddit is turning against her. Someone on X described her Sandy Liang dress as “matronly.” Someone on X said her fertility window is almost over, and they’re so right; it’s all so over. She posts about just wanting to have a cottage and eat organic beef products with her husband and five babies. She hopes the right man is reading, or better yet, an acquiring editor at a publishing house. She still has a little time. She’s not, like, 33. She’ll go fascist when one proposes.
N is observing the protest from the sidelines so she can write an op-ed about it. All she ever wanted to be was a liberal intellectual: Columbia, Lincoln Center, the New York Times, Barney Greengrass, the whole scene. She attended the right parties, charmed the right people, landed the right jobs. But the culture of those places was changing, and much faster than she felt she could keep up with. The more nimble writers in her cohort spent a few years publicly reckoning with their own complicity with white supremacy, rape culture, and settler colonialism. Let them: They were leaving a wide open lane for her to stand up for yesterday’s liberalism, in particular for the apartheid state it once freely embraced. Her peers might shun her, but there were people on the opposite coast with none of their snobbery and far more wealth. She would accept their money, and she would use it to realize her Upper West Side dreams and to buy and desecrate everything her haters cared about. She went fash on her way to the bank.
O thinks the protest looks corny, but he’s down with it. He’s pretty chill about most stuff in his life because life is sweet when you make your own schedule. O is everyone’s plug because everyone smokes weed now, but he’s increasingly disturbed by the Apple Store sheen and ID requirements of the legal dispensaries. Legal name to cop weed? That’s some white people shit. Everywhere he goes now, things are so sanitized and transactional. Where’s the community! He knows everyone on his block by name, but with more people being priced out every day, he’s had to start thinking of new marketing strategies for the gentrifiers. Maybe an IG account — something cute and colorful. He’s not going fascist because he’s not an idiot; the cops and the corporations alike are fucking up his business.
And what about that man over there, on the fringe, the one with the sullen eyes? P never had to “go” fascist. He was fascist by the time he hit puberty. Everyone around him in his safe, enviable suburb was comfortable, complacent, generically liberal, and a little bit ashamed that they depended on Brown-skinned laborers to cook their meals, mow their lawns, and pick up their trash. Not so ashamed that they would change anything about the arrangement, of course, but the right amount of shame, just enough to signal to one another that they were, after all, good people. But he never cared about being seen as a good person. He just wanted to be seen. So he said out loud all the ugly things he knew deep down they must think too, those loathsome hypocrites. And if they hated him for it, well, they also couldn’t look away. Pissing them off was better than being ignored. Still, he couldn’t quite shake the sense that they saw him as a harmless curiosity, a joke. When fascism finally comes — and he knows, he’s always known, that it will come — he’ll be ready for it, and the joke will be on them.
Lux would like to thank our friends, community, and fellow observers of the political scene for contributing to this article. Those who characterologically analyze fascists together will never flip fash.
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