ONCE THE DRAFT of this book was done, my friend Al Brilliant suggested that I write an essay about how it came to fruition. I thought about this for a few weeks. Everything that came to mind was anchored to my life in Greensboro, North Carolina, my home for the last forty years.
I arrived not long after the 1979 murders of five members of the Communist Workers Party by the Klan and local Nazis and became a comrade to the survivors. I bumbled from one odd job to another until I was hired as a staff writer by the black-owned weekly paper, the Carolina Peacemaker. In graduate school I had read a famous essay about the “historian as detective” and reasoned I could do the work of a journalist because it was essentially no different from the work of a historian.
After two years of writing, shooting photos, and putting the paper together every Wednesday night so it would hit the street on Thursday—all for six bucks an hour and no overtime—I moved to the Greensboro daily paper, the News & Record, where I hoped after a six-week paid internship—the oldest in the lot by a dozen years—I would be hired as a reporter. Instead, I was offered a position on the copy desk, despite having co-written a front-page story on my first day as an intern. Later, I found out why. The executive editor thought I was a communist, though he actually didn’t know the real story. It was enough for this genteel southern gentleman that my last name was Roberto and that I had come over from the Peacemaker and was a radical who could not be trusted to report the news objectively. Still, I did the drill on the copy desk in news and features and wrote many book reviews, and even occasionally was allowed to write a news story or a piece for the commentary section of the Sunday paper.
Meanwhile, I became immersed in the study of the Iran-Contra scandal, especially the role played by former CIA chief and then sitting vice president, George H. W Bush, in the illegal Contra resupply network. The managing editor of the News & Record, at the time part of the arch-conservative Landmark chain, told me to drop my inquiry, which I pursued on my own time, and focus on copyediting or face firing. After failing to convince the Boston Globe and the Washington Post to publish my investigative work, some of it eventually appeared in a lengthy piece in, of all places, Landmark’s flagship paper, the Virginian-Pilot. In retrospect, Iran-Contra was my first real introduction to the genesis of American fascism. I consider it a pivotal moment in the leap from liberal-capitalist democracy that occurred in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump. The proto-fascism of the Reagan-Bush presidencies survived a violation of the Constitution by establishing an “off the shelf” government to direct a terrorist, imperialist war on Nicaragua and its people. We can now see the fascist trajectory from Reagan-Bush to Trump as the outcome of the second general crisis of Pax Americana—the capitalist imperatives of an empire in decline that brought the Reagan-Bush Washington consensus to become firmly rooted in the neoliberalism of Clinton, then to the neoconservative George W. Bush, followed by Obama’s vapid recovery program in the face of an acute crisis that enabled Trump’s entry into the White House as a bona fide American fascist.
In between then and now, I finished my Ph.D. with a dissertation on Marx’s concept of progress, thanks to Paul Breines, the late Roberta Manning, and other supportive faculty in the history department at Boston College. This ended five years as a full-time part-timer in the history department at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, where I finally got a real position in 2003 and earned tenure and promotion in 2009 at age sixty-one. As the contemporary world historian among a small faculty, I occasionally taught courses on socialism, fascism, and environmentalism. Along the way, I began my rewarding collaboration with Gregory Meyerson about the crisis of the American Empire and the plausibility of fascism. Since 2011, it has been a whirlwind of study and activism aimed to make it all count for the people in Greensboro.
The young Marx once wrote that truth is the path to it. The totality of study and activism rooted in a Marxist understanding of the dialectical relationship between theory and practice is a compelling idea to anyone who opposes what is now occurring in America, which is our own Gleichschaltung. This march toward fascism, however, is more protracted and unique in its barbarisms than its German predecessor. We live in a moment of profound crisis, of politics, and of the mind and soul, the state of alienation in myriad forms all derived from a totalizing force—capital. I do not believe that historians who write for the public can feel its beat unless they are rooted in a critical understanding of its movements, and that requires engagement. This, I believe, is what the young Marx meant by “profane history” in The Poverty of Philosophy in 1847, which he wrote while fully engaged in the revolutionary politics of the proletarian struggles in Brussels, from which came the first attempt to organize European workers in the nascence of a united front. This is what shapes my thinking.
One of my heroes in this book, Harry F. Ward, believed he knew what it meant to be a Christian and a communist. Here was a thoughtful man whose religious calling was to care for the flock while recognizing that the concrete form of evil that endangered it was the capitalist system. In the nineteenth century and within the European context, Marx was right when he called religion the opiate of the masses. It is fair to say that Ward saw this too. But as a Christian a century later, he recognized in the epoch of monopoly-capitalist crisis and the coming of fascism that the ideological mystifications of organized religion had been subsumed by a more powerful drug—the barbarous and alienating powers of capital itself. It is likely for this reason that his biographer, David Nelson Duke, wrote that Ward always believed in a “historic dynamic that impelled humanity toward its full realization.” While some called this dynamic God, the communists in the Soviet Union denied it and said it was man alone. Ward asked, who cares? “They do what they do, as they do, because for them the world is young; the former things are passing away, all things are becoming new.” This made me think about the Sandinista revolution and the struggle of the Nicaraguan people against the American Empire in the 1980s, as they fought against the naked and brutal methods of imperialist aggression that many on the U.S. left called Third World fascism. It was a moment when the old Marxist revolutionary Tomás Borge Martinez said that the Nicaraguan revolution would be made by revolutionary Christians and non-Christian revolutionaries. A united front indeed.
Carmen Haider, who helped me understand how American fascism would arise within the framework of the two-party system, talked about the “possibilities of resistance” against it. Though not a Marxist—or at least the extent one can say given her virtual disappearance from public discourse—Haider was certain that only a working-class movement could prevent it. She recognized that the farmers and the middle class were on the other side; that is, they were fighting for fascism but not conscious of it. It would not be enough to win them over to the workers’ movement; their permanent allegiance could only be won if they were made to understand the difference between appearance and essence. This would take education in an ongoing struggle against complacency. The whole revolutionary process for a rising class consciousness, she believed, could be “accelerated by the leadership of any group which will make it its task to explain the situation.”
Haider might have been a closet communist for all we know. She made no bones that those responsible for creating class consciousness had to understand the simple fact that the “poorest paid workers and unemployed” were the “revolutionary vanguard” that, as Marx once wrote, had nothing to lose but their chains. While the better-paid workers would come around slowly, Haider warned that the middle class showed reluctance even in crisis times “to consider its interests as synonymous with those of the working class,” preferring instead to identify itself in in its outlook and aspirations with the dominant group in society—the capitalist class. When Haider looked at the whole political landscape in America in 1934, all she could say was this:
Under these circumstances it will require brilliant leadership to increase the class-consciousness of the American masses to such a point as to make them engage in an active opposition to Fascism. Moreover, a remarkable rise of such class-consciousness would itself stimulate the counter-attack, since under present conditions in the United States the employers must be regarded as more fully class conscious than the workers.
This was the revolutionary challenge when the American Behemoth was rising in the 1920s and 1930s; and so today it is greater, now that the beast is at full strength.