The Great Confinement

“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.” Most of us have heard that quip before. It’s traced back to Sinclair Lewis, the satirical novelist who wrote It Can’t Happen Here, a dystopian novel about the rise of the Nazis in America. There’s some debate about whether he said those exact words, but that’s what he was getting at. There’s just one problem:

Fascism didn’t have to come to America.

It was already here.

American race laws, westward expansion, and eugenics movements inspired Hitler. He knew about them. He studied them. He admired them. He emulated them. For evidence up front, you can read Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, Edwin Black’s War Against The Weak, Carroll Kakel’s The American West and the Nazi East, Claudio Saunt’s Unworthy Republic, and James Whitman’s Hitler’s American Model. Everything Hitler did, everything you read about now, America did first, all the way back in the 1830s. Americans invented modern genocide.

It was an export.