This is the second of two posts on Greg Grandin’s America, América: A New History of the New World (Penguin Press, 2025). Click here for the first post.
In America, América, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Greg Grandin continually reminds readers that WW II was a battle against European fascism—Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy. Even though Spain maintained a veiled neutrality during the war, Franco was a fascist leader. The Empire of Japan, part of the Axis alignment, isn’t typically defined as fascist, but it had fascist characteristics.
As three generations have passed since the end of the war in 1945, most of us have no working definition of fascism. We’re familiar with democracies, communism and dictatorships. What is fascism? Grandin’s book, as it details in its middle sections the post-WW II political landscape in the Americas, describes fascism as “a virulent, mobilized nationalism” exhibiting the following characteristics:
* government led by charismatic leader
* extreme nationalism exhibited by leader and supporters
* a defined enemy (or enemies)
* the use of military force upon a country’s own citizens
* the curtailing of free speech, specifically restricting the freedom of the press
* the political obliteration of checks and balances, specifically shaping the judicial court system to represent the will of the leader and ruling party
* the co-opting of religion for state purposes
In our post-Cold War era, fascism has reemerged in the Americas. Grandin writes, “In any given election, agitated conservatives might tap into misogyny, gender panic, Christian supremacy, or racism to win, sometimes spectacularly so, such as when Jair Bolsonaro took power in Brazil in 2018, or in 2023, when Hayekian Javier Milei won in Argentina. El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, has, in the name of fighting gang violence, done away with due process to line up thousands of young men, stripping them naked and displaying them to the world with shaved heads. Octavio Paz died before he could witness such a Dantesque display of fascist dehumanization, or otherwise he might have revised his assertation that Latin America’s Catholic culture produced no pariahs” (pgs. 624–25).
This book went into press as Donald Trump assumed his second presidency. Not quite a year into this presidency, it’s become obvious that Trump is following a fascist playbook.
Out of a total 625 million inhabitants, Grandin writes, 480 million Latin Americans currently live under some type of social-democratic government. The best hope to confront and overcome the neofascist movement, he says, is for these governments to continue to pursue policies that champion a humanist and social welfare bent. Chile’s example, Grandin writes, is the starkest: Allende’s social democracy (1970–73) followed by Pinochet’s authoritarianism (1973–1990). Chile has steadfastly, in the subsequent decades, rejected the latter’s Hayekian-influenced economic shock therapy of deregulation, privatization and austerity measures. All this—along with political repression—just so Chile can have a burgeoning multi-millionaire class? A majority of Chileans, for decades, have said “no.”
In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro was recently sentenced to 27 years in prison for attempting to undermine the democratic presidential election of 2022, which he lost. In many ways, his and his supporters’ actions mirrored those of Donald Trump and his supporters during the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol. Bolsonaro has appealed his sentence. The largest Latin American country with a population of 213 million, Brazil’s current democracy was established in 1988 after more than twenty years of military dictatorship. In June 2023, Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court banned Bolsonaro from running for president (or any political office) until 2030 for his part in undermining the 2022 election.
It begs the question: Will the majority of the US’s 341 million citizens reject Trump’s continuing foray into fascism?
T. Carlos “Tim” Anderson – I’m a Protestant minister and Director of Austin City Lutherans (ACL), an organization of partners in Austin, Texas working together to serve low-income individuals and families.
T. Carlos Anderson 