Slate Academy: Fascism

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Fascism Today: Where Are We Now?

In the final episode, our Slate Academy tries to determine how historical examples of fascism help us understand the present.

Episode Notes

In this final episode, we pull together all of the histories we’ve read and try to determine how much we can use historical examples to understand what’s happening today. NYU historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert in Fascist Italy and a guest on our first episode, rejoins us to help sort through comparisons and implications.

Supplementary reading for this episode:

• Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “An American Authoritarian,” the Atlantic, Aug. 10
• Jonathan Blitzer, “A Scholar of Fascism Sees a Lot That’s Familiar With Trump,” the New Yorker, Nov. 4
• Christian Carol, “Dropping the Political F-Bomb,” Foreign Policy, March 14, 2014
• Isaac Chotiner, “Is Donald Trump a Fascist?” (interview with Robert Paxton), Slate, Feb. 10, 2016
• Michael Kinsley, “Donald Trump Is Actually a Fascist,” Washington Post, Dec. 9
• John McNeill, “How Fascist Is Donald Trump? There’s Actually a Formula for That,” Washington Post, Oct. 21
• Kevin Passmore, Fascism: A Very Short Introduction: Chapter 7: “Phoenix From the Ashes?”
• Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism: Chapter 7: “Other Times, Other Places”
• Timothy Snyder, “Him,” Slate, Nov. 18
• Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition

About the Show

Join Rebecca Onion, June Thomas, and Joshua Keating for a Slate Academy that travels back in history to examine how fascism looked in the 20th century, then uses that knowledge to examine America and the world today.

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