This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America

by Paul Street

This book examines the Trump phenomenon and presidency as fascist. Fascism here connotes not generically "bad" politics or a consolidated political-economic regime (Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany) but a set of political, movement, and ideological traits understood within the context of the neoliberal-capitalist era. While Trump’s election defeat is a respite, the nation is far from out of the [neofascist] woods. Defeating the menace will require political and societal re-structuring far beyond what is imagined by Democrats. This argument is developed across seven chapters that recount Trump’s assault on the 2020 election, specifically define the meaning of fascism as it used in this book, demonstrate the neofascist nature of the Trump presidency, engage intellectual class Trumpism-fascism-denial, analyze the Trump base, root Trumpism in a longstanding and indeed founding American white nationalism, examine why Trump rose to power when he did and suggest paths for fascism-proofing the United States.　

312 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2022

About the author

Paul Street is an independent radical-democratic policy researcher, journalist, historian, author and speaker based in Iowa City, Iowa, and Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of six books to date: Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004); Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era(New York: Routledge, 2005); Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: a Living Black Chicago History (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008); The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Paradigm, 2010); and (with Anthony DiMaggio) Crashing the Tea Party: Mass Media and the Campaign to Remake American Politics (Paradigm, 2011).

Street’s essays, articles, reviews, interviews, and commentaries have appeared in numerous outlets, including CounterPunch, Truthout, the Chicago Tribune, Capital City Times, In These Times, Chicago History, Critical Sociology, Journal of American Ethnic History, Social History, Review of Educational, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, Dissent, Black Agenda Report, Economic & Political Weekly (India), Tinanbantu (South Africa), New Left Project (United Kingdom), Press TV (Iran), The Times of India (India), Morning Star (England), Al-Alkhbar (The News in Beirut, Lebanon), Dissident Voice, Black Commentator, Monthly Review, History News Network, Tom’sDispatch, AlterNet., the Capital City Times (Madison, WI), and the Iowa City Press Citizen, and (above all) ZNet and Z Magazine. Street’s essays are picked up and reproduced in numerous languages) across the planet/World Wide Web in venues too numerous to track and mention.

Street’s writings, research findings, and commentary have been featured in a large number and wide variety of media venues, including The New York Times, CNN, Al Jazeera, the Chicago Tribune, WGN (Chicago/national), WLS (ABC-Chicago), Fox News, and the Chicago Sun Times.

Street has appeared in more than 100 radio and television interviews/broadcasts and on the popular live Web book-chat at “Firedog.” Lake

Street has taught various aspects of U.S. history at a large number of Chicago-area colleges and universities and was the Director of Research at The Chicago Urban League (from 2000 through 2005), where he published two major grant-funded studies: The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, Jobs and Community in Chicago, Illinois, and the Nation (October 2002) and Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, Policy and the State of Black Chicago (2005).

Reviews

[Andrew Clay Pauley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Writing this in late 2024, there is no doubt in my mind that the MAGA movement is a fascist movement. Trump is a fascist and so are those who elected him. Unfortunately, according to Paul Street, there really is not much a solution to this. Fascism is on the rise globablly. It does not look to me that what's about to happen will be rectified in my lifetime, which is just a really bleak way at looking at things.

I'm begining to think that this is how Liberalism was always going to end -- how it started. I've been wanting read more about how people survived under absolutism in the 1500s-1600s. I think that's where society is heading.

As for the book itself, if you have any doubts about Trump and the MAGA movement being fascist, you need to read this book. It is a rigorous argument that Trump is indeed a fascist. Especially useful for me was Paul Street's busting of the myth of Trump's populism. While poorer rural areas voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, it was the relatively well off in those areas who did so. This means it was middle class voters and the higher working class voters who went for Trump. It was not the poor and lower working class. I'd be interested in seeing an analysis of the 2024 election demographics and if this held true then as well.

America is about to enter a very dark chapter in its history. If you want to know why, read this book. I do still have criticisms, but I think those pale in comparison to the importance of a book like this. This is a solid explanation of what fascism is, why Trump is a fascist, why people deny Trump is a fascist and why those people are wrong, why Trump appealed to rural Americans, why a distorted view of history has allowed Americans to see Trump as an aberration, and why Democrats and even leftists have contributed to this rise in fascism.

I also liked the references to Sinclair Lewis' novel, "It Can't Happen Here." I plan to read that to add to my important dystopian reads list.