American fascism: Sue Cole’s new book fails to realise Trump is not an aberration

Around her, members of the UN Security Council. 

Picasso’s Guernica, among his most famous anti-war works, screams off the walls.

The caption reads: “December 8, 2023: US blocks UN Security Council demand for humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza.”

In another black and white illustration drawn with pencil, smoke billows over a child as she holds on tight to her terrified companions: a terrified donkey and a malnourished dog. Meanwhile, a dead cat lies stretched out at her feet. Around them the remnants of devastated apartment buildings can be seen below a thick smog. The caption reads: “Starving to Death, Cease Fire!”

These are just two illustrations in a chilling collection of work from the British artist Sue Coe in a new book about declining democratic values in the United States.

The 190-page book, The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism (OR Books) – accompanied by a 40-page introduction from the art historian Stephen F Eisenman – features Coe’s provocative and stirring work that stretches from the military-industrial complex and the climate crisis to child labour and animal cruelty. 

In his introduction, Eisenman asks readers to consider first what democracy means to them.

He goes on to examine the flaws of the US political system, offering a sobering assessment of American democracy, noting the attacks on free speech, and the unpopular support for Israel’s war on Gaza.

“Continued US military support for the war is tantamount to endorsement of ethnic cleansing,” Eisenman writes.

“Were you surprised from your conversations to discover that our democratic freedoms are quite limited? Some people say the US is only democratic every four years, when people vote for president,” he adds.

The history of fascism in America

The return of Donald Trump to the White House has been enveloped by a widespread fear that he would turn the US into a fascist state.

Since his inauguration, the fear has become somewhat tangible.

Domestically, he has gutted the budgets of several US agencies, his administration has attacked diversity, equity and inclusion programmes, transgender issues and environmental justice. 

On international issues such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he has flat batted western consensus by humiliating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office and has openly called for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. His increasing reliance on tech billionaires, such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, has also given the given American fascism a ring of inevitability.

Given the easy resort to label all things Trump “fascist”, Eisenman looks to provide a brief history of the terminology, defining and historicising its basic tenets.

These include the public coercion into submitting to a dear leader, the consolidation and prioritising of a “racial purity”, and the search for a mythical and glorious past. 

In practice, Eisenman reminds readers that fascism means a return to a time of banned books, a controlled media, criminalised civil society, and a lack of judicial oversight.

And though all descriptions of fascism today draw comparisons to the German and Italian fascist regimes of the 1930s and 1940s, Eisenman writes that the US itself has a long history of fascism that predates the second world war.

He explains that the founding of American democracy in 1787 notwithstanding, Black people were still listed as commodities to be bought and sold by white Americans for close to another 100 years.

Even after slavery was abolished, there were years of racial segregation and disenfranchisement, known as “Jim Crow” that followed in its wake.

“Until recently, American racial terror – slavery, segregation, and Ku Klux Klan (KKK) violence – was not understood to be a version of fascism. It was instead seen as at best a tragic and at worst a criminal response to the harsh realities of the labour demands of cotton plantations of the American South,” Eisenman writes.

Describing the rise of the KKK in the early 20th century and in the 1920s and 1930s, he notes that German, Italian and American fascism were more connected than people would like to admit.

“Despite generally supporting segregation, almost no Southern newspapers of the period acknowledged similarities between Nazi and American racism.”

Moreover, even as the US fought to end rising fascism in Europe, it would go on to incorporate the skills of certain European fascists in its fight against communism after the Second World War. By example, Eisenman narrates the story of Klaus Barbie, aka “the butcher of Lyon”.

Barbie reportedly sent 10,000 French Jews to the concentration camp Auschwitz in the 1940s.

Instead of facilitating his arrest after the end of the war, the US had him join the US Army Counterintelligence Corps. Barbie later became a US agent in Bolivia. 

The return of Trump 2.0

As an artist-activist who is known to depict social and political strife, Coe’s visuals can be anything from a snapshot or an anecdote to the entire story. 

She is recognised for a dedication to its message rather than to any particular artistic technique.

Her work is a mesmerising attack on capitalism and the powerful. It is at once self-assured, angry and mournful. Likewise, her illustrations are visceral and salient; her villains are unruly caricatures and victims are silent screamers. Her characters seem to climb into each other; they elicit a horror and disillusionment that matches the moment.

“We don’t see our victories because the bad is so overwhelming,” Coe said at a talk at NYU Abu Dhabi in 2013.

However, while the illustrations in the book are moving and poignant – beginning with Eisenman’s introduction followed by Coe’s illustrations – there appears to be a disconnect between his words and her artwork.

In his introduction, Eisenman teases out the contradictions of the US having moved to defeat fascism in Europe during the Second World War to then employing some of the same fascist figures to derail anti-colonial movements in various places around the globe.

But instead of seeing the continuity of American fascism through the decades since the repression of the McCarthyist era – in the late 1940s and 1950s in which there was a crackdown on leftist activists in the US – it skips American crimes over the next decades and focuses instead on the rise of Trump.

“In 2016, fascism returned to the US in the form of Donald Trump, but he was just its avatar,” Eisenman writes.

But can a country be called a democracy when it invades Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq; or kills millions of people around the world under the guise of a “war on terror”; or leads coups in several Latin American countries or conducts drone wars in several Muslim majority countries; or carries our extra-judicial killings of American citizens in foreign countries or maintains torture camps of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo? 

Eisenman ignores, too, the inconvenient stories of Puerto Rico and Hawaii – both seized and held undemocratically as colonies by the US. 

As recently as 2023, the Special Committee on Decolonization at the UN called for the US to provide the people of Puerto Rico with the right to self-determination and independence.

“Among other things, it urged the United States government to complete the return of all lands occupied by its military forces in the territory to the people of Puerto Rico,” the committee said.

In so doing, the book suffers from American exceptionalism that sees Trump as an aberration of the post-WWII order.

But the US has always functioned as an exception to the post-WWII order that it helped to build. 

Trump stands on the shoulders of a myriad of individuals from George Bush and Barack Obama to Joe Biden and Antony Blinken.

The write-up also appears to underestimate the acumen of a young America increasingly sceptical of an electoral system that only offers the illusion of choice. In the face of high tuition fees, high rent, irregular employment and high medical costs, the tone is a tad condescending.  

“As imperfect as our government is, it could be a lot worse,” Eisenman writes, ironically repeating the same mistake of those who failed to see the fascism of America’s early democratic years.

Moreover, it appears to show an ignorance, or disconnect with the experiences of young people, especially over the past 18 months. 

“Suppose your messages on social media disappeared or it was illegal to be Muslim or queer, or if books by your ‘favourite author’ were removed from stores or libraries,” he writes.

But as the last 18 months have demonstrated, social media posts and accounts that offend the establishment are deleted already. Palestinian-Americans and Muslims have been shot, killed or made disabled by hate crimes, prior to the return of Trump.

Academics who speak up for Palestine, be they Muslim or Jewish, have been suspended or fired from their jobs. Never mind the fear of books being removed, those authors who push the envelope aren’t even stocked in the first place. Fascism has long been here; but just for other people and just in another way. 

Whereas Coe’s illustrations are stunning, the reduction of American terror to Trump as the singular monster driving a country into fascist future is not just ahistorical, it is myopic. 

It’s telling that the only two images about Gaza in the book show Palestinians as victims. There is are no images of Palestinian resistance to the onslaught, which in itself carries so many lessons for America’s fight against authoritarianism and the tech-autocracy fast taking over the country. 

But when it comes to matters related to Trump, he is all encompassing, ever present throughout the book. 

Like the dear leader he is about to become.