Why am I passionate about this?
I’ve been trying to understand people’s politics since I was a kid and wondered why my dad, who had been a boy in Sicily under Mussolini, spoke so fondly of “il Duce”—even though Dad was an otherwise independent thinker who believed in people’s inherent dignity, not to mention a man who was an immigrant and an outsider and thus exactly the kind of person fascists hate. I think this background partially explains why I focus my writing on interpreting the significance and appeal of widespread and, in some cases, morally indefensible and contradictory cultural-political ideologies such as neoliberalism and racism.
Patricia's book list on today’s fascism and resisting it
Why did Patricia love this book?
Fascism always holds out a promise of belonging to the tribe, the race, and, most importantly, the nation. Lepore’s very short and beautifully readable history of the US explicitly rejects the right-wing and fascist assumption that the nation and nationalism are theirs.
This America retells US history from the perspective that the country has not lived up to its promises of equality, but the first step to making that happen is acknowledging its painful history. The book contextualizes the invocations of some of its greatest critics, such as DuBois, Douglass, and Baldwin, in their clear-eyed pronouncements of the United States’ failures of justice and democracy.
Lepore’s hope rests on the belief that a pluralistic, truly democratic United States is possible if Americans own the nation’s failures to live up to its stated standards and commit to the painful work of holding ourselves and the structures of civic life accountable to…
1 author picked This America as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
At a time of much despair over the future of liberal democracy, Jill Lepore makes a stirring case for the nation in This America, a follow-up to her much-celebrated history of the United States, These Truths.
With dangerous forms of nationalism on the rise, Lepore, a Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, repudiates nationalism here by explaining its long history-and the history of the idea of the nation itself-while calling for a "new Americanism": a generous patriotism that requires an honest reckoning with America's past.
Lepore begins her argument with a primer on the origins of nations, explaining how…