What is communism, socialism, and fascism?

With the midterms coming up, these words are being uttered more and more each day. So what does it really mean when we call someone a socialist, communist, or fascist? Where did these ideologies come from, and why do we have ideologies in the first place? Today we speak with Patrick McGovern, professor of political science at Buffalo State University, and Susan Kang, professor of political science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and host of Left On Red. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Nick Capodice?

  Hello, everyone. Nick Cappadicee here from Civics 101. So this January, a democratic socialist, Zohran Mamdani, was sworn in as the mayor of New York City. And that party, the Democratic Socialists for America, the DSA, it has been growing. In 2016, about 6,000 Americans were registered as members of the DSA. And now their numbers are over 100,000. Several members of the DSA won their primaries. They are running for office in the upcoming 2026 midterms. And in response, members of the Republican Party are not just using the word socialist

• 0:44Nick Capodice?

  in their campaigns against them, they're switching it out with another word.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Michael will stand up to the radical left communist in Congress, and he will always put America first, and he's going to put Wisconsin first.

• 0:56Speaker 02

  We're fighting right now in Congress over whether we're going to maintain our status as a constitutional republic, or we're going to trade that in, dismantle the foundations, and go down this dark road of death to communism. This is not a game. Everybody needs to understand, these crazy little mini Mamdonis who are popping up all around the country, they are a danger to you and your family.

• 1:16Nick Capodice?

  And tying all this together, when Mayor Mamdani visited with President Trump at the White House, he was asked about his feelings regarding Trump and a third word.

• 1:26Speaker 03

  He asked about your comment, calling the president a fascist. And your answer was, both President Trump and I have been clear about our positions and our views. Are you affirming that you think President Trump is a fascist?

• 1:38Speaker 04

  I've spoken about--

• 1:40Speaker 01

  That's okay, you can just say--

• 1:41Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  It's easier. It's easier than explaining--

• 1:47Nick Capodice?

  Socialism, communism, fascism. It is a scant three months until the midterm elections. And we're all going to hear this trio of words a heck of a lot more in those months. So we want to make sure everyone is on the same page. What do these words mean? What do they not mean? Today on Civics 101 from Mint Mobile, it's all about the isms. So stick around.

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• 3:50Speaker 04

  Hurry, hurry, hurry. Step right up, folks. Here's the answer to your problems. Dr. Utopia's sensational new discovery, ism. Iism will cure any ailment of the body--

• 4:01Nick Capodice?

  Do you recognize that voice, Hannah?

• 4:03Hannah McCarthy?

  The voice of Dr. Utopia? No, Nick, I don't recognize it.

• 4:08Nick Capodice?

  It's Frank Nelson.

• 4:09Hannah McCarthy?

  Who?

• 4:10Nick Capodice?

  Wait, let me try this. Do you recognize this? Yes?

• 4:14Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, that guy.

• 4:16Nick Capodice?

  That guy. The yes guy. A no. A no. A yeah.

• 4:24Nick Capodice?

  You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nick Cappadicee.

• 4:26Hannah McCarthy?

  I'm Hannah McCarthy.

• 4:27Nick Capodice?

  And today, we are tackling three isms. This is a trio that sees a lot of use and misuse in the media and on social media.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  We will never let socialism destroy American healthcare.

• 4:41Speaker 06

  According to a new survey, 70% of American millennials say they'll likely vote socialist, and one in three of them view communism favorably.

• 4:49Speaker 04

  The leader of the American military compared the President of the United States to Hitlerian fascism.

• 4:58Nick Capodice?

  We are talking socialism, communism, and fascism. Words that you or I, Hannah, or even you, gentle listener, might misuse with the best of intentions.

• 5:10Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay, Nick. Each of those words, on their own, are college courses.

• 5:15Nick Capodice?

  You're not wrong, Hannah. So this is going to be as light of a touch as I can manage.

• 5:19Hannah McCarthy?

  Hang on, before you start, what was that thing you played with the guy peddling isms?

• 5:24Nick Capodice?

  Oh, yeah. That is as good a place to start as any. It is from a cartoon called Make Mine Freedom. It was a cartoon funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in the 1940s. It is a jocular short where we learn how great the, quote, "American way of business" is. The scene I played for you there had the shady Dr. Utopia peddling them bottles of isms. And these Americans see what life is like once they get a taste.

• 5:51Speaker 04

  I'll take this case to the Supreme Court. The state is the Supreme Court. Our decision is as follows. No more private property. No more you.

• 6:02Hannah McCarthy?

  Wait, what is the ism cocktail? Communism? Socialism?

• 6:06Nick Capodice?

  Interestingly, Hannah, it is not named or specified once in the entire movie, but this is clearly an anti-communist piece. But whatever the ism is we're talking about today, all isms at their core are ideologies.

• 6:21Speaker 06

  So ideologies are frameworks. They're ways of organizing the way we think and engage society and political power structures.

• 6:33Nick Capodice?

  This is Patrick McGovern, professor of political science at Buffalo State University, and he gets a very special shout out.

• 6:39Hannah McCarthy?

  Why is that?

• 6:40Nick Capodice?

  Patrick is responsible for teaching political theory to the person we have had on our show more than any other.

• 6:48Hannah McCarthy?

  You mean Dan Casino from Fairleigh Dickinson University?

• 6:51Nick Capodice?

  I do, indeed.

• 6:52Hannah McCarthy?

  Aw, thanks, Patrick.

• 6:53Nick Capodice?

  Thank you, Patrick. But back to the episode. Patrick told me why we have ideologies, what they do in the first place.

• 7:00Speaker 06

  They provide us with, if you think about the human brain as having, you know, the reptile brain that says, "Run like hell." And then the brain that sits on top of that says, "Well, let's think about this." Ideologies are in the run like hell thing. They're there to help us simplify, filter, and deal with an onslaught of data that we get hit with coming out of our political realm, coming out of the social world we engage in. So these are things that help us understand what's coming at us. And if you look at anybody who's defining this, it's, they're deeply within us. They are part of who and what we are. Someone like Karl Marx would say about ideologies, "We don't know their ideology.

• 7:42Speaker 06

  We simply think, one, other people think this way, think the same way we do. And if they don't, they're bad." It's that easy, black and white, good over here, bad over there. So ideologies help us organize those things.

• 7:57Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay, so ideologies are the labels we adhere to that help guide lots of other choices we make.

• 8:03Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, and labels that we attach to other people that we may disagree with. And all three of the isms we're talking about today were created in direct contrast to another ism.

• 8:13Speaker 06

  If we're going to talk about friends and enemies, all of those were organized primarily against da-da-da-da-da, liberalism.

• 8:23Hannah McCarthy?

  Liberalism. Now, not liberal as in left wing, but liberal as in the old-school definition, the freedom of the individual is the most important thing.

• 8:31Nick Capodice?

  Absolutely.

• 8:32Speaker 06

  We in the United States call it libertarianism, and that's a whole other show. But the liberalism that we get from someone like the English political thinker John Locke, writing in the late 1600s, promotes the idea of the individual as coming prior to society, that the individual-- societies are made up of atomized individuals. Society is just a collection of individuals. So when you organize government, government has to be restricted from impinging upon the individual pursuing their own interest.

• 9:08Nick Capodice?

  Last thing on ideologies generally, before I get into any one of these in particular. Patrick posits that the notion of the United States having one is relatively new.

• 9:17Speaker 06

  One of the things I think my students and most people just don't understand, and that's, it's okay, but we're just taught this way, is that the nation-state, as we organize politically, internationally, and, you know, the way we look at the world today, we are members, we're citizens of the United States, the United States. That's something we only come to recognize after the Civil War. That's what the Civil War was about. Prior to it, we call it these United States.

• 9:51Nick Capodice?

  But after the Civil War, we really start to run with this idea of the US as a nation-state, because it is a lot more effective to get soldiers to join and fight for a country and what it stands for than for your town or your state to do the same.

• 10:06Speaker 06

  So what happens is we start seeing the development nation-states getting in cahoots with economies, organizing society in such a way as to make them better at projecting their power into the rest of the world, particularly Europeans. The question becomes, what's the best way of doing that? And how do you avoid some of the problems that come with it? And one of the problems that comes with it, and this is where socialists and Marxists kick in, is that, hey, when you look at that economy that you think is fueling everything, one, you're making some people super rich, and you're destroying the lives of other people.

• 10:43Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay, we're getting to how the economy works here. Making the wealthy wealthier and hurting the non-wealthy at the same time. Are we straying into our first ism?

• 10:53Nick Capodice?

  We are indeed, Hannah. Socialism.

• 10:57Nick Capodice?

  I define socialism as a political movement that seeks to--

• 11:01Hannah McCarthy?

  Equalize political, social, and economic power within capitalist society.

• 11:07Nick Capodice?

  This is Susan Kang, professor of political science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

• 11:12Hannah McCarthy?

  I'm a member of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America. And also, for fun, I also co-host a podcast called Left on Red. Left on Red is a very funny name for a podcast about socialism.

• 11:26Nick Capodice?

  Well, as I am a thousand-year-old vampire, I don't really get the joke, Hannah, but I sort of do. I asked Susan, though, what the goal of socialism is. What are socialists trying to do?

• 11:36Hannah McCarthy?

  To me, the fight for socialism in like, you know, our contemporary context would be promoting rights for workers, social and economic rights for regular people, whether it be like guaranteeing housing, healthcare, education, things like a clean environment. Did I say childcare? And lots of things that we, in our current society, think of as things you pay for, right? Because I'm also a scholar of human rights, so human rights are not just the idea that you have a right not to be discriminated against, which is, of course, also fundamental to socialism in my mind, but also that you don't have to have value in a capitalist market economy

• 12:18Hannah McCarthy?

  to be able to have your basic needs met. And so it's like a really minimalist view of socialism. Okay, so Susan identifies as a socialist.

• 12:28Nick Capodice?

  She does.

• 12:29Hannah McCarthy?

  Now, when I think of extreme socialism, I think of things like a system where nobody owns property and everything is distributed equally. Is that what she's advocating for?

• 12:40Nick Capodice?

  Absolutely not. There are dozens of different kinds of socialism.

• 12:44Hannah McCarthy?

  My own family, for example, my grandmother, lived in what is now North Korea. They lost land. There was a lot of repression. You know, there was starvation, like, you know, under Stalin, for example, there was an attempt to create a new society through force. And like, no one that I know who calls themselves a socialist wants to do something like that. Like, we know that really radical, top-down, state-mandated, social, economic reforms, they don't work, right? What we need is to build broad consensus among people who think, yeah, this is what we want.

• 13:16Speaker 06

  One of the things I like to point out to people, that if you, you know, you don't like socialism, all right, then don't read Dickens. That anger that you see in Charles Dickens against the factory owners, Marx is writing the same thing, just they're doing it different ways, but it's the same anger. And again, this is particular this time, the rise of the textile mill, the rise of automation. We're not quite there yet, but it's, you can see it beginning to happen. Child labor, the reason you have kids working these looms is their little hands work faster and can get into the machinery. Oh, and the kid's hand is ripped off. Yep, too bad. Go beg. There's no, there's no social net. So you

• 13:59Speaker 06

  had people who were making the argument that, okay, we've got this rise of the nation-state, maybe we can use it to provide a baseline of protection against the citizens that you're asking to commit to the nation-state.

• 14:13Nick Capodice?

  Even though I'd be hard-pressed to find someone who referred to the US as a socialist country, we do have an awful lot of socialist policies, places where the government steps in to help people out.

• 14:26Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay, off the top of my head, I'm thinking like food assistance programs, unemployment insurance, Medicare, social security.

• 14:35Nick Capodice?

  The mail.

• 14:36Hannah McCarthy?

  The mail. The US mail, like, they get stuff there, right? And we take it for granted, but it's really nice. What if I offered you 25, I don't know, 50-odd cents to deliver this thing to my friend in California? That would never work. There's no market for that.

• 14:51Nick Capodice?

  And there's one big, big one that I never before thought of as socialist.

• 14:56Speaker 06

  Just get on Google and type in biggest discretionary spending US government. And what do you get? That is the spending outside of debt maintenance and social security that are mandated. You have to pay into that. What's the next thing? Okay, it's defense.

• 15:14Speaker 06

  You and I are not going out and buying a B2 bomber. We can't. We cannot, you know, France cannot buy a B1 bomber from us. There's one group that's purchasing, that's, that's the United States military. That's socialist. That's government buying these things for us.

• 15:34Hannah McCarthy?

  Capitalists have to work really, really hard to go against that existing consensus to tell them that this is going to be not in your favor. Having these kinds of basic rights are going to mean that you, hard-working American, are going to get cheated, when in actuality, the cheating is already there.

• 15:50Nick Capodice?

  Again, a reminder here, Susan identifies as a socialist. We're sharing her political viewpoint here, but I have to add, it's not an uncommon one.

• 15:58Hannah McCarthy?

  It's the wealthy who are hoarding their wealth, hiding it offshore, refusing to pay their share of taxes, doing things like kicking people off Medicaid, like hundreds of thousands of people are now being kicked off Medicaid, other social programs, which in no way will benefit anyone, not even like, you know, employers. So we see that this is like an ideological war that has to constantly be fought, because otherwise, if we were allowed to present our ideas, then we would win, because they're popular ideas. Okay, I'd like to move on to a more specific form of socialism, one that the US has certainly been at odds with over the years: communism.

• 16:37Nick Capodice?

  Ah, yes, communism. We're going to get to that, as well as fascism, right after the break.

• 16:44Hannah McCarthy?

  And Nick, speaking of free things for the common good.

• 16:46Nick Capodice?

  Oh, I see where this is going.

• 16:48Hannah McCarthy?

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• 21:10Hannah McCarthy?

  We're back. We're doing a gentle touch on a bunch of isms today. And Nick, we were about to dive into the system of government that provides, from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.

• 21:21Nick Capodice?

  Top marks to you, Hannah. Let's do a minute on communism.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  Now the world begins to learn the truth about communism. Family ties are discouraged. The state is supreme. Religion is the opiate of the people.

• 21:35Nick Capodice?

  The basic definition of communism is a system based on the ideals presented by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's work, The Communist Manifesto. And the big thing you gotta know about it is that it removes all class.

• 21:49Hannah McCarthy?

  Like, there's no more upper class, no more working class, no more so-called lower class, et cetera.

• 21:54Nick Capodice?

  Right. And everyone owns everything together, leading to the eventual removal, due to irrelevance, of private property, of money, and ultimately, the state itself. But, like we said with socialism, communism is also not so cut and dried.

• 22:13Speaker 06

  When you talk about the communism that comes out of Marxism, you get Leninism, you get Maoism, you get Trotskyism, just to name a few.

• 22:23Nick Capodice?

  Again, this is Patrick McGovern, professor of political science at Buffalo State University.

• 22:27Speaker 06

  They all have different views. For example, Lenin had no problem with the state. The revolution was people seizing the state, using the state to organize workers, and then eventually the state goes away. But as you could see with Stalin, Stalin had no problem with keeping the state right in place. And this is one of the breaks between Stalin and Trotsky. That's, "Oh, no, no, no, that's not, we don't want the state. We can see what the problems with the state is. It's authoritarian." And classic Marxists are not authoritarian.

• 22:57Nick Capodice?

  To my understanding, Hannah, no country has yet successfully had a Marxist-style government. Again, here's Susan Kang, professor of political science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

• 23:09Hannah McCarthy?

  In my mind, communism is what various states, like various countries of the world, participated in before the end of the Cold War, in which there was an attempt to use a powerful state to radically transform society to fit socialist ideas. Sometimes people use the term "actually existing socialism" or "state socialism" to describe this, but we could think of this as, like, East Germany, Soviet Union, like, the Eastern Bloc, maybe Vietnam, North Korea, and, oh, China, obviously. And in some places, it was very Stalinist, with a really powerful totalitarian state. But the general idea was that there was an

• 23:53Hannah McCarthy?

  ideology of socialism that justified the whole project. But the practices were not necessarily ones that someone like myself would ever endorse or say, "We're good," right? So, for example, Stalin thought that most farming in Soviet Union was done through privatized means. And he was like, "Nah, let's do something called collective farming. And if you don't fall in line, I'm gonna send you to the Gulag." And so, it was very top-down, not a lot of appreciation for local knowledge.

• 24:24Nick Capodice?

  And a lot of people protested and were indeed kicked out or sent to the Gulags. Those were forced labor camps, where over 18 million people were imprisoned. And this, of course, had horrible repercussions.

• 24:38Hannah McCarthy?

  And so, his great Soviet collectivization of agriculture led to some of the most devastating famines in Russian history, in which, like, millions of people died. So, that's not something that socialists would endorse, at least not contemporary socialists.

• 24:53Speaker 06

  Marx wouldn't look at China, Marx wouldn't look at the Soviet experiment, or Vietnam, or Cuba and say, "Yeah, that's what I had in mind." No, those people are miserable. That's not what he had in mind. He had in mind a radical democracy, where we all own the means of production.

• 25:09Hannah McCarthy?

  All right. In the US, we have historical moments like the Red Scare, the Cold War. These are things that supported the idea that America, as a nation-state, does not espouse a communist ideology, that it is, in fact, anti-communist. But there was a Communist Party in the US, wasn't there?

• 25:29Nick Capodice?

  There was. And I gotta bring this up, because it happened just a few blocks from where I live. A historic marker dedicated to the birthplace of a member of that party has very recently been removed.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  I am dead set against this. And I think it's an embarrassment that we have a program that allows us to put communists on historical markers and then say, "Oh, that's part of our history." It's not part of my history.

• 25:56Speaker 06

  Certainly, in the 1930s in the United States, there were a lot of people who were, you know, members of the Communist Party, flirting with the Communist Party. And the fear was that they were just agents of the Soviet Union. And certainly, the Soviet Union was trying to make them agents. That's clear. But once a lot of people caught wind that that was going on, they high-tailed it out of there.

• 26:23Nick Capodice?

  So, a historic marker dedicated to the birthplace of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was removed, not during the Cold War, not during the Red Scare, but a few weeks ago. And New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu signed off on the removal. Flynn was a leader in the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World Labor Union, as well as a founding member of the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union. And yes, she was indeed a leading member of the Communist Party USA. She went to prison for that. She was accused of advocating the violent overthrow of the government. And she defended herself at the trial, saying, quote, "Never have I, and not now do I, intend to advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence, nor do I intend to bring about such an overthrow." She died during

• 27:07Nick Capodice?

  a visit to Russia in the 1960s, but as per her wishes, her remains were shipped to be buried in Chicago. Right next to Emma Goldman.

• 27:16Speaker 06

  Not all people who claim Marxist roots, of course, are not endorsing what Stalin was up to. And look how many people left. Marxists left the Soviet Union because that's what he was up to. They knew what he was doing, and they got out of there.

• 27:33Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay, Nick, last ism here: fascism. It's a little strange to include it in this list, because communism and socialism share a lot of principles, but fascism does not share those same principles.

• 27:47Nick Capodice?

  I agree. They do not share principles. I picked these three specifically because of their prevalence in social media. And we've been in the historic vein for a while, Hannah, but I have to let our listeners know that in this last part, we're gonna touch on today's political climate and our guest's view of it. And we don't do that too often on the show, okay? Okay. First, I'm gonna start with a contrasting piece of propaganda to make mine freedom. Here is a clip from another film called "Don't Be a Sucker." It's an anti-fascism movie produced by the US Department of War in 1947.

• 28:23Speaker 04

  I'm speaking to you as an American American. And I tell you, friends, we'll never be able to call this country our own until it's a country without, without Negroes, without alien foreigners, without Catholics, without Freemasons. You know, what's wrong with the Masons? I'm a Mason. Hey, that fellow's talking

• 28:45Nick Capodice?

  about me. And that makes a difference, doesn't it?

• 28:49Hannah McCarthy?

  Wait, the protagonist is going along with fascist ideas until he hears they're against Freemasons?

• 28:57Nick Capodice?

  Yeah. Not really a persecuted group today, Hannah, or ever.

• 29:03Speaker 06

  In getting ready for this podcast, I was reading up on all of this. And where people are worried about the ism of Marxism slash communism, fascism had a much bigger impact on the world. More countries are willing to engage in fascist tendencies, authoritarian, totalitarian tendencies, than, you know, a successful communist revolution.

• 29:29Hannah McCarthy?

  Do you have, like, a Webster's definition of fascism?

• 29:32Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, this one's harder to define. There's no, like, fascist manifesto. And it's not a term anybody really uses to describe themselves. But Patrick gave me a good breakdown.

• 29:42Speaker 06

  Okay, I'm gonna say it's an authoritarian nationalist ideology that's characterized by strong central government, a dictatorial leader, a strict control of the economy. It suppresses political dissent. It's aggressive. It's militaristic. And it has a clear sense of an enemy who has caused a crisis in the nation. And there's only one person that can solve that crisis, and everybody has to get on board with the leader. Whether you call it Il Duce, you call him the Fuhrer, you call him the Man. And again, it's almost

• 30:23Speaker 06

  always a male figure. It's very, very gendered in that regard.

• 30:28Hannah McCarthy?

  Getting on board with the leader is an idea that has been around since we have had leaders. But when does that word, fascism, arise as an ideology?

• 30:39Speaker 06

  Fascism came out of Italy in the 1920s, under Benito Mussolini, who was trying to organize, again, like everybody else, he's looking around saying, you know, Italy kind of didn't do so well in World War I. So, Benito Mussolini comes along and says, "I'm gonna make you a reincarnation of the Roman Empire. We're going to be important again."

• 31:03Hannah McCarthy?

  That is a pretty bold... Claim. How does he go about doing that?

• 31:07Nick Capodice?

  Well, first, by concentrating on massive weapons production and equally massive industrial production, and also framing this Italy-first ideology. We are the best.

• 31:18Speaker 06

  The other thing is fascism ties in with the rise of national communication systems, film, radio, propaganda. During World War I, nation-states figured out how to get millions of people into the trenches and be willing to walk into a meat grinder and not give a second thought about it. Fascists do this extremely well.

• 31:45Nick Capodice?

  And unlike our other isms, fascism allows people to get very, very wealthy.

• 31:51Speaker 06

  Fascism is all about the nation state. It does not challenge private property. That's one of the things where it's going to come after Marxism and say, no, we're going to let the private, especially large capital holders, we're going to let them be, we're going to let them get rich, so long as they're supporting our regime's aim, and that is to make Italy great again.

• 32:13Nick Capodice?

  And, as we all know, Mussolini wasn't the last fascist.

• 32:18Hannah McCarthy?

  Right. Many leaders since have used the idea of the nation above the individual or race above the individual to gain power.

• 32:27Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, like Adolf Hitler. And while Hitler and Mussolini are dead and gone, and the fascist ideologies of Italy and Germany that led to World War II are no longer tied to those nation-states, fascism itself is not gone from the earth.

• 32:43Speaker 06

  One of the things we tend to forget is that with the end of World War II, elements that bring about fascism were not defeated. They did not go away. So that's always a threat. One of fascism's biggest targets is democracy. They don't want our vote. They want our participation, but they don't want our vote. They don't want a sense of individuality. It's be a good soldier, strap on this national burden, and take up arms.

• 33:16Nick Capodice?

  And Patrick says that if we're looking at fascism today, in America, the enemy isn't necessarily another nation.

• 33:25Speaker 06

  It may not be taking up arms and go off to Afghanistan and fight, but take up arms against the people who are driving our country apart. But you certainly opened up a can of worms. It's like, well, what fascist elements do we see in the United States? If I come out and say Trump, you're going to get a boatload of, you're going to be overwhelmed. But certainly that tendency that I am the answer, we are in crisis, I am the answer, God, guns, and Coca-Cola, don't challenge industry unless it's Disney and they're making us woke or something. But the people who get on board with them,

• 34:06Speaker 06

  the people who are on board with them are clearly good and everybody else is bad. That certainly shows at least a tendency towards authoritarianism.

• 34:17Hannah McCarthy?

  Patrick said the ideology of fascism didn't end after the war. But does that mean we're stuck with it?

• 34:25Nick Capodice?

  Maybe. Maybe not. I mean, I don't want to end an episode on a shrug, but this is truly something that comes and goes.

• 34:36Speaker 06

  This has been a long slog, I would argue, since World War II. And it came in waves. And American politics is always on this pendulum, and we happen to be swinging towards a not-so-discursive mode right now. My hope, and history tells us, we'll swing back, but what's going to take us to swing back? Maybe it was January 6th that we say, oh, OK, we've gone, we've gone far enough.

• 35:17Nick Capodice?

  Well, that is it for this triumvirate of words on Civics 101. I'm off to go read some Marx, Engels, Hegel, Locke, and Machiavelli. This episode was made by me and Capodice with you, Hannah McCarthy. Thank you. Our staff includes Marina Henke, Rebecca Lavoy, and Taylor Quimby. Music in this episode from Epidemic Sound, Blue Dot Sessions, and the wondrous Chris Zabriski. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio. All right?

• 35:49Speaker 02

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