I’m old enough, I think, to claim that I grew up in the shadow of World War II. Not during the conflict itself, bombs dropping, blackouts, rationing. None of that. More, within its direct fallout. The Cold War, for sure. But also the living, breathing memory of the conflict. Grandparents of peers who had served. In some cases, parents even. Echoes of the Holocaust in the very real existential threats posed to the state of Israel not yet even a quarter of a century old.

Movie theatres were filled with WWII movies enabling those not part of the ‘Greatest Generation’ to experience wartime on the big screen, even in Sensurround! Along with perfidious Russian communists (pay no attention to Battle of Stalingrad, western children), Nazis represented, in the aggregate of western culture, the very epitome of evil. Monstrous evil. Eeee-ville. And ultimately, inept in their evil plans to rule the world. Bumbling even, preening and insecure in their arrogance, the butt of sitcom jokes in Hogan’s Heroes.

A sentiment that didn’t simply fade away with my youth. Think, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Inglourious Basterds. A 2018 episode of Santa Clarita Diet where Drew Barrymore’s realtor zombie wife and mom character decides it’s OK to feast on neo-Nazi organs.

Fascism as malevolent. Fascism as a punchline. But also, fascism as a throwback. A moment in history that emerged owing to particular historical contingencies—an unfairly adjudicated armistice to a horrific war that laid waste to a generation of Europeans, a wildly speculative global economy that went pop into the Great Depression, an irrational and reactionary fear to the rise of Communism from the east—unique to its time and would not be repeated. Fascism, in the form of Nazism arose and, with great effort and sacrifice, was decisively defeated or, at least, relegated to the fringes of society. Forever. End of story. That’s all she wrote.

Except that,

here we are.

Fascism has become fashionable, once again.

Its adherents, the more savvy ones, may not call it that, they don’t like us calling it that, they will try desperately to laugh off and disavow the label, but they’re all in on the tenets. Pick your poison. There are plenty to choose from but let’s just go with the three here: 1) Demonizaton of domestic enemies; 2) Preposterous lies; 3) Contempt for democratic institutions.

Sound familiar?

It should and, of course, it shouldn’t.

Not today. Not in 2025. Not ever.

Except that,

here we are.

How is that even possible?

What are our historic contingencies that made this revival possible?

From a plethora, I’ll just focus on one.

We got lazy.

We got comfortable. We got complacent. We got lazy.

Those of us who benefitted most from our grandparent’s and great-grandparent’s defeat of fascism have done the very least to fend off its rebirth and renewal.

We embraced the economics and technology that enabled great concentrations of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands. We derided elected government at all levels for being inefficient, unresponsive and the source of much of our woes and dysfunction. We accepted as truth those ‘preposterous lies’. We grew weary of inclusivity and increased equity across racial and gender lines, ironically, embracing toleration of intolerance instead.

We took the path of least resistance. Chose the easy route. We got lazy. Lazy, greedy and selfish.

All under the pretext of, Well, how bad can it get? It’s not like fascism’s going to rear its ugly head again. We killed that off.

Didn’t we?

Look around.

And no, ‘we’ didn’t kill fascism.

We just pretended it no longer existed. That it always hadn’t been just lurking around the corner, waiting for the next opportunity to make its presence felt. That fascism is always possible because fascism is a human construct, and preys on our desire for easy answers, our fear of the Other and the more modern malaise of thinking all the hard work to defeat fascism had already been done for us.

Well, it wasn’t. And here it is again. And the time for picking what side of it we’re going to be on has expired.