Why do so many young white men in America find fascism ‘cool’?

A supporter of former President Donald Trump holds a Confederate flag outside the Senate Chamber during a protest after breaching the US Capitol in Washington DC on Jan 6, 2021. – AFP/Getty Images/TNS

LAST autumn, just blocks from my apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a gang of neo-Nazis gathered in Harvard Square on a Sunday afternoon. Videos showed a group of masked white men shouting, spitting, cursing homophobic slurs and chest-thumping at students. They were part of the Nationalist Social Club, a local neo-Nazi outfit, nicknamed the “131 Crew,” as if it were a sneaker collective and not a gang.

In researching the rise of the fascist movement in the United States, I have found troubling parallels to 1930s Italy and Germany. From cult worship and rising anti-semitism to hatred of minorities and birthrate theories steeped in eugenics, the overlap between the Fascist ideas of the interwar years and our own are too stark to ignore.