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Chapter 5. The Formation of a U.S. Fascist Aesthetics; or, Welcome to Main Street
- Rutgers University Press
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5 / The Formation of a U.S. Fascist Aesthetics; or, Welcome to Main Street In Main Street, Sinclair Lewis satirically writes that the small town is “our comfortable tradition and sure faith” (2). Reflecting on this passage in 2009, the information and linguistics scholar Geoffrey Nunberg observes that this position remains unchanged: “80 years after it was coined, ‘Wall Street vs. Main Street’ is still a potent political slogan. We still feel the need to write our moral differences on our geography.” Whereas Wall Street signifies a disavowed space of capitalist corruption , dishonesty, and greed, Main Street signifies an avowed space of benevolence, authenticity, and community. In this chapter I counter this popular coding of Main Street. As capitalism continues to globalize, destabilize , and dehumanize, the dominant small town becomes imagined more forcefully as an island community. In the twentieth century the small town becomes a nation form that obsessively distinguishes and regulates who and what is “native” and who and what is “foreign.” The dominant small town, I contend, functions as a testing ground for citizenship : to be at home in the small town is to be at home in the nation, and conversely, to be excluded from the small town is to be excluded from the national symbolic.1 The geography scholar David Harvey writes that the “capitalist hegemony over space puts the aesthetics of place very much back on the agenda” (Condition 303). The aesthetic production of place is frequently a reactionary process grounded in the desire to escape from the conditions and logic of global capitalism. In an American context, the dominant small town is inextricable from the question of aesthetics. More 88 / the formation of a u.s. fascist aesthetics specifically I suggest that in the twentieth century the dominant small town becomes legible by means of a fascist aesthetics. What constitutes this aesthetics is suggested by Walter Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936). At the conclusion of the essay, Benjamin insists that a progressive politics must produce an aesthetics that would be “useless for the purposes of Fascism” (218). Some of the terms that become aligned with a fascist aesthetics are “authenticity ,” “heritage,” “organic,” “aura,” “immediate,” “ritual,” and “tradition” (220–224, 233). A fascist aesthetics imagines space as a homogeneous, ahistorical island community that vilifies social and cultural diversity.2 My claim that the dominant small town becomes legible by means of a fascist aesthetics should not be read as an ahistorical claim. Rather the dominant small town, like all ideological forms, is historically mediated. As I will explore in chapter 8, at the end of the twentieth century the dominant small town becomes a diverse, hospitable, cosmopolitan space. It Can Happen Here In the early twentieth century a literary genre emerged that critiques the logic of U.S. exceptionalism and imagines how the United States can become a fascist state.3 The inaugural text of this genre is Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935), published fifteen years after Lewis’s Main Street. The novel provocatively and critically suggests that what was unfolding in Germany, Spain, and Italy could also occur in the United States. In Lewis’s speculative history, the Great Depression creates favorable conditions for the meteoric rise of the populist demagogue Senator Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip. Windrip wins the 1936 presidential election with the promise of economic salvation by any means necessary (any means, that is, except communism). Once president, he instantiates a fascist regime in which Congress and the Supreme Court are “castrated” (135), all fifty states dissolved (134–135), labor unions destroyed (145), and all political parties dismantled with the exception of the American Corporate State and Patriotic Party (142). Moreover in order to maintain totalitarian order, the United States creates “camps” to detain and silence all political and social dissidents (143–144). This U.S. fascist regime, like its European counterparts, is racist, misogynist, and homophobic. However, the state mystifies its violent practices by framing its politics as a return to “tradition.” In his presidential campaign, Windrip promises to return to traditional ways and practices: “All women now employed shall . . . be assisted to return to [44.200.74.73] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:08 GMT) the formation of a u.s. fascist aesthetics / 89 their incomparably sacred duties as home-makers and as mothers of strong, honorable future Citizens of the Commonwealth” (67, capitalization in original). All subjects outside of this “regime of the normal” are ostracized...