Post by Seth Goldstein

Suggested Reading: Understanding Fascism — and the Ideas That Make America Great Again If you want to understand fascism, don’t start with political theory — start with literature. The great writers saw authoritarianism not as a concept, but as a condition of the soul: obedience, fear, and cruelty disguised as patriotism. These are the writers I’ve read over my life — voices that shaped my conscience, my sense of justice, and my understanding of America. Some wrote from perspectives steeped in bias or exclusion, yet their work still exposes the roots of power, privilege, and moral decay. Others give us the counterweight — the voices of diversity, struggle, and hope that remind us what makes this country worth defending. American, Irish, and British Voices F. Scott Fitzgerald • Ernest Hemingway • Edna St. Vincent Millay • William Faulkner • George Orwell • John Steinbeck • Sinclair Lewis • Upton Sinclair • Richard Wright • James Baldwin • Ralph Ellison • Herman Melville • George Eliot • Charles Dickens • Emily Brontë • Charlotte Brontë • Elizabeth Gaskell • Jane Austen • Leo Tolstoy • Jack Kerouac • Edith Wharton • Philip Roth • Henry Roth • Joan Didion • Betty Smith • John Dos Passos • James Joyce • Kurt Vonnegut • Robert Penn Warren • Mary Shelley • Ford Madox Ford • Sylvia Plath • Arthur Miller • Toni Morrison • Langston Hughes • Walt Whitman • Dalton Trumbo French Voices Victor Hugo • Émile Zola • Gustave Flaubert • Honoré de Balzac • Albert Camus • Jean-Paul Sartre German Voices Günter Grass • Erich Maria Remarque Russian Voices Leo Tolstoy • Anton Chekhov • Isaac Babel These writers — flawed, diverse, courageous — all wrestled with the same questions: What corrupts a nation? What redeems it? Their works remind us that the struggle for freedom, dignity, and truth is never finished. That’s what still makes America great. #Democracy #Fascism #ReadingList #Justice #Freedom #Writers #LaborRights #HumanRights #History