Does it feel like most Americans are ignoring the insane rise of fascism?

[Abolishinist]

112. I wasn't familiar with Professor Kimber Quinney, after looking her up

I find she's a fellow San Diegan. A dozen or so years ago I purchased a number of books (by noted scholars) on F(f)ascism, some read, some skimmed - and was fascinated by at once the subtle differences in their attempts to define the term and the outright 180 degree differences in opinion.

Most of what I read tended to place great emphasis on the inter-war period. In the end, I found Robert Paxton to be my fave. However, if you're familiar with Zeev Sternhell, his approach got me interested in some other topics as well, as it is his opinion that the beginnings go back to the fin-de-siecle.

The historian Zeev Sternhell has traced the ideological roots of fascism back to the 1880s, and in particular to the fin-de-siècle (French for “end of the century”) theme of that time. This ideology was based on a revolt against materialism, rationalism, positivism, bourgeois society, and democracy. The fin-de-siècle generation supported emotionalism, irrationalism, subjectivism, and vitalism. The fin-de-siècle mindset saw civilization as being in a crisis that required a massive and total solution. Its intellectual school considered the individual only one part of the larger collectivity, which should not be viewed as an atomized numerical sum of individuals. They condemned the rationalistic individualism of liberal society and the dissolution of social links in bourgeois society.

In the end, I found his take to be an interesting, albeit much too involved, journey, but as I said, it opened other doors for exploration, such as Vichy France and the Dreyfus affair. Sternhell, as I recall, did not even consider the Nazis to be fascists.