j.r. leonard

I spent my childhood reading fantasy novels and playing video games where the Great Evil was defeated and sealed away, but inevitably the seals weaken and the Evil returns. It was a fun fantasy conceit, but I guess there was some deep truth in it as well.

The impulse to create a nightmare society that subjugates and brutalizes whole classes of people did not begin with Madison Grant or Adolf Hitler. It didn't begin with Columbus or Pizarro either. It's a natural tendency that crops up again and again, everywhere on Earth...

When that tendency - which we now call "fascism" but is really something much deeper - prevails, whole societies are annihilated, oppression is maintained for centuries. When it loses, it lurks for a while and then stages a comeback.

Now it's coming back, and in places like America, Europe, and New Zealand it's manifesting as white supremacism, but you can see signs of it in China, in India, in Brazil, in Turkey, in different forms.

I believe that the United States' other intellectual and ideological tradition - the pluralist, universalist, egalitarian one - can help us resist the return of fascism. So I'm not ready to go out and burn the old Stars 'n Stripes just yet.

But nor do I believe that natural American goodness and freedom and apple pie will inevitably defeat the Evil. The outcome is very much in doubt.