“There are ways of being evil that are not fascist, but I don’t think there’s a way of being fascist without being evil.” — Joseph Kelly
On yesterday’s show, Anthony Badger, author of Prosperity Road, told the story of America’s transformation into a global superpower between 1920 and 1945. Today is the prequel. Joseph Kelly, author of The Biggest Lie, narrates the story of America between 1818 and 1915. It’s what he calls the “prehistory of American fascism”. There’s no prosperity here. Nor nostalgia. It’s a miserable story.
The “biggest lie”, for Kelly, is the myth of white supremacy. He traces it back to a South Carolina congressman named William Smith who, in 1820, claimed that what the founders had meant by all men are created equal was that all men aren’t created equal. The convenient logic of Southern slave-owners. So America didn’t import fascism from Mussolini or Hitler, Kelly says. It’s actually a made-in-America product, the innovation of Southern racists. Thus the American white supremacist Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race was the book that the pagan Hitler called his “bible”, and Jim Crow became, in all-too-many ways, a model for the Nazis.
“Nostalgia is a way of being modern”, Kelly says. Racialized American fascism took its romantic iconography from the Germanic knights and the Scottish lairds so mocked by Mark Twain. By reaching back into the European Dark Ages, the Confederates imagined they had invented the civilization of the future, one they sought to spread across the Western and Southern Hemispheres. So fascism, for all its fetishization of the volkish nation, is actually an early product of globalization. The biggest lie became the South’s “most successful export” — first shipped to the American North, and later, through Grant and the eugenicists, to Europe. A most unprosperous idea. And, Kelly warns, one that is returning to fashion. The prequel threatens to become the sequel.
FIVE TAKEAWAYS
1. Kelly puts a season on the closing of the Southern mind. After the summer of 1835 you could not stand up in the South and proclaim that all men are created equal and mean it — a white person who tried risked lynching, or exile. What follows is almost two generations raised in a one-party state with no free speech. Mark Twain said he grew up in Missouri and never once heard slavery arraigned until he left.
2. Did they know they were lying? William Smith did. But the first American anthropologists were amateurs whose authority came from owning plantations, and they dressed anecdote in scientific language and sold it to the world as science. Louis Agassiz was the one man equipped to explode it and instead became a champion of black primitivism. The charge is not conscious lying — it is that they declined to look.
3. For about a decade after the Civil War the biracial republic functioned, and almost all of its problems were created by unreconstructed white Southerners. Then the North let redemption happen in 1876, because the Southern playbook had become useful: Northern cities were absorbing Europeans, so white got parsed. The Irish became Anglo-Saxon adjacent, and were handed the billy clubs.
4. Everyone says fascism cannot be defined, which Kelly calls a cop-out. Working from Robert Paxton: tribal identity, the tribe under siege, the fear of replacement, the extralegal violence it licenses, the beauty of it. All present in the antebellum South. Two absent — the cult leader, and the duty to trust him over your own reason. Hence prehistory.
5. Emancipation released an extraordinary reserve of talent. Ida B. Wells went from schoolteacher to the great voice against lynching after a friend was killed, and wrote that nobody in the South believed the lie about black men and white women; the anxiety was sexual. Their very existence refuted it, which is why the mobs went through the middle-class blocks.
ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Intro
02:11 — Madison Grant and Jim Crow
04:42 — Orwell, and the trouble with the f word
05:44 — Defining fascism: Paxton’s passions
10:48 — No way of being fascist without evil
15:37 — Nostalgia is a way of being modern
22:19 — White supremacy, in a word
24:40 — William Smith and the speech of 1820
27:38 — Did they know they were lying?
33:30 — The summer of 1835
35:58 — Did the culture create the science?
38:20 — Ten years of a working republic
41:30 — The South’s most successful export
44:40 — Ida B. Wells and the People’s Grocery
48:55 — Jackson and Native Americans
52:01 — Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders
54:46 — When everything looks like a nail
57:43 — Charlottesville, January 6 and 2026
01:00:53 — Closing