This is THE BEST book on the rise of 21st century fascism I’ve read so far.

It’s not even close.

I loved its imperial boomerang-style inclusion of proto-fascism in India, Israel, and Brazil alongside the US. I loved the way it didn’t shy away from the most unhinged parts of far-right politics.

And two things struck me in particular—

1️⃣ Its main focus was: why do regular people crave fascism?

This focus on fascism, not as a form of government imposed on people by a tyrant but, as a government craved and pushed for by regular citizens, puts this book firmly in the tradition of post-WWII German philosophers like Hannah Arendt and Theodore Adorno (and makes the typical American liberal books on modern fascism look amateurish by comparison).

But it’s Arendt and Adorno for our times. Rather than the Dreyfus Affair, Seymour investigates the hallucinated enemy that is antifa, anti-immigrant rhetoric, the homoeroticism of the manosphere, Islamophobia, and the un-horniness of incel culture.

His argument was really compelling. Basically, this incohate craving for fascism is caused by systematic failures and big disasters (the crappiness of late stage capitalism, climate disasters, pandemics, etc). Except blaming a scapegoat, especially a group they can persecute, feels way more real and cathartic than railing against a nebulous system they can’t impact and don’t understand.

2️⃣ I started this book just hours before Charlie Kirk was shot. And the way it described how proto-fascist governments will use disasters (Charlie Kirk’s death) to ramp up authoritarianism (scapegoating the “radical left,” linking antifa to terrorism, designating anti-capitalist thought or trans identity as pre-crime, the whole Jimmy Kimmel thing, etc)… 😳 the way this book soberly predicted and described the complete chaos that was happening irl…

It was like a fever dream, tbh.

Needless to say, his application of Naomi Klein’s concept of disaster capitalism to fascist nationalism was Spot. On.

What even are we doing here? One Nation Under Guns is essentially a drawn-out thesis: the Second Amendment refers to militias, not individual ownership, and pro-gun movements misuse it disingenuously. That’s the whole book.

As a rather brief historical account of the birth of the second amendment and how it has become twisted in the modern era, it's just okay. However, the subtitle "How Gun Culture Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy" implies a sense of reckoning with the American system and how deeply, intrinsically intertwined American culture and gun culture are.

Instead, Erdozain positions pro-gun activism as a sort of derailment of America's "true democracy", treating racism and violence as unfortunate cultural mistakes rather than ideals foundational to America's inception. His framing turns into a surface-level "bad apples" argument, as though the problem is a handful of extremists rather than the predictable outcome of a nation built upon violence and inequality.

While I appreciated that he named America's white supremacist and racist systems for what they are, his failure to actually engage deeply with them makes their inclusion ring hollow.

The first glaring issue was Erdozain beginning American history with the American revolution, and not with the genocide of indigenous people. Because of this, when he attempts to trace the origin of the second amendment, he fails to acknowledge that even the constitutional militias he refers to and argues in favor of were used against indigenous people, fueled by racism and colonialism.

Later, he talks about the KKK and how white supremacist vigilante groups used violence to terrorize Black people in the Jim Crow era. Again, important to mention, but fails to recognize that the KKK are exactly the "armed militias" he argues the amendment refers to.

I was also bugged by how he glorified Martin Luther King Jr.'s "nonviolence", and talks about how America once had a period of anti-gun sentiment during the 60s, while failing to mention how a big proponent for America actually engaging in gun control legislation was to control civil rights activists such as the Black Panthers, and how gun control historically has disproportionately harmed marginalized people.

"That young activist was, of course, Martin Luther King Jr., and his decision to give up firearms changed the trajectory of American history forever. If a man whose house was bombed can do it, so can we." Oh brother, this guy STINKS!

Now listen, I'm not saying that we don't need gun control, but in order to actually reckon with America's complex relationship with guns, we need to actually examine the systems that led us here and how they're continuing to be upheld by pro-gun activists. We need to talk about the full history of gun control, and how these systems of oppression need to be dismantled or at least addressed in tandem with the gun control conversation.

There's no mention of the militarization of police, or how marginalized communities have armed themselves precisely because the police do not protect them. Instead, Erdozain comes across as very sympathetic to cops and seems to imply that only cops should have guns. Brother, I thought that was the whole problem with guns? You know the whole racism and unfairly labeling people as criminals thing?

Ultimately, Erdozain is not a political scientist, he is a theologian steeped in humanism. He constantly refers back to John Locke and paints America as a true democracy built upon collective morality that must be returned to. Because of this, he fails to actually provide any meaningful systemic critique or historical analysis to help understand how gun culture came to be as extreme as it is today.

You're better off reading something like Jesus & John Wayne, which reckons with white supremacist, evangelical Christianity and how the idolization of vigilante justice is built into the mythology of American nationalism.

The ideas in here? Great. Liberal feminism = bad; intersectional and anti-capitalist feminism = good.

This is a great little 2 hour audiobook for a hike or a workout; let your anger at stupid dumb white liberal feminists fuel you.

But, as robust feminist theory? Ehhhh. This was a very 2010s (derogatory) book. Back when Obama was cool, Trump was just a blip on our history’s bend towards justice, and we really thought Westernized mass protest was going to work (they hadn’t started shooting American crowds with tear gas and “less than lethal” bullets yet).

The intersectional anti-capitalist feminism of the 2020s is a bit more jaded. Or at least, I am. So I wanted more.