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THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!  
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Andrew Tonkovich
March 9, 2025
Los Angeles Review of Books
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_ Andrew Tonkovich reviews Sue Coe and Stephen F. Eisenman’s “The
Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism.” _

, Sue Coe

 

The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism
by Sue Coe and Stephen F. Eisenman.
OR Books, 2025. 200 pages.

THE UNSHY IF almost comically provocative title of a new collection
featuring the darkly beautiful drawings and illustrations of legendary
artist and printmaker Sue Coe suggests, in its perfect syntactical
on-the-nose-ness, exactly what we’ve come to: an illustrated
“guide” to American fascism compiled, ostensibly, for children but
arriving at a time when grown-ups have fallen down on the job of not
only teaching about but also resisting fascism. For its pedagogical
candor, gentle remedial instruction, and elegant incitement, we should
be grateful to _The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American
Fascism_, which features an introduction and companion essays by
longtime Coe collaborator Stephen F. Eisenman, professor emeritus of
art history at Northwestern University and an art critic and columnist
for _CounterPunch_,_ _who assumes—indeed insists upon—a dark
honesty and, of course, a vigorous dialectic.

Eisenman’s analysis is the most clear, generous, and sincere of any
recent book I have read on fascism and anti-fascism, which includes
work by commentators, from liberal to anarchist to so-called
conservative, such as Jeff Sharlet, Federico Finchelstein, Timothy
Snyder, Jason Stanley, Mark Bray, Maria Ressa, Paris Marx, Elie
Mystal, Joan Braune, Heather Cox Richardson, Bill Kristol, and Masha
Gessen. All, of course, argue _against_ fascism, but until recently,
very few historians, political scholars, or pundits have been as
delightfully willing to punch fascism _in the nose_ as Coe and
Eisenman are.

Many experts in this scholarly field—or minefield—have hemmed and
hawed about defining, identifying, or even applying the word
“fascism” to what we are experiencing. Reputable public
intellectuals caution against or wonder whether we should even use the
term and, if so, how. To be fair, their reluctance, or their
insistence on historical nuance, might have been a reasonable and
civic-minded gesture (or foolish exercise of privilege) a decade ago.
Today, getting the taxonomy just right seems like agreeing or
disagreeing on whether it’s the horse or the cow that got out of the
barn while the door was left open.

As Princeton sociologist Kim Lane Scheppele has observed, fascism
suggests an “ideology,” and thus “authoritarianism”—a
“practice”—may more accurately describe the brutal, stupid,
often ideologically confusing GOP-Trumpist program, or Trump himself.
If you’ve been playing along, you’ve assembled your own list of
polite descriptors, weak-tea synonyms, euphemisms, or placeholders:
autocrat, strongman, demagogue, nationalist, ultranationalist, white
Christian nationalist, far-rightist, authoritarian. A horse out of the
barn by any other name!

Now arrives Eisenman, collaborator with Coe on earlier small books,
with a thought experiment—or, since this is a book for young folks,
a homework assignment in civics. It’s one that this anti-fascist
reader (and premature anti-fascist) has long waited for: “Before you
read this book, it would be good to talk with family or friends about
what democracy means to you. Fascism means the death of democracy, but
you can’t understand the first term without understanding the
second.” Those two simple lines—with the loss of democracy now
helping to define fascism—recall a similarly sincere, angry, and
gorgeously polemical passage, lately on everybody’s reading list,
from George Orwell’s 1946 essay
[[link removed]] “Politics
and the English Language”:

Since you don’t know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against
Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought
to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the
decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some
improvement by starting at the verbal end.

Eisenman, introducing visual artist Coe, asks, pointedly, a version of
that question: since you don’t know what Democracy is, how can you
struggle for Democracy?

There’s much more to appreciate in Eisenman’s essays, but this is
a picture book emerging from a 40-year career of illustration. Coe is
a genius who embraces and builds on a tradition that includes Bruegel,
Goya, Honoré Daumier, German expressionism, Käthe Kollwitz, and John
Heartfield. Knowing this tradition isn’t essential to apprehending
the exquisite logic and powerful visual poetry of her drawings and
linocuts, though it can’t hurt.

Featured on the book’s cover is a drawing titled “The In Crowd,”
a young American’s social-microcosm scene of protofascism: in the
foreground, caricaturish schoolyard bullies huddle conspiratorially
around a handgun, our national fetish object, while another group,
presumably the “out” crowd, apprehends the threat and anticipates
violence. Anybody can easily recognize those background kids as
vulnerable, victimized, ostracized by an intolerant mob: they include
a child in a wheelchair, another wearing glasses and a peace-dove
T-shirt, yet another holding a book entitled _History_. The “out”
crowd is also marked as ethnically “different”: one wears a
yarmulke, while another has Asian features.

The little brownshirts huddle near a schoolhouse or neighborhood
block, admiring the weapon. The scene is simply if artfully composed,
the artfulness and simplicity working together, and perhaps even a
fascist would get it. Surely a young person would. This is indeed what
democracy looks like right now. The pages that follow offer a diptych,
mirror portraits titled “Making a Fascist”—with “Capital”
supporting the death-daddy figure of “Fascism” next to figures
labeled “Fraud,” “Violence,” and “Terror.”

_The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism_ is
mostly a Sue Coe picture book, with nearly 100 images, but essential
to it are Eisenman’s essays, among them “How to Use This Book,”
“Art for Art’s Sake vs. Political Art,” and “The Artist as
Political Thinker.” In “Political vs. ‘Expressive’ Art—And
the End of Art,” Eisenman reviews the thought experiment he’s run:

[Coe’s] art focuses on those who are exploited and abused; decries
state-sanctioned violence, whether perpetuated by the U.S. military or
private individuals enabled by far-right politicians; celebrates
physical nature and attacks the corporations that are destroying it;
embraces the varieties of human culture, gender, and sexuality; and
proposes that land and resources be shared by humans and animals
alike. The name for such a system of mutuality, abundance and
sustainability is democracy, and its prospects—along with the art
that supports it—will be dimmed or destroyed if fascism is allowed
to prevail.

If you look for depictions of democracy in Coe’s stark, beautiful
work, you will apprehend, even without Eisenman’s argument, a kind
of photonegative, a grim diagnosis or status report. Yet Coe also
integrates resistance, solidarity, witness, collective opposition, and
mutual aid into her democratic stress test. There are protesters
holding a sign that reads “Protect Children Not Guns,” a mass
protest, Black and white hands gripped in solidarity under the banner
“Fight Fascism,” children and animals gathered arm in arm around
an emptying hourglass titled “Empathy,” a female figure labeled
“Democracy” releasing a bird of “hope.”

The images speak well enough for themselves, though Eisenman’s
essays guide us not only to see them but also to employ them as,
indeed, a “practice” of civic literacy, of self-examination, of
historical analysis. They offer a way to see ourselves and our
democracy in—and perhaps beyond—this fascist moment. I find
considerable joy and courage in Coe’s work, which reminds me of the
words of art critic John Berger, from his seminal 1972 book _Ways of
Seeing_: “Seeing comes before words. […] It is seeing which
establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world
with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded
by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never
settled.”

Eisenman writes about what Coe draws, calling attention to the power
of a photonegative space, a way to consider what we know or think we
know. Eisenman and Coe—and also Orwell and Berger—encourage us to
see that the defects of democracy are the cracks where fascism enters.
Seeing the darkness in Coe’s work helps us clearly envision, and
struggle for, its opposite. There is very little light in these
powerful drawings, but there is plenty of illumination.

_(Images reproduced from OR Books)_

ANDREW TONKOVICH edits the _Santa Monica Review_ and is the founding
editor of _Citric Acid: An Online Orange County Literary Arts
Quarterly of Imagination and Reimagination_. His latest collection
is _Keeping Tahoe Blue and Other Provocations_ (2020).

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OR BOOKS was founded by John Oakes and Colin Robinson in 2009.

COLIN ROBINSON, publisher. Robinson worked as a senior editor at
Scribner and was previously managing director of Verso Books and
publisher of The New Press. Among the authors he has published are
Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Mike Davis, Norman
Finkelstein, Eduardo Galeano, Eric Hobsbawm, Lewis Lapham, Mike
Marqusee, Rigoberta Menchú, Matt Taibbi and Jann Wenner. He has
written for publications including The New York Times, The London
Review of Books, The Sunday Times (London) and The Guardian
(London),and has appeared on broadcast media including NPR (“On the
Media”), CNN, MSNBC, CBC and CSPN.

JOHN OAKES, editor-at-large. Oakes co-founded the book publisher Four
Walls Eight Windows, which was purchased by the Avalon Publishing
Group. Among the authors he has published are Andrei Codrescu, Sue
Coe, R. Crumb, Cory Doctorow, Andrea Dworkin, Abbie Hoffman, Gordon
Lish, Harvey Pekar, Rudy Rucker, John Waters and Edmund White. Oakes
is a former board member of PEN America. He has written for
the _Associated Press_, the _International Herald Tribune_, and
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LAUNCHING OR

In a voyage abundant in metaphors (and blessed with sunshine)
publishing veterans John Oakes and Colin Robinson literally launched
their new venture OR Books on an old fireboat from a pier eight blocks
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In other words, they aim to sell non-returnable only and print only
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