During the Red Scare that colored American politics from the late 1940s through the early 1960s, the citizenry was pushed to feel constant paranoia about Communist infiltration in government and society. This was also known as “Reds under the bed.”
With MAGA nation, the United States has returned to those constricting anti-Communist days, only now the “reds” are advocates of “woke,” DEI and everything that goes contrary to the president’s agenda.
The paranoia is currently on the other foot. Liberal Americans now fear the rise of fascism like never before. There has always been background unease with the U.S. right, but fascism has never been as profound or close to the surface as it is today. This weekend I read or heard the term in reference to President Trump’s style of governance by three different pundits (I’m sure I could find more)—and it made me recall a book of woodcuts created by political artist and activist Sue Coe. I’m reprinting a Daily Heller I published about the book years ago because it has sadly not lost any relevance in 2025.
I do not eat red meat because of Sue Coe. Her activist art did not make me into a total vegetarian, but her views of humanity—and especially her 1996 graphic exposé “Dead Meat,” which was as shocking as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, published 90 years earlier—made me think long and hard about issues like food manufacture and so much more.
Now she is warning us to the potential of fascism to (once more) rear its head in the disruption of our democracy. American Fascism Now (Rotland Press) presents 16 new linocut prints by Coe, completed between 2017 and 2020, and a text by art historian Stephen F. Eisenman that chronicles the current dangerous political precipice the United States is now teetering on. This is an urgent lesson book on the warning signs of fascism as it appears to be advancing into American culture.
“This project is published to coincide with the looming 2020 American presidential election,” says Ryan Standfest, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Detroit-based Rotland. “The design of the book nods toward Die Pleite, in the use of [its] typeface and paper color on the covers (I actually scanned an endpaper from an old German volume of George Grosz drawings for the texture/subtle fixing).”
P.S.: Yesterday Trump would not confirm he would validate a peaceful transition if he loses a fair election. Fascism or Trumpism, take your pick.
The post The Daily Heller: Sue Coe Strikes! appeared first on PRINT Magazine.