It can happen here: ‘The Order’ reopens the debate on fascism in the US

In the prescient political satire It Can’t Happen Here, written by Nobel Prize for Literature winner Sinclair Lewis in 1935 and set in the United States during the Great Depression, a presidential candidate with a demagogic and populist discourse, supported by supposed American ideals, hides his true intention: to create a totalitarian society in the image of the European ones of the era, but with American features.

The white supremacist organization Aryan Nations, which emerged in the 1970s and is portrayed in the film The Order — which was quietly released a few weeks ago on the Prime Video platform despite the big names in its cast and having been shown at the Venice Film Festival — degenerated even further in the 1980s when a splinter group broke away: an Aryan resistance movement called The Order, which committed a series of arson and bomb attacks.

On January 20, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and chief advisor to President Donald Trump, twice performed the fascist (and Nazi) salute, his right arm at an angle of about 40 degrees from the horizontal and slightly tilted to the right, in front of an auditorium packed with professional cameras and private cell phones. Some were surprised by such audacity. Others, who saw it coming from afar, although perhaps not to the extent of Lewis — a formidable writer unfortunately half-forgotten today — were not so surprised. As José A. Vázquez Aldecoa says in the prologue to the Spanish edition of It Can’t Happen Here: “We cannot trust ourselves, the germ is among us, and at any moment it can emerge. Perhaps not as a purely fascist regime, with banners, uniforms, grateful speeches and cheap nationalism, but as a government that goes too far by cutting back on certain freedoms in the name of the common good, security, and even democracy itself.” This (or that) can’t happen here, but perhaps it already is.

As The Order — set in 1983 and based on an investigative book by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt about the chilling depths of the country’s racist underbelly — shows, America is a land of community. Where men love simple things like barbecues and salmon fishing. But where guns are also loved, and Jews and Blacks are hated. And where the main issue is that, sometimes, it is the same people who love one thing and the other. “This is a great country, the problem is our minds,” says one of the characters. In The Order, directed by Justin Kurzel, author of the excellent Macbeth (2015) and Nitram (2021), and starring Jude Law and the very fashionable Nicholas Hoult (Clint Eastwood’s juror number two, who also stars in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu), it is noted: “Hate groups don’t usually rob banks, until they do.” Also, following the line of the visionary Lewis, one could have said that rulers are not usually fascists, until they are.

One of the supporting characters in the film is Richard Girnt Butler, founder of the Aryan Nations, which was born out of a religious movement, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The FBI agents, led by Law’s character, go to the enormous headquarters of his organization in the state of Idaho, presided over by an industrial warehouse with a Nazi flag on its roof. It is the classic location in deep America where men, women and children go about their daily business without intrusion. With one important nuance: the children playing on the swings in the adjacent playground greet the adult FBI visitors with the same raised arm as Musk. Within the racist entity, two groups coexist: the sibylline and the violent. The former have raised, in every sense, the latter. But the latter have gone astray. They advocate extermination based on individual crimes. The sibylline, on the other hand, make a bet on the future: “In 10 years, we will have members in Congress and the Senate. That is how changes are made, but it takes time.” The film, remember, is set in the 1980s.

Both groups are a threat to the Democrats. Both pursue the same goals, albeit in different ways: destroying the system from the outside, or changing it from within. However, the violent faction, who began their criminal actions with bank robberies and attacks on porn theaters and erotic shops, are not to the liking of the sibylline side either. The appeal is to the loss of jobs, to dignity. It is the rebirth of “White Power.” And much of the discourse is based on education. Bob Matthews, the neo-Nazi activist who leads The Order, played by Hoult, reads The Turner Diaries to his son at night, the bible of the American racist right. A fictional story about a group of white separatists who wage a racial war against the U.S. government and ends with the extermination of non-whites, politicians, and liberals, which is structured in six steps: recruitment, fundraising, armed revolution, domestic terror, assassination, and the “day of the rope.” The book is banned in Canada for being pure hate propaganda and of decisive influence, according to specialists, in attacks such as that of the Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVeigh, in 1995, which left 168 people dead, as well as the assault on the Capitol in January 2021, encouraged by Trump.

The Turner Diaries’ day of the rope, the day when traitors to the race are finally hanged, brings us back to another recent film that examines the worst case scenario, and in which images of those hanged on bridges, ships, and other places is recurrent: Civil War, with a character played with terrifying force by Jesse Plemons, his now unforgettable red sunglasses a source of social and political nightmares. In fact, cinema has always warned us about this. If there is one good thing about American cinema (and there are many) it is that it has always looked at its societies head on, and in the present tense, as well as retrospectively. “Not all of us here were born with a white sheet on our heads,” says Law’s assistant in The Order, played by Tye Sheridan. Surely that is true, but for whatever reason, from the Ku Klux Klan to the Aryan Nations, some shocking images and terrible acts have always been present. And cinema has echoed them, along with literature (among the most important examples, the alternate history The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth).

Films as relevant as Mississippi Burning (not to mention the founding and ideologically contrary The Birth of a Nation), Seven Days in May, Executive Action, The Domino Principle and BlacKkKlansman also spoke of it: plots, coups d’état, and racial crimes. Even a recent title like the horror comedy Soft & Quiet (2022), which, again with communities as its axis, starred a group of white women who, around a cake with a swastika drawn on it with jam, had a snack every afternoon while forging an association in the fight against diversity, inclusion, and anyone who dared to threaten the cleanliness of the country created by what they consider to be “the founding fathers.” As recounted in Why is there no socialism in the United States?, another revealing essay written by the German sociologist Werner Sombart and published in 1906, everything seemed to point to the United States as the true homeland of socialism: early industrialization, the absence of hierarchies, the cult of equality... However, it never went beyond the narrowest circles. As narrow as fascism? That is not so clear, and even less so now.

In fact, if you scratch a little under the surface of The Order there are worrying facts. It is a Canadian-made film, shot in Alberta (again, in Canada), directed by an Australian (Kurzel) and starring two Englishmen (Law and Hoult), about a part of the idiosyncrasy of the U.S., which barely grossed $2 million dollars at the box office, and which Prime Video, with hardly any publicity, released without a theatrical run in all international territories. Perhaps that is why a story like Civil War, perhaps not coincidentally not considered in the Oscar nominations and directed by another Briton, Alex Garland, is so important. The magnificent Mississippi Burning was made in the 1980s and is set in the 1960s; The Order was shot in 2024 but the events take place in the 1980s; Civil War is current and is set in the near future. As prescient as It Can’t Happen Here? Let’s hope not.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition