1 of 100: Origins of fascism (a reading list)

I am considering taking up my 100 Days self-challenge again. (In the past I've done a couple of 365-day challenges, but that's clearly too much. By about day 100 I'm out of ideas... So: 100 it is. This'll be my third or fourth one, assuming I actually get going.)

Today, given the Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity (I am trying to write those words calmly, without sarcasm or invective) and Sunday's French election results, I thought: hm, maybe I should start learning something about the rise of fascism. Since it seems to be ever more upon us.

And so, here is a list of books that I might make into a project—though the subject matter is so depressing, I expect just the relatively short 1995 essay by Umberto Eco, "Ur-Fascism," will suffice. But in case I feel like suffering more, here are some suggestions I've gleaned from the internet, starting with a few written at the time of and shortly after WWII:

Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933)
Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (1941)
Friedrich Reck, Diary of a Man in Despair (1947) (the author died in Dachau in 1945)
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960)

More recent treatments:

Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996)
Michael Mann, Fascists (2004)
Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (2007)
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017)—which I reported on here
Daniel Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (2019) and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point (2023)
Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2020) 

And for a couple of more specifically about what's going on here, now:

Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America (2023)—and here, by the way, is Heather speaking today about this and other recent Supreme Court decisions, which she calls "very bad": bad decisions, and very bad for our democracy, constituting, essentially, a legal coup
Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight against Fascism (2023)

There is, of course, fiction:

Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here (1935)
George Owell, Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949)
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
William Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954)
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and its sequel, The Testaments (2019)
P. D. James, The Children of Men (1992)
Philip Kerr, Berlin Noir (1993) (and here's a New Yorker piece about Kerr)
Philip Roth, The Plot against America (2004)
Robert Harris, Fatherland (2006)

And finally, here's a book I might just order right now: Arundhati Roy's Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction. from 2020. A collection of essays.

I'll try to be a bit more upbeat tomorrow. In parting, here are some African wild dog puppies. And if that wasn't enough for you, here's some more: