This Is What Democracy Looks Like!

Andrew Tonkovich reviews Sue Coe and Stephen F. Eisenman’s “The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism.”

By Andrew TonkovichMarch 9, 2025

• Young Adult & Children’s Literature

• Politics

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 “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.

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All images reproduced by permission of OR Books.