The Young Person's Illustrated Guide to American Fascism

This fierce, smart interweaving of punch-packing art and powerful, precise words lays bare the authoritarianism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and misogyny that populate the political landscape of the United States today.

Designed especially to inform and activate younger readers, these pages pay particular attention to the threats facing the most basic tenets of American democracy, exemplified by the attempted stealing of elections, violence on the streets of the capital, and the evasion of legal consequences by the most powerful in the land. Beyond the crimes of Trump and his cohort, The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism explores the threads of fascism in U.S. history and shows their baleful influence on today’s foreign policy, especially support for genocide in Gaza, and the brutal treatment of asylum seekers along the U.S./Mexican border.

Perfectly complemented by Stephen Eisenman’s crystalline text, Sue Coe’s art is, in turn, tough, satirical, bracing, sweet, and sober. It secures her place in a pantheon that features the zine illustration of Art Spiegelman, the realism of Philip Pearlstein, the caricatures of Honoré Daumier, the expressionism of Käthe Kollwitz, and the Dadaism of John Heartfield.

Sue Coe is an artist, animal rights activist, and anti-fascist. She is the author of The Animal’s Vegan Manifesto and Cruel. She has depicted the rights struggles of women, children, queers, animals, refugees, and political dissidents. She has exposed the suffering of AIDS patients, displaced persons, and domesticated animals. Her art has also exposed the horrors of factory farms, zoos, prisons, and refugee camps. Coe’s prints, drawings and paintings are found in many major art museums, and her illustrations have been published in The New York Times, The Nation and elsewhere.

Stephen F. Eisenman is Professor Emeritus of Art History at Northwestern University and the author of a dozen books including Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History, Gauguin’s Skirt, The Abu Ghraib Effect, and The Cry of Nature: Art and the Making of Animal Rights. He is an art critic and columnist for Counterpunch and the co-founder of the environmental justice non-profit, Anthropocene Alliance.