The Dark Night of Fascism

Lawyer Eugene Volokh out of curiosity traced down the quote: "dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe," to Tom Wolfe's conversation with some american intellectuals in the 1960's.

(Grass commented): "For the past hour, I have my eyes fixed on the doors here," he said. "You talk about fascism and police repression. In Germany when I was a student, they come through those doors long ago. Here they must be very slow."...
He was not simply saying, "You really don't have so much to worry about." He was indulging his sense of the absurd. He was saying: "You American intellectuals — you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!"
He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.

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