Much like Siegfried Kracauer argues in From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947) that Weimer German cinema foreshadowed the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, the creators of Mad Men’s depiction of the American Sixties seem to have foreshadowed the stylish rise of neo-fascism in early in the twenty-first century. Neo-fascism is, however, a bit of a misnomer because, as Mad Men elaborates, fascism has always been deeply embedded in American society and in the nation’s collective identity.

As such, when the drinking, sex, melodrama, stealth marketing, and sleek mid-century design of Mad Men is stripped away, the show poignantly depicts Cold War America, and by implication the twenty-first century, as having deep strains of the same banality of evil associated with Nazism also deeply embedded in American consumer culture, military industrial complex, political system, and collective identity.

Fascism is most characterized by mass mobilization, racism, sexism and misogyny, homophobia, opposition to Marxism, a glorification of violence, militarism, extreme nationalism, imperialism, a fetishization for a youthful “New Man” and warrior culture, and populism and anti-urbanism. All these themes are prominently displayed throughout seven seasons of Mad Men.

Mad Men was a cultural phenomenon. The show about the inner workings of a 1960s Madison Avenue advertising agency and the inner lives of the company’s employees featured ninety-two episodes in seven seasons between 2007 – 2015 and was awarded a record four straight Emmys for Outstanding Drama Series. As recently as 2017, Business Insider referred to the series as the best show to come out of television’s Golden Era.

Mad Men is most explicitly about how individual identity is shaped by collective identity and vice versa. Matthew Weiner, Mad Men’s creator, in fact compares Dick Whitman’s American experience to Jewish-Americans in the postwar period. “Their identity is the same story as Don’s identity,” Weiner said in a 2014 interview. “How do we become white? How do I get my kid to go to Wesleyan so he can be in that law firm? What’s it going to take?” Don, as a metaphor for the Jewish-American experience in the postwar era surfaces very early in the series.

In season one, for example, he is especially taciturn about his childhood, but reluctantly and cryptically tells Roger Sterling and his wife, Mona, to think of him as “Moses in a basket,” which likewise alludes to the fluidity of individual identity (Moses was adopted by a non-Jewish king) and collective identity (Moses was as Jewish as Don was American). Don, as a metaphor for the Jewish-American experience, is also a clue that Mad Men is as much about the specter of fascism deeply embedded in postwar America’s collective identity as it is about the individual identity of the characters. In other words, Mad Men is as much about postwar American identity as it is about the fluid identities of characters such as Don and Peggy.

The fact that so many of the characters on the show have German and Italian names and/or are enamored with German and Italian culture seems to allude to cultural syncretism and likewise alludes to the fact that Germanic and Italian culture have deep roots in American society, particularly Protestantism and Catholicism. The point seems underscored further in season two by the fact that creative partners Kurt (a German) and Smitty (an American) share the same last name – Smith. The Smiths likewise point viewers to the fact that postwar American and German economies were increasingly entwined in the decades after World War II, thanks largely to the Marshall Plan.

Late in season three, Don takes Betty to Rome, while Pete saves his neighbor’s German nanny by buying her a new dress to replace the one that she ruined, which was owned by her boss. Both instances evoke the Marshall Plan, which both salvaged the European economy and made business partners of American companies, such as ad agencies and Volkswagen. The irony of Rome being an empire in decline, particularly in contrast to the postwar United States at the height of its imperial powers, is further elaborated in season three: “American dollar is very good,” a thankful Italian bellhop says to Don, who has just tipped him at the Rome Hilton. “Two dollars, Don?” Betty chides her husband, “he makes that in a week.” Here, Don represents liberal Americans, such as George C. Marshall, who advocated the Marshall Plan, versus conservatives who did not approve of their tax dollars being diverted to make business partners of many of the same fascists whom America had recently waged war against.

The many instances of Americans taking vacations to formally fascist countries, which are often ignored or completely overlooked in postwar American history, likewise speak to Madison Avenue’s relationship with fascists such as Volkswagen and Francisco Franco. Mad Men’s critique of American fascism illuminates that Americans in the postwar period were increasingly seduced into taking vacations by multinational corporations such as Hilton Hotels in league with ad men such as Don Draper. Late in season seven, for example, Don’s daughter, Sally, plans a trip to Franco’s fascist Spain.

The intervention of American tax dollars made countries like Spain (a fascist regime until 1975) and Italy (where fascists’ purge of leftism in the interwar era was comparable to the purge of leftists in postwar American society) into trendy tourist destinations amongst America’s burgeoning middle class in the decades after World War II. As organized religion increasingly lost its mystique, aura, and value in the context of an increasingly secularized militarist postwar American consumer culture in which nuclear holocaust seemed a genuine possibility, vacation destinations such as Hawaii, California, Italy, and Spain were, as Mad Men elaborates, increasingly depicted as utopian anecdotes to New York City, especially in the season four finale when Don takes his kids to Disneyland.

The notion that American tax and tourist dollars kept companies such as Volkswagen and Franco’s regime alive and thriving in the interest of fueling consumer capitalism as a Cold War anecdote to communism grows more poignant in season four when Don jokingly asks Roger if he “enjoyed the Führer’s party?” His quip was in reference to the sadist southerner, Lee Garner, Jr. of Lucky Strike Cigarettes. “May he live for 1000 years,” Roger drunkenly retorts. The fact that their overlord is a southern segregationist speaks to the deep strain of fascism deeply embedded yet often ignored in American identity.

The historical memory of World War II, as alluded to above, which is remembered far less fondly in Great Britain than in the United States, also looms heavily over Mad Men. In season three, for example, Lane Pryce rehearses his speech for the agency’s Fortieth Anniversary Party. “It was very rousing,” his assistant, John Hooker, says of the speech. “Churchill rousing or Hitler rousing?” Lane implores his underling. The specter of fascism in postwar American consumer culture likewise looms especially large when Don Draper likens Jaguar, which proves to be a particularly difficult client. “To Munich. You’re always saying that,” Pete, who was too young to have fought in the war, scoffs. “What does it mean anyway?” Roger explains that “it means we gave the Germans whatever they wanted to make them happy, and they just wanted more.” Pete rhetorically scoffs back, “Well, who won the war?” Pete’s comment seems to indicate that the Americans subsumed the Germans in terms of imperial avarice. The notion of always wanting more likewise seems to be a not-so-veiled critique of the nature of consumerism in which more is never enough.

Weiner told Michael Renov in an interview for the book From Shtetl to Stardomthat there was a group of boys he went to middle school with in southern California who called themselves the “Sons of Hitler.” His memory seems to speak to the fact that he sees many similarities between the culture of his youth and what he learned about European fascism as a student. Mad Men, in short, is as much about postwar America’s collective identity as a nation shaped by Cold War consumerist conformity, the advertising industry, and militarism as it is about the individuals depicted on the show. Fascism, in short, is not bound by ideology, which is particularly alluded to in season one of Mad Men as Abraham Menken (the owner of a mid-level Jewish department store next to Macy’s) says to his daughter as they leave Sterling & Cooper after a meeting with Don Draper and Pete Campbell, “This place reminds me a czarist ministry. No matter what decision you make, you don’t feel as though it was yours.”

Further evidence that Mad Men is as much about fascism embedded in postwar America’s collective identity as it is about the individual identity of the characters on the show can especially be detected in season one as Don tells Pete that Sterling & Cooper has “more failed artists and intellectuals than the Third Reich.” Earlier in the season, Paul Kinsey asks Peggy – soon after she returns from eating lunch with Harry Crane, Ken Cosgrove, and Joan Holloway – if she “had fun with the Hitler youth?”

The viewer also learns that Volkswagen, a company long associated with the Third Reich and Hitler, who ceremoniously opened the company’s first factory in 1937, is growing more popular in the United States due to its clever and minimalist advertising campaign. Roger notes that Birkbock, a Jewish ad agency, was skittish at the prospect of reindustrializing Germany. “Everybody has their price,” Salvatore Romano (Bryan Batt) sneeringly quips. Helen Bishop (Darby Stanchfield), the Draper’s neighbor from down the street, drives a Volkswagen. One of the men at the party hosted by Betty early in the inaugural season of the show jokes that, “the last time” he saw a Volkswagen, he “was throwing a grenade in it.” Sterling & Cooper also do business with Kodak and United Fruit in season one, both of which likewise did business with the Nazis. The Central Intelligence Agency also waged a coup in Guatemala in 1954 on behalf of United Fruit, which was that country’s largest landowner.

In later seasons of the show, Don’s ad agency is all but consumed with trying to land the General Motors account, which spent more on advertising than any other company in the world. GM likewise did business with the Nazis all through the 1930s and even sued the federal government and won reparations for property destroyed by allied bombing raids during World War II. The company was also, Weiner reminded readers of TIME in a 2014 interview, bailed out by American taxpayers after the 2008 global economic collapse, which underscored the corporate welfare endemic in the American polity.

The specter of postwar consumerism being fascistic is even more explicit when Pete lands a meeting with Honda Motorcycles, a Japanese company. Roger, who is still deeply traumatized because of his time in the United States Navy during World War II, refuses to do business with the Japanese company. “If Birkbock can do business with Volkswagen,” Pete says, “we can do business with anyone.” Roger later laments that Charlie Chaplin, whose famous monologue in The Dictator (1940), which – like Orson Wells’ Caesar, was a searing indictment of fascism, was “very sad and lonely.”

Later in season four, Peggy has a new leftist love interest named Abe Drexler, who makes his living as a journalist for underground publications such as The Village Voice. Abe writes a story titled “Nuremberg on Madison Avenue,” which is one of the most explicit references Mad Men makes to postwar American consumerism being fascistic. Two seasons later, Ted Shaw tells a tableful of attendees at the Clio’s, an advertising industry award show, that “they’re going to fire off a canon when the atrocities begin.” In season five, Roger laments that Jane, his twenty-year-old secretary turned wife, asked, “Which one is Mussolini?” Later in the episode, Michael Ginsberg, who told Peggy he was born in a Nazi concentration camp, is first introduced to viewers. Peggy examines his portfolio and says, “You really have a voice.” Ginsberg scoffs, “That’s what they said about Mein Kampf, ‘Hitler really has a voice.’” In season seven, McCann-Erickson’s Jim Hobart (H. Richard Greene) tells Joan Holloway that he could get The New York Times to “print Mein Kampf on the front page” due to the amount of ad space his agency buys during a year.

Twelve Caesar’s eagles made of granite, which traditionally signified new territory gained by the Roman emperor, peered down on the entrance of Pennsylvania Station in midtown Manhattan for five decades before being torn down. The Roman Eagle was later adopted as a symbol by the Italian, German, and American empires. In season three, controversy regarding the tearing down of Pennsylvania Station to build Madison Square Garden seems to become Sterling & Cooper’s public relations cross to bear on behalf of its corporatist real estate developer client, which alludes to Robert Moses. Kinsey shows one of the besieged developers of the proposed stadium an article critical of the endeavor with a headline that reads “Stop Fascism” in big and bold print. The controversy surrounding the tearing down of Penn Station on Mad Men seems to allude to Jane Jacobs’ classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), which championed ad-hocism in city building rather than the corporatism and Hausmannization hailed by Robert Moses and Madison Avenue, which, historian Fitzhugh Brundage argues, “left a trail of desolation, like a latter-day Sherman” dividing the recent past into “before” (ancient) and “after” (modern).

Mad Men rightly depicts a longtime duplicity inherent in American identity between liberty and equality for all in epic tension with the United States as a bastion of capitalism. The mangled duality between freedom and authoritarianism embedded in America’s collective identity in the postwar era is thus evident throughout the show. For instance, in the premier episode of season six, Sandy, a virtuoso violinist whose mother recently died, says to Betty about the beatnik squatters in Manhattan’s Village south of Fourteenth Street, “people are naturally democratic if you give them a chance.” The adolescent’s romantic notion is starkly contrasted with Don’s pessimistic view of humanity.

In season three, for instance, he engages in pillow talk with his daughter’s former teacher, Suzanne Farrell, whose character seems inspired by Leonard Bernstein’s song, “Suzanne.” She gladly reminisces about a question posed to her earlier in the day by a bright-eyed eight-year-old in her art class: “How do I know if what I see as blue is the same as it is to you?” the child asked. Suzanne, a free spirit, is thrilled by the curiosity and complexity of such a seemingly innocent question. Don, conversely, answers the question as if he were one of the failed Third Reich artists he described to Pete in season one; “The truth is,” Don says matter-of-factly, “that people may see things differently, but they don't really want to.” Don likewise seems to ape an authoritarian ethos when he tells a beatnik at the Gaslight Café in season one that, “people want to be told what to do so badly that they will listen to anyone.”

Another hint that Mad Men, particularly Don, is a critique of the duality between freedom and authoritarianism embedded in postwar American consumerism is the show’s thematic similarity to Simone de Beauvoir's Les Belles Images (1966), a novel about a professionally accomplished yet spiritually unfulfilled ad-woman in postwar Paris, France, who seems like she may have been part of the inspiration for Don Draper’s character. Simone de Beauvoir, like so many critical theorists of the era, including her husband, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and Frantz Fanon, dedicated their careers to exploring ways in which fascism was deeply embedded and often overlooked in modern and otherwise “free” democratic yet corporatist societies.

But the most concealed yet glaring clue that Mad Men – a show about the American advertising industry – is a Trojan Horse of a critique of consumerism as fascistic can be found buried late and very fleetingly in the final season of the show. Don, who is “riding the rails” west in the interest of escaping the stultifying fascism at Jim Hobart’s agency, McCann-Erickson, which had recently acquired his agency, sees a woman sunbathing by a motel pool. She reads, of all things, The Woman from Rome (1947), a novel by Alberto Moravia about the intersecting lives of many characters, most notably a prostitute and an idealistic scholar who, after an interrogation by fascist officers, during which he betrays his colleagues for reasons he himself is not able to understand, becomes completely disillusioned and nihilistic.

Though Moravia’s novel examines the identities of a prostitute, an intellectual, and a fascist henchman, the story is ultimately a study – like Mad Men – of individual identity in the context of the wider society. The Woman from Rome is thematically like Mad Men in terms of exploring individualism in the context of the wider cultural milieu that shapes individuals’ personal identities. Both The Woman from Rome and Mad Men, in short, are as much about the individuals’ environment (the nation state) as they are about the individual characters’ inner lives. Both stories also depict cultures in which fascism, in one form or another, is deeply entrenched in the day-to-day lives of the characters. But the power of that fascism often goes undetected by the characters affected by it.