How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

fascist politics, essentially the danger of rhetoric that encourages fear and anger as a means to foment ethnic and religious division, seeping into public discourse.

Panic about immigration and the fear of losing the dominant culture to religious or ethnic minorities loathed by the majority groups are central to fascist politics.

In India, we are witnessing a transition from liberal citizenship practices to fascist ones. BJP’s fascist politics are not merely rhetorical.

Fascist politics invokes a pure mythic past tragically destroyed.

In the rhetoric of extreme nationalists, such a glorious past has been lost by the humiliation brought on by globalism, liberal cosmopolitanism, and respect for “universal values” such as equality. These values are supposed to have made the nation weak in the face of real and threatening challenges to the nation’s existence.

in the fascist imagination, the past invariably involves traditional, patriarchal gender roles. The fascist mythic past has a particular structure, which supports its authoritarian, hierarchical ideology. That past societies were rarely as

The function of the mythic past, in fascist politics, is to harness the emotion of nostalgia to the central tenets of fascist ideology—authoritarianism, hierarchy, purity, and struggle.

The Hindutva movement has fabricated a version of a mythic Indian past

India’s dominant nationalist party, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), adopted Hindutva ideology as its official creed and won power in the country using emotional rhetoric calling for a return to this fictional, patriarchal, harshly conservative, ethnically and religiously pure past.

H. R. Haldeman: “You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks,” Haldeman quoted Nixon as saying in a diary entry from April 1969. “The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

Fascist movements have been “draining swamps” for generations. Publicizing false charges of corruption while engaging in corrupt practices is typical of fascist politics,

Democracy, by permitting freedom of speech, opens the door for a demagogue to exploit the people’s need for a strongman; the strongman will use this freedom to prey on the people’s resentments and fears.

book 8 of The Republic argues that democracy is a self-undermining system whose very ideals lead to its own demise.

Fascist politics seeks to undermine public discourse by attacking and devaluing education, expertise, and language.

When education, expertise, and linguistic distinctions are undermined, there remains only power and tribal identity.

Russia’s antigay, antifeminist university agenda emerged out of a 1997 conference in Prague called the World Congress of Families, organized by Allan Carlson, an American historian at the “ultraconservative Hillsdale College in Michigan.”

In fascist ideology, the function of the education system is to glorify the mythic past, elevating the achievements of members of the nation and obscuring the perspectives and histories of those who do not belong.

Fascist politics traffics in delusions that create these kinds of false distinctions between “us” and “them,” regardless of obvious realities.

Trump’s continuing behavior—actions and speech that used to be considered remarkable—have real and disturbing consequences: “These actions are not simply coming to be regarded as more typical; they are coming to be seen as more normal. As a result, they will come to be seen as less bad and hence less worthy of outrage.”2