How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

ICE is an organization that is like the police but is not the police. The job of the police in a democratic society is to keep communities safe. In practice, ICE collaborates with conventional American criminal justice institutions, including local police departments, but often ends up working at cross-purposes with them by creating fear in immigrant communities, whose members become less likely to report crime. As a result, some police chiefs have aligned themselves against ICE raids. The goal of ICE is not to make communities safer. ICE’s mission is to reinforce a distinction between “us” and “them.”

Fascist political tactics employed by an election’s winner materialize in the resulting state apparatus, not only between individuals.

Debates that require one to direct one’s eye instead to the streets force us to look away from the structural consequences of fascist rhetoric. By ignoring the state apparatus erected by those who entered into office through fascist politics, we behave as if fascist political tactics cannot transform once-democratic states into fascist ones. This is a thesis that history, as well as common sense, rejects.

Trump called the virus “the Chinese virus” in part because that is where it originated. But the reason he sticks to this label in the face of criticism is to reframe debate around nationalist conflict (and away from the incompetence of his administration). And when it began to take the virus seriously, the Trump administration immediately sought to use it as a means to justify retroactively its nationalist agenda of closing borders, and its suspicion of immigrants, by associating immigrants (and “sanctuary cities”) with the virus.

A moral of this book is that fascism is not a new threat, but rather a permanent temptation.

Fascist politics includes many distinct strategies: the mythic past, propaganda, anti-intellectualism, unreality, hierarchy, victimhood, law and order, sexual anxiety, appeals to the heartland, and a dismantling of public welfare and unity.

The dangers of fascist politics come from the particular way in which it dehumanizes segments of the population. By excluding these groups, it limits the capacity for empathy among other citizens, leading to the justification of inhumane treatment, from repression of freedom, mass imprisonment, and expulsion to, in extreme cases, mass extermination.

The most telling symptom of fascist politics is division. It aims to separate a population into an “us” and a “them.”

Fascist politicians justify their ideas by breaking down a common sense of history in creating a mythic past to support their vision for the present. They rewrite the population’s shared understanding of reality by twisting the language of ideals through propaganda and promoting anti-intellectualism, attacking universities and educational systems that might challenge their ideas. Eventually, with these techniques, fascist politics creates a state of unreality, in which conspiracy theories and fake news replace reasoned debate. As the common understanding of reality crumbles, fascist politics makes room for dangerous and false beliefs to take root. First, fascist ideology seeks to naturalize group difference, thereby giving the appearance of natural, scientific support for a hierarchy of human worth. When social rankings and divisions solidify, fear fills in for understanding between groups. Any progress for a minority group stokes feelings of victimhood among the dominant population. Law and order politics has mass appeal, casting “us” as lawful citizens and “them,” by contrast, as lawless criminals whose behavior poses an existential threat to the manhood of the nation. Sexual anxiety is also typical of fascist politics as the patriarchal hierarchy is threatened by growing gender equity.

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.

Here, Mussolini makes clear that the fascist mythic past is intentionally mythical. 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.

But why is patriarchy so strategically central to fascist politics? In a fascist society, the leader of the nation is analogous to the father in the traditional patriarchal family.

If one can convince a population that they are rightfully exceptional, that they are destined by nature or by religious fate to rule other populations, one has already convinced them of a monstrous lie.

In the United States, Confederate monuments arose well after the Civil War had ended, as part of a mythologized history of a heroic Southern past in which the horrors of slavery were de-emphasized. President Trump denounced the task of connecting of this mythologized past to slavery as an attempt to victimize white Americans for celebrating their “heritage.” Erasing the real past legitimates the vision of an ethnically pure, virtuous past nation.

In order to honestly debate what our country should do, what policies it should adopt, we need a common basis of reality, including about our own past. History in a liberal democracy must be faithful to the norm of truth, yielding an accurate vision of the past, rather than a history provided for political reasons. Fascist politics, by contrast, characteristically contains within it a demand to mythologize the past, creating a version of national heritage that is a weapon for political gain.

Political propaganda uses the language of virtuous ideals to unite people behind otherwise objectionable ends.

Corruption, to the fascist politician, is really about the corruption of purity rather than of law.

Just as fascist politics attacks the rule of law in the name of anticorruption, it also purports to protect freedom and individual liberties. But these liberties are contingent on the oppression of some groups.

The chief reason we have free speech in democracy is to facilitate public discourse about policy on the part of citizens and their representatives. But the kind of debate where one shrieks insults at another, not to mention engages in physical violence and then denounces protest as an attack on speech, is not the relevant kind of public discourse that free speech rights are meant to protect.

Fascist politics seeks to undermine public discourse by attacking and devaluing education, expertise, and language. Intelligent debate is impossible without an education with access to different perspectives, a respect for expertise when one’s own knowledge gives out, and a rich enough language to precisely describe reality. When education, expertise, and linguistic distinctions are undermined, there remains only power and tribal identity.

In liberal democracy, political leaders are supposed to consult with those they represent, as well as with experts and scientists who can most accurately explain the demands of reality on policy. Fascist leaders are instead “men of action” with no use for consultation or deliberation.

By rejecting the value of expertise, fascist politicians also remove any requirement for sophisticated debate. Reality is always more complex than our means of representing it. Scientific language requires ever more complex terminology, to make distinctions that would be invisible without it. Social reality is at least as complex as the reality of physics. In a healthy liberal democracy, a public language with a rich and varied vocabulary to make distinctions is a vital democratic institution. Without it, healthy public discourse is impossible. Fascist politics seeks to degrade and debase the language of politics; fascist politics thereby seeks to mask reality.

Regular and repeated obvious lying is part of the process by which fascist politics destroys the information space. A fascist leader can replace truth with power, ultimately lying without consequence. By replacing the world with a person, fascist politics makes us unable to assess arguments by a common standard. The fascist politician possesses specific techniques to destroy information spaces and break down reality.

But the notion of a “marketplace of ideas,” like that of a free market generally, is predicated on a utopian conception of consumers. In the case of the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas, the utopian assumption is that conversation works by exchange of reasons, with one party offering its reasons, which are then countered by the reasons of an opponent, until the truth ultimately emerges. But conversation is not just used to communicate information. Conversation is also used to shut out perspectives, raise fears, and heighten prejudice.

Allowing every opinion into the public sphere and giving it serious time for consideration, far from resulting in a process that is conducive to knowledge formation via deliberation, destroys its very possibility. Responsible media in a liberal democracy must, in the face of this threat, try to report the truth, and resist the temptation to report on every possible theory, no matter how fantastical, as long as someone advances it.

Ever since Plato and Aristotle wrote on the topic, political theorists have known that democracy cannot flourish on soil poisoned by inequality. It is not merely that the resentments bred by such divisions are tempting targets for a demagogue. The more important point is that dramatic inequality poses a mortal danger to the shared reality required for a healthy liberal democracy. Those who benefit from inequalities are often burdened by certain illusions that prevent them from recognizing the contingency of their privilege. When inequalities grow particularly stark, these illusions tend to metastasize. What dictator, king, or emperor has not suspected that he was chosen by the gods for his role? What colonial power has not entertained delusions of its ethnic superiority, or the superiority of its religion, culture, and way of life, superiority that supposedly justifies its imperial expansions and conquests? In the antebellum American South, whites believed that slavery was a great gift to those who were enslaved. The harshness of Southern planters to enslaved persons who sought to flee or rebel was in no small part due to their conviction that such behavior revealed lack of gratitude.

Fascist ideology, then, takes advantage of a human tendency to organize society hierarchically, and fascist politicians represent the myths that legitimize their hierarchies as immutable facts. Their principle justification of hierarchy is nature itself.

In “Why Now? It’s the Empire, Stupid,” a June 2016 article in The Nation, the NYU historian Greg Grandin argues that Donald Trump’s politics is effective in the context of the 2016 campaign because it comes at a time of decline for the American empire.

The exploitation of the feeling of victimization by dominant groups at the prospect of sharing citizenship and power with minorities is a universal element of contemporary international fascist politics.

This kind of nationalism, the nationalism that arises from oppression, is not fascist in origin. These forms of nationalism, in their original formations, are equality-driven nationalist movements.

When the Israeli right uses the unquestioned history of Jewish oppression to assert Jewish dominance over Palestinian lands and lives, they are relying on the sense of victimization to obscure the contradiction between a struggle for equal respect and a struggle for dominance. Oppression is a powerful motivation for action, but the questions of who is wielding it when, under what context and against whom, remain eternally crucial.

Nationalism is at the core of fascism. The fascist leader employs a sense of collective victimhood to create a sense of group identity that is by its nature opposed to the cosmopolitan ethos and individualism of liberal democracy. The group identity can be variously based—on skin color, on religion, on tradition, on ethnic origin. But it is always contrasted with a perceived other against whom the nation is to be defined. Fascist nationalism creates a dangerous “them” to guard against, at times to battle with, to control, in order to restore group dignity.

Fascist law-and-order rhetoric is explicitly meant to divide citizens into two classes: those of the chosen nation, who are lawful by nature, and those who are not, who are inherently lawless.

Fascist propaganda does not, of course, merely present members of targeted groups as criminals. To ensure the right kind of moral panic about these groups, its members are represented as particular kinds of threats to the fascist nation—most important, and most typical, a threat to its purity.

Transgender individuals and homosexuals are used to heighten anxiety and panic about the threat to traditional male gender roles.

Given the significance of gender hierarchy to fascist ideology, that politicians have been trying to foment mass hysteria about trans women is unsurprising if this effort is understood as a manifestation of fascist political tactics and a sign that fascist politics is ascendant. Conversely, the growing acceptance of trans women is a strong affirmation of liberal democratic norms.

By employing the politics of sexual anxiety, a political leader represents, albeit indirectly, freedom and equality as threats. The expression of gender identity or sexual preference is an exercise of freedom. By presenting homosexuals or transgender women as a threat to women and children—and, by extension, to men’s ability to protect them—fascist politics impugns the liberal ideal of freedom. A woman’s right to have an abortion is also an exercise of freedom. By representing abortion as a threat to children—and to men’s control over them—fascist politics impugns the liberal ideal of freedom. A person’s right to marry whom they wish is an exercise of freedom; by representing members of one religion, or one race, as a threat because of the possibility of intermarriage is to impugn the liberal ideal of freedom.

The United States has its own history of policies that feed stereotypes and make them appear real. The structure of policing and incarceration, and the white reaction to them, is central to explaining how racialized mass incarceration in the United States constructs and seemingly legitimates negative group stereotypes.

Labor unions are a powerful weapon against the development of an unequal economic sphere. Because fascism thrives under conditions of economic uncertainty, where fear and resentment can be mobilized to set citizens against one another, labor unions guard against fascist politics’ gaining a foothold.

The basis of a commitment to a generous universal welfare system is an expression of the belief in the fundamental value of each citizen. The liberal democrat does not pit “makers” against “takers” in a competition for value. A generous social welfare system unites a community in mutual bonds of care, rather than dividing it into factions that demagogues can exploit. Labor unions bring together workers from different ethnic and religious backgrounds and across gender identity and sexual orientation in common goals—cooperating to bargain for a better deal.

When voters in a democratic society yearn for a CEO as president, they are responding to their own implicit fascist impulses.