How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

Since publishing How Fascism Works in September 2018, global events have only substantiated my concerns about modern fascism.

I wrote this book as a warning about 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.

For years in Europe, there was talk of a “Spanish exception” to the rise of the far right in Europe; supposedly their long experience of fascism in the twentieth century protected them from making the same mistake again. In 2018, this ended, as Vox, a far-right party harkening back to Spain’s fascist dictator Franco, raising fear and panic about immigration and loss of traditional culture, was formed.

People often assume that fascist tactics can achieve success only where democratic institutions, and commitment to democratic culture, is already weak. We are thus told to pay attention to policies and institutions rather than the rhetoric they can follow.

İsmet Akça, a political science professor who was removed from his position at Istanbul Yildiz Technical University, said, “These people being purged are not just democratic left-oriented people, they are very good scientists, very good academics. By purging them, the government is also attacking the very idea of the higher education, the very idea of the universities in this country.”

In 2017, after winning a national referendum giving him new, sweeping, almost dictatorial powers, Erdoğan introduced a new educational curriculum for the schools. Its goal was to de-emphasize secular ideals and eliminate scientific theories that run counter to religious ideology, such as evolution.

Limbaugh, here, provides a perfect example of how fascist politics targets expertise, mocking and devaluing

Fascist leaders are instead “men of action” with no use for consultation or deliberation.

Once universities and experts have been delegitimized, fascist politicians are free to create their own realities, shaped by their own individual will.

By rejecting the value of expertise, fascist politicians also remove any requirement for sophisticated debate.

Fascist politics seeks to degrade and debase the language of politics; fascist politics thereby seeks to mask reality.

In a healthy liberal democracy, language is a tool of information. The goal of fascist propaganda is not merely to mock and sneer at robust and complex public debate about policy; it is to eliminate its possibility.

It is a core tenet of fascist politics that the goal of oratory should not be to convince the intellect, but to sway the will. The anonymous author of an article in a 1925 Italian fascist magazine writes, “The mysticism of Fascism is the proof of its triumph. Reasoning does not attract, emotion does.”

Throughout Mein Kampf, Hitler is clear that the aim of propaganda is to replace reasoned argument in the public sphere with irrational fears and passions. In a February 2018 interview, Steve Bannon said, “We got elected on Drain the Swamp, Lock Her Up, Build a Wall….This was pure anger. Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls.”15

In fascist politics, universities are debased in public discourse, and academics are undermined as legitimate sources of knowledge and expertise, represented as radical “Marxists” or “feminists” spreading a leftist ideological agenda under the guise of research.

When propaganda succeeds at twisting ideals against themselves and universities are undermined and condemned as sources of bias, reality itself is cast into doubt. We can’t agree on truth. Fascist politics replaces reasoned debate with fear and anger.

Fascist politics exchanges reality for the pronouncements of a single individual, or perhaps a political party.

By replacing the world with a person, fascist politics makes us unable to assess arguments by a common standard.

Anyone looking at current U.S. politics, or current Russian politics, or current Polish politics, would immediately note the presence and political potency of conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy theories function to denigrate and delegitimize their targets, by connecting them, mainly symbolically, to problematic acts.

Conspiracy theories are a critical mechanism used to delegitimize the mainstream media, which fascist politicians accuse of bias for failing to cover false conspiracies.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was at the basis of Nazi ideology. The Protocols is an early-twentieth-century hoax, supposedly written as an instruction manual to Jews as a plot for world domination. Scholars have discovered that it was liberally plagiarized from Maurice Joly’s 1864 book, A Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, a political satire set as a debate in hell between Montesquieu, who makes the case for liberalism, and Machiavelli, who makes the case for tyranny.

Machiavelli’s arguments for tyranny are transformed, in The Protocols, into arguments made by the “Elders of Zion,” supposedly Jew...

It sold millions of copies throughout the world in the 1920s, including in the United States, where half a million copies were mass-produced and distributed by Henry Ford, the automaker, by 1925.

According to The Protocols, Jews are at the center of a global conspiracy that dominates the most respected mainstream media outlets and the global economic system, using them to spread democracy, capitalism, and communism, all masks for Jewish interests.

The University of Connecticut philosopher Michael Lynch has used the example of “Pizzagate” as evidence for the thesis that conspiracy theories are not intended to be treated as ordinary information.

Lynch’s point is that the “Pizzagate” conspiracy was not intended to be treated as ordinary information. The function of conspiracy theories is to impugn and malign their targets, but not necessarily by convincing their audience that they are true.

Donald Trump came to mainstream political attention by attacking the press for their supposed censorship of the conspiracy theory called “birtherism,” the belief that President Obama was born in Kenya and therefore not eligible to be president of the United States.

Fascist politicians discredit the “liberal media” for censoring discussion of outlandish right-wing conspiracy theories, which suggests mendacious behavior covered up by the veneer of liberal democratic institutions.

The goal of the conspiracies is to cause widespread mistrust and paranoia, justifying drastic measures, such as censoring or shutting down the “liberal” media and imprisoning “enemies of the state.”

George Soros is an American billionaire philanthropist of Hungarian Jewish origin. Soros’s philanthropic organization, the Open Society Foundations, has been deeply involved in democracy-building efforts in more than a hundred countries, including in his native Hungary, where his support also led to the founding of Central European University, Hungary’s leading university. In

Hannah Arendt,

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she writes: Mysteriousness as such became the first criterion for the choice of topics….The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one of the chief characteristics of modern masses. They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part. Repetition…is only important because it convinces them of consistency in time.1

These conspiracy theories are effective nevertheless because they provide simple explanations for otherwise irrational emotions, such as resentment or xenophobic fear in the face of perceived threats.

In fascist ideology, in times of crisis and need, the state reserves support for members of the chosen nation, for “us” and not “them.” The justification is invariably because “they” are lazy, lack a work ethic, and cannot be trusted with state funds and because “they” are criminal and seek only to live off state largesse.

In fascist politics, “they” can be cured of laziness and thievery by hard labor. This is why the gates of Auschwitz had emblazoned on them the slogan ARBEIT MACHT FREI—work shall make you free.

Their remedy was to dismantle the state and replace it with the nation. In contrast to the state, the nation lacks mechanisms like “welfare,” which Hitler denounces for robbing individuals of their capacity for economic independence. The state represented the redistribution of the wealth of hardworking citizens to “undeserving” minorities outside the dominant ethnic or religious community, who would take advantage of them.

And yet a dominant theme emerging from research on white Americans’ attitude toward welfare is that the single largest predictor of white Americans’ attitude toward programs described as “welfare” is their attitude toward the judgment that black people are lazy.

‘Race Coding’ and White Opposition to Welfare,” “The perception that blacks are lazy has a larger effect on white Americans’ welfare policy preferences than does economic self-interest, beliefs about individualism or views about the poor in general.”

There is widespread ignorance of the fact that the majority of those who benefit from welfare programs are white.

in the previous chapter, the valorization of self-sufficiency is at the core of fascist ideology, inextricably intermingled with hostility toward certain hated minority groups.

The “hard work” versus “laziness” dichotomy is, like “law-abiding” versus “criminal,” at the heart of the fascist division between “us” and “them.” But what is most terrifying about these rhetorical divides is that it is typical of fascist movements to attempt to transform myths about “them” into reality through social policy.

The essential characteristic of fascist propaganda was never its lies, for this is something more or less common to propaganda everywhere and of every time. The essential thing was that they exploited the age-old Occidental prejudice which confuses reality with truth, and made that “true” which until then could only be stated as a lie.3

By subjecting members of a despised minority to brutal treatment and then sending them as refugees across borders into other countries, fascist movements can create an apparent reality underlying their claim that members of that group are lazy and dependent on state aid or petty crime. By such methods, they also export the conditions that make fascist politics effective.

Arendt’s point is that fascist unreality is a promissory note on the way to a future reality that transforms into fact at least some basis of what was once stereotyped myth.

In this way, as a prelude to ethnic cleansing or genocide, governments will artificially create the conditions inside the state that seem to legitimize the subsequent brutal treatment of the population.

In his 2015 book, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder writes: During the transition from Czechoslovak to Slovak law, Slovaks and others stole with enthusiasm from the Jews. Tiso and the leaders of the new state saw this as part of a natural process whereby Slovaks would displace Jews (and, in some measure, Slovak Catholics would displace Slovak Protestants) as the middle class. Laws expropriating Jews thus created an artificial Jewish question: what to do with all of these impoverished people?4 Snyder subsequently explains that the solution Slovak leaders chose was to deport their Jewish population to Auschwitz, after first seeking assurances from the Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler that the fifty-eight thousand Slovakian Jews they sent would not be returned.

The treatment of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar robbed them of opportunities to work, and the constant harassment and policing no doubt created a mental health crisis among the population. All of this served to reinforce negative stereotypes of Rohingya people, which served to legitimize the brutal and inhumane treatment of them that culminated in the 2017 ethnic cleansing of their population as well as raising opposition to their acceptance as refugees in other lands.

In a description of how French police treat Algerians, Fanon concisely spells out how the regular practice of the colonizer—in this case, the French police in Algeria—can create the material conditions underlying a racist stereotype. The French stereotype of Arabs was that they were shifty, sneaky, dirty, and distrustful. But Fanon points out that this stereotype was created by the way that the French police regularly treated Arabs, and the fact that French rule impoverished them.

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.