How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

The black auditors she used, with very similar résumés, had a 14 percent callback rate when they did not report a criminal record—suggesting that black Americans who report no criminal record already fare worse in seeking entry-level employment than white Americans who do report a criminal record.

Rising incarceration rates among black populations can naturally be expected to lead to rising unemployment among that population. White American stereotypes of black Americans as lazy and violent derive from the very beginning of the United States, where these attributes were regularly used to justify the enslavement of America’s black population.

The mechanisms underlying the racialized mass incarceration of black Americans are part of a long tradition of justifying stereotypes of this population as lazy—that is, unable, because supposedly unwilling, to gain employment.

In the 1960s, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations responded to the civil rights movement by pairing job training and antipoverty programs with punitive anticrime measures. When Richard Nixon ran for the office of president in 1968, he used urban unrest to change the subject from social justice to law and order.

There are disagreements and open questions in the now large body of literature on the causes of the current crisis in mass incarceration in the United States. But there is no disagreement that the combination of harsh, punitive crime policies for black American communities coupled with drastic cuts to social welfare programs and job training has led to tragic consequences and a self-reinforcing pattern of repeated stereotypes and policies.

Pointing to this population, politicians employing fascist tactics can speak of a crisis of laziness supposedly underlying multigenerational poverty, rather than to its real causes. The “laziness” can then supposedly be “cured” by forcing this population into “hard work” by slashing the safety net further. Given that the evidence suggests whites are not hiring black men, especially formerly incarcerated ones, this would then simply further entrench such patterns of unemployment—thereby perpetuating a flawed stereotype that is useful in fascist politics.

However, what has not accompanied this shift is an awareness that the underlying motivations for the hard-on-crime rhetoric and policies were fascist, set up to establish an us-versus-them dichotomy and reinforce preexisting hierarchal stereotypes.

One roadblock to the kind of us/them divisions described above is unity and empathy along class lines, exemplified in labor unions.