How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

past. Fascist politics invokes a pure mythic past tragically destroyed.

In all fascist mythic pasts, an extreme version of the patriarchal family reigns supreme,

In the rhetoric of extreme nationalists, such a glorious past has been lost by the humiliation brought on by globalism, liberal cosmopolitanism,

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 patriarchal father’s authority derives from his strength, and strength is the chief authoritarian value.

Fascist politics repudiates any dark moments of a nation’s past.

In the United States, the history of the South is continually mythologized to whitewash slavery and was used to justify the refusal to grant black U.S. citizens voting rights until a century after slavery’s end.

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

To many white Americans, President Obama must have been corrupt, because his very occupation of the White House was a kind of corruption of the traditional order.