How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

White Americans constitute 77 percent of the U.S. population, and black Americans 13 percent. Yet more black Americans are incarcerated than white Americans. There has scarcely been a time in history when one group has composed so much of the world’s prison population; black Americans may be only 13 percent of the U.S. population, but they are 9 percent of the world’s prison population. If the system of justice in the United States were fair, and if the 38 million black Americans were as prone to crime as the average ethnic group in the world (where an ethnic group is, for example, the 61 million Italians, or the 45 million Hindu Gujarati), you would expect that black Americans would also be about 9 percent of the 2013 estimated world population of 7.135 billion people. There would then be well over 600 million black Americans in the world. If you think that black Americans are like anybody else, then the nation of black America should be the third-largest nation on earth, twice as large as the United States.

The number of countries in the study with high inequality and high union density was zero. 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.