How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

We are thus told to pay attention to policies and institutions rather than the rhetoric they can follow.

In the United States, as Donald Trump’s campaign against immigration intensifies, it is sweeping untold numbers of undocumented workers of all backgrounds into anonymously run private detention centers, where they are concealed from view and public concern.

In June 2019, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez created a furor by describing these private detention camps as “concentration camps.” But Ocasio-Cortez’s description is accurate. Like concentration camps in Germany in the 1930s, they are hidden from public view. Journalists are barred from visiting these centers; they are open only to legal representatives and members of Congress.*3

There is an economic reality to this situation as well. We increasingly see connections between powerful business interests and the institutions of state terror.

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.

ICE’s mission is to reinforce a distinction between “us” and “them.”

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.

In all three countries, there is movement toward unifying institutions around loyalty to an ethnic identity, as in India, or loyalty to a single leader, as in the United States, where the most powerful political party is increasingly defined by fealty to Donald Trump.

as I show in the pages to follow, fascist ideology conflicts in principle with expertise, science, and truth.

Using crisis as anti-democratic opportunity is a classic fascist tactic.

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

In each of our local communities, there is at least one activist who has been dealing with a problem for generations.

It remains for us to join that struggle, realizing that it’s not to overcome a moment, but rather to make a permanent democratic commitment.

It is time to turn from our quarrels and to build our White ramparts again. This alliance with foreign races means nothing but death to us. It is our turn to guard our heritage from Mongol and Persian and Moor, before we become engulfed in a limitless foreign sea.1

The America First movement was the public face of pro-fascist sentiment in the United States at that time.

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.

fascist ideology seeks to naturalize group difference,

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.

“We” live in the rural heartland, where the pure values and traditions of the nation still miraculously exist despite the threat of cosmopolitanism from the nation’s cities, alongside the hordes of minorities who live there, emboldened by liberal tolerance.

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.

but fascist myths distinguish themselves with the creation of a glorious national history in which the members of the chosen nation ruled over others, the result of conquests and civilization-building achievements.

We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary for it to be a reality….Our myth is the nation, our myth is the greatness of the nation! And to this myth, this greatness, which we want to translate into a total reality, we subordinate everything.1

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.

Both of these remarks reveal an underlying patriarchal ideology that is typical of much of U.S. Republican Party policy.

“make Hungary great again.”

The clear message is that patriarchy is a virtuous past practice whose protection from liberalism must be enshrined in the fundamental law of the country.

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.

The strategic aim of these hierarchal constructions of history is to displace truth, and the invention of a glorious past includes the erasure of inconvenient realities. While fascist politics fetishizes the past, it is never the actual past that is fetishized.

Fascist politics repudiates any dark moments of a nation’s past. In early 2018, the Polish parliament passed a law making it illegal to suggest that Poland bore responsibility for any of the atrocities committed on its soil during the Nazi occupation of Poland, even the well-documented pogroms during this time.

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.

There already is a strong built-in bias toward forgetting and minimizing problematic acts one’s in-group committed in the past.

As Du Bois shows, whites in the South, with the collusion of Northern elites, brought an end to the Reconstruction era because of the widespread fear among the wealthy classes that newly enfranchised black citizens would join with poor whites in developing

a powerful labor movement to challenge the interests of capital.

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

Nixon’s rhetoric of “law and order” that followed this conversation was used to conceal a racist political agenda, one that was perfectly explicit within the White House’s walls.

Fascist politicians characteristically decry corruption in the state they seek to take over, which is bizarre, given that fascist politicians themselves are invariably vastly more corrupt than those they seek to supplant or defeat.

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

as democratic rhetoric and undemocratic intent.6

In the name of rooting out corruption and supposed bias, fascist politicians attack and diminish the institutions that might otherwise check their power.

But these liberties are contingent on the oppression of some groups.

This is classic fascist ideology with a hierarchy of value of worth between races.

specious

Socrates argues that people are not naturally led to self-governance but rather seek a strong leader to follow.

“This will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed.”

Lololol. They say they are for free speech….

The chief reason we have free speech in democracy is to facilitate public discourse about policy on the part of citizens and their representatives.

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.