How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

Schools introduce students to the dominant culture and its mythic past.

Where speech is a right, propagandists cannot attack dissent head-on; instead they must represent it as something violent and oppressive (a protest therefore becomes a “riot”).

Right now, a contemporary right-wing campaign is charging universities with hypocrisy on the issue of free speech.

Given the formal protections of academic freedom, universities in the United States host the freest domain of expression of any workplace.

Attacking the only workplaces in a country with genuine free-speech protections using the ideal of free speech is another instance of the familiar Orwellian nature of propaganda.

Fascism is about the dominant perspective, and so, during fascist moments, there is strong support for figures to denounce disciplines that teach perspectives other than the dominant ones—such as gender studies or, in the United States, African American studies or Middle Eastern studies.

[Nazis] believed that the women’s movement was part of an international Jewish conspiracy to subvert the German family and thus destroy the German race. The movement, it claimed, was encouraging women to assert their economic independence and to neglect their proper task of producing children. It was spreading the feminine doctrines of pacifism, democracy and “materialism.” By encouraging contraception and abortion and so lowering the birth rate, it was attacking the very existence of the German people.

As one example of policies inspired by the conference, the Russian government persecuted the European University of St. Petersburg for its liberal inclinations; Russian authorities have been trying to close it down for years and finally succeeded in 2016, when its teaching license was suspended.

In 2010, the state legislature of North Carolina was taken over by Republicans affiliated with the far-right “Tea Party” movement. Together with the Republican governor, Pat McCrory, they went after the distinguished institution the University of North Carolina.

These arguments rest on the grounds that being justified in our own positions requires regularly grappling with opposing ones (as well as on the grounds that there was no room in the first place).

Fascist politics, however, makes room for the study of myths as fact.

tendentiously

In fascist ideology, the goal of general education in the schools and universities is to instill pride in the mythic past; fascist education extols academic disciplines that reinforce hierarchal norms and national tradition.

The priorities here make sense when one realizes that in antidemocratic systems, the function of education is to produce obedient citizens structurally obliged to enter the workforce without bargaining power, and ideologically trained to think that the dominant group represents history’s greatest civilizational forces.

The far-right American radio host Rush Limbaugh has, on his popular radio show, denounced “the four corners of deceit: government, academia, science and media. Those institutions are now corrupt and exist by virtue of deceit. That’s how they promulgate themselves; it is how they prosper.”

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

All propaganda should be popular and should adapt its intellectual level to the receptive ability of the least intellectual of those whom it is desired to address. Thus it must sink its mental elevation deeper in proportion to the numbers of the mass whom it has to grip….The receptive ability of the masses is very limited, and their understanding small; on the other hand, they have a great

They’re eating the dogs.

power of forgetting. This being so, all effective propaganda must be confined to very few points which must be brought out in the form of slogans.12

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.

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. When it is successful, its audience is left with a destabilized sense of loss, and a well of mistrust and anger against those who it has been told are responsible for this loss.

Regular and repeated obvious lying is part of the process by which fascist politics destroys the information space.

Their function is rather to raise general suspicion about the credibility and the decency of their targets.

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 function of conspiracy theories is to impugn and malign their targets, but not necessarily by convincing their audience that they are true.

The idea that President Obama is secretly a Muslim pretending to be a Christian in order to overthrow the U.S. government makes rational sense of the irrational feeling of threat many white people had upon his ascension to the presidency.

demagogic

Attempting to counter such rhetoric with reason is akin to using a pamphlet against a pistol.

Disagreement requires a shared set of presuppositions about the world. Even dueling requires agreement about the rules. You and I might disagree about whether President Obama’s healthcare plan was good policy. But if you suspect that President Obama was an undercover Muslim spy seeking to destroy the United States, and I do not, our discussion will not be productive.

Allowing every opinion into the public sphere and giving it serious time for consideration, far from resulting in a process that is conducive to knowledge formation via deliberation, destroys its very possibility.

What happens when conspiracy theories become the coin of politics, and mainstream media and educational institutions are discredited, is that citizens no longer have a common reality that can serve as background for democratic deliberation.

Fascist politics seeks to destroy the relations of mutual respect between citizens that are the foundation of a healthy liberal democracy, replacing them ultimately with trust in one figure alone, the leader.

The resentment that flows from unmet expectations can be redirected against minority groups seen as not sharing dominant traditions; goods that go to them are represented by demagogic politicians, in a zero-sum way, as taking goods away from majority groups.

By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites….5

Extreme economic inequality is toxic to liberal democracy because it breeds delusions that mask reality, undermining the possibility of joint deliberation to solve society’s divisions.

Simple observation shows that in every such situation he who is more favored feels the never ceasing need to look upon his position as in some way “legitimate,” upon his advantage being “deserved,” and the other’s disadvantage being brought about by the latter’s “fault.”

Regardless of a society’s form of government, the contents of its fundamental belief system, or the complexity of its social and economic arrangements, human societies tend to organise as group-based social hierarchies in which at least one group enjoys greater social status and power than other groups.2

Fascists argue that natural hierarchies of worth in fact exist, and that their existence undermines the obligation for equal consideration.

There is no persuasive evidence for such hierarchies, despite centuries of attempts to establish them by religious edict or scientific investigation.

to represent the actual defenders of liberal democracy as defending its ideals only in the service of undermining them.

In the case of contemporary Russia, and much of the U.S. Christian right, liberal democracy leads to the legitimation of immigration and the supposed introduction of mass rape by immigrants, and to the acceptance of homosexuality together with its supposedly attendant sin of “degeneracy.”

Hierarchy benefits fascist politics in another way: Those who are accustomed to its benefits can be easily led to view liberal equality as a source of victimization.

It is in the very nature of empire to create a hierarchy; empires legitimize their colonial enterprises by a myth of their own exceptionalism.

Today, white Americans wildly overestimate the extent of U.S. progress toward racial equality over the past fifty years.

In a 2014 study, the psychologists Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson found that simply making salient the impending national shift to a “majority-minority” country significantly increased politically unaffiliated white Americans’ support for right-wing policies.

The exploitation of the feeling of victimization by dominant groups at the prospect of sharing citizenship and power with minorities is a universal element of contemporary international fascist politics.

For a white working-class male who is no longer employed, for structural economic reasons, to be told to “check your privilege” may increase the likelihood that he might see a level playing field in the agenda of white supremacy.

Fascist politics covers up structural inequality by attempting to invert, misrepresent, and subvert the long, hard effort to address it.

These ideas also reflect a somewhat nostalgic longing for that past world, when men believed they could simply take their places among the nation’s elite, simply by working hard and applying themselves. Alas, such a world never existed; economic elites have always managed to reproduce themselves despite the ideals of a meritocracy. But that hasn’t stopped men from believing it. It is the American Dream. And when men fail, they are humiliated, with nowhere to place their anger.7

When the Israeli right uses the unquestioned history of Jewish oppression to assert Jewish dominance over Palestinian lands and lives, they are relying on the sense of victimization to obscure the contradiction between a struggle for equal respect and a struggle for dominance.