How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

But when, exactly, was America great, in the eyes of the Trump campaign? During the nineteenth century, when the United States enslaved its black population? During Jim Crow, when black Americans in the South were prevented from voting? A hint about the decade that was most salient to the Trump campaign emerges from a November 18, 2016, Hollywood Reporter interview with Steve Bannon, the then president-elect’s chief strategist, in which he remarks about the era to come that “it will be as exciting as the 1930s.” In short, the era when the United States had its most sympathy for fascism.

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. Though

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.

Fascist politics can dehumanize minority groups even when an explicitly fascist state does not arise.3

The most telling symptom of fascist politics is division. It aims to separate a population into an “us” and a “them.”

the very specific way that fascist politics distinguishes “us” from “them,” appealing to ethnic, religious, or racial distinctions, and using this division to shape ideology and, ultimately, policy. Every mechanism of fascist politics works to create or solidify this distinction.

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.

First, fascist ideology seeks to naturalize group difference, thereby giving the appearance of natural, scientific support for a hierarchy of human worth. When social rankings and divisions solidify, fear fills in for understanding between groups. 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.

As the fear of “them” grows, “we” come to represent everything virtuous.

After the war, Article 14 was particularly poignant, solemnly affirming the right of every person to seek asylum.

it acknowledged that certain categories of people might once again have to flee the nation states under whose flag they once lived.

The suffering of strangers can solidify the structure of fascism. But it can also trigger empathy once another lens is clicked into place.

In all fascist mythic pasts, an extreme version of the patriarchal family reigns supreme, even just a few generations ago.

Further back in time, the mythic past was a time of glory of the nation, with wars of conquest led by patriotic generals, its armies filled with its countrymen, able-bodied, loyal warriors whose wives were at home raising the next generation. In the present, these myths become the basis of the nation’s identity under fascist politics. 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.

This uniformity—linguistic, religious, geographical, or ethnic—can be perfectly ordinary in some nationalist movements, 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.

The fascist mythic past has a particular structure, which supports its authoritarian, hierarchical ideology.

This imagined history provides proof to support the imposition of hierarchy in the present, and it dictates how contemporary society should look and behave.

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

in the soil of Europe’s original homeland.”2 The fascist mythic past exists to aid in changing the present.

The patriarchal family is one ideal that fascist politicians intend to create in society—or return to, as they claim.

But why is patriarchy so strategically central to fascist politics?

In a fascist society, the leader of the nation is analogous to the father in the traditional patriarchal family. The leader is the father of his nation, and his strength and power are the source of his legal authority, just as the strength and power of the father of the family in patriarchy are supposed to be the source of his ultimate moral authority over his children and wife.

“the kernel of Nazi thinking on the women’s question” as “a dogma of inequality between the sexes as immutable as that between the races.”

“oppression of women in Nazi Germany in fact furnishes the most extreme case of anti-feminism in the 20th century.”

Most of its politicians openly abhor homosexuality. It is anti-immigrant, and the European Union has condemned its most antidemocratic measures, such as creating laws allowing government ministers (who are party members) full control of state media by granting them power to fire and hire the broadcasting chiefs of Poland’s radio and television stations.

The new bill proposed by PiS would have eliminated rape and incest as exceptions to the ban on abortion, with incarceration as a penalty for women who pursue the procedure.

“Just What Are Traditional Gender Roles?” In it, he claims that women were traditionally regarded as property in all European cultures, except for Jewish societies and some gypsy groups, which were matrilineal: This was why the Jews were so keen to attack these ideas, because the patrilineal passing of property was innately offensive to their culture. Europe only has this absurd notion of women as independent entities because of organized subversion by agents of Judaism.7

In 1990, the Hutu power newspaper Kangura published the Hutu Ten Commandments. The first three are about gender. The first declared anyone a traitor who married a Tutsi woman, thereby polluting the pure Hutu bloodline. The third called on Hutu women to ensure that their husbands, brothers, and sons would not marry Tutsi women. The second commandment is: 2. Every Hutu should know that our Hutu daughters are more suitable and conscientious in their role as woman, wife and mother of the family. Are they not beautiful, good secretaries and more honest?

Both of these remarks reveal an underlying patriarchal ideology that is typical of much of U.S. Republican Party policy. These politicians could simply have given voice to the most direct description of the facts, which is that Trump’s remarks demean half our fellow citizens. Instead, Romney’s remark, in language evocative of that used in the Hutu Ten Commandments, describes women exclusively in terms of traditionally subordinate roles in families, as “wives and daughters”—not even as sisters.

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 Science of the Swastika, his 2008

While fascist politics fetishizes the past, it is never the actual past that is fetishized.

These invented histories also diminish or entirely extinguish the nation’s past sins. It is typical for fascist politicians to represent a country’s actual history in conspiratorial terms, as a narrative concocted by liberal elites and cosmopolitans to victimize the people of the true “nation.”

In the United States, Confederate monuments arose well after the Civil War had ended, as part of a mythologized history of a heroic Southern past in which the horrors of slavery were de-emphasized. President Trump denounced the task of connecting of this mythologized past to slavery a...

Turkey’s Article 301 of its penal code outlaws “insulting Turkishness,” including mentioning the Armenian genocide during the First World War. Such attempts to legislate the erasure of a nation’s past are characteristic of fascist regimes.

Le Front National is France’s extremist far-right party, and the first neofascist party in Western Europe to achieve significant electoral success. Its original leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was convicted of Holocaust denial. Le Pen’s successor as leader of Le Front National is his daughter, Marine Le Pen, who finished second in the French presidential elections in 2017. The role of the French police in rounding up French Jews to be sent to Nazi death camps under the Vichy government is well documented. But during the 2017 election campaign, Marine Le Pen denied French complicity in one particularly large roundup of French Jews, in which thirteen thousand were gathered at the Vélodrome d’Hiver cycling track and sent to Nazi death camps. In a television interview in April 2017, she said: “I don’t think France is responsible for the Vel’ d’Hiv….I think that, generally speaking, if there are people responsible, it’s those who were in power at the time. It’s not France.” She added that the dominant liberal culture had “taught our children that they have all the reasons to criticize [the country], and to only see, perhaps, the darkest aspects of our history. So, I want them to be proud of being French again.”

Just as politicians in the U.S. Republican Party seek to harness white resentment (and votes) by denouncing accurate historical scholarship about the brutality of slavery as a way to “victimize” American whites, especially from the South, AfD seeks to garner votes by representing the accurate history of Germany’s Nazi past as a form of victimization of the German people.

When it does not simply invent a past to weaponize the emotion of nostalgia, fascist politics cherry-picks the past, avoiding anything that would diminish unreflective adulation of the nation’s glory.

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.

Fascist politics, by contrast, characteristically contains within it a demand to mythologize the past, creating a version of national heritage that is a weapon for political gain.

likely to suffer from a sort of amnesia of wrongdoing when the perpetrators are characterized explicitly as their countrymen. When American subjects were presented with the agents of the violence as Americans (rather than Europeans), they had significantly worse memory for negative historical events, and “what participants did recall was phrased more dismissively when the perpetrators were in-group members.” Rotella and Richeson’s work builds on a body of previous work with similar results.13

central narrative in the justification of the South’s refusal to grant blacks the vote is a false history of the period known as Reconstruction,

Reconstruction ended when Southern whites enacted laws that had the practical effect of banning black citizens from voting. White southerners propagated the myth that this was necessary because black citizens were unable to self-govern; in the histories advanced at the time, Reconstruction was represented as a time of unparalleled political corruption, with stability restored only when whites were again given full power.

W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1935 masterwork, Black Reconstruction, is

The final chapter of Black Reconstruction is titled “The Propaganda of History.” In it, Du Bois harshly denounces the practice of appealing to the ideals of historical scholarship, truth and objectivity, to advance political goals. To do so, Du Bois declares, is to undermine the discipline of history. Historians who advance a false narrative for political gain under the treasured ideals of truth and objectivity, according to Du Bois, are guilty of transforming history into propaganda.

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

U.S. president Richard Nixon’s “war on crime” is a good example of masking problematic goals with virtuous ones.

Elizabeth...

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W.E.B. Du Bois writes in Black Reconstruction, “the center of the corruption charge…was in fact that poor men were ruling and taxing rich men.”3 And in describing the chief rhetorical claim behind disenfranchising black citizens, Du Bois writes: The south, finally, with almost complete unity, named the negro as the main cause of southern corruption. They said, and reiterated this charge, until it became history: that the cause of dishonesty during reconstruction was the fact that 4,000,000 disfranchised black laborers, after 250 years of exploitation, had been given a legal right to have some voice in their own government, in the kinds of goods they would make and the sort of work they would do, and in the distribution of the wealth which they created.4