How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

When fascist politics is at its most successful, the leader is regarded by the followers as singularly trustworthy.

In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump repeatedly and openly lied, and openly flouted long-sacrosanct liberal norms. The U.S. mainstream media dutifully reported his many lies. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, followed liberal norms of equal respect; her one violation of these norms, which occurred when she called some of the supporters of her opponent “deplorables,” was endlessly thrown back in her face. And yet again and again, Americans found Trump to be the more authentic candidate. By giving voice to shocking sentiments that were presumed to be unsuitable for public discourse, Trump was taken to be speaking his mind. This is how, by exhibiting classic demagogic behavior, a politician can come to be seen as the more authentic candidate, even when he is manifestly dishonest.

In another kind of propagandistic twisted meaning, politicians can convey the message that they are the representative of the common good by explicitly attacking the common good. To see how this perplexing situation is possible, one can look at how in the U.S. political system these conditions have arisen in the recent past.

Two factors have eroded the protections that representative democracy is supposed to provide. First, candidates must raise huge sums to run for office (ever more so since the 2010 Citizens United decision by the U.S. Supreme Court). As a result, they represent the interests of their large donors. However, because it is a democracy, they must also try to make the case that they represent the common interest. They must pretend that the best interests of the multinational corporations that fund their campaigns are also the common interest.

Second, some voters do not share democratic values, and politicians must appeal to them as well. When large inequalities exist, the problem is aggravated. Some voters are simply more attracted to a system that favors their own particular religion, race, gender, or birth position. 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. Some voters see such groups, rather than the behavior of economic elites, as responsible for their unmet expectations. Candidates must attract these voters while appearing not to flout democratic values.

They want politicians to tell it like it is. And they will seek such candidates even in the absence of a clear set of values they share.

However, this is not a promising strategy in certain political climates. It is difficult to represent oneself as genuinely representing the common interest in an environment of general distrust. It does not appeal to voters who reject democratic values, such as racial or gender equality, or those who simply deny that inequalities exist. And there will be fierce competition for voters who support democratic values between candidates representing themselves as their champions.

Such open rejection of democratic values would be taken as political bravery, as a signal of authenticity. It was not without justification that Plato saw in democracy’s freedoms an allowance for the rise of a skilled demagogue who would take advantage of these freedoms to tear reality asunder, offering himself or herself as a substitute.

divisions are tempting targets for a demagogue. The more important point is that dramatic inequality poses a mortal danger to the shared reality required for a healthy liberal democracy. Those who benefit from inequalities are often burdened by certain illusions that prevent them from recognizing the contingency of their privilege. When inequalities grow particularly stark, these illusions tend to metastasize. What dictator, king, or emperor has not suspected that he was chosen by the gods for his role?

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. Those who benefit from large inequalities are inclined to believe that they have earned their privilege, a delusion that prevents them from seeing reality as it is. Even those who demonstrably do not benefit from hierarchies can be made to believe that they do; hence the use of racism to ensnare poor white citizens in the United States into supporting tax cuts for extravagantly wealthy whites who happen to share their skin color.

Liberal equality means that those with different levels of power and wealth nevertheless are regarded as having equal worth. Liberal equality is, by definition, meant to be compatible with economic inequality. And yet, when economic inequality is sufficiently extreme, the myths that are required to sustain it are bound to threaten liberal equality as well.

Hierarchy is a kind of mass delusion, one readily exploited by fascist politics.

The natural law allegedly places men over women, and members of the chosen nation of the fascist over other groupings.

In it, he denounces the principles of liberty and equality enshrined in the U.S. Constitution as violations of the laws of nature:

The Cornerstone Speech makes vivid the characteristically fascist logic that liberal democratic principles are in conflict with nature and must therefore be abandoned:

white American citizens are widely ignorant of this fact, believing that racial economic inequality has dramatically narrowed.2 Forty-five percent of President Donald Trump’s supporters believe that whites are the most discriminated-against racial group in America;

This feeling of threat can be marshaled politically as support for right-wing movements. This dialectic is far from native to the United States; it is rather a general feature of group psychology. 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.

The case is similar with the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States today. Its opponents try to represent the slogan as the illiberal nationalist claim that only black lives matter. But the slogan is hardly intended as a repudiation of the value of white lives in the United States. Rather, it intends to point out that in the United States, white lives have been taken to matter more than other lives. The point of the slogan Black Lives Matter is to call attention to a failure of equal respect. In its context, it means, “Black lives matter too.”

At the core of fascism is loyalty to tribe, ethnic identity, religion, tradition, or, in a word, nation.

If I grew up in a country in which my religious holidays were the national holidays, it would feel like marginalization to have my children grow up in a more egalitarian country in which their religious holidays and traditions are just one of many. If I grew up in a society in which every character in the movies I see and the television programs I watch looked like me, it would feel like marginalization to see the occasional protagonist who does not. I would start to feel that my culture is no longer “for me.” If I grew up seeing men as heroes and women as passive objects who worship them, it would feel like oppression to be robbed of my felt birthright by having to regard women as equals in the workplace or on the battlefield. Rectifying unjust inequalities will always bring pain to those who benefited from such injustices. This pain will inevitably be experienced by some as oppression.

Promulgating a mythical hierarchal past works to create unreasonable expectations. When these expectations are not met, it feels like victimhood.8

Patriarchy, according to Manne, is the hierarchal ideology that engenders the unreasonable expectations of high status. Misogyny is what faces women who are blamed when patriarchal expectations are left unfulfilled. The logic of fascist politics has a vivid model in Manne’s logic of misogyny.

Nationalism is at the core of fascism. The fascist leader employs a sense of collective victimhood to create a sense of group identity that is by its nature opposed to the cosmopolitan ethos and individualism of liberal democracy. The group identity can be variously based—on skin color, on religion, on tradition, on ethnic origin. But it is always contrasted with a perceived other against whom the nation is to be defined. Fascist nationalism creates a dangerous “them” to guard against, at times to battle with, to control, in order to restore group dignity.

The word “criminal” attributes a certain type of character to someone. Psychologists have studied a practice they call linguistic intergroup bias. It turns out we tend to describe the actions of those we regard as one of “us” quite differently than we describe the actions of those we regard as one of “them.”

To describe someone as a “criminal” is both to mark that person with a terrifying permanent character trait and simultaneously to place the person outside the circle of “us.” They are criminals. We make mistakes.

U.S. context is the use of the term “riot” to describe political protests. In the United States in the 1960s, the civil rights movement included black political protests in urban areas against police brutality (most famously in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles and the Harlem district of Manhattan). These protests were regularly described in the media as “riots.” As James Baldwin wrote at the time about the media description of these protests, “when white men rise up against oppression, they are heroes: when black men rise, they have reverted to their native savagery. The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto was not described as a riot, nor were the participants maligned as hoodlums: the boys and girls in Watts and Harlem are thoroughly aware of this.”2 Such misrepresentations allowed Richard Nixon to run for office in 1968 on a “law and order” platform. Nixon’s administration is generally viewed as laying the groundwork for the subsequent mass incarceration of black American citizens.