How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

fascist politics, essentially the danger of rhetoric that encourages fear and anger as a means to foment ethnic and religious division, seeping into public discourse.

When you legitimize yourself entirely by inventing enemies, the truth ceases to matter, normal restraints of civilization and decency cease to matter, the checks and balances of normal politics cease to matter.*2

ICE is a novel American institution—it was created in 2003 by the Homeland Security Act in the wake of September 11, at a time when rights and liberties took a back seat to concerns about safety. The same act created the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, tasked with policing the border and staffing migrant detention centers. In ICE, we have a special force, created in an anti-democratic moment in American history, authorized with police-like power and directed at political outsiders inside our borders. The institution itself is tied politically to the country’s leader. Trump is the first president endorsed by a major union representing ICE’s employees, and Trump has repeatedly called himself its chief defender.

The goal of ICE is not to make communities safer. ICE’s mission is to reinforce a distinction between “us” and “them.”

By ignoring the state apparatus erected by those who entered into office through fascist politics, we behave as if fascist political tactics cannot transform once-democratic states into fascist ones. This is a thesis that history, as well as common sense, rejects.

In German history, the term “Gleichschaltung” connotes the process by which the institutions of the German government gradually became “Nazified,” moving from liberal democratic organizing principles to National Socialist ones, principally fealty to the Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler. Without comparing the new brand of far-right leaders to Hitler, it is nevertheless possible to see similar processes at work in three of the world’s largest democracies—India, the United States, and Brazil. 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.

Our democratic culture is on life support.

Tech giants and media benefit from the dramatic clash of friend and enemy. Fear and anger get people to the polls, but they also keep people online and glued to the media. Oil companies benefit when ultranationalist movements represent international climate change agreements, such as the Paris Agreement, as threats to national sovereignty. The weaker individual states and international agreements are, the stronger the power of multinational corporations becomes.

fascism in power seeks to make its rhetoric into reality—for example, by immiserating and impoverishing populations it represents as diseased. In early March, Trump’s Executive Office for Immigration Review ordered immigration court staff “to remove CDC posters designed to slow spread of coronavirus.”*6 It’s hard to see what the point of such an order is, except to give some reality to the association between immigrants and the virus by failing to inform these populations of the dangers.

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. The United States has captured the attention of the world not because of its fascist history, but because of the heroism its residents have exhibited in internal fights against it. From the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement, the United States has fought against white Christian nationalism, no less than Europe has fought against its own ultranationalist movements. Brazil threw off its military dictatorship; India was founded on secular liberal principles, with a clear-eyed view of the dangers of the very religious nationalism it now faces (yet again).

structures that preserve our democracies against the current threats have long been in place. In each of our local communities, there is at least one activist who has been dealing with a problem for generations.

The wisdom and courage of lifelong activists such as Matos informs this book—through democratic activists throughout our communities, we can be reminded that the struggles we face are ongoing, and the forces—on both sides—strong.

In recent years, multiple countries across the world have been overtaken by a certain kind of far-right nationalism; the list includes Russia, Hungary, Poland, India, Turkey, and the United States.

Fascist politics does not necessarily lead to an explicitly fascist state, but it is dangerous nonetheless.

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.

Genocides and campaigns of ethnic cleansing are regularly preceded by the kinds of political tactics described in this book. In the cases of Nazi Germany, Rwanda, and contemporary Myanmar, the victims of ethnic cleansing were subjected to vicious rhetorical attacks by leaders and in the press for months or years before the regime turned genocidal. With these precedents, it should concern all Americans that as a candidate and as president, Donald Trump has publicly and explicitly insulted immigrant groups.

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

Communist politics weaponizes class divisions.

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.

hierarchy of human worth.

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” are hardworking, and have earned our pride of place by struggle and merit. “They” are lazy, surviving off the goods we produce by exploiting the generosity of our welfare systems, or employing corrupt institutions, such as labor unions, meant to separate honest, hardworking citizens from their pay. “We” are makers; “they” are takers.

In its own history, the United States can find a legacy of the best of liberal democracy as well as the roots of fascist thought (indeed, Hitler was inspired by the Confederacy and Jim Crow laws). Following the horrors of World War II, which sent masses of refugees fleeing fascist regimes, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirmed the dignity of every human being. The drafting and adoption of the document were spearheaded by former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and after the war it stood for the United States’ ideals as much as those of the new United Nations.

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

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

It’s in the name of tradition that the anti-Semites base their “point of view.” It’s in the name of tradition, the long, historical past and the blood ties with Pascal and Descartes, that the Jews are told, you will never belong here. —Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

Depending on how the nation is defined, the mythic past may be religiously pure, racially pure, culturally pure, or all of the above. But there is a common structure to all fascist mythologizing. In all fascist mythic pasts, an extreme version of the patriarchal family reigns supreme, even just a few generations ago.

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 t...

in the fascist imagination, the past invariably involves traditional, patriarchal gender roles. The fascist mythic past has a particular structure, which supports its authoritarian, hierarchical ideology.

In a 1922 speech at the Fascist Congress in Naples, Benito Mussolini declared: 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.

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.”

In fascist politics, myths of a patriarchal past, threatened by encroaching liberal ideals and all that they entail, function to create a sense of panic at the loss of hierarchal status, both for men and for the dominant group’s ability to protect its purity and status from foreign encroachment.

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 invention of a glorious past includes the erasure of inconvenient realities.

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.”

President Trump denounced the task of connecting of this mythologized past to slavery as an attempt to victimize white Americans for celebrating their “heritage.”

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. According to Radio Poland, “Article 55a, clause 1, of the draft law states that ‘whoever accuses, publicly and against the facts, the Polish nation, or the Polish state, of being responsible or complicit in the Nazi crimes committed by the Third German Reich…or other crimes against peace and humanity, or war crimes, or otherwise grossly diminishes the actual perpetrators thereof, shall be subject to a fine or a penalty of imprisonment of up to three years.’ ”

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.

In order to honestly debate what our country should do, what policies it should adopt, we need a common basis of reality, including about our own past.

Even if politicians did nothing to stoke it, Americans would minimize the history of enslavement and genocide, Poles would minimize a history of anti-Semitism, and Turkish citizens would be inclined toward denying past atrocities against Armenians. Having politicians urge this as official educational policy adds fuel to an already raging fire.

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.

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.