How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

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.

The role of political propaganda is to conceal politicians’ or political movements’ clearly problematic goals by masking them with ideals that are widely accepted.

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

From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, using diary notes from Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman: “You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks,” Haldeman quoted Nixon as saying in a diary entry from April 1969. “The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

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 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.”

Fascist politicians know that their supporters will turn a blind eye to their own, true corruption since in their own case it is just a matter of members of the chosen nation taking what is rightfully theirs.

democratic rhetoric and undemocratic intent.6

It is standard in fascist politics for harsh criticisms of an independent judiciary to occur in the form of accusations of bias, a kind of corruption, critiques that are then used to replace independent judges with ones who will cynically employ the law as a means to protect the interests of the ruling party.

as both countries introduced laws to replace independent judges with party loyalists soon after antidemocratic regimes took power.

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

The liberty that many whites in Southern states sought by calling for “states’ rights” was the freedom to restrict the liberties of their fellow black citizens.

Hitler argues that “true Germanic Democracy”—that is, dictatorship by a single individual—is genuine democracy because only in such a system does genuine individual responsibility for political decisions exist, as the power to make those decisions rests with one person—and individual responsibility is a liberal notion par excellence.

book 8 of The Republic argues that democracy is a self-undermining system whose very ideals lead to its own demise.

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

the enemies of liberal democracy employing this strategy, pushing the freedom of speech to its limits and ultimately using it to subvert others’ speech.

the very same month that his Justice Department was again attempting to bring an American citizen to trial for laughing, Sessions delivered a speech at Georgetown Law School excoriating university campuses for failing to live up to a commitment to free speech because of the presumption that the academy discourages right-leaning voices. He called for a “national recommitment to free speech and the First Amendment” (in the week Sessions gave this speech, news was dominated by President Trump’s call for the owners of National Football League teams to fire players who knelt during the national anthem to protest racism, an exercise of First Amendment rights if ever there was one).

fascism elevates the irrational over the rational, fanatical emotion over the intellect. It is less often remarked upon, however, that fascism performs this elevation indirectly, that is to say, propagandistically.

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.

Schools introduce students to the dominant culture and its mythic past. Education therefore either poses a grave threat to fascism or becomes a pillar of support for the mythical nation.

Among its aims was to address the incidents of racial abuse that black students faced on a regular basis, as well as addressing curricula that represented culture and civilization as the product solely of white men. The media largely ignored these motivations and, representing protesting black students as an angry mob, used the situation as an opportunity to foment rage against the supposed liberal political excesses of the university.

Right now, a contemporary right-wing campaign is charging universities with hypocrisy on the issue of free speech. Universities, they say, claim to hold free speech in the highest regard but suppress any voices that don’t lean left by allowing protests against them on campus. Most recently, critics of campus social justice movements have found an effective method of turning themselves into the victims of protest. They contend that protesters mean to deny them their own free speech.

It is not accidental that the rhetoric of the Trump administration, in particular its attacks on “political correctness” and its use of free-speech rhetoric, overlaps with the talking points of some of the well-funded institutions that have arisen to attack and delegitimize universities as bastions of liberalism.

Given the formal protections of academic freedom, universities in the United States host the freest domain of expression of any workplace. In private workplaces in the United States, free speech is a fantasy. Workers are regularly subjected to nondisclosure agreements, forbidding them to speak about various matters. In most workplaces, workers can be fired for political speech on social media. 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.

Whenever fascism threatens, its representatives and facilitators denounce universities and schools as sources of “Marxist indoctrination,” the classic bogeyman of fascist politics.

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. The dominant perspective is often misrepresented as the truth, the “real history,” and any attempt to allow a space for alternative perspectives is derided as “cultural Marxism.”

In her 2017 book, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, the journalist Masha Gessen describes how Russia’s antigay, antifeminist university agenda emerged out of a 1997 conference in Prague called the World Congress of Families, organized by Allan Carlson, an American historian at the “ultraconservative Hillsdale College in Michigan.” The conference had a large turnout. Gessen writes, “Inspired by the turnout, the organizers turned the World Congress of Families into a permanent organization dedicated to the fight against gay rights, abortion rights, and gender studies.”5

In a process sometimes tendentiously called “decolonizing” the curriculum, neglected perspectives are incorporated, thereby ensuring that students have a full view of history’s actors. In the fight against fascism, adjusting the curriculum in this way is not mere “political correctness.” Representing the voices of all of those whose existence has shaped and formed the world in which we live provides an essential means of protection against fascist myth.

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.

one of the first actions Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan undertook after the attempted coup against him in 2016 was to dismiss more than five thousand deans and academics from their posts in Turkish universities for suspicion of pro-democratic or pro-leftist sentiments. Many were also imprisoned.

In 2017, after winning a national referendum giving him new, sweeping, almost dictatorial powers, Erdoğan introduced a new educational curriculum for the schools. Its goal was to de-emphasize secular ideals and eliminate scientific theories that run counter to religious ideology, such as evolution.

Limbaugh, here, provides a perfect example of how fascist politics targets expertise, mocking and devaluing it. In liberal democracy, political leaders are supposed to consult with those they represent, as well as with experts and scientists who can most accurately explain the demands of reality on policy.

Fascist leaders are instead “men of action” with no use for consultation or deliberation.

“It is a type of man who rejects culture….It is a man who does not believe in ideas, and hence rejects doctrines. It is a man who only believes in acts and carries out these acts in line with a nebulous myth.”

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.

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.

“The mysticism of Fascism is the proof of its triumph. Reasoning does not attract, emotion does.”

Student protests are misrepresented in the press as riots by undisciplined mobs, threats to the civil order.

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.

A fascist leader can replace truth with power, ultimately lying without consequence. By replacing the world with a person, fascist politics makes us unable to assess arguments by a common standard. The fascist politician possesses specific techniques to destroy information spaces and break down reality.

Conspiracy theories are a critical mechanism used to delegitimize the mainstream media, which fascist politicians accuse of bias for failing to cover false conspiracies.

Conspiracy theories are tools to attack those who would ignore their existence; by not covering them, the media is made to appear biased and ultimately part of the very conspiracy they refuse to cover.