How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

Under conditions of stark economic inequality, when the

benefits of liberal education, and the exposure to diverse cultures and norms, are available only to the wealthy few, liberal tolerance can be ...

Knobe and Bear’s work provides a basis for a phenomenon that those who lived through transitions from democracy to fascism regularly emphasize from personal experience and with great alarm: the tendency of populations to normalize the once unthinkable.

In the United States, we have seen normalization of extreme policies with the rapid development of racialized mass incarceration, which occurred in my lifetime. More recently, in the United States, we have seen the normalization of mass shootings.

What normalization does is transform the morally extraordinary into the ordinary. It makes us able to tolerate what was once intolerable by making it seem as if this is the way things have always been. By contrast, the word “fascist” has acquired a feeling of the extreme, like crying wolf. Normalization of fascist ideology, by definition, would make charges of “fascism” seem like an overreaction, even in societies whose norms are transforming along these worrisome lines.

Since I am an American, I must note that one goal appears to be to use fascist tactics hypocritically, waving the banner of nationalism in front of middle- and working-class white people in order to funnel the state’s spoils into the hands of oligarchs.

Under a fascist agenda, the refugee narrative—life in refugee camps, the journey from fear and conflict to such camps, the hopelessness that accompanies extended time in these places—rather than engendering empathy, is cast as the origin story of terrorism and danger. These populations struggle through unspeakable horrors to reach safer shores.

The challenges we will face are enormous. How do we maintain a sense of common humanity, when fear and insecurity will lead us to flee into the comforting arms of mythic superiority in vain pursuit of a sense of dignity? Vexing questions define our times.