How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

Today, white Americans wildly overestimate the extent of U.S. progress toward racial equality over the past fifty years. Economic inequality between black and white Americans is roughly at the point it was during Reconstruction; for every $100 the average white family has accumulated, the average black family has just $5; and yet, as Jennifer Richeson, Michael Kraus, and Julian Rucker have shown in their 2017 paper, “Americans Misperceive Racial Economic Equality,” 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; 54 percent of Trump’s supporters believe that Christians are the most persecuted religious group in America. There is a crucial distinction, of course, between feelings of resentment and oppression and genuine inequality and discrimination.