How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

Confederate monuments arose well after the Civil War had ended, as part of a mythologized history of a heroic Southern past in which the horrors of slavery were de-emphasized. President Trump denounced the task of connecting of this mythologized past to slavery as an attempt to victimize white Americans for celebrating their “heritage.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

Disagreement requires a shared set of presuppositions about the world. Even dueling requires agreement about the rules. You and I might disagree about whether President Obama’s healthcare plan was good policy. But if you suspect that President Obama was an undercover Muslim spy seeking to destroy the United States, and I do not, our discussion will not be productive. We will not be talking about the costs and benefits of Obama’s health policy, but rather about whether any of his policies mask a devious antidemocratic agenda.

Empires in decline are particularly susceptible to fascist politics because of this sense of loss. It is in the very nature of empire to create a hierarchy; empires legitimize their colonial enterprises by a myth of their own exceptionalism. In the course of decline, the population is easily led to a sense of national humiliation that can be mobilized in fascist politics to serve various purposes.

In “Why Now? It’s the Empire, Stupid,” a June 2016 article in The Nation, the NYU historian Greg Grandin argues that Donald Trump’s politics is effective in the context of the 2016 campaign because it comes at a time of decline for the American empire. We are witnessing the passing of the era after the end of the Cold War in which the United States reigned supreme in the world as the only remaining superpower. In the article, he argues that an empire gives rise among its citizens to a comforting myth of superiority, thereby concealing the various social and structural problems that otherwise would lead to political difficulties. With its demise, the citizens of a once powerful empire must confront the fact that their exceptionalism was a myth.

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 experience of losing a once unquestioned, settled dignity—the dignity that comes with being white, not black—is easily captured by a language of white victimization.

Fascist law-and-order rhetoric is explicitly meant to divide citizens into two classes: those of the chosen nation, who are lawful by nature, and those who are not, who are inherently lawless.

The “hard work” versus “laziness” dichotomy is, like “law-abiding” versus “criminal,” at the heart of the fascist division between “us” and “them.” But what is most terrifying about these rhetorical divides is that it is typical of fascist movements to attempt to transform myths about “them” into reality through social policy. We see this regularly with movements of refugees.

Fascist politics preys on the human frailty that makes our own suffering seem bearable if we know that those we look down upon are being made to suffer more.