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January 23 - February 8, 2023
fascist politics, essentially the danger of rhetoric that encourages fear and anger as a means to foment ethnic and religious division,
Panic about immigration and the fear of losing the dominant culture to religious or ethnic minorities loathed by the majority groups are central to fascist politics.
A distinguishing mark of fascist politics is the targeting of ideological enemies and the freeing of all restraints in combating them.
The goal of ICE is not to make communities safer. ICE’s mission is to reinforce a distinction between “us” and “them.”
Our democratic culture is on life support.
Fear and anger get people to the polls, but they also keep people online and glued to the media.
the attacks on expertise, science, and truth that are the lifeblood of fascist politics
Using crisis as anti-democratic opportunity is a classic fascist tactic.
It was under Obama that the current harsh deportation regime started in the United States.
I have chosen the label “fascism” for ultranationalism of some variety (ethnic, religious, cultural), with the nation represented in the person of an authoritarian leader who speaks on its behalf.
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.
The most telling symptom of fascist politics is division. It aims to separate a population into an “us” and a “them.”
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.
Any progress for a minority group stokes feelings of victimhood among the dominant population.
I have written this book in the hope of providing citizens with the critical tools to recognize the difference between legitimate tactics in liberal democratic politics on the one hand, and invidious tactics in fascist politics on the other.
Hitler was inspired by the Confederacy and Jim Crow laws).
1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Fascist politics invokes a pure mythic past tragically destroyed.
The bill failed to pass only because of a large outcry and demonstrations by women on the streets of Poland’s cities.
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.
In a glorious past, members of the chosen national or ethnic community realized their rightful place at the top by setting the cultural and economic agenda for everyone else.
fictional, patriarchal, harshly conservative, ethnically and religiously pure past.
The strategic aim of these hierarchal constructions of history is to displace truth, and 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.
In the United States, 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.
Such attempts to legislate the erasure of a nation’s past are characteristic of fascist regimes.
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,
A people lives happily in the present and the future so long as it recognizes its past and the greatness of its ancestors….We
We want to make our people proud again of our history.
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.
In the United States, the history of the South is continually mythologized to whitewash slavery and was used to justify the refusal to grant black U.S. citizens voting rights until a century after slavery’s end.
Southern whites enacted laws that had the practical effect of banning black citizens from voting. White southerners propagated the myth that this was necessary because black citizens were unable to self-govern;
W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1935 masterwork, Black Reconstruction, is a decisive refutation of the then official history of the Reconstruction era.
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.
To many white Americans, President Obama must have been corrupt, because his very occupation of the White House was a kind of corruption of the traditional order.
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.
Fascist states focus on dismantling the rule of law, with the goal of replacing it with the dictates of individual rulers or party bosses.
In book 8 of Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that people are not naturally led to self-governance but rather seek a strong leader to follow. Democracy, by permitting freedom of speech, opens the door for a demagogue to exploit the people’s need for a strongman; the strongman will use this freedom to prey on the people’s resentments and fears. Once the strongman seizes power, he will end democracy, replacing it with tyranny.
Fascists have always been well acquainted with this recipe for using democracy’s liberties against itself;
Goebbels once declared, “This will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed.”
Desiree Fairooz
“The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’ ” is a 1939 essay by the American literary theorist Kenneth Burke.
Fascists reject Enlightenment ideals while proclaiming that they are forced to do so by a stark confrontation with reality, by the natural law.
Fascist politics seeks to undermine public discourse by attacking and devaluing education, expertise, and language.
When education, expertise, and linguistic distinctions are undermined, there remains only power and tribal identity.
In fascist ideology, there is only one legitimate viewpoint, that of the dominant nation. 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.
Where speech is a right, propagandists cannot attack dissent head-on; instead they must represent it as something violent and oppressive (a protest therefore becomes a “riot”).
