How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

The targeting of enemies—minorities, liberals, secularists, leftists, urban naxals, intellectuals, assorted protestors—is not driven by a calculus of ordinary politics….When you legitimize yourself entirely by inventing enemies, the truth ceases to matter, normal restraints of civilization and decency cease to matter, the checks and balances of normal politics cease to matter.*2

When observing the tangible effects of Trump’s rhetoric, many in the media look to the streets for hate crimes by skinheads, or for other examples of extrajudicial violence aimed at Trump’s targets—immigrants and Muslims, for example—but not actually committed by the Trump administration. This is dangerously confused. It is a reaction that masks the worst material effects of Trump’s political tactics. Fascist political tactics employed by an election’s winner materialize in the resulting state apparatus, not only between individuals. Debates that require one to direct one’s eye instead to the streets force us to look away from the structural consequences of fascist rhetoric. By ignoring the state apparatus erected by those who entered into office through fascist politics, we behave as if fascist political tactics cannot transform once-democratic states into fascist ones. This is a thesis that history, as well as common sense, rejects.

Reality is always more complex than our means of representing it.

Fascist politics transforms the news from a conduit of information and reasoned debate into a spectacle with the strongman as the star.

Those who benefit from large inequalities are inclined to believe that they have earned their privilege, a delusion that prevents them from seeing reality as it is.

Simple observation shows that in every such situation he who is more favored feels the never ceasing need to look upon his position as in some way “legitimate,” upon his advantage being “deserved,” and the other’s disadvantage being brought about by the latter’s “fault.” That the purely accidental causes of the difference may be ever so obvious makes no difference.

it is rather a general feature of group psychology. 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.

Rectifying unjust inequalities will always bring pain to those who benefited from such injustices. This pain will inevitably be experienced by some as oppression.

In her book Down Girl, Kate Manne illustrates this by drawing a distinction between patriarchy and misogyny. Patriarchy, according to Manne, is the hierarchal ideology that engenders the unreasonable expectations of high status. Misogyny is what faces women who are blamed when patriarchal expectations are left unfulfilled. The logic of fascist politics has a vivid model in Manne’s logic of misogyny.

When voters in a democratic society yearn for a CEO as president, they are responding to their own implicit fascist impulses.

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 smoothly represented as elite privilege.