How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

Without comparing the new brand of far-right leaders to Hitler, it is nevertheless possible to see similar processes at work in three of the world’s largest democracies—India, the United States, and Brazil. In all three countries, there is movement toward unifying institutions around loyalty to an ethnic identity, as in India, or loyalty to a single leader, as in the United States,

A moral of this book is that fascism is not a new threat, but rather a permanent temptation. The United States has captured the attention of the world not because of its fascist history, but because of the heroism its residents have exhibited in internal fights against it.

In 1939, in an essay entitled “Aviation, Geography, and Race,” published in that most American of journals, Reader’s Digest, Lindbergh embraced something close to Nazism for America: It is time to turn from our quarrels and to build our White ramparts again. This alliance with foreign races means nothing but death to us. It is our turn to guard our heritage from Mongol and Persian and Moor, before we become engulfed in a limitless foreign sea.

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.

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.

Fascist politics invokes a pure mythic past tragically destroyed.

In all fascist mythic pasts, an extreme version of the patriarchal family reigns supreme, even just a few generations ago. Further back in time, the mythic past was a time of glory of the nation, with wars of conquest led by patriotic generals, its armies filled with its countrymen, able-bodied, loyal warriors whose wives were at home raising the next generation. In the present, these myths become the basis of the nation’s identity under fascist politics.

We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary for it to be a reality….Our myth is the nation, our myth is the greatness of the nation! And to this myth, this greatness, which we want to translate into a total reality, we subordinate everything.

The function of the mythic past, in fascist politics, is to harness the emotion of nostalgia to the central tenets of fascist ideology—authoritarianism, hierarchy, purity, and struggle.

The fascist mythic past exists to aid in changing the present.

“to be a woman means to be a mother, means affirming with the whole conscious force of one’s soul the value of being a mother and making it a law of life…the highest calling of the National Socialist woman is not just to bear children, but consciously and out of total devotion to her role and duty as mother to raise children for her people.”

History in a liberal democracy must be faithful to the norm of truth, yielding an accurate vision of the past, rather than a history provided for political reasons. Fascist politics, by contrast, characteristically contains within it a demand to mythologize the past, creating a version of national heritage that is a weapon for political gain.

The role of political propaganda is to conceal politicians’ or political movements’ clearly problematic goals by masking them with ideals that are widely accepted.

“You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks,” Haldeman quoted Nixon as saying in a diary entry from April 1969. “The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” In a direct and systematic way, Nixon recognized that the politics of crime control could effectively conceal the racist intent behind his administration’s domestic programs.

Corruption, to the fascist politician, is really about the corruption of purity rather than of law.

book 8 of The Republic argues that democracy is a self-undermining system whose very ideals lead to its own demise.

Nazi propaganda minister Joseph 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.”

Fascists reject Enlightenment ideals while proclaiming that they are forced to do so by a stark confrontation with reality, by the natural law.

Typically used without any connection to Marx or Marxism, the expression is employed in fascist politics as a way to malign equality. That is why universities that seek to give some intellectual space to marginalized perspectives, however small, are subject to denunciation as hotbeds of “Marxism.” Fascism is about the dominant perspective, and so, during fascist moments, there is strong support for figures to denounce disciplines that teach perspectives other than the dominant ones—such as gender studies or, in the United States, African American studies or Middle Eastern studies.

In her 2017 book, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, the journalist Masha Gessen describes how Russia’s antigay, antifeminist university agenda emerged out of a 1997 conference in Prague called the World Congress of Families, organized by Allan Carlson, an American historian at the “ultraconservative Hillsdale College in Michigan.”

7 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.

When it is successful, its audience is left with a destabilized sense of loss, and a well of mistrust and anger against those who it has been told are responsible for this loss.

By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites….

In the antebellum American South, whites believed that slavery was a great gift to those who were enslaved. The harshness of Southern planters to enslaved persons who sought to flee or rebel was in no small part due to their conviction that such behavior revealed lack of gratitude.

It is precisely here that the triumph of our theory appears; the slackened reins of government are immediately, by the law of life, caught up and gathered together by a new hand, because the blind might of the nation cannot for one single day exist without guidance, and the new authority merely fits into the place of the old already weakened by liberalism.

The Civil Rights Act of 1866 made the newly emancipated black Americans of the South into U.S. citizens and protected their civil rights. It was passed by the Senate and the House on March 14, 1866. Later that month, President Andrew Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Act, on the grounds that “this law establishes for the security of the colored race safeguards which go infinitely beyond any that the General Government have ever provided for the white race.”

Nationalism is at the core of fascism. The fascist leader employs a sense of collective victimhood to create a sense of group identity that is by its nature opposed to the cosmopolitan ethos and individualism of liberal democracy.

It contains a concise statement of the Nazi ideology that the true values of the nation were to be found in the rural population, that National Socialists “see in the farmers the main bearers of a healthy folkish heredity, the fountain of youth of the people, and the backbone of military power.”

It was official Nazi policy that “by bettering the lot of the domestic agricultural laborer and by preventing flight from the land, the importation of foreign agricultural labor becomes unnecessary and will therefore be forbidden.”

Nico Passchier notes that “rural, and especially

“Jews living in villages and small towns were subjected to window smashing and physical assault, sometimes culminating in murder. This made them seek the anonymity and sense of communal comfort to be found in large centres like Frankfurt and Berlin….Country areas generally tended to be more anti-Semitic than urban ones. In the cities, anti-Jewish feeling was roughly inversely proportional to [the city’s] size.”

In fascist politics, everyone in the chosen nation shares a religion and a way of life, a set of customs.

In fascism, the state is an enemy; it is to be replaced by the nation, which consists of self-sufficient individuals who collectively choose to sacrifice for a common goal of ethnic or religious glorification.

In fascist ideology, it is the nation that provides, not the state—small ethnically or religiously pure communities composed of self-sufficient individuals working as a community.

“The perception that blacks are lazy has a larger effect on white Americans’ welfare policy preferences than does economic self-interest, beliefs about individualism or views about the poor in general.”

Thus, Das Schwarze Korps conceded several years before the outbreak of the war that people abroad did not completely believe the Nazi contention that all Jews are homeless beggars who can only subsist as parasites in the economic organism of other nations; but foreign public opinion, they prophesied, would in a few years be given the opportunity to convince itself of this fact when the German Jews would be driven out across the borders like a pack of beggars.

Fascist unreality is, as Arendt explains, a prelude to fascist policy.

The strong temptation for those who employ fascist politics, once they assume power, is to use their position of power to make their once fantastical statements increasingly more plausible.

The French stereotype of Arabs was that they were shifty, sneaky, dirty, and distrustful. But Fanon points out that this stereotype was created by the way that the French police regularly treated Arabs, and the fact that French rule impoverished them.

Summarizing the situation, Fanon concludes, “It is the racist who creates the inferiorized.”6

White American stereotypes of black Americans as lazy and violent derive from the very beginning of the United States, where these attributes were regularly used to justify the enslavement of America’s black population. After slavery, these stereotypes were used to justify the equally brutal practice of convict leasing, whereby large portions of the black population of the formerly antebellum South were arrested for petty crimes and leased to iron, steel, and coal companies for hard labor, often with fatal consequences.

Groups are ordered, in fascism, by their capacity to achieve, to rise above others, in labor and war. Hitler decries liberal democracy because it embodies a contrary value system, one that grants worth independently of victory in a natural, meritocratic struggle. Hitler denounces democracy as incompatible with individuality, since it does not allow individual citizens to rise above others in competitive struggle.

He warned that a democratic political sphere and an authoritarian economic sphere make for an unstable mix because the state has the tendency to encroach on business with democratically imposed regulations. Hitler emphasized that industrialists should support the Nazi movement, since business already operates according to “the leader principle,” the Führer Principle. In private enterprise, when a CEO gives the orders, the employees must comply; there is no room for democratic governance.

Instead, in fascist ideology, all institutions, from the family to the business to the state, would run according to the Führer Principle. The father, in fascist ideology, is the leader of the family; the CEO is the leader of the business; the authoritarian leader is the father, or the CEO, of the state. When voters in a democratic society yearn for a CEO as president, they are responding to their own implicit fascist impulses.

The pull of fascist politics is powerful. It simplifies human existence, gives us an object, a “them” whose supposed laziness highlights our own virtue and discipline, encourages us to identify with a forceful leader who helps us make sense of the world, whose bluntness regarding the “undeserving” people in the world is refreshing.

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.

When universities are as expensive as they are in the United States, their generous liberal visions are easy targets for fascist demagoguery. 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.

Fascist politics lures its audiences with the temptation of freedom from democratic norms while masking the fact that the alternative proposed is not a form of freedom that can sustain a stable nation state and can scarcely guarantee liberty. A state-based ethnic, religious, racial, or national conflict between “us” and “them” can hardly remain stable for long.

the tension and conflicts inherent in growing global economic inequality, we will soon find ourselves confronted by movements of disadvantaged people across borders that dwarf those of previous eras, not excepting the movement of refugees in World War II. Traumatized, impoverished, and in need of aid, refugees, including legal immigrants, will be recast to fit racist stereotypes by leaders and movements committed to maintaining hierarchical group privilege and using fascist politics.