How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

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.

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. Law and order politics has mass appeal, casting “us” as lawful citizens and “them,” by contrast, as lawless criminals whose behavior poses an existential threat to the manhood of the nation. Sexual anxiety is also typical of fascist politics as the patriarchal hierarchy is threatened by growing gender equity.

Fascist opposition to gender studies, in particular, flows from its patriarchal ideology.

What happens when conspiracy theories become the coin of politics, and mainstream media and educational institutions are discredited, is that citizens no longer have a common reality that can serve as background for democratic deliberation. In such a situation, citizens have no choice but to look for markers to follow other than truth or reliability. What happens in such cases, as we see across the world, is that citizens look to politics for tribal identifications, for addressing personal grievances, and for entertainment. When news becomes sports, the strongman achieves a certain measure of popularity. Fascist politics transforms the news from a conduit of information and reasoned debate into a spectacle with the strongman as the star.

Fascist politics seeks to destroy the relations of mutual respect between citizens that are the foundation of a healthy liberal democracy, replacing them ultimately with trust in one figure alone, the leader. When fascist politics is at its most successful, the leader is regarded by the followers as singularly trustworthy.

By giving voice to shocking sentiments that were presumed to be unsuitable for public discourse, Trump was taken to be speaking his mind. This is how, by exhibiting classic demagogic behavior, a politician can come to be seen as the more authentic candidate, even when he is manifestly dishonest.

Two factors have eroded the protections that representative democracy is supposed to provide. First, candidates must raise huge sums to run for office (ever more so since the 2010 Citizens United decision by the U.S. Supreme Court). As a result, they represent the interests of their large donors.

Second, some voters do not share democratic values, and politicians must appeal to them as well. When large inequalities exist, the problem is aggravated. Some voters are simply more attracted to a system that favors their own particular religion, race, gender, or birth position.

As the infamous Republican political strategist Lee Atwater, then a consultant in Reagan’s White House (later the campaign manager for George H. W. Bush’s ’88 win), explained that racist intent had to be made less overt over time in a 1981 interview with political scientist Alexander Lamis: 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….

Even those who demonstrably do not benefit from hierarchies can be made to believe that they do; hence the use of racism to ensnare poor white citizens in the United States into supporting tax cuts for extravagantly wealthy whites who happen to share their skin color.

To completely destroy reality, fascist politics replaces the liberal ideal of equality with its opposite: hierarchy.

The fates of human beings are not equal. Men differ in their states of health and wealth or social status or what not. 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. —Max Weber, On Law in Economy and Society (1967), 335

Fascist ideology, then, takes advantage of a human tendency to organize society hierarchically, and fascist politicians represent the myths that legitimize their hierarchies as immutable facts.

Fascists argue that natural hierarchies of worth in fact exist, and that their existence undermines the obligation for equal consideration. One sees a valuation of this kind in the words of the many white supporters of Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election who regularly spoke of their disdain for supposedly “undeserving” recipients of U.S. governmental largesse in the form of healthcare, by which they often meant their black fellow citizens.

The idea behind liberal democracy is that all of us are equally deserving of the basic goods of society.

No one is forced by a confrontation with reality into believing in these kinds of hierarchal differences between, for example, genders, or racial or ethnic groups. There is no persuasive evidence for such hierarchies, despite centuries of attempts to establish them by religious edict or scientific investigation.

Establishing hierarchies of worth is of course a means of obtaining and retaining power—a kind of power that liberal democracy attempts to delegitimize.

Hierarchy benefits fascist politics in another way: Those who are accustomed to its benefits can be easily led to view liberal equality as a source of victimization. Those who benefit from hierarchy will adopt a myth of their own superiority, which will occlude basic facts about social reality. They will distrust pleas for tolerance and inclusion made by liberals on the grounds that these pleas are masks for power grabs by other groups. Fascist politics feeds off the sense of aggrieved victimization caused by loss of hierarchal status.

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 fascist politics, the opposing notions of equality and discrimination get mixed up with each other.

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.

There is a crucial distinction, of course, between feelings of resentment and oppression and genuine inequality and discrimination.

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.

In the face of discrimination, oppressed groups throughout history have risen up in movements that proclaimed pride for their endangered identities. In Western Europe, the Jewish nationalism of the Zionist movement arose as a response to toxic anti-Semitism. In the United States, black nationalism arose as a response to toxic racism. In their origins, these nationalist movements were responses to oppression. Anticolonialist struggles typically take place under the banner of nationalism; for example, Mahatma Gandhi employed Indian nationalism as a tool against British rule. This kind of nationalism, the nationalism that arises from oppression, is not fascist in origin. These forms of nationalism, in their original formations, are equality-driven nationalist movements.

The case is similar with the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States today. Its opponents try to represent the slogan as the illiberal nationalist claim that only black lives matter. But the slogan is hardly intended as a repudiation of the value of white lives in the United States. Rather, it intends to point out that in the United States, white lives have been taken to matter more than other lives. The point of the slogan Black Lives Matter is to call attention to a failure of equal respect. In its context, it means, “Black lives matter too

The difference between the nationalism motivated by oppression and nationalism for the sake of domination is clear when one reflects upon their respective relationships with equality. But that difference can be invisible from the inside. Whether or not the anguish that accompanies loss of privileged status is similar to the sense of oppression that accompanies genuine marginalization, it is anguish nevertheless.

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

The addiction of citizens of all races, classes, and groups should be addressed with compassion, empathy, and the liberal values of shared human dignity and equality.

Since fascist politics has, at its basis, the traditional patriarchal family, it is characteristically accompanied by panic about deviations from it. Transgender individuals and homosexuals are used to heighten anxiety and panic about the threat to traditional male gender roles.

By presenting homosexuals or transgender women as a threat to women and children—and, by extension, to men’s ability to protect them—fascist politics impugns the liberal ideal of freedom. A woman’s right to have an abortion is also an exercise of freedom. By representing abortion as a threat to children—and to men’s control over them—fascist politics impugns the liberal ideal of freedom.

Highlighting male helplessness in the face of sexual threats to their wives and children accentuates such feelings of anxiety at the loss of patriarchal masculinity. The politics of sexual anxiety is a powerful way to present freedom and equality as fundamental threats without explicitly appearing to reject them.

Cities have long been treated, in rhetoric and literature, as places of decadence and sin, most particularly, sexual decadence and sin. Sodom and Gomorrah are the biblical reference points for the source of sexual anxiety, where homosexuality, race mixing, and other sins against fascist ideology are most likely to occur.

The poll suggests that the politics of rural versus urban is a promising avenue for sowing division for demagogically minded U.S. politicians, particularly around the topic of immigration.

Fascist politics feeds the insulting myth that hardworking rural residents pay to support lazy urban dwellers, so it is not a surprise that the base of its success is found in a country’s rural areas.

The accuracy of a fascist politician’s attacks on cities is not particularly important to their success. These messages resonate with voters who do not live in cities, and they don’t need to appeal to urban dwellers.

And yet during this time, cities in the United States were enjoying their lowest rates of crime in generations and record low unemployment. Trump’s rhetoric about cities makes sense in the context of a more general fascist politics, in which cities are seen as centers of disease and pestilence, containing squalid ghettos filled with despised minority groups living off the work of others.

Fascist politics targets financial elites, “cosmopolitans,” liberals, and religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities. In many countries, these are characteristically urban populations. Cities therefore usefully serve as a proxy target for the classic enemies of fascist politics.

As the Princeton political scientist Martin Gilens writes in his 1996 paper “ ‘Race Coding’ and White Opposition to Welfare,” “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.”

In fascist ideology, the ideal of hard work is weaponized against minority populations.