How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

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.

using diary notes from Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman: “You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks,”

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

Fascist politics seeks to undermine public discourse by attacking and devaluing education, expertise, and language. Intelligent debate is impossible without an education with access to different perspectives, a respect for expertise when one’s own knowledge gives out, and a rich enough language to precisely describe reality. When education, expertise, and linguistic distinctions are undermined, there remains only power and tribal identity.

[Nazis] believed that the women’s movement was part of an international Jewish conspiracy to subvert the German family and thus destroy the German race. The movement, it claimed, was encouraging women to assert their economic independence and to neglect their proper task of producing children. It was spreading the feminine doctrines of pacifism, democracy and “materialism.” By encouraging contraception and abortion and so lowering the birth rate, it was attacking the very existence of the German people.

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.

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….

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.”

Serbia’s recent history under demagogic nationalists shows how a history of past oppression can be marshaled in fascist politics for military mobilization against phantom enemies.

In the United States, the steep increase in incarceration rates has accompanied a steep drop in crime. In a 2017 review essay, “The Impacts of Incarceration on Crime,” its author, David Roodman, notes that the “59% per capita rise in incarceration between 1990 and 2010 accompanied a 42% drop in FBI-tracked ‘index crimes.’ ”4 And yet, as Roodman accurately notes, “researchers agree that putting more people behind bars added modestly, at most, to the fall in crime.”

In a male-centered gender hierarchy, where it is assumed that men are better than women and that masculinity is superior to femininity, there is no greater perceived threat than the existence of trans women, who despite being male and inheriting male privilege “choose” to be female instead. By embracing our own femaleness and femininity, we, in a sense, cast a shadow of doubt over the supposed supremacy of maleness and masculinity. In order to lessen the threat we pose to the male-centered gender hierarchy, our culture (primarily via the media) uses every tactic in its arsenal of traditional sexism to dismiss us.

The thesis of Darré’s 1929 essay “The Peasantry as the Key to Understanding the Nordic Race” is that true freedom is realized only in the rural agrarian life of the peasant. In the rural life, one is forced to “rely on one’s own abilities” and be self-sufficient, rather than to be a “parasite,” as Darré argues city-dwellers are.

Mussolini denounces the world’s great cities, such as New York, for their teeming populations of nonwhites. In fascist ideology, the city is a place where members of the nation go to age and die, childless, surrounded by the vast hordes of despised others, breeding out of control, their children permanent burdens on the state.

Among whites, a criminal record reduced the likelihood of a callback interview for an entry-level job by 50 percent—Pager’s white auditors who reported no criminal record had a 34 percent callback rate, and her white auditors who reported a criminal record had a 17 percent callback rate. The black auditors she used, with very similar résumés, had a 14 percent callback rate when they did not report a criminal record—suggesting that black Americans who report no criminal record already fare worse in seeking entry-level employment than white Americans who do report a criminal record. Only 5 percent of black applicants reporting a criminal record received callback interviews.

When Richard Nixon took office in 1969, he inherited a penal system that had been shedding prisoners. The 1960s produced the single largest reduction in the population of federal and state prisons in the nation’s history, with 16,500 fewer inmates in 1969 than in 1950. Despite this trend toward decarceration, under the auspices of the Nixon administration the federal government began to construct prisons at unprecedented rates.

Vance Muse was explicit about the racial motivation of the attack on unions via right-to-work laws: “From now on white women and white men will be forced into organizations with black African apes whom they will have to call ‘brother’ or lose their jobs.”

In 1945, Muse said, “They call me anti-Jew and anti-nigger. Listen, we like the nigger—in his place….Our [right-to-work] amendment helps the nigger; it does not discriminate against him. Good niggers, not those Communist niggers. Jews? Why, some of my best friends are Jews. Good Jews.” Muse declared himself “a southerner and for white supremacy,” and the Christian Americans “considered the New Deal to be part of the broader assault of ‘Jewish Marxism’ upon Christian free enterprise.”