How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

HOW FASCISM WORKS

rhetoric that encourages fear and anger as a means to foment ethnic and religious division, seeping into public discourse.

Bolsonaro ran an anti-corruption campaign centered on the theme of Law and Order. He was openly anti-feminist and anti-gay, and he repeatedly lauded the country’s past of military dictatorship.

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

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.

In the rhetoric of extreme nationalists, such a glorious past has been lost by the humiliation brought on by globalism, liberal cosmopolitanism, and respect for “universal values” such as equality. These values are supposed to have made the nation weak in the face of real and threatening challenges to the nation’s existence.

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.

Political propaganda uses the language of virtuous ideals to unite people behind otherwise objectionable ends.

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.

Fascist politics replaces reasoned debate with fear and anger.

According to fascist ideology, by contrast, nature imposes hierarchies of power and dominance that are flatly inconsistent with the equality of respect presupposed by liberal democratic theory.

At the core of fascism is loyalty to tribe, ethnic identity, religion, tradition, or, in a word, nation.

Nationalism is at the core of fascism.

Fascist law-and-order rhetoric is explicitly meant to divide citizens into two classes: those of the chosen nation, who are lawful by nature, and those who are not, who are inherently lawless. In fascist politics, women who do not fit traditional gender roles, nonwhites, homosexuals, immigrants, “decadent cosmopolitans,” those who do not have the dominant religion, are in their very existence violations of law and order.

He likes having a businessman in office, especially one who’s not afraid to speak the painful truth. “It’s time,” he said, “we had someone in there to fight for us.”