How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

People often assume that fascist tactics can achieve success only where democratic institutions, and commitment to democratic culture, is already weak. We are thus told to pay attention to policies and institutions rather than the rhetoric they can follow.

On January 27, 2017, the Trump Administration issued one of its first executive orders, with the title Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States. It halted indefinitely the admission of refugees from the war in Syria, and placed a ban on travel into the United States by citizens of seven Muslim majority countries. It was ultimately superseded by two replacement travel prohibitions, trying to overcome obvious legal objections because banning based on religious identity is manifestly inconsistent with the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The third version of the legislation was adjusted to include two non-Muslim majority countries, North Korea and Venezuela, on its list of “Countries of Identified Concern,” whose nationals the order bans from entry to the United States. The Supreme Court ruled, in a 5-4 decision, that this adjustment made the executive order consistent with the Establishment Clause (despite obviously being crafted for just this purpose). In the ensuing years, this ban on many of the world’s Muslims from entry to the United States has become normalized.

In German history, the term “Gleichschaltung” connotes the process by which the institutions of the German government gradually became “Nazified,” moving from liberal democratic organizing principles to National Socialist ones, principally fealty to the Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler. 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, where the most powerful political party is increasingly defined by fealty to Donald Trump.

Fascist politics exploits crises to advance its ideological agenda.

fascism in power seeks to make its rhetoric into reality—for example, by immiserating and impoverishing populations it represents as diseased.

Using crisis as anti-democratic opportunity is a classic fascist tactic.

A moral of this book is that fascism is not a new threat, but rather a permanent temptation.

From the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement, the United States has fought against white Christian nationalism, no less than Europe has fought against its own ultranationalist movements. Brazil threw off its military dictatorship; India was founded on secular liberal principles, with a clear-eyed view of the dangers of the very religious nationalism it now faces (yet again).

It was under Obama that the current harsh deportation regime started in the United States.

In recent years, multiple countries across the world have been overtaken by a certain kind of far-right nationalism; the list includes Russia, Hungary, Poland, India, Turkey, and the United States. The task of generalizing about such phenomena is always vexing, as the context of each country is always unique. But such generalization is necessary in the current moment. I have chosen the label “fascism” for ultranationalism of some variety (ethnic, religious, cultural), with the nation represented in the person of an authoritarian leader who speaks on its behalf.

My interest in this book is in fascist politics. Specifically, my interest is in fascist tactics as a mechanism to achieve power.

Fascist politics does not necessarily lead to an explicitly fascist state, but it is dangerous nonetheless.

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.

In the cases of Nazi Germany, Rwanda, and contemporary Myanmar, the victims of ethnic cleansing were subjected to vicious rhetorical attacks by leaders and in the press for months or years before the regime turned genocidal.

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.

As the fear of “them” grows, “we” come to represent everything virtuous. “We” live in the rural heartland, where the pure values and traditions of the nation still miraculously exist despite the threat of cosmopolitanism from the nation’s cities, alongside the hordes of minorities who live there, emboldened by liberal tolerance. “We” are hardworking, and have earned our pride of place by struggle and merit. “They” are lazy, surviving off the goods we produce by exploiting the generosity of our welfare systems, or employing corrupt institutions, such as labor unions, meant to separate honest, hardworking citizens from their pay. “We” are makers; “they” are takers.

In its own history, the United States can find a legacy of the best of liberal democracy as well as the roots of fascist thought (indeed, Hitler was inspired by the Confederacy and Jim Crow laws).

After the war, Article 14 was particularly poignant, solemnly affirming the right of every person to seek asylum.

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.

The patriarchal family is always represented as a central part of the nation’s traditions, diminished, even recently, by the advent of liberalism and cosmopolitanism. But why is patriarchy so strategically central to fascist politics? In a fascist society, the leader of the nation is analogous to the father in the traditional patriarchal family. The leader is the father of his nation, and his strength and power are the source of his legal authority, just as the strength and power of the father of the family in patriarchy are supposed to be the source of his ultimate moral authority over his children and wife. The leader provides for his nation, just as in the traditional family the father is the provider. The patriarchal father’s authority derives from his strength, and strength is the chief authoritarian value. By representing the nation’s past as one with a patriarchal family structure, fascist politics connects nostalgia to a central organizing hierarchal authoritarian structure, one that finds its purest representation in these norms.

Reconstruction ended when Southern whites enacted laws that had the practical effect of banning black citizens from voting. White southerners propagated the myth that this was necessary because black citizens were unable to self-govern; in the histories advanced at the time, Reconstruction was represented as a time of unparalleled political corruption, with stability restored only when whites were again given full power.

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

U.S. president Richard Nixon’s “war on crime” is a good example of masking problematic goals with virtuous ones. The Harvard historian Elizabeth Hinton addresses this tactic in her book From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, 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,” 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.”

Corruption, to the fascist politician, is really about the corruption of purity rather than of law. Officially, the fascist politician’s denunciations of corruption sound like a denunciation of political corruption. But such talk is intended to evoke corruption in the sense of the usurpation of traditional order.

Du Bois writes: The south, finally, with almost complete unity, named the negro as the main cause of southern corruption. They said, and reiterated this charge, until it became history: that the cause of dishonesty during reconstruction was the fact that 4,000,000 disfranchised black laborers, after 250 years of exploitation, had been given a legal right to have some voice in their own government, in the kinds of goods they would make and the sort of work they would do, and in the distribution of the wealth which they created.

To many white Americans, President Obama must have been corrupt, because his very occupation of the White House was a kind of corruption of the traditional order. When women attain positions of political power usually reserved for men—or when Muslims, blacks, Jews, homosexuals, or “cosmopolitans” profit or even share the public goods of a democracy, such as healthcare—that is perceived as corruption.

Vladislav Surkov was essentially Vladimir Putin’s propaganda minister for many years. In his book Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, the journalist Peter Pomerantsev describes Surkov’s “political system in miniature” as democratic rhetoric and undemocratic intent.

We find this inversion in much of the rhetoric of “states’ rights,” a phrase used to defend the liberty of U.S. states in the South from federal intervention. But the federal intervention that is most associated with the call for “states’ rights” is the elimination of slavery, and subsequently Jim Crow laws restricting the right to vote for black citizens. The liberty that many whites in Southern states sought by calling for “states’ rights” was the freedom to restrict the liberties of their fellow black citizens.

In Mein Kampf, after excoriating parliamentary democracy, Hitler praises “true Germanic Democracy,” with “free choice of the Leader, along with his obligation to assume entire responsibility for all he does and causes to be done.” What Hitler here describes is absolute rule by a leader, after an initial democratic vote.

In book 8 of Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that people are not naturally led to self-governance but rather seek a strong leader to follow. Democracy, by permitting freedom of speech, opens the door for a demagogue to exploit the people’s need for a strongman; the strongman will use this freedom to prey on the people’s resentments and fears. Once the strongman seizes power, he will end democracy, replacing it with tyranny. In short, 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.”

The chief reason we have free speech in democracy is to facilitate public discourse about policy on the part of citizens and their representatives. But the kind of debate where one shrieks insults at another, not to mention engages in physical violence and then denounces protest as an attack on speech, is not the relevant kind of public discourse that free speech rights are meant to protect.

It is often noted, rightly, that fascism elevates the irrational over the rational, fanatical emotion over the intellect.

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.

In fascist ideology, there is only one legitimate viewpoint, that of the dominant nation. Schools introduce students to the dominant culture and its mythic past. Education therefore either poses a grave threat to fascism or becomes a pillar of support for the mythical nation. It’s no wonder, then, that protests and cultural clashes on campuses represent a true political battleground and receive national attention. The stakes are high.

David Horowitz is a far-right activist who has been targeting universities, and the film industry, since the 1980s. In 2006, Horowitz published a book, The Professors, naming the “101 most dangerous professors in America,” a list of leftist and liberal professors, many of whom were supporters of Palestinian rights. In 2009, he published another book, One-Party Classroom, with a list of the “150 most dangerous courses in America.”

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.” The conference had a large turnout. Gessen writes, “Inspired by the turnout, the organizers turned the World Congress of Families into a permanent organization dedicated to the fight against gay rights, abortion rights, and gender studies.”

No one thinks that the demands of free inquiry require adding researchers to university faculties who seek to demonstrate that the earth is flat. Such a position we have determined through conclusive scientific inquiry to be fruitless. Even the most ardent defender of free speech does not argue that we should spend precious university resources on this question. Adding a flat earther would, rather, impede objective inquiry. Similarly, I can safely and justifiably reject ISIS ideology without having to confront its advocates in the classroom or faculty lounge. I do not need to have a colleague who defends the view that Jewish people are genetically predisposed to greed in order to justifiably reject such anti-Semitic nonsense.

Fascist politics, however, makes room for the study of myths as fact.

In liberal democracy, political leaders are supposed to consult with those they represent, as well as with experts and scientists who can most accurately explain the demands of reality on policy. Fascist leaders are instead “men of action” with no use for consultation or deliberation. In his 1941 essay “The Rebirth of European Man,” the French fascist Pierre Drieu la Rochelle writes, “It is a type of man who rejects culture….It is a man who does not believe in ideas, and hence rejects doctrines. It is a man who only believes in acts and carries out these acts in line with a nebulous myth.”

Reality is always more complex than our means of representing it. Scientific language requires ever more complex terminology, to make distinctions that would be invisible without it. Social reality is at least as complex as the reality of physics. In a healthy liberal democracy, a public language with a rich and varied vocabulary to make distinctions is a vital democratic institution. Without it, healthy public discourse is impossible. Fascist politics seeks to degrade and debase the language of politics; fascist politics thereby seeks to mask reality.

The goal of fascist propaganda is not merely to mock and sneer at robust and complex public debate about policy; it is to eliminate its possibility.

It is a core tenet of fascist politics that the goal of oratory should not be to convince the intellect, but to sway the will.

The anonymous author of an article in a 1925 Italian fascist magazine writes, “The mysticism of Fascism is the proof of its triumph. Reasoning does not attract, emotion does.”

In Mein Kampf, in a chapter entitled “The Struggle in the Early Days: The Role of the Orator,” Hitler writes that it is a gross misunderstanding to dismiss simple language as stupid. Throughout Mein Kampf, Hitler is clear that the aim of propaganda is to replace reasoned argument in the public sphere with irrational fears and passions. In a February 2018 interview, Steve Bannon said, “We got elected on Drain t...

The philosopher Giulia Napolitano has suggested that we should think of conspiracy theories as “aimed” at some out-group, and in the service of some in-group. Conspiracy theories function to denigrate and delegitimize their targets, by connecting them, mainly symbolically, to problematic acts. Conspiracy theories do not function like ordinary information; they are, after all, often so outlandish that they can hardly be expected to be literally believed.