How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

Perhaps the most famous twentieth-century conspiracy theory revolves around The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was at the basis of Nazi ideology. The Protocols is an early-twentieth-century hoax, supposedly written as an instruction manual to Jews as a plot for world domination. Scholars have discovered that it was liberally plagiarized from Maurice Joly’s 1864 book, A Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, a political satire set as a debate in hell between Montesquieu, who makes the case for liberalism, and Machiavelli, who makes the case for tyranny. Machiavelli’s arguments for tyranny are transformed, in The Protocols, into arguments made by the “Elders of Zion,” supposedly Jewish leaders bent on world domination.

According to The Protocols, Jews are at the center of a global conspiracy that dominates the most respected mainstream media outlets and the global economic system, using them to spread democracy, capitalism, and communism, all masks for Jewish interests. The most prominent and influential Nazi leaders, including Hitler and Goebbels, firmly believed this conspiracy theory to be true.

The University of Connecticut philosopher Michael Lynch has used the example of “Pizzagate” as evidence for the thesis that conspiracy theories are not intended to be treated as ordinary information. Lynch points out that if one were actually supposed to believe that there was a pizzeria in Washington, D.C., that was trafficking in child sex slaves for Democratic congressmen, it would be entirely rational to act as Edger Maddison Welch acted. And yet, Welch was roundly condemned by those who promulgated the “Pizzagate” conspiracy for his actions. Lynch’s point is that the “Pizzagate” conspiracy was not intended to be treated as ordinary information. The function of conspiracy theories is to impugn and malign their targets, but not necessarily by convincing their audience that they are true. In the case of “Pizzagate,” the conspiracy theory was intended to remain at the level of innuendo and slander.

Fascist politicians discredit the “liberal media” for censoring discussion of outlandish right-wing conspiracy theories, which suggests mendacious behavior covered up by the veneer of liberal democratic institutions.

George Soros is an American billionaire philanthropist of Hungarian Jewish origin. Soros’s philanthropic organization, the Open Society Foundations, has been deeply involved in democracy-building efforts in more than a hundred countries, including in his native Hungary, where his support also led to the founding of Central European University, Hungary’s leading university. In 2017, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán claimed that there was a “Soros Plan” to flood Hungary with non-Christian migrants in order to dilute the nation’s Christian identity. Orbán’s government has launched a campaign against George Soros and his alleged plan, including billboards and television ads targeting Soros, employing what many have perceived to be starkly anti-Semitic representations. There is of course no evidence whatsoever that the Jewish financier has any sort of plan to flood Hungary with non-Christian migrants, but the lack of evidence in the mainstream media is taken, by the Orbán government, to be evidence of Soros’s control over it, when in fact it is Orbán who is manipulating reality.

Hannah Arendt, perhaps the twentieth century’s greatest theorist of totalitarianism, gave clear warning of the importance of conspiracy theories in antidemocratic politics. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she writes: Mysteriousness as such became the first criterion for the choice of topics….The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one of the chief characteristics of modern masses. They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part. Repetition…is only important because it convinces them of consistency in time.1

Perhaps philosophy’s most famous defense of the freedom of speech was articulated by John Stuart Mill, who defended the ideal in his 1859 work, On Liberty. In chapter 2, “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion,” Mill sets out to establish that silencing any opinion is wrong, even if the opinion is false. To silence a false opinion is wrong, because knowledge arises only from the “collision [of truth] with error.” In other words, true belief becomes knowledge only by emerging victorious from the din of argument and disagreement and discussion.

Whether rightly or wrongly, many associate Mill’s On Liberty with the motif of a “marketplace of ideas,” a realm that, if left to operate on its own, will drive out prejudice and falsehood and produce knowledge. But the notion of a “marketplace of ideas,” like that of a free market generally, is predicated on a utopian conception of consumers. In the case of the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas, the utopian assumption is that conversation works by exchange of reasons, with one party offering its reasons, which are then countered by the reasons of an opponent, until the truth ultimately emerges. But conversation is not just used to communicate information. Conversation is also used to shut out perspectives, raise fears, and heighten prejudice.

The philosopher Ernst Cassirer writes in 1946, remarking on the changes wrought by fascist politics on the German language: If we study our modern political myths and the use that has been made of them we find in them, to our great surprise, not only a transvaluation of all our ethical values but also a transformation of human speech….New words have been coined, and even the old ones are used in a new sense; they have undergone a deep change of meaning. This change of meaning depends upon the fact that these words which formerly were used in a descriptive, logical, or semantic sense are now used as magic words that are destined to produce certain effects and to stir up certain emotions. Our ordinary words are charged with meanings; but these new-fangled words are charged with feelings and violent passions.2

The argument for the “marketplace of ideas” presupposes that words are used only in their “descriptive, logical, or semantic sense.” But in politics, and most vividly in fascist politics, language is not used simply, or even chiefly, to convey information but to elicit emotion.

Mill seems to think that knowledge, and only knowledge, emerges from arguments between dedicated opponents. Such a process, according to Mill, destroys prejudice. Mill would surely then be pleased with the Russian television network RT, whose motto is “Question More.” If Mill is correct, RT, which features voices from across the broadest possible political spectrum, from neo-Nazis to far leftists, should be the paradigm source of knowledge production. However, RT’s strategy was not devised to produce knowledge. It was rather devised as a propaganda technique, to undermine trust in basic democratic institutions.

What did Mill get wrong here? Disagreement requires a shared set of presuppositions about the world. Even dueling requires agreement about the rules. You and I might disagree about whether President Obama’s healthcare plan was good policy. But if you suspect that President Obama was an undercover Muslim spy seeking to destroy the United States, and I do not, our discussion will not be productive. We will not be talking about the costs and benefits of Obama’s health policy, but rather about whether any of his policies mask a devious antidemocratic agenda.

In devising the strategy for RT, Russian propagandists, or “political technologists,” realized that with a cacophony of opinions and outlandish possibilities, one could undermine the basic background set of presuppositions about the world that allows for productive inquiry.

Allowing every opinion into the public sphere and giving it serious time for consideration, far from resulting in a process that is conducive to knowledge formation via deliberation, destroys its very possibility. Responsible media in a liberal democracy must, in the face of this threat, try to report the truth, and resist the temptation to report on every possible theory, no matter how fantastical, as long as someone advances it.

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.

But there is a way a politician could appear to be sincere without having to vie against other candidates pursuing the same strategy: by standing for division and conflict without apology. Such a candidate might openly side with Christians over Muslims and atheists, or native-born Americans over immigrants, or whites over blacks, or the rich over the poor. They might openly and brazenly lie. In short, one could signal authenticity by openly and explicitly rejecting what are presumed to be sacrosanct political values.

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

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols, recall, is a forgery that is written like an instruction manual by “the elders of Zion,” supposed leaders among Jews, to other Jews, to take over and dominate the world on behalf of the Jewish people. It begins by instructing the reader to “infect the opponent with the idea of freedom, so-called liberalism.” According to The Protocols, liberalism weakens the “opponent” (here, the Christian), by drawing Christians into recognizing the equal rights of Jews.

Equality, according to the fascist, is the Trojan horse of liberalism. The part of Odysseus can be variously played—by Jews, by homosexuals, by Muslims, by non-whites, by feminists, etc. Anyone spreading the doctrine of liberal equality is either a dupe, “infected by the idea of freedom,” or an enemy of the nation who is spreading the ideals of liberalism only with devious and indeed illiberal aims.

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.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Ottoman Empire experienced a tremendous collapse, losing more than 400,000 square miles of territory in Africa and Europe, including Libya, Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Crete. The Ottoman sultanate was overthrown in 1908, and in 1913 the empire was taken over by extremist ultranationalists who preached a vision of a completely mythic pure ethnic Turkish past that was placed in threat by the presence of non-Turkish, non-Muslim minorities (the mythology here is particularly extreme, as the Ottoman Empire’s home of modern-day Turkey was the site of one of the world’s most powerful and longest-lasting Christian empires, Byzantium). They were able to exploit the sense of humiliation and resentment and loss of territory to bring about, in the second decade of the twentieth century, one of the more horrific crimes in history, the massacre of the Armenian Christian population of Turkey.

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.”

In a 2014 study, the psychologists Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson found that simply making salient the impending national shift to a “majority-minority” country significantly increased politically unaffiliated white Americans’ support for right-wing policies.4 For example, reading about an impending racial shift of the country from majority white to majority nonwhite made white American subjects less inclined to support affirmative action, more inclined to support restrictions on immigration, and, perhaps surprisingly, more likely to support “race neutral” conservative policies such as increasing defense spending.

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 outlets spread a sense of paranoia at a “fifth column” of “liberal” groups in our midst using the vocabulary of human rights to undermine the nation’s traditions.

Psychologists have studied a practice they call linguistic intergroup bias. It turns out we tend to describe the actions of those we regard as one of “us” quite differently than we describe the actions of those we regard as one of “them.”

If someone we regard as one of “us” does something bad—for example, steals a chocolate bar—we tend to describe the action concretely. In other words, if my friend Daniel steals a chocolate bar, I will tend to characterize what he did as “stealing a chocolate bar.” On the other hand, if someone we regard as one of “them” does the same thing, we tend to describe the action more abstractly, by imputing bad character traits to the person committing it. If Jerome, who is regarded as one of “them,” steals a chocolate bar, he is much more likely to be described as a thief or a criminal. If a white American sees a well-dressed white American handcuffed in the back of a police car, the question that comes to mind might be what happened that led to that particular arrest. If a white American sees a black American handcuffed in the back of a police car, the question that presents itself might instead be how the police got “that criminal.”

The reverse is true of good actions. If someone we regard as one of “us” does a good deed, we will be inclined to explain what happened by attributing it to good character traits of the person in question. Daniel’s giving a child a chocolate bar is described as an instance of “Daniel’s generosity.” Jerome’s giving a child a choco...

Research on linguistic intergroup bias has shown that an audience can infer from how someone’s actions are being described—abstractly or concretely—whether that person is being categorized as “us” or “them.” For example, experimental subjects make inferences from the way someone describes someone else as to whether that person is likely to share the same political party as the person they are describing, or the same religion.1 To describe someone as a “criminal” is both to mark that person with a terrifying permanent character trait and simultaneously to place the person outside the circle of “us.” They are criminals. We make mistakes.

Another salient example in the U.S. context is the use of the term “riot” to describe political protests. In the United States in the 1960s, the civil rights movement included black political protests in urban areas against police brutality (most famously in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles and the Harlem district of Manhattan). These protests were regularly described in the media as “riots.” As James Baldwin wrote at the time about the media description of these protests, “when white men rise up against oppression, they are heroes: when black men rise, they have reverted to their native savagery. The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto was not described as a riot, nor were the participants maligned as hoodlums: the boys and girls in Watts and Harlem are thoroughly aware of this.”

In 1980, half a million Americans were in prison or jail. By 2013, there were more than 2.3 million. The explosion in incarceration has fallen disproportionately on American citizens who are the descendants of those who were enslaved in this country. White Americans constitute 77 percent of the U.S. population, and black Americans 13 percent. Yet more black Americans are incarcerated than white Americans. There has scarcely been a time in history when one group has composed so much of the world’s prison population; black Americans may be only 13 percent of the U.S. population, but they are 9 percent of the world’s prison population.

In 1896, Frederick L. Hoffman published the book Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, which the historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad describes as “arguably the most influential race and crime study of the first half of the twentieth century.” Its thesis is that black Americans are uniquely violent, lazy, and prone to disease. In 1996, William J. Bennett, John J. DiIulio, Jr., and John P. Walters published the book Body Count: Moral Poverty…and How to Win America’s War Against Crime and Drugs. Its thesis is that America faces a unique threat from a new generation of young men, a large percentage of whom are black, who are especially prone to cruel, violent acts and incapable of honest work; these young men they call “super-predators.”

The pervasive sense that city dwellers in Minnesota were living off the taxes of the hardworking rural population of Minnesota was a powerful force in the Minnesota Republican triumph in 2014. (“We pay taxes too,” Cordon quotes a rural Minnesota resident as saying, “but we see a lot of our tax dollars going to urban development in the metro area. We’d like to see some of that share. We’d like to have nice roads too.”) And yet, as is typical in politics that exacerbates the rural-urban divide during times of globalization, the perception was mythical—in Minnesota, as in many places in the globalized economy, it is the metro areas that are “the state’s economic engine, generating tax dollars that flow outward to every corner of the state.”

Today, “right to work” legislation has passed in twenty-eight U.S. states, and at the time of this writing threatens to be validated by the Supreme Court, at least for public labor unions. These laws forbid unions to collect dues from employees who do not wish to pay them, while requiring unions to provide employees who do not choose to pay dues equal union representation and rights. Such legislation is intended to destroy labor unions by removing their access to financial support. “Right to work” is an Orwellian name for legislation that attacks workers’ ability to collectively bargain, thereby robbing workers of a voice.

Hitler saw “two principles starkly opposed: the principle of democracy which, wherever its practical results are evident, is the principle of destruction. And the principle of the authority of the individual, which I would like to call the principle of achievement.”17 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. Just so, in politics, Hitler urges, the leader should function like the CEO of a company.