How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

Panic about immigration and the fear of losing the dominant culture to religious or ethnic minorities loathed by the majority groups are central to fascist politics.

A distinguishing mark of fascist politics is the targeting of ideological enemies and the freeing of all restraints in combating them.

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

In the United States, as Donald Trump’s campaign against immigration intensifies, it is sweeping untold numbers of undocumented workers of all backgrounds into anonymously run private detention centers, where they are concealed from view and public concern.

On the local level, county jails bolster their budgets by housing those detained by ICE’s massively broadened mandate. The legal, material, and economic structure of these camps is evocative of Nazi Germany’s early concentration camps.

ICE is an organization that is like the police but is not the police. The job of the police in a democratic society is to keep communities safe. In practice, ICE collaborates with conventional American criminal justice institutions, including local police departments, but often ends up working at cross-purposes with them by creating fear in immigrant communities, whose members become less likely to report crime. As a result, some police chiefs have aligned themselves against ICE raids. The goal of ICE is not to make communities safer. ICE’s mission is to reinforce a distinction between “us” and “them.”

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. This threatens the democratic nature of these institutions as well as their competence to carry out their institutional missions. Our democratic culture is on life support.

India, the United States, and Brazil are now run by far-right parties, with demagogic leaders implementing ultranationalist agendas. In the bastions of democracy in Western Europe, far-right parties are ascendant. All around the world, liberal democracy is in retreat. Not since the middle of the twentieth century has liberal democracy been in such peril.

In early March, Trump’s Executive Office for Immigration Review ordered immigration court staff “to remove CDC posters designed to slow spread of coronavirus.”*6 It’s hard to see what the point of such an order is, except to give some reality to the association between immigrants and the virus by failing to inform these populations of the dangers.

In the United States, the Department of Justice sought emergency powers from Congress, including indefinite detention by judges. Using crisis as anti-democratic opportunity is a classic fascist tactic.

In each of our local communities, there is at least one activist who has been dealing with a problem for generations. It was under Obama that the current harsh deportation regime started in the United States.

The America First movement was the public face of pro-fascist sentiment in the United States at that time.2 In the twenties and thirties, many Americans shared Lindbergh’s views against immigration, especially by non-Europeans. The Immigration Act of 1924 strictly limited immigration into the country, and it was specifically intended to restrict the immigration of both nonwhites and Jews. In 1939, the United States allowed so few refugees through its borders that it is a miracle that my father happened to be among them. In 2016, Donald Trump revived “America First” as one of his slogans, and from his first week in office, his administration has ceaselessly pursued travel bans on immigration, including refugees, specifically singling out Arab countries. Trump also promised to deport the millions of nonwhite Central and South American undocumented workers in the United States and to end legislation protecting the children they brought with them from deportation. In September 2017, the Trump administration set a cap of forty-five thousand on the number of refugees that will be allowed into the United States in 2018, the lowest number since presidents began placing such limits.

But when, exactly, was America great, in the eyes of the Trump campaign? During the nineteenth century, when the United States enslaved its black population? During Jim Crow, when black Americans in the South were prevented from voting? A hint about the decade that was most salient to the Trump campaign emerges from a November 18, 2016, Hollywood Reporter interview with Steve Bannon, the then president-elect’s chief strategist, in which he remarks about the era to come that “it will be as exciting as the 1930s.” In short, the era when the United States had its most sympathy for fascism.

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. As Donald Trump declared in his Republican National Convention speech in July 2016, “I am your voice.”

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. Though a defense of certain elements is legitimate and sometimes warranted, there are times in history when they come together in one party or political movement. These are dangerous moments. In the United States today, Republican politicians employ these strategies with more and more frequency. Their increasing tendency to engage in this politics should give honest conservatives pause.

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.

Fascist politics can dehumanize minority groups even when an explicitly fascist state does not arise.

The most telling symptom of fascist politics is division. It aims to separate a population into an “us” and a “them.” Many kinds of political movements involve such a division; for example, Communist politics weaponizes class divisions. Giving a description of fascist politics involves describing the very specific way that fascist politics distinguishes “us” from “them,” appealing to ethnic, religious, or racial distinctions, and using this division to shape ideology and, ultimately, policy. Every mechanism of fascist politics works to create or solidify this distinction.

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.

As the common understanding of reality crumbles, fascist politics makes room for dangerous and false beliefs to take root. First, fascist ideology seeks to naturalize group difference, thereby giving the appearance of natural, scientific support for a hierarchy of human worth. When social rankings and divisions solidify, fear fills in for understanding between groups. 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.

It is only natural to begin this book where fascist politics invariably claims to discover its genesis: in the past. Fascist politics invokes a pure mythic past tragically destroyed.

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.

In a 1922 speech at the Fascist Congress in Naples, Benito Mussolini declared: We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary for it to be a reality….Our myth is the nation, our myth is the greatness of the nation! And to this myth, this greatness, which we want to translate into a total reality, we subordinate everything.

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 fascist mythic past exists to aid in changing the present.

In fascist politics, myths of a patriarchal past, threatened by encroaching liberal ideals and all that they entail, function to create a sense of panic at the loss of hierarchal status, both for men and for the dominant group’s ability to protect its purity and status from foreign encroachment.

In order to honestly debate what our country should do, what policies it should adopt, we need a common basis of reality, including about our own past. History in a liberal democracy must be faithful to the norm of truth, yielding an accurate vision of the past, rather than a history provided for political reasons. Fascist politics, by contrast, characteristically contains within it a demand to mythologize the past, creating a version of national heritage that is a weapon for political gain.

whites in the South, with the collusion of Northern elites, brought an end to the Reconstruction era because of the widespread fear among the wealthy classes that newly enfranchised black citizens would join with poor whites in developing a powerful labor movement to challenge the interests of capital.

It’s hard to advance a policy that will harm a large group of people in straightforward terms. The role of political propaganda is to conceal politicians’ or political movements’ clearly problematic goals by masking them with ideals that are widely accepted.

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

Fascist movements have been “draining swamps” for generations. Publicizing false charges of corruption while engaging in corrupt practices is typical of fascist politics, and anticorruption campaigns are frequently at the heart of fascist political movements. Fascist politicians characteristically decry corruption in the state they seek to take over, which is bizarre, given that fascist politicians themselves are invariably vastly more corrupt than those they seek to supplant or defeat.

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.

Masking corruption under the guise of anticorruption is a hallmark strategy in fascist propaganda.

The undemocratic intent behind fascist propaganda is key. Fascist states focus on dismantling the rule of law, with the goal of replacing it with the dictates of individual rulers or party bosses.

In the name of rooting out corruption and supposed bias, fascist politicians attack and diminish the institutions that might otherwise check their power.

Just as fascist politics attacks the rule of law in the name of anticorruption, it also purports to protect freedom and individual liberties. But these liberties are contingent on the oppression of some groups.

Historically, fascist leaders have often come to power through democratic elections. But the commitment to freedom, such as the freedom inherent in the right to vote, tends to end with that victory.

Fascists have always been well acquainted with this recipe for using democracy’s liberties against itself; 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.”

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.

Fascist politics seeks to undermine the credibility of institutions that harbor independent voices of dissent until they can be replaced by media and universities that reject those voices.

Whenever fascism threatens, its representatives and facilitators denounce universities and schools as sources of “Marxist indoctrination,” the classic bogeyman of fascist politics. Typically used without any connection to Marx or Marxism, the expression is employed in fascist politics as a way to malign equality. That is why universities that seek to give some intellectual space to marginalized perspectives, however small, are subject to denunciation as hotbeds of “Marxism.”

Fascist politics, however, makes room for the study of myths as fact. In fascist ideology, the function of the education system is to glorify the mythic past, elevating the achievements of members of the nation and obscuring the perspectives and histories of those who do not belong.

The far-right American radio host Rush Limbaugh has, on his popular radio show, denounced “the four corners of deceit: government, academia, science and media. Those institutions are now corrupt and exist by virtue of deceit. That’s how they promulgate themselves; it is how they prosper.”10 Limbaugh, here, provides a perfect example of how fascist politics targets expertise, mocking and devaluing it. 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.

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 the Swamp, Lock Her Up, Build a Wall….This was pure anger. Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls.”

Fascist politics exchanges reality for the pronouncements of a single individual, or perhaps a political party. Regular and repeated obvious lying is part of the process by which fascist politics destroys the information space. A fascist leader can replace truth with power, ultimately lying without consequence.

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.

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.