How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

There have been years of media attention to the disaster of the policies emerging from the “tough on crime” movements of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, resulting in large bipartisan support for shifting from punitive crime policies to social programs. However, what has not accompanied this shift is an awareness that the underlying motivations for the hard-on-crime rhetoric and policies were fascist, set up to establish an us-versus-them dichotomy and reinforce preexisting hierarchal stereotypes. It should therefore concern U.S. citizens that at the time of this writing, the plan of many members of the ruling Republican Party in the United States, including the administration of current U.S. president Donald Trump, his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, is to eliminate the already threadbare U.S. social welfare state while simultaneously making the criminal justice system substantially more punitive. After years and years of media attention to the consequences of such policies, no one can now claim ignorance of the effects of such a combination of policies, both on black Americans and on white racial attitudes. It takes studious ignorance of the facts, what the University of Connecticut philosopher Lewis Gordon calls “bad faith,” to recommit to such failed policies.10 Such “bad faith” is, as we have seen, characteristic of fascist regimes. We can see, in the case of U.S. politicians’ attitudes toward crime policy and social welfare programs, ...