How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

In 1989, five black teenagers—the “Central Park Five”—were arrested for the gang rape of a white woman jogger in New York City’s Central Park. Newspapers at the time were filled with breathless accounts of “wilding” black lawless teens rampaging and raping white women. At the time, Donald Trump took out full-page ads in several New York City newspapers, describing them as “crazed misfits” and calling for their execution. Subsequently, it emerged not only that the Central Park Five were innocent, but that they were known to be innocent to many of those involved in their prosecution. Years later, all five were completely exonerated and given a cash settlement by the City of New York. In November 2016, Jeff Sessions, now the U.S. attorney general, praised then president-elect Donald Trump’s 1989 comments about the Central Park Five as demonstrating his commitment to “law and order.” This is a striking understanding of law and order, not only because the teenagers were, in fact, completely innocent, but because Trump’s words left no room for due process in the case. Norms of law and order in a liberal democratic state are fundamentally fair. Sessions’s use of the phrase “law and order” instead seems to refer to a system of laws that declares young black men to be, in their very existence, violations of law and order.