How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

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.

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.

What happens when conspiracy theories become the coin of politics, and mainstream media and educational institutions are discredited, is that citizens no longer have a common reality that can serve as background for democratic deliberation. In such a situation, citizens have no choice but to look for markers to follow other than truth or reliability. What happens in such cases, as we see across the world, is that citizens look to politics for tribal identifications, for addressing personal grievances, and for entertainment. When news becomes sports, the strongman achieves a certain measure of popularity. Fascist politics transforms the news from a conduit of information and reasoned debate into a spectacle with the strongman as the star.

Fascist politics, as we have seen, seeks to undermine trust in the press and universities. But the information sphere of a healthy democratic society does not include just democratic institutions. Spreading general suspicion and doubt undermines the bonds of mutual respect between fellow citizens, leaving them with deep wells of mistrust not just toward institutions but also toward one another. 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. When fascist politics is at its most successful, the leader is regarded by the followers as singularly trustworthy.

The myths that arise under conditions of dramatic material inequality legitimize ignoring the proper common referee for public discourse, which is the world. To completely destroy reality, fascist politics replaces the liberal ideal of equality with its opposite: hierarchy.

Leftist critics of liberalism also argue that the liberal ideals of equality and freedom can be used to entrench the power of dominant groups. For example, it can be argued that ways to remedy entrenched structural injustice—say, affirmative action programs—violate liberal ideals of equal treatment. Critiques of liberalism from the right have a different flavor. Right-wing critics warn that liberal equality can be used by marginalized groups as a weapon to displace the privileged status of dominant groups and their traditions.

Hierarchy benefits fascist politics in another way: Those who are accustomed to its benefits can be easily led to view liberal equality as a source of victimization. Those who benefit from hierarchy will adopt a myth of their own superiority, which will occlude basic facts about social reality. They will distrust pleas for tolerance and inclusion made by liberals on the grounds that these pleas are masks for power grabs by other groups. Fascist politics feeds off the sense of aggrieved victimization caused by loss of hierarchal status.

In fascist politics, the opposing notions of equality and discrimination get mixed up with each other. 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.” As W.E.B. Du Bois notes, Johnson perceived minimal safeguards at the start of a path toward future black equality as “discrimination against the white race.”

Today, white Americans wildly overestimate the extent of U.S. progress toward racial equality over the past fifty years. Economic inequality between black and white Americans is roughly at the point it was during Reconstruction; for every $100 the average white family has accumulated, the average black family has just $5; and yet, as Jennifer Richeson, Michael Kraus, and Julian Rucker have shown in their 2017 paper, “Americans Misperceive Racial Economic Equality,” white American citizens are widely ignorant of this fact, believing that racial economic inequality has dramatically narrowed.2 Forty-five percent of President Donald Trump’s supporters believe that whites are the most discriminated-against racial group in America; 54 percent of Trump’s supporters believe that Christians are the most persecuted religious group in America. There is a crucial distinction, of course, between feelings of resentment and oppression and genuine inequality and discrimination.

The case is similar with the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States today. Its opponents try to represent the slogan as the illiberal nationalist claim that only black lives matter. But the slogan is hardly intended as a repudiation of the value of white lives in the United States. Rather, it intends to point out that in the United States, white lives have been taken to matter more than other lives. The point of the slogan Black Lives Matter is to call attention to a failure of equal respect. In its context, it means, “Black lives matter too.” At the core of fascism is loyalty to tribe, ethnic identity, religion, tradition, or, in a word, nation. But, in stark contrast to a version of nationalism with equality as its goal, fascist nationalism is a repudiation of the liberal democratic ideal; it is nationalism in the service of domination, with the goal of preserving, maintaining, or gaining a position at the top of a hierarchy of power and status.

Fascist propaganda typically features aching hymns to the sense of anguish that accompanies loss of dominant status. This sense of loss, which is genuine, is manipulated in fascist politics into aggrieved victimhood and exploited to justify past, continuing, or new forms of oppression.

Kimmel notes “a curious characteristic of these new legions of angry white men: although white men still have most of the power and control in the world, these particular white men feel like victims.” He connects this sense of victimhood to the perpetuation of a mythic patriarchal past: These ideas also reflect a somewhat nostalgic longing for that past world, when men believed they could simply take their places among the nation’s elite, simply by working hard and applying themselves. Alas, such a world never existed; economic elites have always managed to reproduce themselves despite the ideals of a meritocracy. But that hasn’t stopped men from believing it. It is the American Dream. And when men fail, they are humiliated, with nowhere to place their anger.7 Promulgating a mythical hierarchal past works to create unreasonable expectations. When these expectations are not met, it feels like victimhood.

Breitbart News is a powerful far-right U.S. media outlet filled with anti-immigrant propaganda representing refugees as public health threats, threats to civilization, and threats to law and order. In such outlets, we find clear expression of the way in which an aggrieved sense of victimization of dominant majorities can be weaponized for potential political gain.

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. But in doing so, they not only undermine liberal ideals, but also suggest that their targets should be subject to intense scrutiny or punishment merely on the basis that the dominant group feels fearful.

Understanding the dynamics of power in a society is crucial to assessing claims of victimhood. Equality-driven nationalism can rapidly turn oppressive itself, if one is not paying enough attention to shifts in power. Some problematic nationalist sentiments arise from perfectly genuine histories of oppression.

Victimhood is an overwhelming emotion that also conceals the contradiction between equality-driven and domination-driven nationalist movements. When groups in power use the mask of nationalism of the oppressed, or of genuine oppression in the past, to advance their own hegemony, they are using it to undermine equality.

Nationalism is at the core of fascism. The fascist leader employs a sense of collective victimhood to create a sense of group identity that is by its nature opposed to the cosmopolitan ethos and individualism of liberal democracy. The group identity can be variously based—on skin color, on religion, on tradition, on ethnic origin. But it is always contrasted with a perceived other against whom the nation is to be defined. Fascist nationalism creates a dangerous “them” to guard against, at times to battle with, to control, in order to restore group dignity.

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.

A healthy democratic state is governed by laws that treat all citizens equally and justly, supported by bonds of mutual respect between people, including those tasked with policing them. Fascist law-and-order rhetoric is explicitly meant to divide citizens into two classes: those of the chosen nation, who are lawful by nature, and those who are not, who are inherently lawless. In fascist politics, women who do not fit traditional gender roles, nonwhites, homosexuals, immigrants, “decadent cosmopolitans,” those who do not have the dominant religion, are in their very existence violations of law and order.

By describing black Americans as a threat to law and order, demagogues in the United States have been able to create a strong sense of white national identity that requires protection from the nonwhite “threat.” A similar tactic is used internationally now to create friend-enemy distinctions based on fear in order to unify populations against immigrants.

In the spring of 1936, my grandmother, Ilse Stanley, had just returned from a theater tour that had kept her away from Berlin for almost the whole winter, only to discover a city in which “more and more friends were missing.” Soon after her return, a cousin arrived at her home. The Gestapo, her cousin told her, had taken her husband away to a concentration camp. In her 1957 memoir, The Unforgotten, my grandmother describes asking her cousin about the reasons for her husband’s arrest. Her answer: Because he was a criminal with a record. He had paid two fines in court: one for speeding and one for some other traffic fine. They said they finally wanted to do what the court had missed doing all these years: to get rid of all Jews with criminal records. A traffic fine—a criminal record!

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.

Trump’s successful “law and order” campaign took place under the conditions of some of the lowest rates of violent crime in recorded U.S. history.

Discussion that uses terms like “criminal” to encompass both those who commit multiple homicides for pleasure and those who commit traffic violations, or “riot” to describe a political protest, changes attitudes and shapes policy. A good example of what can result when language that criminalizes an entire group of people distorts debate and leads to unreasonable outcomes is the mass incarceration of American citizens of African descent.

Given the significance of gender hierarchy to fascist ideology, that politicians have been trying to foment mass hysteria about trans women is unsurprising if this effort is understood as a manifestation of fascist political tactics and a sign that fascist politics is ascendant. Conversely, the growing acceptance of trans women is a strong affirmation of liberal democratic norms.

it is the metro areas that are “the state’s economic engine, generating tax dollars that flow outward to every corner of the state.” Fascist politics feeds the insulting myth that hardworking rural residents pay to support lazy urban dwellers, so it is not a surprise that the base of its success is found in a country’s rural areas.

Fascist ideology rejects pluralism and tolerance. In fascist politics, everyone in the chosen nation shares a religion and a way of life, a set of customs. The diversity, with its concomitant tolerance of difference, in large urban centers is therefore a threat to fascist ideology. Fascist politics targets financial elites, “cosmopolitans,” liberals, and religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities. In many countries, these are characteristically urban populations. Cities therefore usefully serve as a proxy target for the classic enemies of fascist politics.

To boost the nation, fascist movements are obsessed with reversing declining birthrates; large families raised by dedicated homemakers are the goal.14 In fascist politics, cities are denounced as sites of declining birthrates, which are blamed on the supposed weakening effect of cosmopolitanism on a population, making men and women less capable of fulfilling traditional gender roles (as soldiers and mothers, for example).

Most often American opposition to welfare is represented as a manifestation of a commitment to individualism, of support and desire for nurturing an ethic of self-sufficiency. And yet a dominant theme emerging from research on white Americans’ attitude toward welfare is that the single largest predictor of white Americans’ attitude toward programs described as “welfare” is their attitude toward the judgment that black people are lazy.

Traumatized, penniless refugees coming en masse across borders require state aid and support before entering labor markets. They require such support to learn the language and, initially at least, for shelter, food, and job training. By subjecting members of a despised minority to brutal treatment and then sending them as refugees across borders into other countries, fascist movements can create an apparent reality underlying their claim that members of that group are lazy and dependent on state aid or petty crime. By such methods, they also export the conditions that make fascist politics effective.

Arendt’s point is that fascist unreality is a promissory note on the way to a future reality that transforms into fact at least some basis of what was once stereotyped myth. Fascist unreality is, as Arendt explains, a prelude to fascist policy. Fascist politics and fascist policy cannot easily be divorced from each other. The strong temptation for those who employ fascist politics, once they assume power, is to use their position of power to make their once fantastical statements increasingly more plausible.

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, ...

One roadblock to the kind of us/them divisions described above is unity and empathy along class lines, exemplified in labor unions. In functioning unions, white working-class citizens identify with black working-class citizens rather than resent them. Fascist politicians understand the effectiveness of this solidarity to resisting divisive policies and therefore seek to dismantle unions. Despite its condemnation of “elites,” fascist politics seeks to minimize the importance of class struggle. The labor union is the chief mechanism societies have found to bind people who differ along various dimensions. Trade unions are sources of cooperation and community, and of wage equality, as well as mechanisms to provide protections from the vicissitudes of the global market. According to fascist politics, unions must be smashed so that individual laborers are left to fend for themselves on the sea of global capitalism, ready to become dependent instead on a party or leader. Antipathy to labor unions is such a major theme of fascist politics that fascism cannot be fully comprehended without an understanding of it.

There are more reasons why fascist ideology targets labor unions. Fascist politics is most effective under conditions of stark economic inequality. Research shows that a proliferation of labor unions is the best antidote to the development of such conditions. As the Harvard political scientist Archon Fung points out, “many societies that have low levels of inequality also have high participation in labor unions.”12 Fung notes an extraordinary statistic derived from a study of inequality and labor union density in OECD countries (most of the stable democracies in North America and Europe) in 2013. Fung points out that “countries with high union density have low income inequality (Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and Iceland), and the high inequality countries also have low union density (U.S., Chile, Mexico, and Turkey).” The number of countries in the study with high inequality and high union density was zero. Labor unions are a powerful weapon against the development of an unequal economic sphere. Because fascism thrives under conditions of economic uncertainty, where fear and resentment can be mobilized to set citizens against one another, labor unions guard against fascist politics’ gaining a foothold.

Du Bois describes the labor movement that emerged during Reconstruction as putting “such power in the hands of Southern labor that, with intelligent and unselfish leadership and a clarifying ideal, it could have rebuilt the economic foundations of Southern society, confiscated and redistributed wealth, and built a real democracy of industry for the masses of men.”13 Du Bois documents how the emerging Southern labor movement was riven by racial resentment, with poor whites fearful of losing their place in the social hierarchy above newly emancipated black citizens. Du Bois argues that Northern industrialists together with the old white Southern power structures employed these resentments to smash any semblance of a cross-racial labor movement, and with it what would have been a powerful force for economic equality. When poor white workers lack class identification with poor black workers, they fall back on familiar lines of racial division and resentment.

The father, in fascist ideology, is the leader of the family; the CEO is the leader of the business; the authoritarian leader is the father, or the CEO, of the state. When voters in a democratic society yearn for a CEO as president, they are responding to their own implicit fascist impulses.

The pull of fascist politics is powerful. It simplifies human existence, gives us an object, a “them” whose supposed laziness highlights our own virtue and discipline, encourages us to identify with a forceful leader who helps us make sense of the world, whose bluntness regarding the “undeserving” people in the world is refreshing. If democracy looks like a successful business, if the CEO is tough-talking and cares little for democratic institutions, even denigrates them, so much the better. Fascist politics preys on the human frailty that makes our own suffering seem bearable if we know that those we look down upon are being made to suffer more.

Navigating the tensions created by living in a state with a democratic sphere of governance, a nondemocratic hierarchical economic sphere, and a rich, complex civil society replete with organizations, associations, and community groups adhering to multiple visions of a good life can be frustrating. Democratic citizenship requires a degree of empathy, insight, and kindness that demands a great deal of all of us. There are easier ways to live. For example, we can reduce our public engagement to consumption, viewing our labor as whatever we need do to enter the consumer marketplace with money in our pockets, free to choose our widgets, to shape an identity based upon consumption. Or we can go global and expand our understanding of “us” by wandering the world and appreciating its cultures and wonders, considering both the people living in the refugee camps of the world and the residents of small towns in Iowa to be our neighbors, while maintaining a connection with our own local traditions and duties. But this engaging vision of the self moving through time and cultures is deeply problematic under conditions of stark economic inequality. It requires profound experiences with differe...