How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

Since the book was published, there have not just been new developments—there have also been worrisome advances in existing movements. 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.

When observing the tangible effects of Trump’s rhetoric, many in the media look to the streets for hate crimes by skinheads, or for other examples of extrajudicial violence aimed at Trump’s targets—immigrants and Muslims, for example—but not actually committed by the Trump administration. This is dangerously confused. It is a reaction that masks the worst material effects of Trump’s political tactics. Fascist political tactics employed by an election’s winner materialize in the resulting state apparatus, not only between individuals. Debates that require one to direct one’s eye instead to the streets force us to look away from the structural consequences of fascist rhetoric. By ignoring the state apparatus erected by those who entered into office through fascist politics, we behave as if fascist political tactics cannot transform once-democratic states into fascist ones. This is a thesis that history, as well as common sense, rejects.

With the advent of a public health pandemic like COVID-19, the attacks on expertise, science, and truth that are the lifeblood of fascist politics imperil much more than just our political system. We can see the explicit dangers in the response to COVID-19 of the leaders of the United States, Brazil, and India, which was initially to dismiss the virus as an overblown hoax.*5 The response of these governments to the virus was not some accident—as I show in the pages to follow, fascist ideology conflicts in principle with expertise, science, and truth.

Trump called the virus “the Chinese virus” in part because that is where it originated. But the reason he sticks to this label in the face of criticism is to reframe debate around nationalist conflict (and away from the incompetence of his administration).

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.

Using crisis as anti-democratic opportunity is a classic fascist tactic.

fascism is not a new threat, but rather a permanent temptation.

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.

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 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 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. Many people are not familiar with the ideological structure of fascism, that each mechanism of fascist politics tends to build on others.

Depending on how the nation is defined, the mythic past may be religiously pure, racially pure, culturally pure, or all of the above.

In the present, these myths become the basis of the nation’s identity under fascist politics.

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.

According to Strasser, “for a man, military service is the most profound and valuable form of participation—for the woman it is motherhood!”3 Paula Siber, the acting head of the Association of German Women, in a 1933 document meant to reflect official National Socialist state policy on women, declares that “to be a woman means to be a mother, means affirming with the whole conscious force of one’s soul the value of being a mother and making it a law of life…the highest calling of the National Socialist woman is not just to bear children, but consciously and out of total devotion to her role and duty as mother to raise children for her people.”

a prominent neo-Nazi who ran the fascist online newspaper The Daily Stormer with Andrew Anglin. In May 2017, he published an article in The Daily Stormer titled “Just What Are Traditional Gender Roles?” In it, he claims that women were traditionally regarded as property in all European cultures, except for Jewish societies and some gypsy groups, which were matrilineal: This was why the Jews were so keen to attack these ideas, because the patrilineal passing of property was innately offensive to their culture. Europe only has this absurd notion of women as independent entities because of organized subversion by agents of Judaism.7

gendered language, and references to women’s roles and special value, often slip into political speech without much thought to their implication. In the 2016 U.S. election, a video surfaced showing the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump making harshly demeaning comments about women. Mitt Romney, the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee, said that Trump’s remarks “demean our wives and daughters.” Paul Ryan, the Republican Speaker of the House, said, “women are to be championed and revered, not objectified.” Both of these remarks reveal an underlying patriarchal ideology that is typical of much of U.S. Republican Party policy. These politicians could simply have given voice to the most direct description of the facts, which is that Trump’s remarks demean half our fellow citizens. Instead, Romney’s remark, in language evocative of that used in the Hutu Ten Commandments, describes women exclusively in terms of traditionally subordinate roles in families, as “wives and daughters”—not even as sisters. Paul Ryan’s characterization of women as objects of “reverence” rather than equal respect objectifies women in the same sentence that decries doing so.

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.

one can convince a population that they are rightfully exceptional, that they are destined by nature or by religious fate to rule other populations, one has already convinced them of a monstrous lie.

Sounds like the LDS faith

Nathuram Godse, the man who assassinated Gandhi, was a member of RSS, as was current Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. RSS was explicitly influenced by European fascist movements, its leading politicians regularly praised Hitler and Mussolini in the late 1930s and 1940s.

While fascist politics fetishizes the past, it is never the actual past that is fetishized. These invented histories also diminish or entirely extinguish the nation’s past sins. It is typical for fascist politicians to represent a country’s actual history in conspiratorial terms, as a narrative concocted by liberal elites and cosmopolitans to victimize the people of the true “nation.”

Fascist politics repudiates any dark moments of a nation’s past.

Such attempts to legislate the erasure of a nation’s past are characteristic of fascist regimes.

Just as politicians in the U.S. Republican Party seek to harness white resentment (and votes) by denouncing accurate historical scholarship about the brutality of slavery as a way to “victimize” American whites, especially from the South, AfD seeks to garner votes by representing the accurate history of Germany’s Nazi past as a form of victimization of the German people.

When it does not simply invent a past to weaponize the emotion of nostalgia, fascist politics cherry-picks the past, avoiding anything that would diminish unreflective adulation of the nation’s glory.

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.

The final chapter of Black Reconstruction is titled “The Propaganda of History.” In it, Du Bois harshly denounces the practice of appealing to the ideals of historical scholarship, truth and objectivity, to advance political goals. To do so, Du Bois declares, is to undermine the discipline of history. Historians who advance a false narrative for political gain under the treasured ideals of truth and objectivity, according to Du Bois, are guilty of transforming history into propaganda.

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.

To many white Americans, President Obama must have been corrupt, because his very occupation of the White House was a kind of corruption of the traditional order. When women attain positions of political power usually reserved for men—or when Muslims, blacks, Jews, homosexuals, or “cosmopolitans” profit or even share the public goods of a democracy, such as healthcare—that is perceived as corruption.5 Fascist politicians know that their supporters will turn a blind eye to their own, true corruption since in their own case it is just a matter of members of the chosen nation taking what is rightfully theirs.

It is standard in fascist politics for harsh criticisms of an independent judiciary to occur in the form of accusations of bias, a kind of corruption, critiques that are then used to replace independent judges with ones who will cynically employ the law as a means to protect the interests of the ruling party.

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

This is classic fascist ideology with a hierarchy of value of worth between races. The rhetoric of liberty worked during the Confederacy by explicitly tying white southerners’ liberties to the practice of slavery. When others are doing the labor for you, you are free to do as you please, at least superficially. The liberty involved in the leisurely life of the Southern planter was intimately bound up with the doctrine of white racial superiority.

The liberty that many whites in Southern states sought by calling for “states’ rights” was the freedom to restrict the liberties of their fellow black citizens.

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. In Mein Kampf, after excoriating parliamentary democracy, Hitler praises “true Germanic Democracy,” with “free choice of the Leader, along with his obligation to assume entire responsibility for all he does and causes to be done.”

U.S. attorney general Jeff Sessions is hardly a defender of free speech. And yet the very same month that his Justice Department was again attempting to bring an American citizen to trial for laughing, Sessions delivered a speech at Georgetown Law School excoriating university campuses for failing to live up to a commitment to free speech because of the presumption that the academy discourages right-leaning voices. He called for a “national recommitment to free speech and the First Amendment” (in the week Sessions gave this speech, news was dominated by President Trump’s call for the owners of National Football League teams to fire players who knelt during the national anthem to protest racism, an exercise of First Amendment rights if ever there was one).

Fascist politics seeks to undermine public discourse by attacking and devaluing education, expertise, and language.

unique role in the antiwar movement of the 1960s. Where speech is a right, propagandists cannot attack dissent head-on; instead they must represent it as something violent and oppressive (a protest therefore becomes a “riot”).

In the classic style of demagogic propaganda, the tactic of attacking institutions standing up for public reason and open debate occurs under the cloak of those very ideals.

When fascist movements are under way in liberal democratic states, certain academic disciplines are singled out. Gender studies, for instance, comes under fire from far-right nationalist movements across the world. The professors and teachers in these fields are accused of disrespect to the traditions of the nation.

Fascism is about the dominant perspective, and so, during fascist moments, there is strong support for figures to denounce disciplines that teach perspectives other than the dominant ones—such as gender studies or, in the United States, African American studies or Middle Eastern studies. The dominant perspective is often misrepresented as the truth, the “real history,” and any attempt to allow a space for alternative perspectives is derided as “cultural Marxism.”

Fascist opposition to gender studies, in particular, flows from its patriarchal ideology. National Socialism targeted women’s movements and feminism generally; for the Nazis, feminism was a Jewish conspiracy to destroy fertility among Aryan women. Charu Gupta aptly summarizes the Nazi attitude toward feminist movements: [Nazis] believed that the women’s movement was part of an international Jewish conspiracy to subvert the German family and thus destroy the German race. The movement, it claimed, was encouraging women to assert their economic independence and to neglect their proper task of producing children. It was spreading the feminine doctrines of pacifism, democracy and “materialism.” By encouraging contraception and abortion and so lowering the birth rate, it was attacking the very existence of the German people.4

Today this is cloaked in the guise of alpha males, an other toxic masculinity.

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. In a process sometimes tendentiously called “decolonizing” the curriculum, neglected perspectives are incorporated, thereby ensuring that students have a full view of history’s actors. In the fight against fascism, adjusting the curriculum in this way is not mere “political correctness.” Representing the voices of all of those whose existence has shaped and formed the world in which we live provides an essential means of protection against fascist myth.

In fascist ideology, the goal of general education in the schools and universities is to instill pride in the mythic past;

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.

By rejecting the value of expertise, fascist politicians also remove any requirement for sophisticated debate. Reality is always more complex than our means of representing it. Scientific language requires ever more complex terminology, to make distinctions that would be invisible without it. Social reality is at least as complex as the reality of physics. In a healthy liberal democracy, a public language with a rich and varied vocabulary to make distinctions is a vital democratic institution. Without it, healthy public discourse is impossible. Fascist politics seeks to degrade and debase the language of politics; fascist politics thereby seeks to mask reality.

Adolf Hitler was very explicit about the importance of impoverishing public discourse in this manner. In his chapter on propaganda in Mein Kampf, he writes: All propaganda should be popular and should adapt its intellectual level to the receptive ability of the least intellectual of those whom it is desired to address. Thus it must sink its mental elevation deeper in proportion to the numbers of the mass whom it has to grip….The receptive ability of the masses is very limited, and their understanding small; on the other hand, they have a great power of forgetting. This being so, all effective propaganda must be confined to very few points which must be brought out in the form of slogans.12

It is a core tenet of fascist politics that the goal of oratory should not be to convince the intellect, but to sway the will.

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.”15

By debasing institutions of higher learning and impoverishing our joint vocabulary to discuss policy, fascist politics reduces debate to ideological conflict. Via such strategies, fascist politics degrades information spaces, occluding reality.

By replacing the world with a person, fascist politics makes us unable to assess arguments by a common standard. The fascist politician possesses specific techniques to destroy information spaces and break down reality.