How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

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.