How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

Lynch points out that if one were actually supposed to believe that there was a pizzeria in Washington, D.C., that was trafficking in child sex slaves for Democratic congressmen, it would be entirely rational to act as Edger Maddison Welch acted. And yet, Welch was roundly condemned by those who promulgated the “Pizzagate” conspiracy for his actions. Lynch’s point is that the “Pizzagate” conspiracy was not intended to be treated as ordinary information. The function of conspiracy theories is to impugn and malign their targets, but not necessarily by convincing their audience that they are true. In the case of “Pizzagate,” the conspiracy theory was intended to remain at the level of innuendo and slander.

President Trump is not an outlier here; conspiracy theories are the calling cards of fascist politics. Conspiracy theories are tools to attack those who would ignore their existence; by not covering them, the media is made to appear biased and ultimately part of the very conspiracy they refuse to cover.

Once a public accepts the comfort of conspiracy thinking as an explanation for irrational fears and resentments, its members will cease to be guided by reason in political deliberation.

The argument for the “marketplace of ideas” presupposes that words are used only in their “descriptive, logical, or semantic sense.” But in politics, and most vividly in fascist politics, language is not used simply, or even chiefly, to convey information but to elicit emotion.

Objective truth is drowned out in the resulting cacophony of voices. The effect of RT, as well as the myriad conspiracy-theory-producing websites across the world, including in the United States, has been to destabilize the kind of shared reality that is in fact required for democratic contestation.

Disagreement requires a shared set of presuppositions about the world. Even dueling requires agreement about the rules. You and I might disagree about whether President Obama’s healthcare plan was good policy. But if you suspect that President Obama was an undercover Muslim spy seeking to destroy the United States, and I do not, our discussion will not be productive. We will not be talking about the costs and benefits of Obama’s health policy, but rather about whether any of his policies mask a devious antidemocratic agenda.

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.

Atwater, then a consultant in Reagan’s White House (later the campaign manager for George H. W. Bush’s ’88 win), explained that racist intent had to be made less overt over time in a 1981 interview with political scientist Alexander Lamis: By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites….5

Ever since Plato and Aristotle wrote on the topic, political theorists have known that democracy cannot flourish on soil poisoned by inequality.

Extreme economic inequality is toxic to liberal democracy because it breeds delusions that mask reality, undermining the possibility of joint deliberation to solve society’s divisions.

To completely destroy reality, fascist politics replaces the liberal ideal of equality with its opposite: hierarchy.

Hierarchy is a kind of mass delusion, one readily exploited by fascist politics. A major branch of social psychology, Social Dominance Theory, pioneered by Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto, studies these delusions under the name of “legitimation myths.”

Fascist ideology, then, takes advantage of a human tendency to organize society hierarchically, and fascist politicians represent the myths that legitimize their hierarchies as immutable facts.

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea [of equality]; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.

“The Unwelcome Revival of Race Science,” Gavin Evans describes how “race science is [leaching] into mainstream discourse” via figures such as the political scientist Charles Murray and the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker.

The concern about this kind of writing is that it presents those who seek a natural source for inequality as brave truth-seekers, driven by reason to reject the heart’s plea for equality. This research has proven to be suspect, at best. And yet, the search for the natural source of inequality that Stephens pointed to as fact somehow continues, grail-like. Fascists argue that natural hierarchies of worth in fact exist, and that their existence undermines the obligation for equal consideration.

In his run for the presidency, Trump exploited the lengthy history of ranking Americans into a hierarchy of worth by race, the “deserving” versus the “undeserving.”

The Protocols, recall, is a forgery that is written like an instruction manual by “the elders of Zion,” supposed leaders among Jews, to other Jews, to take over and dominate the world on behalf of the Jewish people. It begins by instructing the reader to “infect the opponent with the idea of freedom, so-called liberalism.” According to The Protocols, liberalism weakens the “opponent” (here, the Christian), by drawing Christians into recognizing the equal rights of Jews. If Christians accept liberalism, they will be led to give equal respect and equal recognition to other religious groups, thereby ceding their dominant traditional position: Political freedom is an idea but not a fact. This idea one must know how to apply whenever it appears necessary with this bait of an idea to attract the masses of the people to one’s party for the purpose of crushing another who is in authority. This task is rendered easier if the opponent has himself been infected with the idea of freedom, SO-CALLED LIBERALISM, and, for the sake of an idea, is willing to yield some of his power. It is precisely here that the triumph of our theory appears; the slackened reins of government are immediately, by the law of life, caught up and gathered together by a new hand, because the blind might of the nation cannot for one single day exist without guidance, and the new authority merely fits into the place of the old already weakened by liberalism.

The Protocols suggests spreading the myth of “political freedom,” or “liberalism,” to members of dominant groups. By accepting the myth of “political freedom,” those in power will grant equal status to those who lack it. But since “the law of life,” that is, nature, demands that one group rule, once Jews are granted some of the power by the dominant Christians, they can then seize all of the power from them.

Equality, according to the fascist, is the Trojan horse of liberalism. The part of Odysseus can be variously played—by Jews, by homosexuals, by Muslims, by non-whites, by feminists, etc. Anyone spreading the doctrine of liberal equality is either a dupe, “infected by the idea of freedom,” or an enemy of the nation who is spreading the ideals of liberalism only with devious and indeed illiberal aims.

According to fascists, liberals and Marxists (or “cultural Marxists”) advance the ideals of equality and liberty, spreading their ideas as “infections” to members of the dominant group which leads them to willingly hand over their power.

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.

Empires in decline are particularly susceptible to fascist politics because of this sense of loss. It is in the very nature of empire to create a hierarchy; empires legitimize their colonial enterprises by a myth of their own exceptionalism. In the course of decline, the population is easily led to a sense of national humiliation that can be mobilized in fascist politics to serve various purposes.

With its demise, the citizens of a once powerful empire must confront the fact that their exceptionalism was a myth.

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.”1

The exploitation of the feeling of victimization by dominant groups at the prospect of sharing citizenship and power with minorities is a universal element of contemporary international fascist politics.

This kind of nationalism, the nationalism that arises from oppression, is not fascist in origin. These forms of nationalism, in their original formations, are equality-driven nationalist movements.

the universal ideal and the many local tribal religions as primitive and savage. In part a response to this religious oppression, the Mau Mau rebellion against Britain valorized the traditional Gikuyu religion—Mau Mau rebels took an oath to Ngai, the Gikuyu god. The Mau Mau colonialist struggle used nationalist religious ideals to fight colonialism. But the goal of the Mau Mau struggle was not to fight for the superiority of the Gikuyu religious traditions over the British religious traditions. The goal was rather to fight for the equality of the Gikuyu traditions against the British demonization of them as forms of primitive savagery. To do so, it was necessary to elevate these traditions, to hold them as sacrosanct and special, not as a means of repudiating the value of British traditions, but rather as a means to emphasize a demand for equal respect. This kind of nationalism is therefore in no sense opposed to equality; instead, despite appearances to the contrary, equality is its goal. The case is similar with the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States today.

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.”

Fascist propaganda typically features aching hymns to the sense of anguish that accompanies loss of dominant status.

In her book Down Girl, Kate Manne illustrates this by drawing a distinction between patriarchy and misogyny. Patriarchy, according to Manne, is the hierarchal ideology that engenders the unreasonable expectations of high status. Misogyny is what faces women who are blamed when patriarchal expectations are left unfulfilled. The logic of fascist politics has a vivid model in Manne’s logic of misogyny.

When the Israeli right uses the unquestioned history of Jewish oppression to assert Jewish dominance over Palestinian lands and lives, they are relying on the sense of victimization to obscure the contradiction between a struggle for equal respect and a struggle for dominance. Oppression is a powerful motivation for action, but the questions of who is wielding it when, under what context and against whom, remain eternally crucial.

... 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.

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.”

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.

there exists today no sufficient material of proven reliability, upon which any scientist can base definite and final conclusions as to the present conditions and tendencies of the eight million American Negroes; and that any person or publication purporting to give such conclusions simply makes statements which go beyond the reasonably proven evidence.6 Du Bois here emphasizes the wide gap between what social scientists know and the full facts, a gap that is subject to what the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has called “manipulative expertise.” Du Bois’s words remain true today.

The argument that 47% of crimes or those in th prison system are black people and th conclusions drawn with that are a great example

Fascist propaganda does not, of course, merely present members of targeted groups as criminals. To ensure the right kind of moral panic about these groups, its members are represented as particular kinds of threats to the fascist nation—most important, and most typical, a threat to its purity. Consequently, fascist politics also emphasizes one kind of crime. The basic threat that fascist propaganda uses to raise fear is that members of the targeted group will rape members of the chosen nation, thereby polluting its “blood.”

The politics of sexual anxiety is particularly effective when traditional male roles, such as that of family provider, are already under threat by economic forces.

Transgender individuals and homosexuals are used to heighten anxiety and panic about the threat to traditional male gender roles.

an article for The New York Times on September 26, 2017, Caitlin Dickerson wrote about what happened in the small town of Twin Falls, Idaho, where three refugee boys, aged seven, ten, and fourteen, were accused of some kind of sexual activity with a five-year-old American girl. Immediately after the incident, Facebook groups formed about it, with links to articles on the Internet claiming “that the little girl had been gang raped at knifepoint, that the perpetrators were Syrian refugees and that their fathers had celebrated with them afterward by giving them high fives.” Soon thereafter, the headline article on the Drudge Report, one of the most visited sites on the Internet, screamed “REPORT: Syrian ‘Refugees’ Rape Little Girl at Knifepoint in Idaho.” The articles were all false—for one thing, as Dickerson reports, no Syrian refugees were resettled in Twin Falls. It’s not clear that there was any attack at all (a police officer, based on the cellphone video of the incident, called the Internet descriptions of it “100 percent false, like not even close to being accurate”). Nevertheless, the fake news stories created a wave of intimidating harassment against public officials in Twin Falls, and a storm of outrage against refugees in the community. In short, they created moral panic about the sexual danger refugees posed for American white girls, a panic that has yet to subside.

times of extreme economic anxiety, men, already made anxious by a perceived loss of status resulting from increasing gender equality, can easily be thrust into panic by demagoguery directed against sexual minorities. Here fascist politics intentionally distorts the source of anxiety. (A fascist politician has no intention of addressing the root causes of economic hardship.) Fascist politics distorts male anxiety, heightened by economic anxiety, into fear that one’s family is under existential threat from those who reject its structure and traditions. Here again, the weapon used in fascist politics is a supposed potential threat of sexual assault.

The politics of sexual anxiety is a way to get around this issue, in the name of safety; it is a way to attack and undermine the ideals of liberal democracy without being seen as explicitly so doing. By employing the politics of sexual anxiety, a political leader represents, albeit indirectly, freedom and equality as threats.

The politics of sexual anxiety also undermines equality. When equality is granted to women, the role of men as sole providers for their families is threatened. Highlighting male helplessness in the face of sexual threats to their wives and children accentuates such feelings of anxiety at the loss of patriarchal masculinity. The politics of sexual anxiety is a powerful way to present freedom and equality as fundamental threats without explicitly appearing to reject them. A robust presence of a politics of sexual anxiety is perhaps the most vivid sign of the erosion of liberal democracy.

Politicians, then, turn their attention to the sites of the most egregious and concentrated sources of sexual deviance and violent threats—cosmopolitan urban centers. In the book of Genesis, Sodom and Gomorrah are cities that are singled out by God to be destroyed for their wickedness and sin. There is textual controversy over what sins were said to be the reason for the destruction of these cities. But regardless of scholarship, in the historical imagination, the sins have been taken to be sexual in nature, specifically, homosexuality. Cities have long been treated, in rhetoric and literature, as places of decadence and sin, most particularly, sexual decadence and sin. Sodom and Gomorrah are the biblical reference points for the source of sexual anxiety, where homosexuality, race mixing, and other sins against fascist ideology are most likely to occur.

National Socialist ideology took this to extremes: Pure German values were rural values, realized in peasant life; the cities, by contrast, were sites of racial defilement, where pure Nordic blood was ruined by mixture with others.

Hitler’s denunciations of large cosmopolitan cities, and their cultural productions, is standard in fascist politics. “Hollywood,” or its local proxy, often supposedly controlled by Jews, is always destroying traditional values and culture by producing “perverted” art.

Whereas cities, to the fascist imagination, are the source of corrupting culture, often produced by Jews and immigrants, the countryside is pure. The “Official Party Statement on Its Attitude toward the Farmers and Agriculture” was published in the National Socialist Völkischer Beobachter in 1930, with Hitler’s signature (though its actual authorship is unclear). It contains a concise statement of the Nazi ideology that the true values of the nation were to be found in the rural population, that National Socialists “see in the farmers the main bearers of a healthy folkish heredity, the fountain of youth of the people, and the backbone of military power.”

as is typical in politics that exacerbates the rural-urban divide during times of globalization, the perception was mythical—in Minnesota, as in many places in the globalized economy, it is the metro areas that are “the state’s economic engine, generating tax dollars that flow outward to every corner of the state.”

In a 1980 essay on the composition of support for the Nazi Party, “The Electoral Geography of the Nazi Landslide,” Nico Passchier notes that “rural, and especially agrarian, support for Nazism was extensive” and that the Nazis had “special success in areas with small farms, a rather homogeneous social structure, strong feelings of local solidarity, and social control.”

The appeal to the countryside in fascist politics can be obscured in countries with urban centers containing deeply religious neighborhoods, or neighborhoods with impoverished workers from rural areas who are well served by the populist economic policies favored by some authoritarian leaders.