How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

danger of rhetoric that encourages fear and anger as a means to foment ethnic and religious division, seeping into public discourse.

People often assume that fascist tactics can achieve success only where democratic institutions, and commitment to democratic culture, is already weak. We are thus told to pay attention to policies and institutions rather than the rhetoric they can follow.

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 you legitimize yourself entirely by inventing enemies, the truth ceases to matter, normal restraints of civilization and decency cease to matter, the checks and balances of normal politics cease to matter.

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

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.

dangers of fascist politics come from the particular way in which it dehumanizes segments of the population.

fascist politics distinguishes “us” from “them,” appealing to ethnic, religious, or racial distinctions, and using this division to shape ideology and, ultimately, policy.

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.

Any progress for a minority group stokes feelings of victimhood among the dominant population.

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

The suffering of strangers can solidify the structure of fascism. But it can also trigger empathy once another lens is clicked into place.

The strategic aim of these hierarchal constructions of history is to displace truth, and the invention of a glorious past includes the erasure of inconvenient realities.

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.”

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.

The mythic history Orbán tells has just enough plausibility to reduce the complex nature of the past and support his goals.

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.

It’s hard to advance a policy that will harm a large group of people in straightforward terms. The role of political propaganda is to conceal politicians’ or political movements’ clearly problematic goals by masking them with ideals that are widely accepted.

A dangerous, destabilizing war for power becomes a war whose aim is stability, or a war whose aim is freedom.

Publicizing false charges of corruption while engaging in corrupt practices is typical of fascist politics, and anticorruption campaigns are frequently at the heart of fascist political movements.

Socrates argues that people are not naturally led to self-governance but rather seek a strong leader to follow. Democracy, by permitting freedom of speech, opens the door for a demagogue to exploit the people’s need for a strongman; the strongman will use this freedom to prey on the people’s resentments and fears. Once the strongman seizes power, he will end democracy, replacing it with tyranny. In short, book 8 of The Republic argues that democracy is a self-undermining system whose very ideals lead to its own demise.

The chief reason we have free speech in democracy is to facilitate public discourse about policy on the part of citizens and their representatives.

It is often noted, rightly, that fascism elevates the irrational over the rational, fanatical emotion over the intellect.

attacking and devaluing education, expertise, and language.

tribal identity.

That is why universities that seek to give some intellectual space to marginalized perspectives, however small, are subject to denunciation as hotbeds of “Marxism.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Fascist politics replaces reasoned debate with fear and anger.

The fascist politician possesses specific techniques to destroy information spaces and break down reality.

Conspiracy theories are a critical mechanism used to delegitimize the mainstream media, which fascist politicians accuse of bias for failing to cover false conspiracies.

But in politics, and most vividly in fascist politics, language is not used simply, or even chiefly, to convey information but to elicit emotion.

The argument from the “marketplace of ideas” model for free speech works only if the underlying disposition of the society is to accept the force of reason over the power of irrational resentments and prejudice.

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.

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.

some voters do not share democratic values, and politicians must appeal to them as well. When large inequalities exist, the problem is aggravated. Some voters are simply more attracted to a system that favors their own particular religion, race, gender, or birth position. The resentment that flows from unmet expectations can be redirected against minority groups seen as not sharing dominant traditions;

Liberal equality means that those with different levels of power and wealth nevertheless are regarded as having equal worth. Liberal equality is, by definition, meant to be compatible with economic inequality. And yet, when economic inequality is sufficiently extreme, the myths that are required to sustain it are bound to threaten liberal equality as well.

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.

In the article, he argues that an empire gives rise among its citizens to a comforting myth of superiority, thereby concealing the various social and structural problems that otherwise would lead to political difficulties.

Fascist politics thrives off the resulting sense of aggrieved loss and victimization that results from the ever more tenuous and difficult struggle to defend a sense of cultural, ethnic, religious, gendered, or national superiority.

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.

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.

suggest that their targets should be subject to intense scrutiny or punishment merely on the basis that the dominant group feels fearful.