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Victimhood is an overwhelming emotion that also conceals the contradiction between equality-driven and domination-driven nationalist movements.
relying on the sense of victimization to obscure the contradiction between a struggle for equal respect and a struggle for dominance.
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.
people who by their nature are insensitive to society’s norms, drawn to violate the law by self-interest or malice.
linguistic intergroup bias. It turns out we tend to describe the actions of those we regard as one of “us” quite differently than we describe the actions of those we regard as one of “them.”
Politicians who describe whole categories of persons as “criminals” are imputing to them permanent character traits that are frightening to most people, while simultaneously positioning themselves as our protectors.
forging a link in the American consciousness between criminality and Americans who descended from enslaved Africans.
Fascist propaganda promotes fear of interbreeding and race mixing, of corrupting the pure nation with,
“The myth of the Black rapist has been methodically conjured up whenever recurrent waves of violence and terror against the Black community have required convincing justification.”
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.
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.
In fascist politics, the family-farm is the cornerstone of the nation’s values, and family farm communities provide the backbone of its military.4 Resources that flow to cities must be directed to the rural communities instead, to preserve this vital center of the nation’s values. And the rural communities, as the source of the pure blood of the nation, cannot be polluted by outside blood via immigration.
Fascist politics aims its message at the populace outside large cities, to whom it is most flattering. It is especially resonant during times of globalization, when economic power swings to the large urban areas as centers of an emerging global economy,
In fascist ideology, the rural life is guided by an ethos of self-sufficiency, which breeds strength. In rural communities, one does not need to depend on the state, unlike the “parasites” in the city.
In fascist politics, the laziness of minorities in cities is cured only by forcing them into hard labor. Hard labor, in Nazi ideology, had a remarkable power: It could purify an inherently lazy race.
In fascist ideology, in times of crisis and need, the state reserves support for members of the chosen nation, for “us” and not “them.” The justification is invariably because “they” are lazy, lack a work ethic, and cannot be trusted with state funds and because “they” are criminal and seek only to live off state largesse.
The United States has its own history of policies that feed stereotypes and make them appear real.
Arendt argues that fascism requires the individuals in a society to be “atomized,” that is, to lose their mutual connection across differences. Labor unions create mutual bonds along lines of class rather than those of race or religion. That is the fundamental reason why labor unions are such a target in fascist ideology.
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.
Fascist movements share with social Darwinism the idea that life is a competition for power, according to which the division of society’s resources should be left up to pure free market competition.
Those who do not compete successfully do not deserve the goods and resources of society. In an ideology that measures worth by productivity, propaganda that represents members of an out-group as lazy is a way to justify placing them lower on a hierarchy of worth.
It is the social Darwinist conception of individual worth that gives structure to fascist hierarchy
Hitler emphasized that industrialists should support the Nazi movement, since business already operates according to “the leader principle,”
The basis of a commitment to a generous universal welfare system is an expression of the belief in the fundamental value of each citizen.
Stark economic inequality creates conditions richly conducive to fascist demagoguery. It is fantasy to think that liberal democratic norms can flourish under such conditions.
They weave a myth of a distinction between “us” and “them,” based in a romanticized fictional past featuring “us” and no “them,” and supported by a resentment for a corrupt liberal elite, who take our hard-earned money and threaten our traditions.
Fascist politics traffics in delusions that create these kinds of false distinctions between “us” and “them,” regardless of obvious realities.
those who lived through transitions from democracy to fascism regularly emphasize from personal experience and with great alarm: the tendency of populations to normalize the once unthinkable.
