How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

Fascist politics exploits crises to advance its ideological agenda.

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). And when it began to take the virus seriously, the Trump administration immediately sought to use it as a means to justify retroactively its nationalist agenda of closing borders, and its suspicion of immigrants, by associating immigrants (and “sanctuary cities”) with the virus.

If Trump recalled Lindbergh specifically with “America First,” the rest of his campaign also longed for some vague point in history—to “Make America Great Again.” But when, exactly, was America great, in the eyes of the Trump campaign? During the nineteenth century, when the United States enslaved its black population? During Jim Crow, when black Americans in the South were prevented from voting? A hint about the decade that was most salient to the Trump campaign emerges from a November 18, 2016, Hollywood Reporter interview with Steve Bannon, the then president-elect’s chief strategist, in which he remarks about the era to come that “it will be as exciting as the 1930s.” In short, the era when the United States had its most sympathy for fascism.

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.

The dangers of fascist politics come from the particular way in which 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.

The most telling symptom of fascist politics is division. It aims to separate a population into an “us” and a “them.”

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.

Happening a lot right now

With the creation of a mythic past, fascist politics creates a link between nostalgia and the realization of fascist ideals.

In a fascist society, the leader of the nation is analogous to the father in the traditional patriarchal family. The leader is the father of his nation, and his strength and power are the source of his legal authority, just as the strength and power of the father of the family in patriarchy are supposed to be the source of his ultimate moral authority over his children and wife. The leader provides for his nation, just as in the traditional family the father is the provider. The patriarchal father’s authority derives from his strength, and strength is the chief authoritarian value. By representing the nation’s past as one with a patriarchal family structure, fascist politics connects nostalgia to a central organizing hierarchal authoritarian structure, one that finds its purest representation in these norms.

Gregor Strasser was the National Socialist—Nazi—Reich propaganda chief in the 1920s, before the post was taken over by Joseph Goebbels. 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.”

Which is why we have people like Charlie Kirk, JD Vance, and conservative pastors pushing women to have more kids and, in effect, trying to push women back into the homes to raise children to believe in their ideals. They recognize their ideals aren't exactly en vogue and so they have to start the brainwashing early or risk dying out.

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.

Which is why the Trump regime is currently rewriting slavery as "beneficial to the African population," ignoring everything we did to the Native Americans, and removing anything negative from our history/museums.

Fascist movements have been “draining swamps” for generations. 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. Fascist politicians characteristically decry corruption in the state they seek to take over, which is bizarre, given that fascist politicians themselves are invariably vastly more corrupt than those they seek to supplant or defeat.

Sounds familiar...

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.

In book 8 of Plato’s Republic, 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.

Fascist politics seeks to undermine public discourse by attacking and devaluing education, expertise, and language. Intelligent debate is impossible without an education with access to different perspectives, a respect for expertise when one’s own knowledge gives out, and a rich enough language to precisely describe reality. When education, expertise, and linguistic distinctions are undermined, there remains only power and tribal identity.

Which is why the current regime is in the process of dismantling the Department of Education so that there is no overarching authority over the red states like Oklahoma which plan to teach from the Bible and promote American exceptionalism. They will also cherry-pick American history and ignore women's contributions and the fact that LGBTQ individuals exist. Republicans have been trying to dumb down the populace for decades. Because the more educated a person is, the more likely they are to vote Conservative.

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.

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. The anonymous author of an article in a 1925 Italian fascist magazine writes, “The mysticism of Fascism is the proof of its triumph. Reasoning does not attract, emotion does.”14 In Mein Kampf, in a chapter entitled “The Struggle in the Early Days: The Role of the Orator,” Hitler writes that it is a gross misunderstanding to dismiss simple language as stupid. Throughout Mein Kampf, Hitler is clear that the aim of propaganda is to replace reasoned argument in the public sphere with irrational fears and passions.

In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump repeatedly and openly lied, and openly flouted long-sacrosanct liberal norms. The U.S. mainstream media dutifully reported his many lies. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, followed liberal norms of equal respect; her one violation of these norms, which occurred when she called some of the supporters of her opponent “deplorables,” was endlessly thrown back in her face. And yet again and again, Americans found Trump to be the more authentic candidate. By giving voice to shocking sentiments that were presumed to be unsuitable for public discourse, Trump was taken to be speaking his mind. This is how, by exhibiting classic demagogic behavior, a politician can come to be seen as the more authentic candidate, even when he is manifestly dishonest.

Trump exploited the lengthy history of ranking Americans into a hierarchy of worth by race, the “deserving” versus the “undeserving.” When pressed by journalists to justify a distinction between the “deserving” and the “undeserving,” Americans who use such vocabulary reach in the first instance for the language of “hardworking” versus “lazy” rather than for the language of racial distinction. But this hardly justifies the division of fellow citizens into such categories. First, in the United States, racism has often taken the form of associating blackness with laziness. Such language has always been a code for division by racial hierarchy. Second, it betrays confusion about the concept of liberal democracy to measure worthiness by a supposed capacity for hard work. It is no part of liberal democratic theory that basic equal respect is won by hard work. The idea behind liberal democracy is that all of us are equally deserving of the basic goods of society.

Fascist politics feeds off the sense of aggrieved victimization caused by loss of hierarchal status.

The case is similar with the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States today. Its 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.”

In the United States, Donald Trump rode to the presidency with a call to expel “criminal aliens.” Since he has taken office, he has continued targeting immigrants. Both he and his administration regularly stoke fear of immigrants by connecting them to criminality. Again and again, we are presented with the specter of “criminal aliens”—and not just in remarks but also in official documents, such as the announcement of a new office in the Department of Homeland Security devoted to helping “victims of crimes committed by criminal aliens.” The word “criminal” has a literal meaning, of course, but it also has a resonant meaning—people who by their nature are insensitive to society’s norms, drawn to violate the law by self-interest or malice. We do not generally use the term to describe those who may have inadvertently broken a law or who may have been compelled to violate a law in a desperate circumstance. Someone who runs to catch a bus is not thereby a runner; someone who commits a crime is not thereby a criminal. The word “criminal” attributes a certain type of character to someone.

Psychologists have studied a practice they call 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.” If someone we regard as one of “us” does something bad—for example, steals a chocolate bar—we tend to describe the action concretely. In other words, if my friend Daniel steals a chocolate bar, I will tend to characterize what he did as “stealing a chocolate bar.” On the other hand, if someone we regard as one of “them” does the same thing, we tend to describe the action more abstractly, by imputing bad character traits to the person committing it. If Jerome, who is regarded as one of “them,” steals a chocolate bar, he is much more likely to be described as a thief or a criminal. If a white American sees a well-dressed white American handcuffed in the back of a police car, the question that comes to mind might be what happened that led to that particular arrest. If a white American sees a black American handcuffed in the back of a police car, the question that presents itself might instead be how the police got “that criminal.”

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. Such language undermines the democratic process of reasonable decision making, replacing it with fear. Another salient example in the U.S. context is the use of the term “riot” to describe political protests. In the United States in the 1960s, the civil rights movement included black political protests in urban areas against police brutality (most famously in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles and the Harlem district of Manhattan). These protests were regularly described in the media as “riots.” As James Baldwin wrote at the time about the media description of these protests, “when white men rise up against oppression, they are heroes: when black men rise, they have reverted to their native savagery. The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto was not described as a riot, nor were the participants maligned as hoodlums: the boys and girls in Watts and Harlem are thoroughly aware of this.”2 Such misrepresentations allowed Richard Nixon to run for office in 1968 on a “law and order” platform. Nixon’s administration is generally viewed as laying the groundwork for the subsequent mass incarceration of black American citizens.

If the demagogue is the father of the nation, then any threat to patriarchal manhood and the traditional family undermines the fascist vision of strength. These threats include the crimes of rape and assault, as well as so-called sexual deviance. 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. Fascist propaganda promotes fear of interbreeding and race mixing, of corrupting the pure nation with, in the words of Charles Lindbergh, speaking for the America First movement, “inferior blood.” Fascist propaganda characteristically magnifies this fear by sexualizing the threat of the other. Since fascist politics has, at its basis, the traditional patriarchal family, it is characteristically accompanied by panic about deviations from it. Transgender individuals and homosexuals are used to heighten anxiety and panic about the threat to traditional male gender roles.

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.

The pervasive sense that city dwellers in Minnesota were living off the taxes of the hardworking rural population of Minnesota was a powerful force in the Minnesota Republican triumph in 2014. (“We pay taxes too,” Cordon quotes a rural Minnesota resident as saying, “but we see a lot of our tax dollars going to urban development in the metro area. We’d like to see some of that share. We’d like to have nice roads too.”) And yet, 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.”

This is a very prevailing thought in Illinois. A lot of downstate voters are trying to secede from "The Great State of Chicago" and form their own state of New Illinois, not understanding that we would not succeed without Chicago tax revenue.

In the National Socialist education system, “Jews are not seen in the occupations of factory worker, bricklayer, blacksmith, locksmith, miner, farmer, plasterer. In other words, the Jew avoided work with his hands and avoided heavy labor while ‘living off the sweat of his neighbors. He is a parasite, like the mistletoe on a tree.’ ”17 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. In fascist politics, “they” can be cured of laziness and thievery by hard labor. This is why the gates of Auschwitz had emblazoned on them the slogan ARBEIT MACHT FREI—work shall make you free.

Like with the recent passing of the "One Great Beautiful Bill." I have heard people expressing joy that people are getting kicked off of their Medicaid insurance and saying they'll have to work like everyone else instead of collecting those "Medicaid checks" (which don't exist - Medicaid is insurance dollars paid directly to healthcare providers, not free money for people to spend).

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. Fascist movements share its ideals of hard work, private enterprise, and self-sufficiency. To have a life worthy of value, for the social Darwinist, is to have risen above others by struggle and merit, to have survived a fierce competition for resources. 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. This aspect of fascist ideology explains the National Socialist attitude toward the disabled, described as lebensunwertes Leben—life unworthy of life. Disabled citizens were regarded as lacking in value, because value in National Socialist ideology arose from the value of one’s contributions to society through work. In Nazi ideology, those who depended on the state for their survival lacked value of any kind. Fascist governments have exhibited some of humanity’s worst cruelty toward disabled populations. Nazi Germany’s 1933 Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases mandated the sterilization of disabled citizens; this was subsequently followed by the secret T4 program, which carried out gassings of disabled German citizens, and eventually, in 1939, phy...

All human institutions are flawed to some degree or other, social welfare systems and labor unions among them. But when critiquing the flaws of any institution, it is important to ask what would be lost in their absence. Jointly mobilizing for better conditions for everyone brings us together in ways that enable us to recognize a common humanity despite differences in appearance, ethnicity, religion, disability status, sexual orientation, and gender. Sadly, humans must continually be reminded that whether we are black or white, gender nonconforming or conforming, woman or man, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, or atheist, we all need a weekend off, food to eat, and time and support to care for our aging parents. Flawed as the institutions and policies that give us our democratic ethos may be, a liberal democratic society without them risks collapse.

But this engaging vision of the self moving through time and cultures is deeply problematic under conditions of stark economic inequality. It requires profound experiences with differences of all sorts. It may require an education that is generous, wise, committed to secular science and poetic truth. When in the United States it can take an entire family income to pay for a year at a good university for one child, we must ask, who of us ends up becoming members of such a successful and broad-minded citizenry? When universities are as expensive as they are in the United States, their generous liberal visions are easy targets for fascist demagoguery. Under conditions of stark economic inequality, when the benefits of liberal education, and the exposure to diverse cultures and norms, are available only to the wealthy few, liberal tolerance can be smoothly represented as elite privilege. Stark economic inequality creates conditions richly conducive to fascist demagoguery. It is fantasy to think that liberal democratic norms can flourish under such conditions.