How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

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.

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.

Any progress for a minority group stokes feelings of victimhood among the dominant population. Law and order politics has mass appeal, casting “us” as lawful citizens and “them,” by contrast, as lawless criminals whose behavior poses an existential threat to the manhood of the nation. Sexual anxiety is also typical of fascist politics as the patriarchal hierarchy is threatened by growing gender equity.

(indeed, Hitler was inspired by the Confederacy and Jim Crow laws).

It’s in the name of tradition that the anti-Semites base their “point of view.” It’s in the name of tradition, the long, historical past and the blood ties with Pascal and Descartes, that the Jews are told, you will never belong here.

and respect for “universal values” such as equality. These values are supposed to have made the nation weak in the face of real and threatening challenges to the nation’s existence.

This imagined history provides proof to support the imposition of hierarchy in the present, and it dictates how contemporary society should look and behave.

In a 1922 speech at the Fascist Congress in Naples, Benito Mussolini declared:

We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary for it to be a reality….Our myth is the nation, our myth is the greatness of the nation! And to this myth, this greatness, which we want to translate into a total reality, we subordinate everything.

Here, Mussolini makes clear that the fascist mythic past is intentionally mythical. The function of the mythic past, in fascist politics, is to harness the emotion of nostalgia to the central tenets of fascist ideology—authoritarianism, hierarchy, purity, and struggle.

German fascists also clearly and explicitly appreciated this point about the strategic use of a mythological past.

The leading Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, editor of the prominent Nazi newspaper the Völkischer Beobachter, writes in 1924,

“the understanding of and the respect for our own mythological past and our own history will form the first condition for more firmly anchoring the coming generatio...

The fascist mythic past exists to aid in chang...

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.

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!”

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.”

Richard Grunberger, a British historian of National Socialism, sums up “the kernel of Nazi thinking on the women’s question” as “a dogma of inequality between the s...

Similar ideas about gender are on the rise globally, including in the United States, very often supported with reference to history. Andrew Auernheimer, known as weev, is a prominent neo-Nazi who ran the fascist online newspaper The Daily Stormer with Andrew Anglin.

In May 2017, he published an article in The Daily Stormer titled “Just What Are Traditional Gender Roles?” In it, he claims that women were traditionally regarded as property in all European cultures, except for Jewish societies and some gypsy groups, which were matrilineal:

This was why the Jews were so keen to attack these ideas, because the patrilineal passing of property was innately offensive to their culture. Europe only has this absurd notion of women as independent entities because of organized subversion by agents of Judaism.

These politicians could simply have given voice to the most direct description of the facts, which is that Trump’s remarks demean half our fellow citizens. Instead, Romney’s remark, in language evocative of that used in the Hutu Ten Commandments, describes women exclusively in terms of traditionally subordinate roles in families, as “wives and daughters”—not even as sisters.

Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán was elected to office in 2010. He has overseen the demolition of the liberal institutions of that country in the service of creating what Orbán openly describes as an illiberal state.

The National Avowal ends by promising to fulfill an “abiding need for spiritual and intellectual renewal” and to provide a way for Hungary’s newer generations to “make Hungary great again.”

In fascist politics, myths of a patriarchal past, threatened by encroaching liberal ideals and all that they entail, function to create a sense of panic at the loss of hierarchal status, both for men and for the dominant group’s ability to protect its purity and status from foreign encroachment.

Nathuram Godse, the man who assassinated Gandhi, was a member of RSS, as was current Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. RSS was explicitly influenced by European fascist movements, its leading politicians regularly praised Hitler and Mussolini in the late 1930s and 1940s.

Turkey’s Article 301 of its penal code outlaws “insulting Turkishness,” including mentioning the Armenian genocide during the First World War. Such attempts to legislate the erasure of a nation’s past are characteristic of fascist regimes.

In their 2013 paper “Motivated to ‘Forget’: The Effects of In-Group Wrongdoing on Memory and Collective Guilt,” Katie Rotella and Jennifer Richeson presented American participants with stories “about the oppressive, violent treatment of American Indians,” framed in one of two ways:

“Specifically, the perpetrators of the violence were described either as early Americans (in-group condition) or as Europeans who settled in what became America (out-group condition).”

The study showed that people are more likely to suffer from a sort of amnesia of wrongdoing when the perpetrators are character...

When American subjects were presented with the agents of the violence as Americans (rather than Europeans), they had significantly worse memory for negative historical events, and “what participants did recall was phrased mor...

As Du Bois shows, whites in the South, with the collusion of Northern elites, brought an end to the Reconstruction era because of the widespread fear among the wealthy classes that newly enfranchised black citizens would join with poor whites in developing a powerful labor movement to challenge the interests of capital.

Fascists have always been well acquainted with this recipe for using democracy’s liberties against itself; Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels once declared, “This will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed.”

Fascists reject Enlightenment ideals while proclaiming that they are forced to do so by a stark confrontation with reality, by the natural law. As Burke notes, Hitler describes his transition into a “fanatical anti-Semite” as “a struggle of ‘reason’ and ‘reality’ against his ‘heart.’ ”

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

David Horowitz is a far-right activist who has been targeting universities, and the film industry, since the 1980s. In 2006, Horowitz published a book, The Professors, naming the “101 most dangerous professors in America,” a list of leftist and liberal professors, many of whom were supporters of Palestinian rights.

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.

In Russia, Vladimir Putin has gone on the offensive on this issue, repurposing universities into ideological weapons directed against the supposed Western excesses of feminism.

Adding a flat earther would, rather, impede objective inquiry. Similarly, I can safely and justifiably reject ISIS ideology without having to confront its advocates in the classroom or faculty lounge. I do not need to have a colleague who defends the view that Jewish people are genetically predisposed to greed in order to justifiably reject such anti-Semitic nonsense.

Victor Klemperer’s 1947 work The Language of the Third Reich is about the language of National Socialism, which he calls LTI (short for Lingua Tertii Imperii). Chapter 3, entitled “Distinguishing Feature: Poverty,” begins, “The LTI is destitute. Its poverty is a fundamental one; it is as if it had sworn a vow of poverty.”

Adolf Hitler was very explicit about the importance of impoverishing public discourse in this manner. In his chapter on propaganda in Mein Kampf, he writes:

All propaganda should be popular and should adapt its intellectual level to the receptive ability of the least intellectual of those whom it is desired to address. Thus it must sink its mental elevation deeper in proportion to the numbers of the mass whom it has to grip….The

The receptive ability of the masses is very limited, and their understanding small; on the other hand, they have a great power of forgetting. This being so, all effective propaganda must be confined to very few points which must be brought out in the form of slogans.

Perhaps the most famous twentieth-century conspiracy theory revolves around The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was at the basis of Nazi ideology. The Protocols is an early-twentieth-century hoax, supposedly written as an instruction manual to Jews as a plot for world domination.

According to The Protocols, Jews are at the center of a global conspiracy that dominates the most respected mainstream media outlets and the global economic system, using them to spread democracy, capitalism, and communism, all masks for Jewish interests.

Texas House Bill 45, the “American Laws for American Courts” bill signed into law by Texas governor Greg Abbott in June 2017, is intended to block Muslims from bringing Sharia law into the state.

That Muslims are trying to sneakily transform Texas into an Islamic republic is deeply improbable—as