How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

That Muslims are trying to sneak Sharia law into Texas makes rational sense of the feeling of fear caused by a combination of religious nationalists spreading anti-Muslim xenophobia, and ISIS propaganda videos of terrorist acts committed on far-off

shores.

It begins by instructing the reader to “infect the opponent with the idea of freedom, so-called liberalism.”

Equality, according to the fascist, is the Trojan horse of liberalism. The part of Odysseus can be variously played—by Jews, by homosexuals,

For the twentieth-century Ku Klux Klan, Jews were often perceived as the force behind black racial equality: Jews sought to advance black equality in order to dilute pure white blood and undermine the white Christian ethnostate.

Americans is roughly at the point it was during Reconstruction; for every $100 the average white family has accumulated, the average black family has just $5; and yet, as Jennifer Richeson, Michael Kraus, and Julian Rucker have shown in their 2017 paper, “Americans Misperceive Racial Economic Equality,” white American citizens are widely ignorant of this fact, believing that racial economic inequality has dramatically narrowed.

In a 2014 study, the psychologists Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson found that simply making salient the impending national shift to a “majority-minority” country significantly increased politically unaffiliated white Americans’ support for right-wing policies.

For example, reading about an impending racial shift of the country from majority white to majority nonwhite made white American subjects less inclined to support affirmative action, more inclined to support restrictions on immigration, and, perhaps surprisingly, more likely to support “race neutral” conservative policies such as increasing defense spending.

In Western Europe, the Jewish nationalism of the Zionist movement arose as a response to toxic anti-Semitism. In the United States, black nationalism arose as a response to toxic racism. In their origins, these nationalist movements were responses to oppression. Anticolonialist struggles typically take place under the banner of nationalism; for example, Mahatma Gandhi employed Indian nationalism as a tool against British rule. 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.

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.

No example of Palestinian fascism though

In 1989, five black teenagers—the “Central Park Five”—were arrested for the gang rape of a white woman jogger in New York City’s Central Park. Newspapers at the time were filled with breathless accounts of “wilding” black lawless teens rampaging and raping white women. At the time, Donald Trump took out full-page ads in several New York City newspapers, describing them as “crazed misfits” and calling for their execution.

Subsequently, it emerged not only that the Central Park Five were innocent, but that they were known to be innocent to many of those involved in their prosecution. Years later, all five were completely exonerated and given a cash settlement by the City of New York.

In November 2016, Jeff Sessions, now the U.S. attorney general, praised then president-elect Donald Trump’s 1989 comments about the Central Park Five as demo...

This is a striking understanding of law and order, not only because the teenagers were, in fact, completely innocent, but because Trump’s words l...

In her 1957 memoir, The Unforgotten, my grandmother describes asking her cousin about the reasons for her husband’s arrest. Her answer:

Because he was a criminal with a record. He had paid two fines in court: one for speeding and one for some other traffic fine. They said they finally wanted to do what the court had missed doing all these years: to get rid of all Jews with criminal records. A traffic fine—a criminal record!

In 1996, William J. Bennett, John J. DiIulio, Jr., and John P. Walters published the book Body Count: Moral Poverty…and How to Win America’s War Against Crime and Drugs. Its thesis is that America faces a unique threat from a new generation of young men, a large percentage of whom are black, who are especially prone to cruel, violent acts and incapable of honest work; these young men they call “super-predators.”

The book warns of a coming wave of youth violence by these “super-predators” (the wave of course did not materialize; violent crime plummeted in subsequent years, rather than sharply rising). These two works bookend a century of pseudoscience forging a link in the American consciousness between criminality and Americans who descended from enslaved Africans.

Adolf Hitler

flows through the playground of black African hordes….It was and is the Jews who bring the Negro to the Rhine, always with the same concealed thought and the clear goal of destroying by the bastardization which would necessarily set in, the white race which they hate.”

This was also a conspiracy theory shared by the American Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, which fantasized openly about Jews intentionally plotting the mass rape of white women by black men to undermine the white race in the United States.

Patriarchal masculinity sets up men with the expectation that society will allow them the role of sole protectors and providers of their families. In 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 w...

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.”

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan began his national political career as the mayor of Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city. Istanbul has large neighborhoods dominated by conservative religious voters, which provided him with an early base of support; Erdoğan’s populist economic policies also served Istanbul’s neglected poor well. However, in 1999, Erdoğan chose Siirt, “a town in the religiously conservative and restive southeastern part of the country,” to give a controversial antisecular speech that landed him in prison for “inciting hatred based on religious difference.”

No mention of them being Muslim 🤔

In the 2017 poll discussed on page 145, there was also a particularly large gulf between rural and urban respondents to the poll surrounding notions of hard work and self-sufficiency. When asked “In your opinion, which is generally more often to blame if a person is poor?” Forty-nine percent of rural residents agreed with the response “lack of effort on their own part,” while 46 percent agreed with the response “difficult circumstances beyond their control.” In contrast, only 37 percent of urban residents agreed with the response “lack of effort on their own part,” whereas 56 percent agreed with “difficult circumstances beyond their control.”

As Hitler writes in Mein Kampf:

Originally the Aryan was probably a nomad and then, as time went on, he became settled; this, if nothing else, proves that he was never a Jew! No, the Jew is not a nomad, for even the nomad had already a definite attitude towards the conception “work.”…In the Jew, however, that conception has no place; he was never a nomad, but was ever a parasite in the bodies of other nations.

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.’ ”

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 an October 2017 article in The Washington Post by Jenna Johnson headlined MANY TRUMP VOTERS WHO GOT HURRICANE RELIEF IN TEXAS AREN’T SURE PUERTO RICANS SHOULD, she quotes Fred Maddox, a seventy-five-year-old Houston resident, on the topic of whether Puerto Rico should receive the kind of federal aid that Houston did:

It shouldn’t be up to us, really. I don’t think so. He’s trying to wake them up: Do your job. Be responsible.

The Maddox family did not have flood insurance but nevertheless received $14,000 in federal aid from FEMA. The article ends with a quote about Maddox’s view of President Trump’s differential responses to the disaster:

He likes having a businessman in office, especially one who’s not afraid to speak the painful truth. “It’s time,” he said, “we had someone in there to fight for us.”

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.

a dominant theme emerging from research on white Americans’ attitude toward welfare is that the single largest predictor of white Americans’ attitude toward programs described as “welfare” is their attitude toward the judgment that black people are lazy.

As the Princeton political scientist Martin Gilens writes in his 1996 paper “ ‘Race Coding’ and White Opposition to Welfare,” “The perception that blacks are lazy has a larger effect on white Americans’ welfare policy preferences than does economic self-interest, beliefs about individualism or views about the poor in general.”

In her landmark study, Pager discovered large effects of prior incarceration on employment opportunity. She used teams of auditors, two of whom were black and two of whom were white, with similar appearances and résumés. One member was told to report an eighteen-month incarceration for cocaine trafficking, and the other was told to report no criminal record. Each week, the team member who reported a criminal record would switch. Together, the teams applied for entry-level jobs in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Among whites, a criminal record reduced the likelihood of a callback interview for an entry-level job by 50 percent—Pager’s white auditors who reported no criminal record had a 34 percent callback rate, and her white auditors who reported a criminal record had a 17 percent callback rate. The black auditors she used, with very similar résumés, had a 14 percent callback rate when they did not report a criminal record—suggesting

Chapter 14 of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction is entitled “Counter-Revolution of Property.” In it, Du Bois describes the labor movement that emerged during Reconstruction as putting “such power in the hands of Southern labor that, with intelligent and unselfish leadership and a clarifying ideal, it could have rebuilt the economic foundations of Southern society, confiscated and redistributed wealth, and built a real democracy of industry for the masses of men.”

Du Bois documents how the emerging Southern labor movement was riven by racial resentment, with poor whites fearful of losing their place in the social hierarchy above newly emancipated black citizens. Du Bois argues that Northern industrialists together with the old white Southern power structures employed these resentments to smash any semblance of a cross-racial labor movement, and with it what would have been a powerful force for economic equality.

When poor white workers lack class identification with poor black workers, they fall back on familiar lines of...

Right-to-work laws began in the state of Texas in the 1940s, first proposed by a lobbyist named Vance Muse, in response to the fact that unions were challenging “the race-based political economy of the region.”

The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) broke off from the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in the mid-1930s, due to the CIO’s insistence on greater inclusivity, in particular the inclusion of unskilled labor. The CIO was, then, from its outset more progressive than the organization from which it broke off, and which it eventually rejoined to form today’s AFL-CIO.

Muse was the head of the Christian American Association, which had been a lobbying organization for oil firms. The Association was racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Catholic, and it advanced its antiunion agenda with a familiar fascist program of fomenting panic about communists seeking racial equality to overthrow white domination.

In 1945, Muse said, “They call me anti-Jew and anti-nigger. Listen, we like the nigger—in his place….Our [right-to-work] amendment helps the nigger; it does not discriminate against him. Good niggers, not those Communist niggers. Jews? Why, some of my best friends are Jews. Good Jews.”

Right-to-work laws were originally advanced in language that mirrored precisely Hitler’s attacks on trade unions in Mein Kampf. Nevertheless, their antiunion agenda, explicitly founded upon a desire to maintain white racial hierarchy and prevent solidarity across races and religions, has largely won the day in the United States today.

But why is being lazy, in fascist politics, constitutive of occupying the lower rungs in a hierarchy of social worth? And of all identities to glorify, why don’t fascist politicians attempt to use, rather than disrupt, class unity? The answer lies in the social Darwinism at the basis of fascist politics.