How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

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 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.

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.

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 a February 2018 interview, Steve Bannon said, “We got elected on Drain the Swamp, Lock Her Up, Build a Wall….This was pure anger. Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls.”

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.

When propaganda succeeds at twisting ideals against themselves and universities are undermined and condemned as sources of bias, reality itself is cast into doubt. We can’t agree on truth. Fascist politics replaces reasoned debate with fear and anger. When it is successful, its audience is left with a destabilized sense of loss, and a well of mistrust and anger against those who it has been told are responsible for this loss.

Fascist politics exchanges reality for the pronouncements of a single individual, or perhaps a political party. Regular and repeated obvious lying is part of the process by which fascist politics destroys the information space. A fascist leader can replace truth with power, ultimately lying without consequence. By replacing the world with a person, fascist politics makes us unable to assess arguments by a common standard. The fascist politician possesses specific techniques to destroy information spaces and break down reality.

Conspiracy theories do not function like ordinary information; they are, after all, often so outlandish that they can hardly be expected to be literally believed. Their function is rather to raise general suspicion about the credibility and the decency of their targets.

Conspiracy theories are tools to attack those who would ignore their existence; by not covering them, the media is made to appear biased and ultimately part of the very conspiracy they refuse to cover.

The effect of RT, as well as the myriad conspiracy-theory-producing websites across the world, including in the United States, has been to destabilize the kind of shared reality that is in fact required for democratic contestation.

Responsible media in a liberal democracy must, in the face of this threat, try to report the truth, and resist the temptation to report on every possible theory, no matter how fantastical, as long as someone advances it.

another. Fascist politics seeks to destroy the relations of mutual respect between citizens that are the foundation of a healthy liberal democracy, replacing them ultimately with trust in one figure alone, the leader. When fascist politics is at its most successful, the leader is regarded by the followers as singularly trustworthy.

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.

Equality, according to the fascist, is the Trojan horse of liberalism. The part of Odysseus can be variously played—by Jews, by homosexuals, by Muslims, by non-whites, by feminists, etc.

Fascist politics feeds off the sense of aggrieved victimization caused by loss of hierarchal status. Empires in decline are particularly susceptible to fascist politics because of this sense of loss.

Donald Trump’s politics is effective in the context of the 2016 campaign because it comes at a time of decline for the American empire. We are witnessing the passing of the era after the end of the Cold War in which the United States reigned supreme in the world as the only remaining superpower. 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. With its demise, the citizens of a once powerful empire must confront the fact that their exceptionalism was a myth. Grandin writes that beginning in 2008—about when Barack Obama won the presidential election—“the safety valve of empire closed, gummed up by the catastrophic war in Iraq combined with the 2008 financial crisis….Because Obama came to power in the ruins of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, empire [was] no longer able to dilute the passions, satisfy the interests, and unify the divisions.”

But the goal of the Mau Mau struggle was not to fight for the superiority of the Gikuyu religious traditions over the British religious traditions. The goal was rather to fight for the equality of the Gikuyu traditions against the British demonization of them as forms of primitive savagery.

At the core of fascism is loyalty to tribe, ethnic identity, religion, tradition, or, in a word, nation.

Rectifying unjust inequalities will always bring pain to those who benefited from such injustices. This pain will inevitably be experienced by some as oppression.

For a white working-class male who is no longer employed, for structural economic reasons, to be told to “check your privilege” may increase the likelihood that he might see a level playing field in the agenda of white supremacy.

Nationalism is at the core of fascism. The fascist leader employs a sense of collective victimhood to create a sense of group identity that is by its nature opposed to the cosmopolitan ethos and individualism of liberal democracy.

To describe someone as a “criminal” is both to mark that person with a terrifying permanent character trait and simultaneously to place the person outside the circle of “us.” They are criminals. We make mistakes.

“In the history of the United States, the fraudulent rape charge stands out as one of the most formidable artifices invented by racism,” writes the activist Angela Davis. “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.”

Hitler’s denunciations of large cosmopolitan cities, and their cultural productions, is standard in fascist politics.

The “Official Party Statement on Its Attitude toward the Farmers and Agriculture” was published in the National Socialist Völkischer Beobachter in 1930, with Hitler’s signature (though its actual authorship is unclear). It contains a concise statement of the Nazi ideology that the true values of the nation were to be found in the rural population, that National Socialists “see in the farmers the main bearers of a healthy folkish heredity, the fountain of youth of the people, and the backbone of military power.” In fascist politics, the family-farm is the cornerstone of the nation’s values, and family farm communities provide the backbone of its military.

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.”

In fascism, the state is an enemy; it is to be replaced by the nation, which consists of self-sufficient individuals who collectively choose to sacrifice for a common goal of ethnic or religious glorification. In a tension that we will explore in the next chapter, fascist ideology involves something at least superficially akin to the libertarian ideal of self-sufficiency and freedom from “the state.”

In fascist ideology, the city is a place where members of the nation go to age and die, childless, surrounded by the vast hordes of despised others, breeding out of control, their children permanent burdens on the state. Cities, in the fascist worldview, are collective enterprises where people rely on public infrastructure, “the state,” for survival and comfort.

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.

In addition to the clear link between incarceration and the inability to get jobs, the combination of severe cuts to the social safety net and job programs and punitive crime polices has led to a population of black Americans with stubbornly high unemployment rates. Pointing to this population, politicians employing fascist tactics can speak of a crisis of laziness supposedly underlying multigenerational poverty, rather than to its real causes. The “laziness” can then supposedly be “cured” by forcing this population into “hard work” by slashing the safety net further. Given that the evidence suggests whites are not hiring black men, especially formerly incarcerated ones, this would then simply further entrench such patterns of unemployment—thereby perpetuating a flawed stereotype that is useful in fascist politics.

One roadblock to the kind of us/them divisions described above is unity and empathy along class lines, exemplified in labor unions. In functioning unions, white working-class citizens identify with black working-class citizens rather than resent them. Fascist politicians understand the effectiveness of this solidarity to resisting divisive policies and therefore seek to dismantle unions. Despite its condemnation of “elites,” fascist politics seeks to minimize the importance of class struggle.

Antipathy to labor unions is such a major theme of fascist politics that fascism cannot be fully comprehended without an understanding of it.

There are more reasons why fascist ideology targets labor unions. Fascist politics is most effective under conditions of stark economic inequality. Research shows that a proliferation of labor unions is the best antidote to the development of such conditions.

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

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. Such antiunion policies paved the way for a presidential candidate running a white nationalist campaign with open nostalgia for the 1930s to sweep to victory across the once proud labor states of the Midwest.

The fascist vision of individual freedom is similar to the libertarian notion of individual rights—the right to compete but not necessarily to succeed or even survive.

Economic libertarianism is, after all, the Manhattan dinner party face of social Darwinism.

Hitler emphasized that industrialists should support the Nazi movement, since business already operates according to “the leader principle,” the Führer Principle. In private enterprise, when a CEO gives the orders, the employees must comply; there is no room for democratic governance. Just so, in politics, Hitler urges, the leader should function like the CEO of a company.

The father, in fascist ideology, is the leader of the family; the CEO is the leader of the business; the authoritarian leader is the father, or the CEO, of the state. When voters in a democratic society yearn for a CEO as president, they are responding to their own implicit fascist impulses.

When universities are as expensive as they are in the United States, their generous liberal visions are easy targets for fascist demagoguery.

Given the inevitability of increased climate change and its effects, the political and social instability of our times as discussed above, and the tension and conflicts inherent in growing global economic inequality, we will soon find ourselves confronted by movements of disadvantaged people across borders that dwarf those of previous eras, not excepting the movement of refugees in World War II. Traumatized, impoverished, and in need of aid, refugees, including legal immigrants, will be recast to fit racist stereotypes by leaders and movements committed to maintaining hierarchical group privilege and using fascist politics.