How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

I have chosen the label “fascism” for ultranationalism of some variety (ethnic, religious, cultural), with the nation represented in the person of an authoritarian leader who speaks on its behalf.

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 know that their supporters will turn a blind eye to their own, true corruption since in their own case it is just a matter of members of the chosen nation taking what is rightfully theirs.

Masking corruption under the guise of anticorruption is a hallmark strategy in fascist propaganda.

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.

Hierarchy benefits fascist politics in another way: Those who are accustomed to its benefits can be easily led to view liberal equality as a source of victimization. Those who benefit from hierarchy will adopt a myth of their own superiority, which will occlude basic facts about social reality. They will distrust pleas for tolerance and inclusion made by liberals on the grounds that these pleas are masks for power grabs by other groups. 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.

There is a long history of social psychological research about the fact that increased representation of members of traditional minority groups is experienced by dominant groups as threatening in various ways.3 More recently, a growing body of social psychological evidence substantiates the phenomenon of dominant group feelings of victimization at the prospect of sharing power equally with members of minority groups. A great deal of recent attention has been paid in the United States to the fact that around 2050, the United States will become a “majority-minority” country, meaning that whites will no longer be a majority of Americans. Taking advantage of the salience of this information, some social psychologists have tested what happens when white Americans are primed with it.

Whether or not the anguish that accompanies loss of privileged status is similar to the sense of oppression that accompanies genuine marginalization, it is anguish nevertheless. If I grew up in a country in which my religious holidays were the national holidays, it would feel like marginalization to have my children grow up in a more egalitarian country in which their religious holidays and traditions are just one of many. If I grew up in a society in which every character in the movies I see and the television programs I watch looked like me, it would feel like marginalization to see the occasional protagonist who does not. I would start to feel that my culture is no longer “for me.” If I grew up seeing men as heroes and women as passive objects who worship them, it would feel like oppression to be robbed of my felt birthright by having to regard women as equals in the workplace or on the battlefield. Rectifying unjust inequalities will always bring pain to those who benefited from such injustices. This pain will inevitably be experienced by some as oppression.

Fascist politics feeds the insulting myth that hardworking rural residents pay to support lazy urban dwellers, so it is not a surprise that the base of its success is found in a country’s rural areas. 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.”9

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.

The pull of fascist politics is powerful. It simplifies human existence, gives us an object, a “them” whose supposed laziness highlights our own virtue and discipline, encourages us to identify with a forceful leader who helps us make sense of the world, whose bluntness regarding the “undeserving” people in the world is refreshing. If democracy looks like a successful business, if the CEO is tough-talking and cares little for democratic institutions, even denigrates them, so much the better. Fascist politics preys on the human frailty that makes our own suffering seem bearable if we know that those we look down upon are being made to suffer more.

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.