How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

how Hitler, in Mein Kampf, repeatedly describes his struggle to embrace National Socialist ideals, such as the realization that life is a battle for power between groups in which reason and objectivity have no role, his realization that humans are beasts, and his rejection of the Enlightenment, as driven by reason. Burke writes, “those who attack Hitlerism as a cult of the irrational should emend their statements to this extent: irrational it is, but it is carried on under the slogan of ‘Reason.’ ” 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.’ ” The fascist claims to have been driven by scientific reason to the view that life is a merciless struggle for dominance, in which the very force that has allegedly brought him to this—the enlightenment ideal of universal reason—must be abandoned.