How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

The Harvard historian Elizabeth Hinton addresses this tactic in her book From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, using diary notes from Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman: “You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks,” Haldeman quoted Nixon as saying in a diary entry from April 1969. “The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” In a direct and systematic way, Nixon recognized that the politics of crime control could effectively conceal the racist intent behind his administration’s domestic programs.1 Nixon’s rhetoric of “law and order” that followed this conversation was used to conceal a racist political agenda, one that was perfectly explicit within the White House’s walls.