How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

Jair Bolsonaro, “the tropical Trump,” was not mentioned in the original edition of this book. Yet soon after it was published, he was elected president of Brazil, the world’s fourth-largest democracy. Bolsonaro ran an anti-corruption campaign centered on the theme of Law and Order. He was openly anti-feminist and anti-gay, and he repeatedly lauded the country’s past of military dictatorship. Since he has been in office, “[a]ll three of Bolsonaro’s politically active sons, along with his wife Michelle, have been implicated in corruption scandals.”*1 In Brazil right now, journalists are being threatened. Universities, a source of protest against Bolsonaro, as well as a target of his political demagoguery, face huge cuts in research funding. On March 15, 2020, far-right-wing demonstrations were held across the country, calling to disband Congress and the courts. Bolsonaro, like Trump, is a climate change denier. Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, whose health is crucial for that of the planet, has faced increasingly catastrophic fires under Bolsonaro’s watch and concomitant increased deforestation.

People often assume that fascist tactics can achieve success only where democratic institutions, and commitment to democratic culture, is already weak. We are thus told to pay attention to policies and institutions rather than the rhetoric they can follow. But Sweden is a country with some of the world’s most stable democratic institutions. It has first-rate public goods—excellent universal health care, education, and day care. The commitment of individual Swedes to democratic values has rarely been questioned. It is a disturbing sign of the power of fascist tactics that the only Swedish political party that characteristically employs them, the Sweden Democrats, has as of this writing become the most popular Swedish political party.

Panic about immigration and the fear of losing the dominant culture to religious or ethnic minorities loathed by the majority groups are central to fascist politics. In the countries in which these tactics are most successful, we now see the clear emergence of fascist policies. India is a key example in this book, particularly the rise of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its leader, Narendra Modi. Since this book was written, BJP has won a majority in India and has moved to implement disturbing policies.

India’s citizenship practices since its founding have been liberal and secular. But under the control of BJP, the country is dramatically transforming. India has a National Population Registry and a Census. But both of these count residents, not citizens. In November 2019, India’s Parliament proposed to add a National Register of Citizens (NRC). The task of the NRC is to make decisions about who is and who is not a citizen, to divide the citizens from the non-citizens. Those deemed to be non-citizens will be scheduled for detention and eventual deportation. India has a large body of residents born in India but lacking documentation such as birth certificates that establish this fact. Decisions must be made about who among them should count as a citizen and who should not. There is significant concern, legitimated by the parties behind this project, that the decision will be made on the basis of religion: Muslim residents without the right paperwork will be subject to detention and deportation; Hindus without the right paperwork will be added to the registry.

India has passed the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB). CAB promises a fast path to citizenship for immigrants belonging to specified religious groups. Muslims who cannot prove their citizenship are excluded from a path to citizenship in the CAB guidelines; Hindus who cannot prove their citizenship have one. In India, we are witnessing a transition from liberal citizenship practices to fascist ones. BJP’s fascist politics are not merely rhetorical.

A distinguishing mark of fascist politics is the targeting of ideological enemies and the freeing of all restraints in combating them.

On January 27, 2017, the Trump Administration issued one of its first executive orders, with the title Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States. It halted indefinitely the admission of refugees from the war in Syria, and placed a ban on travel into the United States by citizens of seven Muslim majority countries. It was ultimately superseded by two replacement travel prohibitions, trying to overcome obvious legal objections because banning based on religious identity is manifestly inconsistent with the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The third version of the legislation was adjusted to include two non-Muslim majority countries, North Korea and Venezuela, on its list of “Countries of Identified Concern,” whose nationals the order bans from entry to the United States. The Supreme Court ruled, in a 5-4 decision, that this adjustment made the executive order consistent with the Establishment Clause (despite obviously being crafted for just this purpose). In the ensuing years, this ban on many of the world’s Muslims from entry to the United States has become normalized. It is no longer a salient topic of discussion in the U.S. media. Trump’s fascist political tactics quickly were made material in policies of explicit exclusion.

The goal of ICE is not to make communities safer. ICE’s mission is to reinforce a distinction between “us” and “them.”

In German history, the term “Gleichschaltung” connotes the process by which the institutions of the German government gradually became “Nazified,” moving from liberal democratic organizing principles to National Socialist ones, principally fealty to the Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler.

India, the United States, and Brazil are now run by far-right parties, with demagogic leaders implementing ultranationalist agendas. In the bastions of democracy in Western Europe, far-right parties are ascendant. All around the world, liberal democracy is in retreat. Not since the middle of the twentieth century has liberal democracy been in such peril.

With the advent of a public health pandemic like COVID-19, the attacks on expertise, science, and truth that are the lifeblood of fascist politics imperil much more than just our political system. We can see the explicit dangers in the response to COVID-19 of the leaders of the United States, Brazil, and India, which was initially to dismiss the virus as an overblown hoax.*5 The response of these governments to the virus was not some accident—as I show in the pages to follow, fascist ideology conflicts in principle with expertise, science, and truth.

Trump called the virus “the Chinese virus” in part because that is where it originated. But the reason he sticks to this label in the face of criticism is to reframe debate around nationalist conflict (and away from the incompetence of his administration). And when it began to take the virus seriously, the Trump administration immediately sought to use it as a means to justify retroactively its nationalist agenda of closing borders, and its suspicion of immigrants, by associating immigrants (and “sanctuary cities”) with the virus. As I show in this book, fascism in power seeks to make its rhetoric into reality—for example, by immiserating and impoverishing populations it represents as diseased.

The Hungarian government’s response to the virus has been to introduce legislation to disband Parliament and let Victor Orbán rule by emergency decree. In the United States, the Department of Justice sought emergency powers from Congress, including indefinite detention by judges. Using crisis as anti-democratic opportunity is a classic fascist tactic.

A moral of this book is that fascism is not a new threat, but rather a permanent temptation.

The United States has captured the attention of the world not because of its fascist history, but because of the heroism its residents have exhibited in internal fights against it. From the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement, the United States has fought against white Christian nationalism, no less than Europe has fought against its own ultranationalist movements.

Before World War II, Charles Lindbergh typified American heroism with his daring flights, including the first solo transatlantic flight, and his celebration of new technology. He parlayed his fame and heroic stature into a leading role in the America First movement, which opposed America’s entrance into the war against Nazi Germany. In 1939, in an essay entitled “Aviation, Geography, and Race,” published in that most American of journals, Reader’s Digest, Lindbergh embraced something close to Nazism for America: It is time to turn from our quarrels and to build our White ramparts again. This alliance with foreign races means nothing but death to us. It is our turn to guard our heritage from Mongol and Persian and Moor, before we become engulfed in a limitless foreign sea.1

In 2016, Donald Trump revived “America First” as one of his slogans, and from his first week in office, his administration has ceaselessly pursued travel bans on immigration, including refugees, specifically singling out Arab countries. Trump also promised to deport the millions of nonwhite Central and South American undocumented workers in the United States and to end legislation protecting the children they brought with them from deportation. In September 2017, the Trump administration set a cap of forty-five thousand on the number of refugees that will be allowed into the United States in 2018, the lowest number since presidents began placing such limits.

when, exactly, was America great, in the eyes of the Trump campaign? During the nineteenth century, when the United States enslaved its black population? During Jim Crow, when black Americans in the South were prevented from voting? A hint about the decade that was most salient to the Trump campaign emerges from a November 18, 2016, Hollywood Reporter interview with Steve Bannon, the then president-elect’s chief strategist, in which he remarks about the era to come that “it will be as exciting as the 1930s.” In short, the era when the United States had its most sympathy for fascism.

In recent years, multiple countries across the world have been overtaken by a certain kind of far-right nationalism; the list includes Russia, Hungary, Poland, India, Turkey, and the United States.

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. As Donald Trump declared in his Republican National Convention speech in July 2016, “I am your voice.”

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.

The dangers of fascist politics come from the particular way in which it dehumanizes segments of the population. By excluding these groups, it limits the capacity for empathy among other citizens, leading to the justification of inhumane treatment, from repression of freedom, mass imprisonment, and expulsion to, in extreme cases, mass extermination.

In the cases of Nazi Germany, Rwanda, and contemporary Myanmar, the victims of ethnic cleansing were subjected to vicious rhetorical attacks by leaders and in the press for months or years before the regime turned genocidal.

The most telling symptom of fascist politics is division. It aims to separate a population into an “us” and a “them.”

Many kinds of political movements involve such a division; for example, Communist politics weaponizes class divisions. Giving a description of fascist politics involves describing the very specific way that fascist politics distinguishes “us” from “them,” appealing to ethnic, religious, or racial distinctions, and using this division to shape ideology and, ultimately, policy. Every mechanism of fascist politics works to create or solidify this distinction.

the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirmed the dignity of every human being. The drafting and adoption of the document were spearheaded by former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and after the war it stood for the United States’ ideals as much as those of the new United Nations. It was a bold statement, a powerful iteration and expansion of liberal democratic understanding of personhood to include literally the entire world community. It bound all nations and cultures to a shared commitment to valuing the equality of every person, and it rang with the aspirations of millions in a shattered world confronting the devastation of colonialism, genocide, racism, global war, and, yes, fascism. After the war, Article 14 was particularly poignant, solemnly affirming the right of every person to seek asylum.

Fascist politics invokes a pure mythic past tragically destroyed. Depending on how the nation is defined, the mythic past may be religiously pure, racially pure, culturally pure, or all of the above.

In the rhetoric of extreme nationalists, such a glorious past has been lost by the humiliation brought on by globalism, liberal cosmopolitanism, and respect for “universal values” such as equality. These values are supposed to have made the nation weak in the face of real and threatening challenges to the nation’s existence.

These myths are generally based on fantasies of a nonexistent past uniformity, which survives in the traditions of the small towns and countrysides that remain relatively unpolluted by the liberal decadence of the cities.

why is patriarchy so strategically central to fascist politics?

In a fascist society, the leader of the nation is analogous to the father in the traditional patriarchal family. The leader is the father of his nation, and his strength and power are the source of his legal authority, just as the strength and power of the father of the family in patriarchy are supposed to be the source of his ultimate moral authority over his children and wife.

The Daily Stormer titled “Just What Are Traditional Gender Roles?” In it, he claims that women were traditionally regarded as property in all European cultures, except for Jewish societies and some gypsy groups, which were matrilineal: This was why the Jews were so keen to attack these ideas, because the patrilineal passing of property was innately offensive to their culture. Europe only has this absurd notion of women as independent entities because of organized subversion by agents of Judaism.7

In the 2016 U.S. election, a video surfaced showing the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump making harshly demeaning comments about women. Mitt Romney, the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee, said that Trump’s remarks “demean our wives and daughters.” Paul Ryan, the Republican Speaker of the House, said, “women are to be championed and revered, not objectified.” Both of these remarks reveal an underlying patriarchal ideology that is typical of much of U.S. Republican Party policy. These politicians could simply have given voice to the most direct description of the facts, which is that Trump’s remarks demean half our fellow citizens. Instead, Romney’s remark, in language evocative of that used in the Hutu Ten Commandments, describes women exclusively in terms of traditionally subordinate roles in families, as “wives and daughters”—not even as sisters. Paul Ryan’s characterization of women as objects of “reverence” rather than equal respect objectifies women in the same sentence that decries doing so.

We can think of fascist politics as a politics of hierarchy (for example, in the United States, white supremacy demands and implies a perpetual hierarchy), and to realize that hierarchy, we can think of it as the displacement of reality by power. If one can convince a population that they are rightfully exceptional, that they are destined by nature or by religious fate to rule other populations, one has already convinced them of a monstrous lie.

Fascist politics repudiates any dark moments of a nation’s past. In early 2018, the Polish parliament passed a law making it illegal to suggest that Poland bore responsibility for any of the atrocities committed on its soil during the Nazi occupation of Poland, even the well-documented pogroms during this time.

When it does not simply invent a past to weaponize the emotion of nostalgia, fascist politics cherry-picks the past, avoiding anything that would diminish unreflective adulation of the nation’s glory.

In order to honestly debate what our country should do, what policies it should adopt, we need a common basis of reality, including about our own past. History in a liberal democracy must be faithful to the norm of truth, yielding an accurate vision of the past, rather than a history provided for political reasons.

If one is not concerned by politicians who deliver an intentional appeal to erase painful historical memory, it is worth acquainting oneself with the psychological literature on collective memory. In their 2013 paper “Motivated to ‘Forget’: The Effects of In-Group Wrongdoing on Memory and Collective Guilt,” Katie Rotella and Jennifer Richeson presented American participants with stories “about the oppressive, violent treatment of American Indians,” framed in one of two ways: “Specifically, the perpetrators of the violence were described either as early Americans (in-group condition) or as Europeans who settled in what became America (out-group condition).”12 The study showed that people are more likely to suffer from a sort of amnesia of wrongdoing when the perpetrators are characterized explicitly as their countrymen. When American subjects were presented with the agents of the violence as Americans (rather than Europeans), they had significantly worse memory for negative historical events, and “what participants did recall was phrased more dismissively when the perpetrators were in-group members.” Rotella and Richeson’s work builds on a body of previous work with similar results.13

White southerners propagated the myth that this was necessary because black citizens were unable to self-govern; in the histories advanced at the time, Reconstruction was represented as a time of unparalleled political corruption, with stability restored only when whites were again given full power. W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1935 masterwork, Black Reconstruction, is a decisive refutation of the then official history of the Reconstruction era. As Du Bois shows, whites in the South, with the collusion of Northern elites, brought an end to the Reconstruction era because of the widespread fear among the wealthy classes that newly enfranchised black citizens would join with poor whites in developing a powerful labor movement to challenge the interests of capital. Du Bois shows how the Reconstruction era was a time of just governance, when black legislators not only did not govern from their own self-interest but bent over backward to accommodate the fears of their white fellow citizens. At the time, Black Reconstruction was largely ignored by white historians; but by the 1960s, the history Du Bois there recounts became widely recognized as fact.

Political propaganda uses the language of virtuous ideals to unite people behind otherwise objectionable ends.

Fascist politicians characteristically decry corruption in the state they seek to take over, which is bizarre, given that fascist politicians themselves are invariably vastly more corrupt than those they seek to supplant or defeat.

In the name of rooting out corruption and supposed bias, fascist politicians attack and diminish the institutions that might otherwise check their power.

E.g., a federal judge, Bruce Rheinhart, issuing a search report at Mar-A-Lago to retrieve classified documents Trump stole from the White House.

Just as fascist politics attacks the rule of law in the name of anticorruption, it also purports to protect freedom and individual liberties. But these liberties are contingent on the oppression of some groups.

the very notion of liberty in the South was predicated on its perversion in the practice of slavery. We find this inversion in much of the rhetoric of “states’ rights,” a phrase used to defend the liberty of U.S. states in the South from federal intervention. But the federal intervention that is most associated with the call for “states’ rights” is the elimination of slavery, and subsequently Jim Crow laws restricting the right to vote for black citizens. The liberty that many whites in Southern states sought by calling for “states’ rights” was the freedom to restrict the liberties of their fellow black citizens.

Historically, fascist leaders have often come to power through democratic elections. But the commitment to freedom, such as the freedom inherent in the right to vote, tends to end with that victory.

In book 8 of Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that people are not naturally led to self-governance but rather seek a strong leader to follow. Democracy, by permitting freedom of speech, opens the door for a demagogue to exploit the people’s need for a strongman; the strongman will use this freedom to prey on the people’s resentments and fears. Once the strongman seizes power, he will end democracy, replacing it with tyranny. In short, book 8 of The Republic argues that democracy is a self-undermining system whose very ideals lead to its own demise. Fascists have always been well acquainted with this recipe for using democracy’s liberties against itself; Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels once declared, “This will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed.” Today is no different from the past. Again, we find the enemies of liberal democracy employing this strategy, pushing the freedom of speech to its limits and ultimately using it to subvert others’ speech.

It is often noted, rightly, that fascism elevates the irrational over the rational, fanatical emotion over the intellect.

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.

Education therefore either poses a grave threat to fascism or becomes a pillar of support for the mythical nation.

Where speech is a right, propagandists cannot attack dissent head-on; instead they must represent it as something violent and oppressive (a protest therefore becomes a “riot”).