How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

In the 2012 American presidential election, vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan repeatedly spoke of American society being divided into “makers” and “takers.” Ryan argued that it was imperative to advance policies that increase the number of “makers” in society and decrease the number of “takers.” At the time, Ryan repeatedly raised the concern that the United States was becoming a society with a majority of “takers” and a minority of “makers,” a society in which “takers” are those “who get more benefits in dollar value from the federal government than they pay back in taxes.” According to this ideology, the “makers” in society, by virtue of their wealth, have more value than the “takers.” More recently, Ryan has abandoned the vocabulary of “makers” versus “takers,” but he has retained the same policies that clearly favor those with more wealth at the expense of those with less wealth. Those Americans inclined to place, for example, different skin colors on “makers” and “takers,” in so doing, move beyond libertarianism into fascism.