How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

According to fascists, liberals and Marxists (or “cultural Marxists”) advance the ideals of equality and liberty, spreading their ideas as “infections” to members of the dominant group which leads them to willingly hand over their power. In the case of women’s equality, acceptance of liberal ideals leads to the destruction of the virtuous patriarchal society that is the basis of fascist myth. Lindbergh’s America First movement repudiated liberal ideals as leading to the pollution of the “pure blood” of the white nation via immigration. In the case of contemporary Russia, and much of the U.S. Christian right, liberal democracy leads to the legitimation of immigration and the supposed introduction of mass rape by immigrants, and to the acceptance of homosexuality together with its supposedly attendant sin of “degeneracy.”