How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

Cities were thriving; the “millennial generation” in the United States tended to prefer urban to suburban areas, and urban areas were experiencing a tremendous revival. Many areas that in the 1970s and 1980s were the paradigm of blighted urban ghettos, such as Harlem, had experienced, for good or for ill, tremendous gentrification and steeply escalating housing prices. Despite this, U.S. president Donald Trump, during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and afterward, regularly spoke of American cities as sites of carnage and blight. For example, in a tweet on January 14, 2017, then president-elect Trump spoke of “burning and crime-infested inner cities of the U.S.” Despite remarkable gentrification in American cities, Trump regularly speaks of cities as containing ghettos filled with black people (who, he implies, are likely criminals). A typical line from one of his campaign speeches was “Our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape that they’ve ever been in before, ever, ever, ever. You take a look at the inner cities, you get no education, you get no jobs, you get shot walking down the street.” And yet during this time, cities in the United States were enjoying their lowest rates of crime in generations and record low unemployment. Trump’s rhetoric about cities makes sense in the context of a more general fascist politics, in which cities are seen as centers of disease and pestilence, containing squalid ghettos filled with despised minority groups...