How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

The weaker individual states and international agreements are, the stronger the power of multinational corporations becomes.

Fascist politicians know that their supporters will turn a blind eye to their own, true corruption since in their own case it is just a matter of members of the chosen nation taking what is rightfully theirs.

When others are doing the labor for you, you are free to do as you please, at least superficially.

people are not naturally led to self-governance but rather seek a strong leader to follow.

In short, book 8 of The Republic argues that democracy is a self-undermining system whose very ideals lead to its own demise.

In fascist ideology, there is only one legitimate viewpoint, that of the dominant nation.

fascist politics reduces debate to ideological conflict.

Conspiracy theories do not function like ordinary information; they are, after all, often so outlandish that they can hardly be expected to be literally believed. Their function is rather to raise general suspicion about the credibility and the decency of their targets.

Attempting to counter such rhetoric with reason is akin to using a pamphlet against a pistol.

Even dueling requires agreement about the rules.

Allowing every opinion into the public sphere and giving it serious time for consideration, far from resulting in a process that is conducive to knowledge formation via deliberation, destroys its very possibility.

Whether or not the anguish that accompanies loss of privileged status is similar to the sense of oppression that accompanies genuine marginalization, it is anguish nevertheless.

Victimhood is an overwhelming emotion that also conceals the contradiction between equality-driven and domination-driven nationalist movements.

Research on linguistic intergroup bias has shown that an audience can infer from how someone’s actions are being described—abstractly or concretely—whether that person is being categorized as “us” or “them.”