Stanley’s new book, “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them,” [is] a timely study of fascist politics past and present.
Stanley examines how modern authoritarian and nationalist—“fascist,” if you like (Stanley obviously does)—politicos have used and subverted purportedly democratic electoral politics to gain power. He finds 10 common themes animating fascist ideology and propaganda:
1. Invocation of a mythic national past marked by racial, ethnic, religious and/or cultural purity—a supposedly glorious history to which the nation needs to return.
2. Propagandistic use of outwardly virtuous ideals (including anti-corruption, democracy, liberty and free speech) to advance abhorrent ends that contradict those ideals.
3. An anti-intellectual assault on education, universities, science, expertise and language, accompanied by charges of Marxism and “political correctness” against liberal and leftist enemies and the advance of simplistic nationalist and authoritarian ideals. This is fertile soil for the deadly denial of climate change that has occurred and for such absurd claims as the notion that whites are now more damaged by racism than are black, Latinx and Native American people in the U.S.
4. An insidious attack on truth and on people’s ability to perceive and agree on truth. Regular and repeated obvious lying is combined with the advance of conspiracy theories and the promotion of “news as sports” and demagogic strongmen as “stars.”
5. An ugly faith in natural hierarchies of worth and a rejection of equality as dangerous, unnatural, Marxist and liberal delusion.
6. An aggrieved and counterfeit sense of victimhood among dominant “us” groups (racial, ethnic and/or religious) that feel threatened by having to share citizenship, resources and power with minority groups (“them”). This ironic victimology feeds an oppressive nationalism devoted to maintaining “natural” hierarchies and uniting “chosen” but supposedly oppressed racial, ethnic, religious groups (whites in the U.S., Christians in Hungary, Hindus in India, and so on.) against the supposedly false claims and unjust demands of “them”—those designated as “naturally” inferior others.
7. A stern embrace of law and order that targets minority others (“them”) as criminal threats to the safety and security of the majority (“us”).
8. Sexual anxiety about the threat supposedly posed by minority, criminal and alien others to “our” traditional male roles, status and family values.
9. A loathing of cities seen as racially and sexually corrupt, ethnically impure, sexually perverse, parasitic criminal zones loaded with a polyglot mass of some inferior, nation-weakening “them.” By contrast, the rural countryside is lauded as the noble wellspring of virtue, strength, self-sufficiency and racial-ethnic purity. The rural heartland/fatherland/motherland/homeland is the sacred and foundational “blood and soil” preserve of “us.” It is the noble native soil of the “volk”—the true ancestral people who embody the spirit of a once-grand nation that needs to be made great again through the defeat of liberal and supposedly leftist elites who have been giving the nation’s resources and power away to naturally inferior others (“them”).
10. A sense of the chosen-people majority (“us”) as hard-working, upright, virtuous and deserving, combined with the notion of demonized minorities and others (“them”) as lazy, dissolute, shifty and undeserving.
Trump has checked the boxes on Stanley’s list of core fascist themes. Consider Trump’s:
· Three-year-old ballcap slogan, “Make America Great Again” (likely lifted from empowered Hungarian fascists’ call to “make Hungary great again”).
· Claim to be “drain[ing] the swamp” while filling his administration with thoroughly corrupt swamp creatures.
· Designation of his authoritarian racist and hate-filled campaign rallies—events where he denounces reporters as “enemies of the people” and even applauds repressive violence against them and others—as “free speech” demonstrations.
· Climate-science denial and taste for conspiracy theories.
· Relentless totalitarian mendacity and endless nonsensical assertions, utterly devoid of evidence.
· Constant leveling of the charge of “fake news” against any reporting or commentary that questions his political agenda and purported greatness.
· Absurd advance-pardon of a racist sheriff who built Nazi-like internment and work camps for Latinx arrestees.
· Savage punitive separation of Central American children from their migrant parents at the southern U.S. border.
· Defense of white supremacists who marched through the University of Virginia campus, chanting “Blood and soil, Jews will not replace us” (Heather Heyer, a young woman protesting the fascists, was killed at that 2017 event).
· Obvious underlying belief that African-Americans, Latinx, Native Americans and women are inherently inferior to white men and unworthy of respect and equality.
· Repeated claims that leading black personalities are “low IQ,” “stupid” and the like.
· Repeated and barely coded racist appeals to “law and order.”
· Repeated false description of immigrants as rapists and other kinds of terrible criminals, not to mention “animals.”
· Mad executive order claiming to end the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of U.S. citizenship to people born on U.S. soil.
· Clear disdain and distrust of scientists, real expertise, intellectuals and independent judges and lawyers.
· Repeated reference to the predominantly white and agrarian, small-town heartland as the real soul of the nation and his related special taste for holding demagogic, fascist-style rallies in heavily white, rural, red-meat, red state regions.
· Regular false description of centrist and liberal corporate Democrats as “the left” and as “socialists.”
That’s just a short list of how Trump’s rhetoric and conduct has lined up with the noxious politics of fascism, which holds power in a shocking number of nations today. (Stanley might have added a special chapter on hypermasculinist militarism and misogyny, both major Trump themes. Perhaps, too, it is time to start thinking about eco-fascism—the special dedication fascists show for assaulting livable ecology.)
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Meanwhile, it seems clear that, as Ferguson says, “[T]he Republican Party is never going back to where it was before Trump, even if the establishment succeeded in putting Pence in his place. In politics, the ‘New Abnormal’ is, alas, the new ‘Normal.’ ” So it will remain, unless and until the creeping fascist party still mostly in power in the U.S. is seriously opposed by an actual and authentic popular opposition that goes after the extreme inequality that provides essential soil for the poisonous new fascist politics of the 21st century.