How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

Hierarchy, according to Stanley, “is a kind of mass delusion, one readily exploited by fascist politics” (79). Those who occupy positions of privilege consistently seek to justify their status in terms of “deserving” it, and the status of those beneath them in terms of their lack of effort or other willful failure. Fascist politics embraces hierarchy and maintains that it is imposed by nature, thus directly opposing notions of human equality expressed in liberal democratic political theory.

These ideas are reflected today by people like Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, who proposed that Ashkenazi Jews are especially intelligent due to their race. Pinker responds to attacks on his ideas by arguing that his critics are concerned only with “political correctness.”

While noting that both leftists and the right wing can challenge liberal democratic ideals, Stanley observes that challenges from the right tend to argue that marginalized groups will use those ideals to usurp the power of the dominant group. Fascists see liberalism as forcing unnatural power sharing. This is reflected in Hitler’s fear of global Jewish conspiracies using liberalism to infect and weaken the supposed natural dominance of the Aryans.

Hierarchy is politically convenient for politicians whose constituents have grown accustomed to the benefits of privilege but now fear losing that privilege. Stanley warns, “Empires in decline are particularly susceptible to fascist politics because of this sense of loss” (90). 

Social psychology firmly establishes that dominant groups experience gains by minority groups as a threat. Recent research suggests that when White Americans are primed with the information that Whites will no longer be a majority of the U.S. population around 2050, they become more likely to support conservative right-wing policies. Fascist politics universally exploit the majority group’s fears that they are victimized by minority groups gaining more rights and power.

Stanley distinguishes various movements that argue for the equality of the oppressed—including Mahatma Gandhi’s Indian nationalism and Black Lives Matter—as fundamentally different than the fascist movements that claim victimhood. While the former type of movement may sometimes be nationalist, they are a response to real oppression and inequality.

Fascism, Stanley explains, is driven by loyalty to the “nation”—that is, the dominant majority it mythologies. Thus, it repudiates equality and seeks to ensure a dominant role for its privileged majority. Accordingly, while a majority may genuinely experience a sense of loss as privileges are shared with formerly excluded groups, fascist politics turn this loss into a feeling of victimhood that demands an oppressive response.

Stanley highlights the “Men’s Rights Activist” movement of the 1990s in the United States as an example of a dominant group responding as victims to the gains of a less powerful group—in this case, women. Another example is the Breitbart New media outlet, which features far right propaganda targeting immigrants as a threat to public health and to law and order.

A society’s power dynamics determine the validity of claims of victimhood, What began as an equality-driven nationalist movement can become oppressive as it gains power. This occurred as Serbians became powerful in the former Yugoslavia, for example.

Following the 1989 arrest of five Black teenagers for allegedly raping a White jogger in New York City, Donald Trump took out full-page ads in several newspapers to call for their execution. All five were ultimately exonerated, and it became clear that many on the prosecution team knew they were innocent. Nonetheless, in 2016, then-U.S. attorney general Jeff Sessions praised Trump’s 1989 comments about the five teenagers as an example of “law and order.” Stanley uses this example to highlight the difference between the fundamentally fair use of “law and order” in a democracy and the elimination of due process suggested by praising calls for the execution of known innocents.

Fascist “law and order” rhetoric aims to divide the populace. There are two classes: the chosen, who are lawful by nature; and others, who are lawless by nature.

The rise of Nazi Germany illustrates the formation of an exclusionary national identity. Prior to the Nazis, the concept of the German Volk emerged, defined by its contrast to the Jewish enemy. Nazis built upon this definition to create fear about Jews as a threat to law and order.

Stanley provides a brief personal history of his grandmother, Ilse Stanley, who learned in 1936 that her husband was among those taken to a concentration camp by the Gestapo while she was away from Berlin. The reason was that he had a criminal record, which consisted of having paid two traffic fines.

Stanley’s grandmother wrote of her experience in a 1957 memoir, The Unforgotten. She worked to rescue prisoners from a concentration camp by disguising herself as a Nazi social worker. However, she was unable to convince many of her fellow German Jews of the extent of the danger because they did not see themselves as criminals.

In settings ranging from Nazi Germany to the present-day United States, labeling others as “criminal” carries a resonate meaning that does not coincide with its literal meaning. This explains why President Trump uses the phrase “criminal immigrants” to suggest that a class of people are a threat to the United States because of their innate lawlessness. The word “criminal” means more than inadvertently breaking a law; it casts aspersions on the person’s—or group’s—character.

This is the us-versus-them dichotomy at the heart of fascist politics. By describing an entire category of people as “criminals,” politicians impute permanent threatening characteristics to them and offer themselves as our protectors.

As with use of the term “riot” to describe predominantly peaceful protests, this type of imputation replaces reasonable public discourse with fear. The description of protests by African-Americans in the 1960s as “riots” helped Richard Nixon win the 1968 U.S. presidential election on a “law and order” platform. His administration then proceeded to establish the groundwork for the mass incarceration of Black Americans that continues today.

Stanley notes that the number of people incarcerated has exploded since 1980, from half a million to 2.3 million in 2013. Although White Americans constitute 77 percent of the population and Black Americans are only 13 percent, there are more Black Americans in prison than Whites.

Moreover, Black Americans constitute 9 percent of the entire world’s prison population. For this to be a proportionate figure, there would need to be over 600 million Black Americans. That is twice the size of the entire U.S. population.

Stanley asks why there is not more empathy for the Black population given the social ills related to incarceration. He contrasts America’s conception of the crack crisis with the very different depictions of the opioid crisis, in which addicts are less generally portrayed as criminals. The latter is more associated with rural White communities, which currently form the political base for President Trump.

Fascist politics focuses on characterizing the outgroup as a threat to “purity” of the “nation.” Thus, above all, it depicts the outgroup as threatening a particular type of crime: rape. This, Stanley argues, raises a sexual anxiety among the in-group, triggering a desire for the protection of the fascist authority.