Nations
don't have to be fascist to suffer from fascist politics.
A Yale
philosopher identifies the ten pillars of fascist politics, and charts their
horrifying rise and deep history in the United States and around the world, to
conclude that fascism is alive in America today.
Fascism
means dividing a population to achieve power. Jason Stanley understood this as
a scholar of philosophy and propaganda and as the child of refugees of WWII
Europe, but even he was surprised by its prevalence at home. First with the
rise of the birther movement and later the ascent of Donald Trump, he observed
that not only is the rise of fascist politics possible in the United States,
but its roots have been here for more than a century. Drawing on history,
philosophy, sociology, critical race theory, and examples from around the world
from 19th-century America to 20th-century Germany (where Hitler was inspired by
the Confederacy and Jim Crow South) to 21st-century India--Stanley identifies
the ten pillars of fascist politics that leaders use to hold onto power by
dividing populations into an us and a them: the mythic past, propaganda,
anti-intellectualism, unreality, hierarchy, victimhood, law and order, sexual
anxiety, appeals to the heartland, and a dismantling of public welfare and
unity. He uncovers urgent patterns that are as prevalent today as ever and pins
down a creeping sens
How Fascism Works review: a vital read for a
nation under Trump
Yale professor Jason Stanley enters a growing literary
field with a sober examination of an inflammatory political concept
Tom
McCarthy
Tom
McCarthy
@TeeMcSee
Mon 15 Oct
2018 06.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/15/how-fascism-works-jason-stanley-review-trump
One of the
insidious ironies of fascist politics, the philosopher Jason Stanley writes in
his arresting new book, is that talk of fascism itself becomes more difficult
because it is made to seem outlandish.
The
normalization of the fascist myth “makes us able to tolerate what was once
intolerable by making it seem as if this is the way things have always been”,
Stanley writes. “By contrast the word ‘fascist’ has acquired a feeling of the
extreme, like crying wolf.”
The
assertion that immigrants are responsible for social ills that threaten to ruin
a once-great nation, for example, might represent run-of-the-mill racism or
xenophobia. His book’s subtitle is after all “The Politics of Us and Them”. But
the idea is also drawn from a blueprint shared by the most robust fascistic
regimes in recent history.
Does such
an assertion, then, deserve to be called “fascist” or not? Is it responsible to
use the word or is doing so inflammatory? Does diagnosing fascism help beat it?
The young
presidency of Donald Trump has produced an impressive new popular literature on
fascism, from Cass Sunstein’s Can it Happen Here? to Madeleine Albright’s
Fascism: A Warning, to Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies
Die.
Stanley
reassures us it is OK to use the F-word, even applied to regimes that do not
appear to seek world domination
Any reader
for whom that previous sentence anticipates a debate – honestly, do Trump’s
offences of pettiness and corruption warrant such historico-political alarm? –
might do well to open Stanley, who reassures us that it is OK to use the
F-word, even when applied to regimes that do not appear to seek to mobilize
populations for world domination.
Fascist
politics – which evoke a mythic past, which rely on a sense of unreality and
victimhood, and which use the cloak of “law and order” to hide corruption and
attack scapegoats – can be used to flexible ends, writes Stanley, a professor
of philosophy at Yale whose previous book was an analysis of propaganda.
What if a
regime, for example, used a dismal us-versus-them divide in national politics
to destroy faith in institutions capable of containing its power – elections,
an independent judiciary, the public forum – thereby eliminating checks on its
own self-enriching schemes?
“Publicizing
false charges of corruption while engaging in corrupt practices is typical of
fascist politics, and anti-corruption campaigns are frequently at the heart of
fascist political movements,” Stanley writes, helpfully, without once
mentioning “Drain the swamp”.
What if the
regime used the same divisive politics to build popular support for a tax
system that preserves wealth for the most privileged while creating no new
opportunities for everyone else? Would that warrant the term “fascism”?
“Since I am
an American,” writes Stanley, “I must note that one goal appears to be to use
fascist tactics hypocritically, waving the banner of nationalism in front of
middle-and working-class white people in order to funnel the state’s spoils
into the hands of oligarchs.”
Underlying
Stanley’s equanimous appraisal of the contemporary political moment is a
weighty personal history. Both of his parents arrived in the US as Jewish
refugees, his mother from eastern Poland and his father from Berlin, where his
grandmother posed as a Nazi social worker to free Jewish prisoners from Sachsenhausen
concentration camp.
“My family
background has saddled me with difficult emotional baggage,” he writes. “But it
also, crucially, prepared me to write this book.”
The book
provides a fascinating breakdown of the fascist ideology, nimbly interweaving
examples from Germany, Italy and Hungary, from Rwanda and Myanmar to Serbia
and, yes, the US. As he proceeds through his framework of the broadest features
of his subject, Stanley includes smaller observations that may for some readers
land bracingly close to home.
“In all
fascist mythic pasts,” he writes, “an extreme version of the patriarchal family
reigns supreme, even just a few generations ago …
“In the
rhetoric of extreme nationalists, such a glorious past has been lost by the
humiliation brought on by globalism, liberal cosmopolitanism, and respect for
‘universal values’ such as equality. These values are supposed to have made the
nation weak in the face of real and threatening challenges to the nation’s
existence.”
Stanley’s
acute awareness of the power of the term, and the subtlety of his argument
here, must contribute to the fact that he does not explicitly brand Trump a
“fascist”. Nor does he harp on “Make America great again”.
It is a
misfortune of yet-unknown dimensions that he does not have to.
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