I became active in political protest in the 1960s, and from that time to this, there have been countless accusations that some politician or political system was “fascist.” Usually, this was taken to be but an exaggerated form of criticism, the term “fascist” not literal but a kind of shorthand. Now, however, with the advent of Donald Trump and other ‘populist’ leaders worldwide, the term has begun to sound more and more literal. It takes only a little remembrance of the tactics of the Trump campaign to realize that this would-be dictator has employed strategies that appear dangerously close to those of fascist leaders in the pre-World War II era. Now comes a book by Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them(Random House: 2018), that outlines the basic characteristics of fascism, including how the politics of our current president adheres more closely to them than many have dared to think.
What Stanley does is write a chapter about each of ten different political strategies that define fascist politics: The Mythic Past, Propaganda, Anti-Intellectual, Unreality, Hierarchy, Victimhood, Law and Order, Sexual Anxiety, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Arbeit Macht Frei. He proceeds to show how each of these, both singly and collectively, serves to exacerbate the divide between “us” (the favored population) and “them” (the outsiders who are targeted in the fascist state). He also shows how the most notable fascist leaders, like Hitler and Mussolini and also Viktor Orban of today’s Hungary, use these strategies to seize and hold power in their respective fascist states. Throughout, Stanley makes plain that he is not studying fascism per se (though he does comment that by fascism, he means a kind of ultra-nationialism where the nation is represented by an authoritarian leader who claims to literally “be” the nation). Rather, he is outlining how his ten categories work in combination to implement “fascist politics,” or, as he puts it: “my interest is in fascist tactics as a mechanism to achieve power.” Whether those tactics result in a state one could actually label “fascist” is implied, but by no means guaranteed. The real danger they represent lies in how they “dehumanize” certain segments of the population—in short, whatever “them” is targeted.
First—and Benito Mussolini with his recalling for Italians the “glorious” past of the Roman Empire (and his use of a Roman term, fasces,to characterize his regime as “fascism”) is the prototype—the evocation of a mythic past is almost a given. Importantly, the past recalled is an invention, not a true remembrance of history. Hitler and his Nazis, in turn, sought to fetishize the volkisch movement, a mythic, medieval Germanic past evoking close-knit ethnic and racial ties. The idea was to get back to an imagined past where Germanic peoples, the volk, were united by blood. It can easily be seen how more modern movements use the same inventions keyed to their local histories. In India, the current leader, Narendra Modi, is a member of RSS, a far-right Hindu nationalist party calling for the suppression of non-Hindu minorities. Similar movements in Hungary, Poland and even France are characterized by similar appeals to an ethnically-united, mythic past. In the same way, the past is regularly mythologized in the American South to whitewash slavery and to justify the monuments that still glorify the Confederacy and its ‘noble’ fight against the Union. It has been noted elsewhere (see Greg Grandin, The Nation, June 2016, “It’s the Empire, Stupid’) that nations with waning empires are particularly susceptible to fascist appeals to this mythic past. We only have to think of Donald Trump’s “Make American Great Again” campaign slogan to realize how this might appeal especially to white men whose jobs have disappeared and who, fearing that they are being replaced by dark “outsiders,” would want to imagine a past when their good jobs seemed secure and their right to rule was unquestioned.
The value of Propaganda for fascist politics hardly needs demonstrating. The basic idea is to united people by disguising, with acceptable ideals, the actual nefarious goals that are sought. Donald Trump’s campaign slogan about “draining the swamp” in Washington is a perfect example of calling “corrupt” the state that he wanted to run in his own corrupt way. And that is exactly what has happened. How do fascist politicians get away with this? By the implication, as Stanley makes clear, that the corruption they seek to eliminate is really “the corruption of purity rather than of law…corruption in the sense of the usurpation of traditional order” (26). In this sense, the fact that Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, even lived in the White House, was a kind of corruption of tradition (white men only in the White House), and Trump supporters could see the former President and everything he did as corrupt. In thus undermining reasonable public discourse, which is a necessary part of democracy, fascist propaganda segues neatly into what Stanley calls “Anti-Intellectualism.” Here, the value of education, of expertise, of complex language are all devalued in the effort to leave only one thing in their place: the power of those in the tribe, especially the ‘leader’. This power is typically expressed in simple language such as that used by Trump with his slogans. Stanley cites a February 2018 interview with Steve Bannon, who said: “We got elected on Drain the Swamp, Lock Her Up, Build a Wall” (55). The complex ideas promoted in university faculties and in education in general, by contrast, undermine the effectiveness of such simple-minded slogans and must be attacked. Universities thus become the lair of Marxists and Communists seeking to invalidate the national myths. Both of these tactics, in turn, lead to the next one: Unreality. With “liberal elites” and rational thought condemned as biased, the ability to agree on truth itself becomes fraught with anger and argument. Anything that contradicts the Dear Leader’s pronouncements or desires gets labeled “fake news.” As Stanley puts it,
Fascist politics exchanges reality for the pronouncements of a single individual…Regular, repeated obvious lying is part of the process by which fascist politics destroys the information space (57).
Though reputable newspapers like the Washington Post have consistently totaled up the numbers of false statements Trump has uttered (well over 4,000), the president seems untouched by such accounting. He needs only cry “fake news,” seconded by his propaganda channel, Fox News, to be believed by his adoring, and misinformed supporters. What is even more astonishing is that these supporters treat such obvious lies as more truthful than the more accurate words of conventional politicians. Trump, according to his followers, is “telling it like it is.”
In accord with the myths of a glorious past that fascist politics exalts, it also exalts the myth of Hierarchy (racial or economic or gender) in society—where leadership, honor and money go disproportionately to the powerful. The myth inheres in the fact that this allegedly accords with nature or the divine plan. Stanley puts it succinctly: “For the fascist, the principle of equality is a denial of natural law…The natural law allegedly places men over women, and members of the chosen nation of the fascist over other groupings” (80). One of the most memorable examples cited by Stanley is a March 21, 1861 speech by Alexander H. Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy. Known as the Cornerstone Speech, it specifically identifies constitutional principles of equality as violations of nature:
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea [of equality]; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition (80).
The very same principle of racial inequality or hierarchy formed the cornerstone of Hitler’s Third Reich. And the concomitant to this alleged ‘natural’ principle is the fascist politician’s disdain for the “undeserving,” those who receive government help or healthcare. Donald Trump made this point recurrently in his campaign and it was meant to evoke, in his rabid followers, their complaint that whereas we are hardworking, upstanding citizens, they, the others—of whom there are many, mostly people of color or immigrants—are lazy and unwilling to work. When a nation is in the condition of apparently losing its favored or wealthy status—as many pre-fascist states typically are—this sense of loss becomes aggravated to the point at which the appeal of fascist leaders becomes particularly strong. We’re losing and we don’t deserve to lose, becomes the cry of those who follow such a leader.
This paves the way for one of the most important chapters in Stanley’s book: Victimhood. In the United States, at least since the Civil War, this has always taken the form of whites feeling like victims to government-imposed equality. While the Civil Rights Act of 1866 finally made black Americans U.S. citizens with protected civil rights, it took not even a month for new President Andrew Johnson to veto the act because it gave the ‘colored race’ more safeguards than the white race ever had. Johnson saw this as “discrimination against the white race.” Today’s whites, especially in the solidly Trumpian states of the South and Midwest, see the same thing. As Stanley points out,
Forty-five percent of President Donald Trump’s supporters believe that whites are the most discriminated-against racial group in America; 54 percent of Trump’s supporters believe that Christians are the most persecuted religious group in America (94).
Stanley cites several studies showing that the prediction of the U.S. becoming a “majority-minority” country around 2050 is seen as highly threatening by white groups, to the point where many feel like victims. This makes them far more likely to oppose policies like affirmative action and immigration and to support right-wing policies. Nor is this unique to the United States but is, rather, a “universal element” of contemporary fascist politics. Because nationalism (not nationalism in pursuit of equality but nationalism in pursuit of domination) is at the core of fascism, the fascist leader uses a sense of “collective victimhood to create a sense of group identity” (106). Whether based on skin color, religion, or ethnic origin, it always situates itself as guarding against an invasive “them” in order to restore the safety and dignity of the dominant group, “us,’ whose sense of loss it always exaggerates. As he did in an October 2017 speech at the International Consultation on Christian Persecution, Viktor Orban of Hungary railed against the “danger” to Europe’s Christian roots represented by soft immigration policies:
“A group of Europe’s intellectual and political leaders wishes to create a mixed society in Europe which, within just a few generations, will utterly transform the cultural and ethnic composition of our continent—and consequently its Christian identity” (107).
As victims of such unfair persecution, Orban urges Hungarians to join him in thwarting this “invasion” fostered by liberal elites, and revive Hungary’s traditional (mythic) role as the defender of Christian Europe against barbarian hordes.
Perhaps Law and Order is the most familiar tactic used by fascist politics. But what is interesting about Stanley’s take is that members of the target group are not only characterized as “criminals,” though that is bad enough; it also represents them as threats to the nation’s purity. This was particularly poisonous in Nazi Germany, but it reigned supreme in the American South as well. The underlying threat, of course, is the threat of rape, which threatens not only women themselves, but the actual “manhood” of the nation. This is why this tactic plays directly into the next one, Sexual Anxiety. With the “leader” depicted as the “father of the nation,” any threat to male control and family traditions also threatens the fascist view of male dominance and strength. According to Hitler, “Jews were behind a conspiracy to rape pure Aryan woman as a means of destroying the ‘white race’” (129). The Ku Klux Klan apparently shared this theory, referring to the Negro goal of “destroying by the bastardization which would necessarily set in, the white race which they hate” (129). It goes without saying that the danger posed by black rapists was also at the heart of the rampage of lynching that marked the Jim Crow era.
Finally, fascist politics takes on both the corruption of cities—Sodom and Gomorrah where outsiders usually concentrate and, like parasites, depend on the largesse of the state—and the contrast between the “hard work” ethic of the countryside and the laziness marked by immigrants and urban dwellers. What’s most damaging about this mythology, according to Stanley, is that fascist movements actually attempt to make their mythic constructions about “them” into actuality by using social policies to do it. By driving Jews out of Germany, the Nazis believed that turning Jews into refugee beggars would prove their fascist contention that Jews were naturally shiftless and lazy. In the same way, American policies in Latin American countries like Honduras and Guatemala turn large populations into migrants, who then, as immigrants, can confirm the fascist contention that they are lazy and dependent on state aid. And for the native population, destroying labor unions, instituting ‘tough on crime’ policies, and fostering the economic inequality that grows more threatening in the U.S. each year also acts as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy—that “those people” are simply lazy and deserve their lot.
In his epilogue, Stanley sums up what he has pointed out in this short but powerful, thought-provoking book:
The mechanisms of fascist politics all build on and support one another. They weave a myth of a distinction between “us” and “them,” based on a romanticized fictional past featuring “us” and not “them,” and supported by a resentment for a corrupt liberal elite, who take our hard-earned money and threaten our traditions. “They” are lazy criminals on whom freedom would be wasted (and who don’t deserve it, in any case). “They” mask their destructive goals with the language of liberalism, or “social justice,” and are out to destroy our culture and traditions and make “us” weak (187).
That’s it in a nutshell. And for those who think that “it can’t happen here,” this little book should be an eye-opener and a wakeup call because, as they say, we’re already half-way there.
Lawrence DiStasi
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