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How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them Paperback – May 26, 2020
Jason Stanley (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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“One of the defining books of the decade.”—Elizabeth Hinton, author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • With a new preface • Fascist politics are running rampant in America today—and spreading around the world. A Yale philosopher identifies the ten pillars of fascist politics, and charts their horrifying rise and deep history.
As the child of refugees of World War II Europe and a renowned philosopher and scholar of propaganda, Jason Stanley has a deep understanding of how democratic societies can be vulnerable to fascism: Nations don’t have to be fascist to suffer from fascist politics. In fact, fascism’s roots have been present in the United States for more than a century. Alarmed by the pervasive rise of fascist tactics both at home and around the globe, Stanley focuses here on the structures that unite them, laying out and analyzing the ten pillars of fascist politics—the language and beliefs that separate people into an “us” and a “them.” He knits together reflections on history, philosophy, sociology, and critical race theory with stories from contemporary Hungary, Poland, India, Myanmar, and the United States, among other nations. He makes clear the immense danger of underestimating the cumulative power of these tactics, which include exploiting a mythic version of a nation’s past; propaganda that twists the language of democratic ideals against themselves; anti-intellectualism directed against universities and experts; law and order politics predicated on the assumption that members of minority groups are criminals; and fierce attacks on labor groups and welfare. These mechanisms all build on one another, creating and reinforcing divisions and shaping a society vulnerable to the appeals of authoritarian leadership.
By uncovering disturbing patterns that are as prevalent today as ever, Stanley reveals that the stuff of politics—charged by rhetoric and myth—can quickly become policy and reality. Only by recognizing fascists politics, he argues, may we resist its most harmful effects and return to democratic ideals.
“With unsettling insight and disturbing clarity, How Fascism Works is an essential guidebook to our current national dilemma of democracy vs. authoritarianism.”—William Jelani Cobb, author of The Substance of Hope
- Print length256 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateMay 26, 2020
- Dimensions5.2 x 0.5 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100525511857
- ISBN-13978-0525511854
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“By placing Trump in transnational and transhistorical perspective, Stanley sees patterns that others miss. . . . Stanley’s comparative perspective is particularly effective in illustrating how fascists use fears of sexual violence. . . . By calling Trump a ‘fascist’—a word that strikes many Americans as alien and extreme—Stanley is trying to spark public alarm. He doesn’t want Americans to respond to Trump’s racist, authoritarian offensives by moving their moral goal posts. The greater danger, he suggests, isn’t hyperbole, it’s normalization.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
“Jason Stanley’s staggering analysis has only grown in importance since the release of How Fascism Works in 2018. It is one of the defining books of the decade.”—Elizabeth Hinton, author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime
“Jason Stanley reveals how the liberties of the people wither when voters embrace politicians who promote the divisive politics of us versus them while denigrating cooperation, compromise, and respect for others. How Fascism Works builds on philosopher Stanley’s insightful How Propaganda Works to explain in concise and easily understood terms how people get tricked into reversing the expanding rights that made America great.”—David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of It’s Even Worse Than You Think and The Making of Donald Trump
“An endless question about history—does it repeat itself? The Allies triumphed over fascism nearly seventy-five years ago. But is it on the rise again? The national populism of Trump and Bannon; Brexit; Orban and the rise of the Hungarian right; the Italian five-star movement; Erdoğan—Jason Stanley has in this extraordinary book tried to answer these questions. For those in denial or in doubt, Stanley’s book provides overwhelming evidence that fascism is alive, well, and on the rise. It’s a clarion call to wake up, pay attention, and do something. No one has any doubt that fascism works; the question remains: How do we stop it? Stanley tells us that fascism is not a plan on how to govern but a plan on how to seize control. This is an important and essential book.”—Errol Morris, filmmaker and author of The Ashtray
“There are moments in which the fate of humanity itself hangs in the balance, and such times always bring with them the resurrection of ugly myths. And yet, as Jason Stanley, one of this nation’s most important philosophers, makes clear, when such myths are deconstructed and their history is laid bare, we remember the extraordinary ties that in fact bind us together. And in the fire of that powerful recollection, modern-day fascism—the current myth-dependent moment of intolerance, xenophobia, and fearmongering in which we find ourselves—can be rendered to ash.”—Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Blood in the Water
“Jason Stanley’s book comes at a most propitious time, when we must come to grips with the political consequences that may follow the rise of xenophobic populism. History teaches what those consequences are, and in his book Stanley, with great analytical and conceptual clarity, not only tells the story but more crucially provides a critical framework through which to see the insidious mechanisms at play that are threatening today’s democracies around the globe. How Fascism Works is a must-read for all of us who take seriously our responsibility as citizens.”—Jan T. Gross, author of Neighbors
“A sharply argued and timely guide . . . Stanley’s highlighting of the politics of sexual anxiety is particularly welcome and relevant.”—Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema
“With unsettling insight and disturbing clarity, How Fascism Works is an essential guidebook to our current national dilemma of democracy vs. authoritarianism. The fingerprints of the fascist past are visible in the present, and this volume bravely shines a light upon them.”—William Jelani Cobb, author of The Substance of Hope
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Mythic Past
It’s in the name of tradition that the anti-Semites base their “point of view.” It’s in the name of tradition, the long, historical past and the blood ties with Pascal and Descartes, that the Jews are told, you will never belong here.
—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
It is only natural to begin this book where fascist politics invariably claims to discover its genesis: in the past. Fascist politics invokes a pure mythic past tragically destroyed. Depending on how the nation is defined, the mythic past may be religiously pure, racially pure, culturally pure, or all of the above. But there is a common structure to all fascist mythologizing. In all fascist mythic pasts, an extreme version of the patriarchal family reigns supreme, even just a few generations ago. Further back in time, the mythic past was a time of glory of the nation, with wars of conquest led by patriotic generals, its armies filled with its countrymen, able-bodied, loyal warriors whose wives were at home raising the next generation. In the present, these myths become the basis of the nation’s identity under fascist politics.
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.
These myths are generally based on fantasies of a nonexistent past uniformity, which survives in the traditions of the small towns and countrysides that remain relatively unpolluted by the liberal decadence of the cities. This uniformity—linguistic, religious, geographical, or ethnic—can be perfectly ordinary in some nationalist movements, but fascist myths distinguish themselves with the creation of a glorious national history in which the members of the chosen nation ruled over others, the result of conquests and civilization-building achievements. For example, in the fascist imagination, the past invariably involves traditional, patriarchal gender roles. The fascist mythic past has a particular structure, which supports its authoritarian, hierarchical ideology. That past societies were rarely as patriarchal—or indeed as glorious—as fascist ideology represents them as being is beside the point. This imagined history provides proof to support the imposition of hierarchy in the present, and it dictates how contemporary society should look and behave.
In a 1922 speech at the Fascist Congress in Naples, Benito Mussolini declared:
We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary for it to be a reality. . . . Our myth is the nation, our myth is the greatness of the nation! And to this myth, this greatness, which we want to translate into a total reality, we subordinate everything.
Here, Mussolini makes clear that the fascist mythic past is intentionally mythical. The function of the mythic past, in fascist politics, is to harness the emotion of nostalgia to the central tenets of fascist ideology—authoritarianism, hierarchy, purity, and struggle.
With the creation of a mythic past, fascist politics creates a link between nostalgia and the realization of fascist ideals. German fascists also clearly and explicitly appreciated this point about the strategic use of a mythological past. The leading Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, editor of the prominent Nazi newspaper the Völkischer Beobachter, writes in 1924, “the understanding of and the respect for our own mythological past and our own history will form the first condition for more firmly anchoring the coming generation in the soil of Europe’s original homeland.” The fascist mythic past exists to aid in changing the present.
...
The patriarchal family is one ideal that fascist politicians intend to create in society—or return to, as they claim. The patriarchal family is always represented as a central part of the nation’s traditions, diminished, even recently, by the advent of liberalism and cosmopolitanism. But why is patriarchy so strategically central to fascist politics?
In a fascist society, the leader of the nation is analogous to the father in the traditional patriarchal family. The leader is the father of his nation, and his strength and power are the source of his legal authority, just as the strength and power of the father of the family in patriarchy are supposed to be the source of his ultimate moral authority over his children and wife. The leader provides for his nation, just as in the traditional family the father is the provider. The patriarchal father’s authority derives from his strength, and strength is the chief authoritarian value. By representing the nation’s past as one with a patriarchal family structure, fascist politics connects nostalgia to a central organizing hierarchal authoritarian structure, one that finds its purest representation in these norms.
Gregor Strasser was the National Socialist—Nazi—Reich propaganda chief in the 1920s, before the post was taken over by Joseph Goebbels. According to Strasser, “for a man, military service is the most profound and valuable form of participation—for the woman it is motherhood!” Paula Siber, the acting head of the Association of German Women, in a 1933 document meant to reflect official National Socialist state policy on women, declares that “to be a woman means to be a mother, means affirming with the whole conscious force of one’s soul the value of being a mother and making it a law of life . . . the highest calling of the National Socialist woman is not just to bear children, but consciously and out of total devotion to her role and duty as mother to raise children for her people.” Richard Grunberger, a British historian of National Socialism, sums up “the kernel of Nazi thinking on the women’s question” as “a dogma of inequality between the sexes as immutable as that between the races.” The historian Charu Gupta, in her 1991 article “Politics of Gender: Women in Nazi Germany,” goes as far as to argue that “oppression of women in Nazi Germany in fact furnishes the most extreme case of anti-feminism in the 20th century.”
...
These ideals of gender roles are defining political movements once again. In 2015, Poland’s right-wing party, the Law and Justice Party (in Polish, Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, abbreviated PiS), won an outright majority in Poland’s parliamentary elections, making it Poland’s dominant party. PiS, in its current incarnation, has at its center a call to return to the conservative Christian social traditions of rural Poland. Most of its politicians openly abhor homosexuality. It is anti-immigrant, and the European Union has condemned its most antidemocratic measures, such as creating laws allowing government ministers (who are party members) full control of state media by granting them power to fire and hire the broadcasting chiefs of Poland’s radio and television stations. But internationally it is best known for its extremism in gender politics. Abortion was already banned in Poland, with exceptions only for severe and irreversible damage to the fetus, for serious risk to the mother, or in the cases of rape or incest. The new bill proposed by PiS would have eliminated rape and incest as exceptions to the ban on abortion, with incarceration as a penalty for women who pursue the procedure. The bill failed to pass only because of a large outcry and demonstrations by women on the streets of Poland’s cities.
Similar ideas about gender are on the rise globally, including in the United States, very often supported with reference to history. Andrew Auernheimer, known as Weev, is a prominent neo-Nazi who ran the fascist online newspaper The Daily Stormer with Andrew Anglin. In May 2017, he published an article in The Daily Stormer titled “Just What Are Traditional Gender Roles?” In it, he claims that women were traditionally regarded as property in all European cultures, except for Jewish societies and some gypsy groups, which were matrilineal:
This was why the Jews were so keen to attack these ideas, because the patrilineal passing of property was innately offensive to their culture. Europe only has this absurd notion of women as independent entities because of organized subversion by agents of Judaism.
According to Weev, echoing twentieth-century Nazism, patriarchal gender roles are central to European history, part of the “glorious past” of white Europe.
In Weev’s writing, the past not only supports traditional gender roles but separates groups that are believed to adhere to them from those that don’t. From Nazi Germany to more recent history, this vindictive distinction can escalate to the point of genocide. The Hutu power movement was a fascist ethnic supremacist movement that arose in Rwanda in the years before the 1994 Rwandan genocide. In 1990, the Hutu power newspaper Kangura published the Hutu Ten Commandments. The first three are about gender. The first declared anyone a traitor who married a Tutsi woman, thereby polluting the pure Hutu bloodline. The third called on Hutu women to ensure that their husbands, brothers, and sons would not marry Tutsi women. The second commandment is:
2. Every Hutu should know that our Hutu daughters are more suitable and conscientious in their role as woman, wife and mother of the family. Are they not beautiful, good secretaries and more honest?
In Hutu power ideology, Hutu women exist only as wives and mothers, entrusted with the sacred responsibility of ensuring Hutu ethnic purity. This pursuit of ethnic purity was a key justification for killing Tutsis in the 1994 genocide.
Of course, gendered language, and references to women’s roles and special value, often slip into political speech without much thought to their implication. In the 2016 U.S. election, a video surfaced showing the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump making harshly demeaning comments about women. Mitt Romney, the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee, said that Trump’s remarks “demean our wives and daughters.” Paul Ryan, the Republican Speaker of the House, said, “women are to be championed and revered, not objectified.” Both of these remarks reveal an underlying patriarchal ideology that is typical of much of U.S. Republican Party policy. These politicians could simply have given voice to the most direct description of the facts, which is that Trump’s remarks demean half our fellow citizens. Instead, Romney’s remark, in language evocative of that used in the Hutu Ten Commandments, describes women exclusively in terms of traditionally subordinate roles in families, as “wives and daughters”—not even as sisters. Paul Ryan’s characterization of women as objects of “reverence” rather than equal respect objectifies women in the same sentence that decries doing so.
The patriarchal family in fascist politics is embedded in a larger narrative about national traditions. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán was elected to office in 2010. He has overseen the demolition of the liberal institutions of that country in the service of creating what Orbán openly describes as an illiberal state. In April 2011, Orbán oversaw the introduction of “the Fundamental Law of Hungary,” Hungary’s new constitution. The goal of the Fundamental Law is stated at the outset, in “The National Avowal,” which begins by praising the founding of the Hungarian state by Saint Stephen, who “made our country a part of Christian Europe one thousand years ago.” The National Avowal continues by expressing pride that “our people has over the centuries defended Europe in a series of struggles” (presumably against the Muslim Ottoman Empire). It recognizes “the role of Christianity in preserving nationhood” and commits “to promoting and safeguarding our heritage.” The National Avowal ends by promising to fulfill an “abiding need for spiritual and intellectual renewal” and to provide a way for Hungary’s newer generations to “make Hungary great again.”
The first series of articles in the Fundamental Law, “The Foundation,” are labeled by letters. Article L states in full:
(1) Hungary shall protect the institution of marriage as the union of a man and a woman established by voluntary decision, and the family as the basis of the survival of the nation. Family ties shall be based on marriage and/or the relationship between parents and children.
(2) Hungary shall encourage the commitment to have children.
(3) The protection of families shall be regulated by a cardinal Act.
The second series of articles, “Freedom and Responsibility,” are labeled by roman numerals. Article II prohibits abortion.
The clear message is that patriarchy is a virtuous past practice whose protection from liberalism must be enshrined in the fundamental law of the country. In fascist politics, myths of a patriarchal past, threatened by encroaching liberal ideals and all that they entail, function to create a sense of panic at the loss of hierarchal status, both for men and for the dominant group’s ability to protect its purity and status from foreign encroachment.
...
If a “return” to a patriarchal society solidifies a hierarchy in fascist politics, the source of that hierarchy reaches even deeper into the past—all the way back to Saint Stephen in the case of Hungary. In a glorious past, members of the chosen national or ethnic community realized their rightful place at the top by setting the cultural and economic agenda for everyone else. This is strategically vital. We can think of fascist politics as a politics of hierarchy (for example, in the United States, white supremacy demands and implies a perpetual hierarchy), and to realize that hierarchy, we can think of it as the displacement of reality by power. If one can convince a population that they are rightfully exceptional, that they are destined by nature or by religious fate to rule other populations, one has already convinced them of a monstrous lie.
The National Socialist movement grew out of the German völkisch movement, whose advocates sought a return to the traditions of a mythic German medieval past. Though Adolf Hitler was more obsessed with a certain vision of ancient Greece as a model for his Reich, leading Nazis such as Alfred Rosenberg and Heinrich Himmler, one of the most powerful members of the regime, were ardent admirers and promoters of völkisch thought. Bernard Mees writes in The Science of the Swastika, his 2008 history of the connection between German antiquarian studies and National Socialism:
völkisch writers soon found that the picture of the ancient Germans could serve practical purposes; the glorious Germanic past could be employed as justification for the imperialist aims of the present. Hitler’s desire to dominate continental Europe was explained in Nazi periodicals in the late 1930s as merely a fulfillment of Germanic destiny, repeating the prehistoric Aryan and then later Germanic migrations throughout the Continent during late antiquity.
The tactics developed by Rosenberg, Himmler, and other Nazi leaders have since inspired fascist politics in other countries. According to adherents of the Hindutva movement in India, Hindus were the indigenous population of India, living according to patriarchal customs and with strict puritanical sexual practices until the arrival of Muslims, and subsequently, Christians, who introduced decadent Western values. The Hindutva movement has fabricated a version of a mythic Indian past with a pure nation of Hindus, to dramatically supplement what is regarded by scholars as the actual history of India. India’s dominant nationalist party, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), adopted Hindutva ideology as its official creed and won power in the country using emotional rhetoric calling for a return to this fictional, patriarchal, harshly conservative, ethnically and religiously pure past. BJP is descended from the political arm of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an extremist, far-right Hindu nationalist party that advocated the suppression of non-Hindu minorities. Nathuram Godse, the man who assassinated Gandhi, was a member of RSS, as was current Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. RSS was explicitly influenced by European fascist movements, its leading politicians regularly praised Hitler and Mussolini in the late 1930s and 1940s.
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Product details
- Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (May 26, 2020)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 256 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0525511857
- ISBN-13 : 978-0525511854
- Item Weight : 6.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.2 x 0.5 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #14,525 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #19 in Fascism (Books)
- #22 in Political Philosophy (Books)
- #408 in World History (Books)
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About the author

Born in Syracuse, New York, Jason Stanley received his BA from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Stanley is now the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University.
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I submit that if you are unwilling to accept a harsh assessment of the GOP’s uses of fascist methods, unless it’s beveled by a list of bad things about Democrats, this book isn’t for you. If you require criticism of this sort to provide equal time for criticism of people on the other side, that says more about your psychological needs than it does about the value of this book.
Lastly, and dully, I’ll add this. I’m a leftist, but I don’t romanticize the left, or demonize conservative ideas. You don’t have to do either of those things to be appalled by the GOP’s attacks on science, expertise, intellectualism, “the media,” and so forth. Fascism is not the same as conservatism, but the GOP nonetheless seems willing to sully American conservatism by borrowing fascism’s methods, presumably because they are highly effective ways to gain and hold into power. People who don’t want to hear that will find ways to discredit this book.
These similarities are quite striking at times. But there are no arguments about why this is fascism, or why these similarities matter. The author seems to assume that these similarities are enough to convince the readers that these are the same. At times it becomes almost like the comic argument “Hitler was a vegetarian, therefore vegetarians are evil”. Which is terribly startling to find in a widely regarded book.
The author claims that fascists tend to create alternative histories:
“ The strategic aim of these hierarchal constructions of history is to displace truth, and the invention of a glorious past includes the erasure of inconvenient realities.”
While possibly true, and very interesting, the author then follow that up by spouting conspiracy theories with no evidence or arguments:
“The media largely ignored these motivations and, representing protesting black students as an angry mob, used the situation as an opportunity to foment rage against the supposed liberal political excesses of the university.”
Towards the end, the author simply stops following the similarity arguments to instead just list grievances with anyone not on the political left:
“Economic libertarianism connects both freedom and virtue with wealth. According to these principles, one “earns” one’s freedom by accruing wealth in struggle. Those who do not “earn” their freedoms in this way do not deserve it. Though fascism involves a commitment to group hierarchies of worth that is flatly incompatible with true economic libertarianism, which does not generalize beyond the individual, both philosophies share a common principle by which value is measured. Economic libertarianism is, after all, the Manhattan dinner party face of social Darwinism.”
And:
“Within universities, fascist politicians target professors they deem too political—typically, too Marxist—and denounce entire areas of study. When fascist movements are under way in liberal democratic states, certain academic disciplines are singled out. Gender studies, for instance, comes under fire from far-right nationalist movements across the world. The professors and teachers in these fields are accused of disrespect to the traditions of the nation.”
This book is not about fascism. It’s about saying that Trump and other (people for economic liberalism, or people against gender studies) are fascists. I found one instance of numbers and fact regarding this argument. The rest is opinion.
So if you are interested in this political stance, this book is a very good read. If you are interested in learning about Fascism, this is not the book fo you.
The division of people into sub-groups is at the heart of the threat of the us and then mentality
Top reviews from other countries

However, to avoid having to accuse myself of living in an echo-chamber, I read only those reviews that awarded the book less than 3 out of 5. The most frequently recurring criticism was that it was unbalanced. I've some sympathy with that point of view. On the other hand, if you were writing a critical account of Hitler's actions, would you feel obliged to devote a substantial amount of space to describing how kind and thoughtful he could be to his secretaries, in order to achieve 'balance'? Probably not.
A beautifully well written and crystal clear analysis of the tactics used then and now by people who want us to be at each other's throats. A polemic certainly but do please read.

Naturally this book is engrossed with dissecting the Trump Whitehouse experience. From the readership position in 2021 we can breathe a collective sigh of relief that that specific car crash is all over. However, it is not. Those who voted for Trump live on and their poison remains. The Republican party has become an extreme right wing personality cult quite beyond reason. Their fascism promised to return power to the member of the chosen nation. To do this it had to turn myths into facts. A mythic past was resurrected for contemporary political purposes. To dispose of fact, they under-mined the position of education and experts by delegitimising their expertise. This was done with relentless lying and conspiracy theories which destroys the factual basis of the debate. Voters no longer knew what was true. The lying served its purpose – to disorientate rational thought and normalise the myths. All history became propaganda. The past can be portrayed as a glorious golden era that has been stolen. This fading glory can be felt as a loss. All empires in decline go through this. Italy. USA. Britain. You would have thought we would have got better used to our place in the world by now. Now the dominant group (white men) can be made to feel like the victim such that they lash out at the people who genuinely are victims. Fascist ideology rejects pluralism and tolerance. We have been here before. We know the score. Or do we?
Jason Stanley’s book is a good dissection of how fascism can seduce a nation. It is as relevant now as ever. He injects some nice personal touches when telling the story of how his Jewish grandmother stayed in Nazi Germany all the way up to 1939. In her memoires she described how the Jews didn’t see the warning signs and stayed. They simply could not imagine what was going to happen. We do not have that luxury. Essential reading.


A must read for anyone interested in politics.

Not a Trump fan, but fascism is a way more complex historical subject than 21st century American politics.