The dangers of normalizing fascist politics. Transforms the morally extraordinary into the ordinary. It makes us able to tolerate what was once intolerable by making it seem as if this is the way things have always been.
The 10 Characteristics of Fascist Politics
“All fascist movements are based on hypernationalism,” Stanley said. He said that hypernationalism may be racially, ethnically, or religiously based, and that it is always patriarchal and always anti-gay. The end goal of fascist politics, he said, is for an authoritarian leader or party to seize power and maintain power for as long as possible by altering reality to fit their warped vision of the world.
Stanley identified ten characteristics that define fascist political movements. “I observe all ten pillars in the United States today,” he said.
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A Mythic Past. “Fascism always promises to return us to a mythic past,” Stanley said. For Hitler, that meant returning to the past of the Holy Roman Empire, when Germans ruled over non-Germans; for Mussolini, that meant the Roman Empire itself.
This past is a place where the patriarchy rules supreme, where in-group men are warriors and in-group women are mothers and wives. This past is mythic, Stanley said: it is fake. It never really was, except in the words of fascist politicians.
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Propaganda. Stanley said fascist politicians always revert to anti-corruption campaigns, even when they themselves are transparently corrupt. He said the Nazis were among the most corrupt regimes in history, plundering the wealth and property of European Jews, and yet still waged a merciless propaganda campaign that promised to rid the continent of corruption supposedly introduced by Jews.
Trump branded Clinton as “Crooked Hillary” and promised to “drain the swamp,” despite his long history of underhanded business and political dealings. Vladimir Putin, the same time that he is reviving mid-20th century Russian fascist thinker Ivan Ilyin, consistently lambasts the European Union as fascist.
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Anti-Intellectualism. “The enemy of fascism is equality,” Stanley said. He said universities are continually attacked by fascist politicians as hotbeds of cultural and political Marxism. He said these politicians uphold a mythical “common man” as always knowing what is right, and deride women and racial and sexual minorities who seek basic equality as in fact seeking political and cultural domination.
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Hierarchy. As opposed to liberal democracies, which are based on freedom and equality, fascism enshrines a dominant group’s traditions as the unequivocal rule.
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Victimhood. Throughout fascist politics, the dominant group always portrays itself as victims. Stanley said the Nazis said they were the victims of the minority Jews. He said that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán held an international conference on the persecution of Jews in October 2017, during which he declared that Christians are the most persecuted group in the world.
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Unreality. Fascist politicians rely on conspiracy theories instead of facts to justify their calls for power. “When ‘Birtherism’ came,” Stanley said, “everyone should have been terrified.”
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Law and Order. The fascist politician promises a regime of law and order not to punish actual criminals, but to criminalize “out groups” like racial, ethnic, religious and sexual minorities. “Right now,” Stanley said, “we’re seeing criminality being written into immigration status” in the United States. He said fascist politicians thrive on launching purportedly specific attacks against certain segments of a population, like “criminal” immigrants or Jews, and then broadening that definition to include the entire group.
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Sexual Anxiety. Stanley said the fascist politician always foments panic around the threat of rape perpetrated by out-group men against in-group women. “The particular threat is rape,” he said, “and then you create fear among people by talking about rape, and then you try to attack people’s diminished sense of traditional manlihood by fomenting fear about sexuality.”
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Sodom and Gomorrah. Fascist politicians always locate virtue in the countryside and in small towns, and never in cities with their mixtures of people, races, “decadence” and permissiveness.
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Arbeit macht frei. Fascist politicians identify out groups as lazy, attack welfare systems and labor organizers, and promote the idea that the group on top is hard working, the groups on the bottom are lazy and drains on the state and should be forced to work, ideally for free.
Stanley said these traits are not necessarily new to American history by way of the Trump administration. This country is founded on fascist policy put in practice as applied to Native Americans and African slaves, he said. After all, Hitler greatly admired the U.S.’s Immigration Act of 1924, which specifically excluded immigrants based on race and nationality of origin.
But that doesn’t make the Trump presidency’s politics, rhetoric, and policies any less alarming, he said.
“History tells us that, when a group is treated horrifically, it’s always preceded by the ways that immigrants are currently being discussed,” he said. Even though Trump does not yet denounce democratic processes like free and open elections, his administration does detain migrants and separate children from their families; it does openly denounce the media and intellectuals at “enemies of the state;” and it does unabashedly support authoritarian rulers throughout the world.
The only adequate resistance, Stanley said, is to defend institutions like objective journalism and even the FBI as established protectors of truth, justice and equality.
“The ordinary citizen has to stand up and loudly confront people who engage in this sort of fascist rhetoric and not be afraid,” he said. “Those millions of acts of individual bravery, if we can stitch together, will save us.”
“Democracy is not a voting system,” he continued. “Democracy is a set of values of equal respect and liberty. And you cannot have equal respect and liberty survive in fascist moments.”
Click on the audio player below to listen to the full interview. https://soundcloud.com/
Yale Prof Sees Fascism Creeping In U.S.
https://www.transcend.org/tms/2018/10/yale-prof-sees-fascism-creeping-in-u-s/
The Ten Indicators of Fascism
“History doesn’t repeat itself,” Mark Twain supposedly said, “but it rhymes.” In his book How Fascism Works (2018), the American scholar Jason Stanley outlines 10 indicators of fascist politics. He traces these themes from a study of the strife-ridden early 20th century, when fascist movements took power in Italy, Germany, Spain and elsewhere. Set against the developments of the 21st century, this checklist makes for revealing reading not just for Stanley’s American readership, but also for people around the world.
The first pillar of fascism, according to Stanley, is the political invocation of a mythic past. That tendency is obvious in the language of President Donald Trump in the US (his catchphrase ‘Make America Great Again’ promises a return to a golden era), but it’s even more palpable in the ideology of the BJP and its allies, who glorify a Hindu India unspoilt by the influences of ‘foreign’ cultures and religions.
Next is the use of propaganda and of a culture of promoting ‘anti-intellectualism’ and ‘unreality’. Stanley argues that fascists deliberately undermine confidence in the media, dismissing it as fake news; they vilify experts and universities (think of the habitual furores in both India and the US over the ‘anti-national’ activities of college students); and they spread conspiracy theories and misinformation. Fascist politics relies on polarising opinion, making people scornful of public discourse in general, and appealing to the crudest emotions and passions of the public.
The fifth pillar is hierarchy, the idea that one group of people in society has a greater claim to that society than others. Trump’s rhetoric in the US privileges white, ‘native-born’ Americans over people of colour and immigrants; Hindutva insists that Hindus are the truest Indians and that all others are, to some extent, distant from the essence of the country.
The inevitable complement to that claim is the next pillar of fascism, victimhood. Stanley gives examples in the US context of right-wing politicians and cultural figures representing men as victims of feminism, or of whites being victims of criminal acts committed by blacks and immigrants. In Nazi Germany, ordinary Germans were depicted as poor victims of the machinations of Jews. In the Indian context, Hindutva ideologues insist that Hindus constitute a downtrodden group, their identity and traditions besmirched and even suppressed both by adherents of other faiths and by the ‘secular elites’.
The last four of Stanley’s pillars of fascism refer to a paranoia about law and order (think of the vilification of Muslims as terrorists or illegal immigrants); a sexual anxiety about the vulnerability of women in the dominant group to other men (think of the frenzy around ‘love jihad’); the notion of ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’, a resentment of cosmopolitan, urban elites as decadent, mongrel and corrupt (as opposed to the moral sturdiness of the average citizen), and, lastly, the claim that the enemy group is lazy and needs to work harder. (The chilling German phrase arbeit macht frei — work shall make you free — lined the gates of the Auschwitz concentration camp.)
With minor exceptions, you can find ground for almost all these pillars in the rise of Hindutva in India. Likewise, the ever-rightward creep of the Republican Party and its base in the US can be sketched across Stanley’s anatomisation of fascism. Stanley doesn’t have a monopoly on the definition of fascism — there are other schema, like the 14 typical features of fascism isolated by the great Italian writer Umberto Eco — but it is clarifying to read these pronounced patterns across time.
Of course, calling modern political leaders and parties fascist draws inevitable pushback; it trivialises the atrocities of the 20th century to compare the likes of Hitler to a self-aggrandising demagogue like Trump. Instead, it’s more useful to recognise that societies at a broader level are complicit in the ascendency of hateful, domineering politics. If we are not vigilant against the demonisation of people in our midst, if we let our history be reduced to simple sagas of triumph or woe, and if we let blundering emotion rule over calm and scrutiny, then we court fascist disaster.
The Hindu BusinessLine
https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/talk/the-ten-indicators-of-fascism/article27158525.ece
The 10 Pillars of Fascism
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A Mythic Past, a great mythic past which the leader harkens back.
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Propaganda. There’s a certain kind of fascist propaganda where everything is inverted. The news is the fake news. Anti-corruption is corruption.
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Anti-Intellectualism. As Steve Bannon said, it’s emotion—rage gets people to the polls. We got elected on “Lock her up!” and “Build the wall!” Hitler, in Mein Kampf, says you want your propaganda to appeal to the most—to the least educated people.
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Unreality. You have to smash truth. So, reason gets replaced by conspiracy theories. I first started writing, got out of my academic shell in 2011, when I wrote a piece about birtherism, because I saw conspiracy theories coming, and that’s a deeply concerning sign. Unreality. So, you smash every—smash truth, so all that remains is loyalty.
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Hierarchy. In fascist politics, the dominant group is better than everyone else. They were like the loyal—the great people in the past who deserve respect just for being them.
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Victimhood. In fascism, the dominant group are the greatest victims. The men are the greatest victims of encroaching feminism. Whites are the greatest victims of blacks. Germans are the greatest victims of Jews.
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Law and Order. What are they victims of? They’re victims of the out group, who are criminals.
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Sexual Anxiety. What kind of criminals are they? They’re rapists.
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Sodom and Gomorrah. The real values come from the heartland. The people in the city are decadent.
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Arbeit Macht Frei—work shall make you free. The out group is lazy. They’re not just criminals; they’re lazy. And social Darwinism. It’s all about winning.
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/10/11/how_fascism_works_jason_stanley_on
How Fascism Works
https://people.howstuffworks.com/fascism-movement.htm
How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them by Jason Stanley – The Geeky Bibliophile
https://thegeekybibliophile.wordpress.com/2018/09/12/how-fascism-works/
The ten indicators of fascism - The Hindu BusinessLine
https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/talk/the-ten-indicators-of-fascism/article27158525.ece
Jason Stanley discusses his new book on anti-intellectualism and fascism
Yale Prof Sees Fascism Creeping In U.S.
https://www.transcend.org/tms/2018/10/yale-prof-sees-fascism-creeping-in-u-s/
Jason Stanley discusses his new book on anti-intellectualism and fascism
# Postmodernism Denialism - Russian TV Example of Confusion
....Objective truth is drowned out in the resulting cacophony of voices. The effect of RT, as well as the myriad conspiracy-theory-producing websites across the world, including in the United States, has been to destabilize the kind of shared reality that is in fact required for democratic contestation.
What did Mill get wrong here?
Disagreement requires a shared set of presuppositions about the world. Even dueling requires agreement about the rules. You and I might disagree about whether President Obama’s healthcare plan was good policy. But if you suspect that President Obama was an undercover Muslim spy seeking to destroy the United States, and I do not, our discussion will not be productive. We will not be talking about the costs and benefits of Obama’s health policy, but rather about whether any of his policies mask a devious antidemocratic agenda.
In devising the strategy for RT, Russian propagandists, or “political technologists,” realized that with a cacophony of opinions and outlandish possibilities, one could undermine the basic background set of presuppositions about the world that allows for productive inquiry...
How Fascism Works - The Politics of Us and Them
-Jason Stanley
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/586030/how-fascism-works-by-jason-stanley/9780525511830/
