Vox's Sean Illing talks with Yale Professor Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works, about what constitutes fascism and why the Trump regime has shown all the signs of a proto-fascism movement that will be with us for a very long time.
Sean Illing
The conventional view of fascism is that it’s either an ideology or a type of government, but you see it a little differently, right?
Jason Stanley
It’s not helpful to think of fascism as a regime type, and it’s not helpful to think of it as a set of coherent beliefs. Fascism is usually a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by immigrants, minorities, and leftists. Fascism takes many different forms in different countries, however. The Ku Klux Klan in the United States has long been regarded as the first functionally fascist organization by scholars like Robert O. Paxton.
I prefer to talk about fascist forces following Toni Morrison in a speech she gave at Howard University called “Racism and Fascism” in 1995. And what she says is that the United States has often preferred fascist solutions to its political problems. Now, what does she mean by that? Well, in that speech, she’s discussing the incarceration system that the United States had developed post-Nixon, after the civil rights movement, essentially to disenfranchise Black citizens. And the “fascist forces” were basically a system that relied on a massive militarized police for enforcement.
Sean Illing
She’s describing a “fascist system” that exists within a larger democratic system.
Jason Stanley
You can have a regime that’s a democracy and economic system that’s capitalist, but if you have massive racial injustice and massive inequality, then you’re going to have fascist social and political forces. You’re going to need a militarized police force to deal with potential uprisings from its impoverished minority neighborhoods that protect its fancy neighborhoods.
So we need to think about fascist social and political movements and fascist tactics, and then all of the background conditions that make these tactics effective. And that’s when you have to worry about a fascist leader emerging who has a kind of relationship with his followers where he can tell them that the minorities are rising up against you, that the immigrants are flooding the gates, that the elites have failed you — and that’s how the leader creates a bond with his supporters.
When this dynamic emerges, that’s when you have to worry about the formation of an actual fascist regime.
Sean Illing
The racism component is easy enough to understand, since fascism feeds on us-them tribalism, but why is nostalgia so central to every fascist movement?
Jason Stanley
If you have a dominant group that feels it was robbed of a glorious past, that feels it has to be ashamed of its glorious past, that is often the source of the most committed fascist movements. Nostalgia is an emotion. If you’re feeling anxious and somebody can convince you that your anxiety and fear and instability is due to the fact that you’ve lost something, that something was taken from you, and that you once got respect for, say, just being a white guy or just being a Hindu man, that’s powerful.
During Black Reconstruction, the famous sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois called this the psychological wages of whiteness. He was describing this extra wage you got just for being white in America, the sense that you were special and legitimate, and that was tied to this belief that you were constantly surrounded by illegitimate citizens. That conjures up a sense of loss and anxiety and a belief in a prideful past that had disappeared. And the fascist leader promises to restore that past, to restore that pride.
Sean Illing
That’s what makes Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan such a perfect distillation of the fascist pitch. Your colleague at Yale, Timothy Snyder, calls this “the politics of eternity,” and it’s worth describing because it captures the toxic power of nostalgia.
Politics is supposed to be about striving for better policies today so that our lives can be improved tomorrow, but Trump reverses this. He anchors his discourse to a mythological past, so that voters are thinking less about the future and more about what they think they lost. It wasn’t about passing legislation or improving lives. Instead, he defined problems in such a way that they could never be solved. We can’t go back in time. We can’t retrieve some lost golden age. So his voters were always condemned to live in disappointment, which keeps that wheel of resentment spinning.
Jason Stanley
Jonathan Metzl’s book Dying of Whiteness is really good on this idea that people crave to see their opponents punished in fascist politics. Timothy Snyder calls this sadopopulism. States like West Virginia or Kansas or Tennessee, to take just a few examples, reject billions of dollars from the federal government to expand Medicaid. They cut taxes for the wealthy to destroy their public schools. All of this harms the very white people who are voting. And they’re doing it, interview after interview shows, because they believe that Medicaid expansion would help Black people, or what they consider the undeserved.
So this kind of politics, that revenge and retribution for stealing your past, is far more important than material benefits to yourself. This is the heart of fascist politics.
Sean Illing
It’s the ultimate fascist hoodwink, right? You inflame grievances while at the same time reinforcing the conditions that brought about those grievances in the first place.
Jason Stanley
Absolutely.
Once you realize that American fascism is inherently connected to race, creating a toxic nostalgia about an America where Black and brown folk are responsible for the country's problems, and that being white is the "best" possible outcome in American society and that status must be defended at all costs, then you understand what MAGA is, why it's so seductive, and why people are willing to fight, die, and kill for it.
The next fascist leader already has a train and tracks ready to go for the trip to hell.
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