Book review: How Fascism Works
by Jason Stanley
In this book, Jason Stanley takes an overused and sometimes misrepresented word and puts meat on its bones, as the best designator for social phenomena that are occurring in our own time. It’s written for awareness rather than alarm—although an inadequate response to this awareness would be cause for alarm. Many of us may have once assumed that Fascism died with Hitler and Mussolini—Stanley demonstrates that it has not, and is identifiably present in Poland, Hungary, and Turkey, as well as sympathy for it in other parts of the world including a significant portion of the US population.
Stanley describes 10 facets of Fascism, with real world examples of each. Those facets are: The Mythic past, as in Make America Great Again; Propaganda, assisted by well funded right wing broadcast networks and negligent mainstream media; Anti-Intellectual, including a rejection of science; Unreality, by offering “alternative” facts as equally valid with proven facts; Hierarchy, in which the father or the boss knows best and everyone is to obey without question; Victimhood, a zero sum game where setting things right for those who’ve clearly been wronged (such as African Americans) evokes feelings of pain and hardship for non-elites resulting in misplaced resentment; Law and Order, pointedly toward the “others,” one result of which is the unjust disproportionate incarceration of black people; Sexual Anxiety, arising from a manufactured false concern about the genetic purity of the dominant population; Sodom and Gomorrah, which is an inaccurate sense that homogeneous rural areas are pure of heart and morals as compared to the implied decadence of cosmopolitan city populations; and Arbiet Macht Frei, the German phrase that means “Work sets you free,” which was posted on the gates of Nazi concentration camps, and which implied that all non-dominant groups were inherently lazy and needed to be taught the value of hard work so as to be like the morally pure dominant group.
If there’s a through line to Fascism, Stanley identifies it as an us vs. them perspective. Examples are Europeans vs. immigrants or US working class whites vs. non-whites—anything to cast a group of people as outsiders, and thus make them the enemy. This allows Fascist leaders to influence their target population and exert control over the reins of government. Although this book was published in 2018 and many of its examples are from the Trump administration of that era, the lessons it presents are long term. Fascists work hard to gradually change the perception of what was once unspeakable to being normal. The rest of us must work even harder to maintain the Overton window within true human decency everywhere—we need to be working on that now.