Fascism Is All Around Us: Jason Stanley
September 22nd, 2022
“The logic of fascism is great replacement theory.”
Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale and the author of 5 books, including How Propaganda Works and most recently How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. We discuss the logic of fascism and why we need to use it as a concept to make sense of our times.
Using a concept like fascism makes plain that their goal is to end democracy. Fascists use projection as the core of their propaganda; they scapegoat a variety of targets like the LGBTQ community and labor unions; and they live in a constant state of paranoia that they–the dominant group–will be replaced. And yet, a vibrant democracy today requires a multiracial coalition.
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Jason Stanley
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producers: Zack Travis and Sara Burningham
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Jason Stanley Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:00] Thanks to Avast for supporting Future Hindsight. With Avast One, you can confidently take control of your online world by helping you stay safe from viruses, phishing attacks, ransomware, hacking attempts and other cybercrimes. Learn more about Avast One at Avast.com.
Mila Atmos: [00:00:23] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos. January 6th, 2021. I was driving to physical therapy. My neck, my back, my shoulders, were all kinds of knotted. I mean, do you remember January 2021? It was so tense. Most of us could not get access to COVID vaccines. The president of the United States was going on even more all caps, Twitter rants than ever. Many of us were homeschooling depressed kids. It was a dark time. Anyway, I'm driving to physical therapy, and I got a call from a friend. She says the Capitol is under siege. I immediately turn on the radio, but I'm not processing what's being said. I'm listening, but not really hearing it. I just kept driving. I went to my appointment and later that evening at the kitchen table over dinner, my husband and I tried to reassure my eldest son, who was screaming. He kept saying, "It's a coup!" He was so worried about what was going to happen next. Tom and I stayed calm. We were the grownups in the room, after all. And then we got up on January 7th and carried on. America carried on. And even now, as the House Select Committee's hearings on the attack on the Capitol offer a play-by-play of this brazen attempt to derail democracy in plain sight. We continue to carry on. An NPR PBS NewsHour Marist poll in July found fewer than 44% of Republicans are following the hearings. Just 12% of Republicans consider the events of January 6th, 2021, to be an insurrection and a threat to democracy. The rest of us, we just say we're shocked. We say this is not normal. And then days or weeks or months pass and what was not normal kind of blends into the baseline. Today's show is an attempt to have a temperature check on where we are and where we might be headed in a big picture philosophical frame. Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy and the author of five books, including How Propaganda Works, and most recently, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. Professor Stanley, welcome to Future Hindsight. Thank you for joining us.
Jason Stanley: [00:03:02] Thank you so much for having me on.
Mila Atmos: [00:03:04] So where were you on January six, 2021?
Jason Stanley: [00:03:08] I was in the chair I'm in now, with my older son watching a mob, a mass mob invade the Capitol. And we we watched it together. And I explained to my son what was happening in real time. He has grown up as my child. So he had been prepared in a sense, for for that incident. And he was ten then. I don't think he was that surprised because we had been discussing the fact that the president of the United States was attempting to remain in power and do a self-coup of the United States. So he knew that and he was prepared. It wasn't as much of a shock to him.
Mila Atmos: [00:03:49] Right. To what extent did you see the insurrection, even Trumpism, coming, and did you envisage it playing out like this?
Jason Stanley: [00:03:57] Yes. Trumpism is a cult of the leader, and Trump is clearly employing fascist political tactics and was from the very beginning appealing to nativism, talking about a mythic past that had been destroyed, and and a nation humiliated by liberalism and immigration, appealing to great replacement theory and paranoia about white men, white male Christians being supplanted. So this whole structure is classic. So Trump was clearly employing fascist politics as a means to take power. Viktor Orban, who recently spoke at CPAC. His speech was called "How We Fight," and he essentially said, you know, fascism is a good way to to win. It is a good political way to win. So the question was whether Trump's rhetoric would be followed by actions that a fascist would also do. He was certainly always talking like a fascist. And the question is, as so often is the case for theorists of rhetoric like myself. "What's the connection between the rhetoric and the actions? How does speaking like that lead someone into acting like a fascist would?" A lot of people said, "Oh, he's not going to. He just talks like a fascist, that's all." But we know from history that it's a mistake not to believe people when they tell you what they're going to do. The thing about Trump, like fascist leaders before him, is that he was very upfront about what he was doing and why people didn't believe him is, I don't know... That's on them. But since he told us he planned openly, if you listen to his rallies, he planned openly how he was going to stay in power. And he did exactly that.
Mila Atmos: [00:05:47] Right. Right. Well, it's good you mention that, because that's exactly what people said. Oh, he's just talking. So they did not think that he would be doing the doing. In fact, I'm also glad you mentioned Orban and CPAC, because while we're probably going to focus much of our conversation today on the U.S., but before we dig into that, it's probably worth saying that this is not just in the US, right? There is a global fascist movement in a way. Orban and Brexit cheerleader Nigel Farage were there at CPAC. So I think it's worth noting the way in which these nationalists and nationalisms are working together and speaking the same language.
Jason Stanley: [00:06:24] Yes. As in the past, as in the Fascist Internationale from the late 1920s, the mid 1930s. So recently there is a global fascist movement and it's an interlinked global fascist movement. Eduardo Bolsonaro is the son of Jair Bolsonaro, the president of Brazil, who is a very explicit fascist, and he's close with Donald Trump Jr, Tucker Carlson, who's kind of a media spokesperson of the global fascist movement. Whenever a major fascist figure faces an election, he goes to support them. So he went to Hungary before Orban's reelection, and he went to Brazil to interview Jair Bolsonaro and praise him, and talk about "we need a leader like that here." So it's a completely interlinked movement with people supporting each other. And as in the past, that's going to give us clues to weaknesses that they will face, because what unifies each of these groups is the belief that their nationality is the greatest. So in the past, what happened is there will be clashes between nationalisms of that sort. So for instance, you are, you even saw it recently when the Polish far right that runs the country PiS started passing laws saying you couldn't talk about Polish concentration camps. And the nationalists in Israel who are allied with the nationalists in Poland and the nationalists in Hungary, objected because at a certain point, you know, Polish, ultra conservative nationalism, Hungarian ultra conservative nationalism are going to conflict with the history of Jews.
Mila Atmos: [00:08:02] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, I spent a chunk of childhood in Germany and I was there visiting in 2017 with my sons. So Trump had just been inaugurated. My sons were 13 and ten at the time, and we were on a walking tour of the rise and fall of Nazism in Munich, where the beer hall putsch took place in 1923, as you know. And I was reminded on that walk that changing normative behaviour in Germany took time. It was like they slid down this hill where little by little the Nazi ways became acceptable, commonplace, normal, and Hitler's rise unfolded over a decade,
basically. And I wonder what kind of time scale we are on here in the United States. What do you think?
Jason Stanley: [00:08:49] I don't want to make predictions because the future is not fixed and the future is up to us. So we will determine what happens. But Republicans are locking in a lot of laws that will enable them to steal the 2024 election. So the Republican Party has inside it the MAGA faction, a fascist core. So one of our two main political parties is explicitly anti-democratic, even the non-fascist core says things like "We're not a democracy; we're a republic." And who knows what that means, but it means we're not a democracy. So one of our two political parties believes that rule by anyone other than arch conservatives is illegitimate. So that belief is deeply ingrained. And if that party wins more political power, it's the end of democracy. So it's, I mean, we only have a partial democracy to begin with. But my concern is there are these laws that have been put in place. You have people running elections in states who believe the 2020 election was rigged or they maybe don't believe that, but they say it because for them, power justifies anything. So I see a likelihood of a period of mass political violence surrounding the election, and I see the likelihood of the United States becoming a one party state. Like many states in the United States already are. Many states in the South have long been authoritarian. 38% of Mississippi is Black American. But Black Americans have no political power in Mississippi. So I see essentially the model of the Southern states becoming federal, which is that Republicans dominate on every level. And the Supreme Court is a far right extremist ideological partisan group that's locked in forever and -- for my life -- and they will be greasing the wheels towards fascism.
Mila Atmos: [00:10:56] Well, so on that note, I sometimes wonder whether fascism is a useful term nowadays, and I mean that from the point of view that it can feel like everyone calls everyone a fascist. You know, it's used so widely and the far right also calls everyone else fascists. You know, MAGA activists call progressives fascists. We're in this realm where words have no meaning. So why should we use fascism as a way of thinking, as a term, to make sense of our time?
Jason Stanley: [00:11:24] As Hitler says in Mein Kampf, always use the enemy's propaganda against them. Fascists always project. Fascists always say the opposition are fascists. So Putin says Ukrainians are fascists. Putin is a fascist. It is always the
case that projection is the central core of fascist propaganda. I mean, think. Trump ran as the anti corruption candidate. He called Hillary Clinton crooked. Projection is what fascist politics is about. So the fact that fascists call their opponents fascists is just, you know, fascists also call their opponents corrupt. The way fascists pervert language should not prevent us from using language. The word fascism is important, or the concept, is important because it tells us what's going to happen. If we don't have a concept, if we don't have a conceptualization of the structure we're facing, we can't make predictions. So if we call it something like right wing populism that sounds fun and cheery and, you know, "hey, you know, I'd vote for a right wing populist over a centrist Democrat populist." It's like... you know, calling fascism right wing populism reminds me of what happened when the media took Richard Spencer, the fascist ideologue. He coined the term alt-right and he coined it because he wanted the media to use it. The media is using the words that the fascists want you to use, to label them ,like right wing populism or alt-right. I mean, who wouldn't want to be in the alt right? It sounds like a Seattle grunge band. So we need to use a concept like fascism because it tells us what is going to happen. What's going to happen is they're going to end democracy, they're going to scapegoat LGBT, they're going to lure social conservatives. And by promising to end abortion, they're going to attack the universities and the schools and try to replace people they regard as Marxists with, quote unquote, patriotic educators who aren't really patriotic. Because if you're a patriotic American, you're against this. But, you know, fascism tells you what's going to happen. It tells you what the targets are going to be. The targets are going to be feminists, LGBT, ethnic minorities. You know, the methods are going to be militarized police militias containing disgruntled former veterans with a lot of guns. So if you don't have the word fascism, then you don't have a model and a map of what's happening.
Mila Atmos: [00:14:05] We are going to pause to hear from our sponsor. And when we come back, Jason Stanley and I are going to continue exploring fascism, scapegoating, and why it's on all of us to step up and step in to defend trans people from right wing attacks. But first, Avast is a global leader in cyber protection for more than 30 years and trusted by over 435 million users and prevents over one and a half billion attacks every month. Avast empowers you with digital safety and privacy. No matter who you are, where you are, or how you connect, enjoy the opportunities that come with being connected on your terms. Avast's new all in one solution, Avast One, helps you take control of your safety and privacy online through a range of features. Avast one is their
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Mila Atmos: [00:16:06] Maybe we can talk about how combating fascism involves stepping up in these fights. For example, what is the link between anti fascism and trans rights?
Jason Stanley: [00:16:21] Right. Great question. So fascism operates by scapegoating. There are a number of different kinds of politics that do, but fascism centers the supposed threat of various minority groups and the way it builds a coalition because you can't think of a fascist social and political movement as a made up just of people who are fascists. It's rather that there's the business community who supports it. There's the social conservatives. The group that supports a fascist social and political movement is made up of lots of people who don't, who themselves are not fascistic in their ideology. It's just they see the fascists as getting things done for them. So the focus on trans as scapegoats, which we're seeing very much right now, is meant to bring in, say, minorities who otherwise would not join a fascist grouping. But enough people hate trans persons that you can get African-Americans, Latinos, etc., into the grouping by scapegoating trans people. If you're continually scapegoating, say, Black people, then you're not going to get enough Black supporters. So you need to find a scapegoat that is small enough in size that it won't threaten your voting population; will instead broaden your voting population. So how to fight this? Does anti fascism require supporting trans rights? Yes, absolutely. I mean, we all know this. It's Martin Niemöller's old saying. "First
they came for the communists and I was not a communist. So I said nothing. Then they came for the..." I mean, that's what they do. They just go through a whole bunch of scapegoats. And so you have to defend them from the very beginning. We are failing that test and so the outlook is rather grim.
Mila Atmos: [00:18:14] It really is. I have kind of a basic question here. You argue that fascism comes as a bundle, right? By nature, it's right wing and it always embraces ultra nationalism. It begins as a social political movement before taking power. But how does it transform once it has gained power? There seems to be this kind of claiming victimhood, which of course is also part of the social movement. But even after being victorious, claiming power, they continue with claiming victimhood. You know, all these state legislatures gerrymandered so Republicans can never lose, still somehow bleating that they're under attack. Ultra conservative Supreme Court justices running around saying that the court's legitimacy is threatened by the media and calling out individual journalists. I'm guessing you can think of similar examples from academia, but I'm interested in how and why there's this endless grievance, even when in power.
Jason Stanley: [00:19:11] Yeah. So dominant group victimhood is the core thing here. The logic of fascism is great replacement theory so that that the dominant group is going to be replaced. And you can see that with the attack on trans women because they're replacing women. So the logic is great replacement theory; and the logic of great replacement theory requires constant paranoia, constant paranoia that you're going to be replaced. So the greatest victims in the world are the dominant group because they're victims of whatever minority is being targeted today. And fascism is a sort of incoherent ideology that will switch targets depending upon which scapegoat they can use. But for the politics to work, there has to be a constant fear of replacement. Hannah Arendt is very clear about this. In origins of totalitarianism, fascism creates the very conditions for its politics to work. You want to keep people anxious and fearful. You know, increase criminality. The very things you promised to solve in order to stay in power, you have to keep very visible. But soon in the United States, what we're going to have is a situation where you won't be able to get essentially fascists out of power because they will lock that in as they have locked in their power in multiple Southern states via gerrymandering.
Mila Atmos: [00:20:35] Right. And in the Supreme Court, like you said.
Jason Stanley: [00:20:37] And the Supreme Court, which is a very explicit I mean, we are ruled by mullahs. It's no different than Iran.
Mila Atmos: [00:20:43] That's making that comparison real. So, has fascism changed over time? This is maybe a stretch as an allegory, but I think about COVID and all its variants, how its virulence or infectiousness has changed with these variants, and the treatments that work for the ancestral strain, so to speak, has become less effective. Like, are we getting better or worse at treating fascism? Has our immunity waned?
Jason Stanley: [00:21:09] Well, the United States has always had a fascist element, fascist social and political movements. The Ku Klux Klan was the first functionally fascist organization. As Paxton calls it, the second Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s was just ideologically just like National Socialism. It was, you know, they thought Marxist Jews were creating labor unions to force racial and gender equality on America. So the second Ku Klux Klan is ideologically fascist. We've long had this. So the John Birch Society, this this ultra right wing movements that were on the far right of of normal conservatives. And then fascism would be when you add violent militias and sort of informal violent street fighters to that, like the Ku Klux Klan, for instance. Now, the group in the United States that's fought those groups are black Americans. The civil rights movement is one of the great anti-fascist movements of the 20th century. So the civil rights movement, let's not forget, was conducted in places like Alabama, which I would choose Vermont myself... So what we need is, we need a multiracial coalition for democracy. We can't just have Black Americans. We can't just have Stacey Abrams trying to preserve democracy. We need a multiracial coalition for a multiracial democracy. The problem is that the laws are being changed governing elections, that the time may be running out. There needs to be more of a sense of urgency than there is. And in your opening statements, you talked about how few Republicans worry about democracy. I think that's because they're opposed to democracy. They're opposed to anything that could give Democrats power. So they're opposed to democracy. So you have a substantial portion of the United States that does not want to live in a democracy. So how do you get people to want to live in a democracy? How do you get people to, say, have a national popular vote for the presidency, which would be a democracy rather than the system we have, which is absurd. The Electoral College. I don't know how you bring about that change in mind. Many Americans would prefer...
Well, in one political party, many members of that political party would prefer ruling, no matter what the system is. They would prefer ruling in a non-democracy over not ruling in a democracy. Their view is the only legitimate rule is Republican rule. So yeah, I mean, I think the sort of conditions in the United States look something like a civil war, which is unsurprising because it is a continuation of the conflict that we do call the Civil War.
Mila Atmos: [00:24:04] Yes, in a way it has never ended or it has just evolved in various iterations. And now here we are at this current iteration.
Jason Stanley: [00:24:12] Exactly.
Mila Atmos: [00:24:12] So I'd like to circle back to January 6th, so we can pull this into focus for our listeners who are trying to figure out our political moment. Where do you see the attack on the Capitol figuring? Is it a low point or I mean, I think you've in a way already answered this, but or is it just a step along the way on a path that we're still very much marching towards fascism? Full fascism, fully entrenched in the government?
Jason Stanley: [00:24:37] Yeah, we're marching fully towards. I mean, Donald Trump, who tried to overthrow the United States to stay in power. And he didn't do it covertly or secretly. He told you what he was doing for months and months and months. He tried to destroy the post office and then he did COVID denialism. And that was all part of a strategy so that the people who would show up on Election Day would be Republicans. So the goal was to win on Election Day and then declare all the mail-in-ballots invalid because the post office was dysfunctional or corrupt or something. The only reason that plan didn't work is that he didn't win on election day, but he told everyone what he was going to do. And then he, we we know from the January 6th committee and their findings that he explicitly planned to overthrow, to stay in power. And he's going to be almost certainly the Republican nominee for president yet again. So a country like that, when someone has done so much wrongdoing, not to mention all of his shady financial deals, etc., etc., when someone has done so much wrongdoing and you cannot punish them, they're not subject to the law. That person is above the law. And when that happens, well, you're veering towards something like a dictatorship. So, yeah, I mean, we are very much on a bad path and we're at the point where very large things have to happen in order to deflect us from that. It can't be small things anymore. So you need to
expand the Supreme Court or get rid of its power. Something. Something about that. Like, that is essential. The Supreme Court will do everything to end democracy. They are a far right, partisan, ideological organization whose only function is to implement far right policy and leadership. So you have to do something about the Supreme Court. How is that going to happen? I don't know. You're going to have to do something about gerrymandering. You're going to have to do something about campaign finance. But because of the rulings of our mullahs of the Supreme Court, they're explicitly greasing the wheels towards the end of democracy. They've allowed political gerrymandering. And with political gerrymandering, you know, you can stay in power indefinitely. And then at a certain point, people start voting for the party that's going to win anyway because people like power. So we need large structural changes. We need to alter the composition of the Supreme Court, set term limits, something like that. We need to have a direct vote for president. We need to incorporate DC as a state so they have senators. Things like this. Democracy is the principle of one person, one vote. We are already structurally so far from that and we're about to be much further from that.
Mila Atmos: [00:27:34] Right. I agree. We need these big structural changes or we're totally doomed. And it's looking less and less likely because the Supreme Court has already agreed to hear Moore versus Harper next season. And so that looks very bad for democracy. But so about the structural changes, where do you see mandates for such large structural changes coming from? Like who is going to get that going? Because the issue with structural changes is that these kinds of systems are are really the thing that undergird the problem in a way. It's like this vicious cycle, you know, because we have states' rights and states can, you know, run elections. That's where they can undermine election integrity. Because we have states' rights that there's the first place that you can outlaw abortion. And so that's the place where you need to address it. But also that's a place where you can manipulate it.
Jason Stanley: [00:28:29] Right. I mean, actually, you know, states' rights might paradoxically or ironically come to to to help those of us who want to live in states where abortion is legal, where trans persons are allowed to live with dignity, where you're allowed to discuss the existence of same sex couples in schools. States' rights would help states like Connecticut or Massachusetts preserve the equality that's required in a democracy. However, as we all know, people who use the term states' rights tend to be completely hypocritical, and all they mean is they want their own inequality not to be
infringed on, and then they want to impose that hierarchical system of values on everyone else.
Mila Atmos: [00:29:16] Right. Right. Well, how's it going to end? For example, the fascist regime in Germany ended because it lost World War II. How can we prepare for a fascist future?
Jason Stanley: [00:29:27] I think people need to reinvest in local politics and this gets to the states' rights point. Democracy only works when we all participate, so everyone needs to participate on the local level. And if there's a an authoritarian takeover of the United States, everyone needs to make sure that their own local areas, their school boards, their city councils, that they can be as unaffected as possible. So I think civic engagement is key. Protecting the minority groups that are scapegoated, you know, making sure that you're... Just being involved. The Republicans saw this early on that, you know, that's why they went over to dominate school boards and local politics. One has got to go through state legislatures. So the Democrats forgot that and are paying the price. America is a big country. And because it's such a big country, you can create these zones if you're self-governing. If you're, if you're a political structure, if you're involved in politics, you can mitigate the anti-democratic policies that the federal government tries to foist upon you. Of course, this is just repeating what the Southern states have been doing forever, but in the other direction.
Mila Atmos: [00:30:45] Right. Right. Well, I love this quote of yours. It takes a village to be anti-fascist. So you've just outlined some things that people are going to do. But what are like two things that everyday listeners can do, two things that they can add to their antifascist toolkit?
Jason Stanley: [00:30:58] Join or support a union. There's a reason that fascists target labor unions. A fascist target labor unions because labor unions make politics material, rather than cultural. Think about it. Everyone, whatever your view on on LGBT is, likes the weekend. Who doesn't like the weekend? So labor unions make politics material. So make politics material. Join or support a union. The more unions there are, the less inequality there is. So that's the first thing. And the second thing is engage in your community. Join the school board. Get involved in get out the vote drives. Connect
yourself with your community. So if something happens, you're part of a community that can defend minority groups.
Mila Atmos: [00:31:45] Great. Thank you. So here's my last question. Looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
Jason Stanley: [00:31:51] What makes me hopeful is that this is a global movement. We have a global antidemocratic movement that is funded by all the people who profit from democracy's demise. That means people who don't want themselves to be governed by the majority. So a multibillionaire like Peter Thiel thinks he doesn't want to pay taxes. He doesn't like some guy from New Jersey to be able to have the power to raise his taxes. So democracy for him is an enemy. So we have all these enemies of democracy, but the United States has the civil rights movement. We've had the labor movement, the gay rights movement. We've had all of these social and political movements, antifascist, social and political movements that have been successful. So we have a history here of fighting these forces. And it's a history that makes me, frankly, proud to be an American.
Mila Atmos: [00:32:46] Oh, hear, hear. Thank you. Thank you very much for joining us, Professor Stanley, it was really a pleasure to have you on Future Hindsight.
Jason Stanley: [00:32:53] Thank you so much for having me on.
Mila Atmos: [00:32:55] Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy and the author of five books, most recently How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. Next week on Future Hindsight. You heard Jason talk a bit about how attacks on educators, intellectuals, and academics are part of the fascist playbook. So it feels super timely as students return to campuses and schoolkids break open those fresh new notebooks, bust out highlighters in a rainbow of colors, that we are going to be speaking to Jonathan Friedman, the director of Free Expression and education programs at PEN America.
Jonathan Friedman: [00:33:35] We are living through a kind of eruption of citizen anger and an effort to kind of see schools and books and school librarians and teachers as somehow engaged in something dangerous for young people.
Mila Atmos: [00:33:52] That's next time on Future Hindsight. And before I go, first of all, thanks for listening. You must really like the show if you're still here. I have something of a favor to ask. Could you write us or leave a review on Apple Podcasts? It seems like a small thing, but it can make a huge difference for an independent show like ours. It's the main way other people can find out about the show. We really appreciate your help. Thank you. This episode was produced by Zack Travis and Sara Burningham. Until next time, stay engaged.
The Democracy Group: [00:34:39] This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.