How Fascism Works

[boxofdelights]

How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, by Jason F. Stanley

This book is not about how fascism works when it is in power, it is about how fascism works on your relatives and neighbors (who don't think of themselves as Nazis) in order to attain power.

Suppose you know that racism is bad, and you are not bad, so you are not racist. But there is something making you uneasy about seeing a Black man in the presidency. It definitely isn't racism. It definitely, definitely isn't. But there's *something* wrong with this picture.

Because the audience for conspiracy theories readily discount their own experience, it is often unimportant that the conspiracy theories are demonstrably false[....] The idea that President Obama is secretly a Muslim pretending to be a Christian in order to overthrow the U.S. government makes rational sense of the irrational feeling of threat many white people had upon his ascension to the presidency. (p.65-66)

Suddenly the consensus reality, that "birtherism" was cooked up by Republican 2016 presidential campaign operatives, to get out ahead of the fact that John McCain was born in Panama, seems less persuasive than the idea that President Obama was born in Kenya, and his birth certificate, the hospital record, the newspaper archives, his baby photos, his family, their neighbors, are all part of a conspiracy. How did they know that *this* baby would grow up to be the Democratic candidate for President? Or are there thousands of Manchurian Candidate babies being seeded all over America every year? Wait, how does being born in Kenya turn a baby into a Kenyan Muslim terrorist anyway? Why didn't being born in Panama turn John McCain into a corrupt Latin American communist drug dealer? You don't know! You don't need to know!

It's a little book, with ten little chapters on The Mythic Past, Propaganda, Anti-Intellectual, Unreality, Hierarchy, Victimhood, Law and Order, Sexual Anxiety, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Arbeit Macht Frei.

Why the sudden mania for laws attacking trans women and children? From the chapter on Sexual Anxiety:

Highlighting supposed threats to the ability of men to protect their women and children solves a difficult political problem for fascist politicians. In liberal democracy, a politician who explicitly attacks freedom and equality will not garner much support. The politics of sexual anxiety is a way to get around this issue, in the name of safety; it is a way to attack and undermine the ideals of liberal democracy without being seen as explicitly so doing. (p.138)

Comments

[sabotabby]

Ooh, this goes on the list.

[isis]

This sounds so up my alley that I, reading Dreamwidth on my phone, immediately brought up the Libby app and checked it out from one of my libraries. Thanks for the post!

[oracne]

This book sounds extremely useful.

[silveradept]

This seems like someone who knows what they are talking about, and knows how to explain the subtler whistles and anxieties.

[kore]

This sounds really good.