What is fascism? Fascism is an ideology developed and elaborated in early 20th-century Western Europe and enabled by technology, mass media, and weapons of war. Most of us learned the basics of that development from grade school history textbooks. We generally came to appreciate to some degree — though we may have forgotten the lesson — that the phrase “creeping fascism” is redundant. Fascism stomped around in jackboots, smashed windows and burned Reichstags before it fully seized power, but its most important action was the creeping: into language, media, education, and religious institutions. None of these movements arose, after all, without the support (or at least acquiescence) of those in power.
There are differences between Italian Fascism, German Nazism, and their various nationalist descendents. Mussolini secured power chiefly through intimidation. But once he was appointed prime minister by the King in 1922 he began consolidating his dictatorship, a process that took several years and required such dealings as the creation of Vatican City in 1929 to secure the Church’s goodwill. Some later fascist leaders, like Augusto Pinochet, came to power in coups (with the support of the CIA). Others, like Hitler, won elections, after a decade of “creeping” into the culture by normalizing nationalist pride based on racial hierarchies and nursing a sense of aggrieved persecution among the German people over perceived humiliations of the past.
In every case, leaders exploited local hatreds and inflamed ordinary people against their neighbors with the constant repetition of an alarming “Big Lie” and the promises of a strongman for salvation. Every similar movement that has arisen since the end of WWII, says Yale University Professor of Philosophy Jason Stanley in the video above, has shared these characteristics: using propaganda to create an alternate reality and paying obeisance to a “cult of the leader,” no matter how repugnant his tactics, behavior, or personality. “Right wing by nature,” fascism’s patriarchal structure appeals to conservatives. While it mobilizes violence against minorities and leftists, it seduces those on the right by promising a share of the spoils and validating conservative desires for a single, unifying national narrative:
Fascism is a cult of the leader. It involves the leader setting the rules about what’s true and false. So any kind of expertise, reality, all of that is a challenge to the authority of the leader. If science would help him, then he can say, “Okay, I’ll use it.” Institutions that teach multiple perspectives on history in all its complexity are always a threat to the fascist leader.
Rather than simply destroying institutions, fascists twist them to their own ends. The arts, sciences, and humanities must be purged of corrupting elements. Those who resist face job loss, exile or worse. The important thing, says Stanley, is the sorting into classes of those who deserve life and property and those who don’t.
[O]nce you have hierarchies set up, you can make people very nervous and frightened about losing their position on that hierarchy. Hierarchy goes right into victimhood because once you convince people that they’re justifiable higher on the hierarchy, then you can tell them that they’re victims of equality. German Christians are victims of Jews. White Americans are victims of Black American equality. Men are victims of feminism.
The appeal to “law and order,” to police state levels of control, only applies to certain threatening classes who need to be put back in their place or eliminated. It does not apply to those at the top of the hierarchy, who recognize no constraints on their actions because they perceive themselves as threatened and in a state of emergency. It’s really the immigrants, leftists, and other minorities who have taken over, “and that’s why you need a really macho, powerful, violent response”:
Law and order structures who’s legitimate and who’s not. Everywhere around the world, no matter what the situation is, in very different socioeconomic conditions, the fascist leader comes and tells you, “Your women and children are under threat. You need a strong man to protect your families.” They make conservatives hysterically afraid of transgender rights or homosexuality, other ways of living. These are not people trying to live their own lives. They’re trying to destroy your life, and they’re coming after your children. What the fascist politician does is they take conservatives who aren’t fascist at all, and they say, “Look, I know you might not like my ways. You might think I’m a womanizer. You might think I’m violent in my rhetoric. But you need someone like me now. You need someone like me ’cause homosexuality, it isn’t just trying for equality. It’s coming after your family.”
Stanley offers several historical examples for his assessment of what he breaks down into a total of 10 tactics of fascism. (See an earlier video here in which he discusses 3 characteristics of the ideology.) Like Umberto Eco, who identified 14 characteristics of what he called “ur-fascism” in a 1995 essay, Stanley notes that “not all terrible things are fascist. Fascism is a very particular ideological structure” that arose in a particular time and place. But while its stated aims and doctrines are subject to change according to the psychology of the leader and the national culture, it always shares a certain grouping, or “bundle,” of features.
Each of these individual elements is not in and of itself fascist, but you have to worry when they’re all grouped together, when honest conservatives are lured into fascism by people who tell them, “Look, it’s an existential fight. I know you don’t accept everything we do. You don’t accept every doctrine. But your family is under threat. Your family is at risk. So without us, you’re in peril.” Those moments are the times when we need to worry about fascism.
Below we’re adding Stanley’s recent interview where he explains how America has now entered fascism’s legal phase. You can read his related article in The Guardian.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Second-year Yale Law student Trent Colbert, he with the elephantine shadow in this discourse, may have another, timely, perspective on Yale faculty commitment to independent thought and speech.
The long march of totalitarianism continues.
My thought too. The Trap House Affair should be of keen interest to any student of fascism. https://www.rasmusen.org/rasmapedia/index.php?title=Trent_Colbert I’m waiting for someone to do a study comparing the US today to Germany 9 1933 and the purge of Jewish and socialist professors. In that affair, the “reasonable majority” professors were almost 100% silent under pressure from pro-Nazi students, even tho the Gestapo was not yet a danger for them.
Utter lies and nonsense. Fascism is a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition. Everything Biden is doing today
There is quite a bit of truth lying in utter lies and nonsense.
Consider his comments: “let’s begin with the attack on abortion right now. which is — the majority of Americans reject the repeal of Roe v Wade they want to keep Roe v Wade but we are facing a future in which abortion rights are going to be severely curtailed -” (starts rambling into blaming the so-called autocratic macho man who holds literally zero political office)
Repealing Roe v Wade cannot be called an attack on abortion.
It was an attack on the centralized authority and power of the national federal government with respect to its authority over state sovereignty.
We can only view repealing Roe as an attack on abortion if it federally protected abortion in the first place. It’s not as if abortion became restricted under federal law when Roe was repealed. Abortion was already restricted by the federal government and has been since the ruling in Roe — under Hyde. Repealing Roe has no bearing on the Hyde Amendment and it remains identical in its federal implications post-Roe.
The fascist nationalist argument goes — Roe was protecting abortion in each of the individual states. From what? State constitutions that actually ratified bodily autonomy (providing actual protections against attacks on abortion Roe never pretended to protect?) Oh. I see. Our conservative Republican state legislatures, then?
The ACLU of Indiana is representing Planned Parenthood of Indiana & Kentucky in its lawsuit against the state of Indiana for what it characterizes as the state legislature’s attack on abortion.
The ACLU of Indiana’s PR team has been seeing to it no one notices the battle is not
anti-abortion vs pro-choice
It’s pro-access vs pro-Hyde
Which is the same as
pro-healthcare vs pro-profiteer
pro-patient rights vs pro-clinic
Women vs PlannedParenthood
This is hardly an attack on abortion by the anti-abortion aka pro-life “social conservatives” he’s referring to…
We can pretend they haven’t been entirely pushed from any meaningful seat at the proverbial table — only because they’re abortion access’s most important unwitting ally. They got us this far — and more importantly — no one else is able to recognize their adversary, Planned Parenthood — deprives women of affordable, safe, private, access to healthcare — and is not the ally they’ve been misled to allow to reduce their reproductive rights to on walks designed to shame and hoping to humiliate accompanied by neon orange vested “escorts” whose health privacy right violation is eagerly broadcasted.
For better or worse, Indiana’s state legislature didn’t make abortions illegal in the state. They made abortion clinics illegal in the state. They legislated deference in state law to professional medical doctors, in hospital environments, to individually define ‘medical reasons’ for each patient as doctors see fit. The language Indiana’s state legislature adopted and passed — is far more protective of abortion access than Roe ever pretended to be.
What’s more, its provisions introduce monumentally important documentation regulations on doctors. In doing so the state legislature has literally solved the 50+ years federal Hyde Amendment problem in Indiana.
Indiana’s new abortion laws have been characterized as some of the most restrictive attacks on abortion among the various states. This might be true if opposite day were a thing. Indiana is not alone. Most of the other state legislatures accused of passing abortion bans — solved the Hyde problem in those states as well.
But shhhh 🤫 We’re going to let the nationalist fascists over at Yale keep relying on waxing poetic meaningless mindless drivel and utopia-distorted concepts of democracy while its tyrannical mob’s knocks continue going ignored outside the walls of a constitutional republic reinforced to ensure we could keep it.
It’s reassuring to note Yale guy’s biased rants and reason for resorting to critical race theory in appealing to their target audience — that audience is so overwhelmingly indoctrinated to accept nationalism’s centralized power of our federal government — their default assumption grossly underestimates the extent of existing limitations on that power. Yale elitist guy was careful to avoid framing his critical race theory comments in their proper context. He didn’t misrepresent it as a national threat. Because he knows he didn’t have to — he knows the majority of his audience reliably consistently just assumes without any need for steering that public education is a power enjoyed federally, and that public education policy is uniformly under nationalist control.
He’s catering to an audience that believes it’s possible to “steal” an election outcome armed with zipties. An audience who lacks anything remotely resembling the comprehension necessary to know well enough to know better than to believe legislators like Paul Gosar were objecting on Trump’s behalf on January 6. An audience so illiterate in U.S. politics they assume Republicans on January 6 efforts to sustain objections to electoral votes for Biden — had they succeeded — would have simply…reversed? To Trump? It’s literally how they imagine it must work — because they have zero capacity to even begin to understand how it actually works. They still think elections are over on election day. If you told them the DNC and the Democratic Party of Arizona sued ITSELF in summer of 2020 in an attempted coup on the U.S. constitutional power of Arizona’s state legislature to change election laws — hoping to usurp that power for Arizona’s secretary of state, of course it sounds like a crackpot Qanon schizophrenic plot to them because they have no prior knowledge whatsoever, and anyone competent enough to know how to look it up to definitively prove it didn’t happen. Of course they’ll wave it off when it goes over their head that Democrats left a desperate paper trail of undeniable red-handed proof of their efforts to get away with counting unsigned ballots AFTER the polls closed in 2020.
Interesting
https://youtu.be/qOUx4IP5ulU?si=IXD4x5NE3P58Q4h9