From How Fascism Works (Jason Stanley, 2020) ppxviii- xxi
ICE is an organization that is like the police but is not the police. The job of the police in a democratic society is to keep communities safe. In practice, ICE collaborates with conventional American criminal justice institutions, including local police departments, but often ends up working at cross-purposes with them by creating fear in immigrant communities, whose members become less likely to report crime. As a result, some police chiefs have aligned themselves against ICE raids. The goal of ICE is not to make communities safer. ICE’s mission is to reinforce a distinction between “us” and “them.”
When observing the tangible effects of Trump’s rhetoric, many in the media look to the streets for hate crimes by skinheads, or for other examples of extrajudicial violence aimed at Trump’s targets immigrants and Muslims, for example but not actually committed by the Trump administration. This is dangerously confused. It is a reaction that masks the worst material effects of Trump’s political tactics, Fascist political tactics employed by an election’s winner materialize in the resulting state appara-tus, not only between individuals. Debates that require one to direct one’s eye instead to the streets force us to look away from the structural consequences of fascist rhetoric. By ignoring the state apparatus erected by those who entered into office through fascist politics, we behave as if fascist political tactics cannot transform once-democratic states into fascist ones. This is a thesis that history, as well as common sense, rejects.
In German history, the term “Gleichschaltung” connotes the process by which the institutions of the German government gradually became “Nazified,” moving from liberal democratic organizing principles to National Socialist ones, principally fealty to the Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler. Without comparing the new brand of far-right leaders to Hitler, it is nevertheless possible to see similar processes at work in three of the world’s largest democracies-India, the United States, and Brazil. In all three countries, there is movement toward unifying institutions around loyalty to an ethnic identity, as in India, or loyalty to a single leader, as in the United States, where the most powerful political party is increasingly defined by fealty to Donald Trump. This threatens the democratic nature of these institutions as well as their competence to carry out their institutional missions. Our democratic culture is on life support.
Behind this transnational ultranationalist movement are the forces of capital. Tech giants and media benefit from the dramatic clash of friend and enemy. Fear and anger get people to the polls, but they also keep people online and glued to the media. Oil companies benefit when ultranationalist movements represent international climate change agreements, such as the Paris Agreement, as threats to national sovereignty. The weaker individual states and international agreements are, the stronger the power of multinational corporations becomes.
India, the United States, and Brazil are now run by far-right parties, with demagogic leaders implementing ultranationalist agendas. In the bastions of democracy in Western Europe, far-right parties are ascendant. All around the world, liberal democracy is in retreat. Not since the middle of the twentieth century has liberal democracy been in such peril.
With the advent of a public health pandemic like COVID-19, the attacks on expertise, science, and truth that are the lifeblood of fascist politics imperil much more than just our political system. We can see the explicit dangers in the response to COVID-19 of the leaders of the United States, Brazil, and India, which was initially to dismiss the virus as an overblown hoax. The response of these governments to the virus was not some accident — as I show in the pages to follow, fascist ideology conflicts in principle with expertise, science, and truth.
Fascist politics exploits crises to advance its ideological agenda. Trump called the virus “the Chinese virus” in part because that is where it originated. But the reason he sticks to this label in the face of criticism is to reframe debate around nationalist conflict (and away from the incompetence of his administration). And when it began to take the virus seriously, the Trump administration immediately sought to use it as a means to justify retroactively its nationalist agenda of closing borders, and its suspicion of immigrants, by associating immigrants (and “sanctuary cities”) with the virus. As I show in this book, fascism in power seeks to make its rhetoric into reality – for example, by immiserating and impoverishing populations it represents as diseased. In early March, Trump’s Executive Office for Immigration Review ordered immigration court staff “to remove CDC posters designed to slow spread of coronavirus.” It’s hard to see what the point of such an order is, except to give some reality to the association between immigrants and the virus by failing to inform these populations of the dangers.
The Hungarian government’s response to the virus has been to introduce legislation to disband Parliament and let Victor Orbán rule by emergency decree. In the United States, the Department of Justice sought emergency powers from Congress, including indefinite detention by judges. Using crisis as anti-democratic opportunity is a classic fascist tactic.
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