From How Fascism Works (Jason Stanley, 2020) pp76-7
Ever since Plato and Aristotle wrote on the topic, political theorists have known that democracy cannot flourish on soil poisoned by inequality. It is not merely that the resentments bred by such divisions are tempting targets for a demagogue. The more important point is that dramatic inequality poses a mortal danger to the shared reality required for a healthy liberal democracy. Those who benefit from inequalities are often burdened by certain illusions that prevent them from recognizing the contingency of their privilege. When inequalities grow particularly stark, these illusions tend to metastasize.
What dictator, king, or emperor has not suspected that he was chosen by the gods for his role? What colonial power has not entertained delusions of its ethnic superiority, or the superiority of its religion, culture, and way of life, superiority that supposedly justifies its imperial expansions and conquests? In the antebellum American South, whites believed that slavery was a great gift to those who were enslaved. The harshness of Southern Planters to enslaved persons who sought to flee or rebel was in no small part due to their conviction that such behavior revealed lack of gratitude.
Extreme economic inequality is toxic to liberal democracy because it breeds delusions that mask reality, undermining the possibility of joint deliberation to solve society’s divisions. Those who benefit from large inequalities are inclined to believe that they have earned their privilege, a delusion that prevents them from seeing reality as it is. Even those who demonstrably do not benefit from hierarchies can be made to believe that they do; hence the use of racism to ensnare poor white citizens in the United States into supporting tax cuts for extravagantly wealthy whites who happen to share their skin color.
Liberal equality means that those with different levels of power and wealth nevertheless are regarded as having equal worth. Liberal equality is, by definition, meant to be compatible with economic inequality. And yet, when economic inequality is sufficiently extreme, the myths that are required to sustain it are bound to threaten liberal equality as well.
The myths that arise under conditions of dramatic material inequality legitimize ignoring the proper common referee for public discourse, which is the world. To completely destroy reality, fascist politics replaces the liberal ideal of equality with its opposite: hierarchy.
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