From How Fascism Works (Jason Stanley, 2020) pp190-3
In the United States, as Donald Trump’s campaign against immigration intensifies, it is sweeping untold numbers of undocumented workers of all backgrounds into anonymous privately run detention centers, where they are concealed from view and public concern.
What normalization does is transform the morally extraordinary into the ordinary. It makes us able to tolerate what was once intolerable by making it seem as if this is the way things have always been. By contrast, the word “fascist” has acquired a feeling of the extreme, like crying wolf. Normalization of fascist ideology, by definition, would make charges of “fascism” seem like an overreaction, even in societies whose norms are transforming along these worrisome lines. Normalization means precisely that encroaching ideologically extreme conditions are not recognized as such because they have come to seem normal. The charge of fascism will always seem extreme; normalization means that the goalposts for the legitimate use of “extreme” terminology continually move.
That our sense of the normal – and our ability to judge it — is shifting does not mean that fascism is now upon us. What it means is that the intuitive sense that charges of “fascism” are exaggerated is not a good enough argument against the word’s use. Rather, arguments about the encroachment of fascist politics need a specific understanding of its meaning and the tactics that fall under its umbrella. Those who employ fascist tactics for political gain have varying goals. Now at least it does not appear that they seek to mobilize populations for world domination, as for example Hitler intended. Instead, though the goals are varied, there are common aspects of fascist thought and politics working in synergy. Since I am an American, I must note that one goal appears to be to use fascist tactics hypocritically, waving the banner of nationalism in front of middle- and working-class white people in order to funnel the state’s spoils into the hands of oligarchs. At the same time, as during the Jim Crow era in the United States, politicians continue to assure their supporters that national identity, variously defined, provides status and dignity that are “priceless.”
Fascist politics lures its audiences with the temptation of freedom from democratic norms while masking the fact that the alternative proposed is not a form of freedom that can sustain a stable nation state and can scarcely guarantee liberty. A state-based ethnic, religious, racial, or national conflict between “us” and “them” can hardly remain stable for long. And yes, even in fascism could sustain a stable state, would it be a good political community, a decent country within which children can be socialized to become empathetic human beings? Children can certainly be taught to hate, but to affirm hatred as a dimension of socialization has unintended consequences. Does anyone really want their children’s sense of identity to be based on a legacy of marginalization of others?
Given the inevitability of increased climate change and its effects, the political and social instability of our times as discussed above, and the tension and conflicts inherent in growing global economic inequality, we will soon find ourselves confronted by movements of disadvantaged people across borders that dwarf those of previous eras, not excepting the movement of refugees in World War II. Traumatized, impoverished, and in need of aid, refugees, including legal immigrants, will be recast to fit racist stereotypes by leaders and movements committed to maintaining hierarchical group privilege and using fascist politics. Many thoughtful citizens throughout the world believe this process is already in play. Under a fascist agenda, the refugee narrative life in refugee camps, the journey from fear and conflict to such camps, the hopelessness that accompanies extended time in these places-rather than engendering empathy, is cast as the origin story of terrorism and danger. These populations struggle through unspeakable horrors to reach safer shores. That even such people could be painted as fundamental threats is a testament to the illusory power of fascist myth. I have tried, in the pages of this book, to spell out its structure so that it can be recognized and resisted.
The challenges we will face are enormous. How do we maintain a sense of common humanity, when fear and insecurity will lead us to flee into the comforting arms of mythic superiority in vain pursuit of a sense of dignity? Vexing questions define our times. Nonetheless, we can take comfort in the histories of progressive social movements, which against long odds and hard struggle have in the past succeeded in the project of eliciting empathy.
In the direct targets of fascist politics-refugees, feminism, labor unions, racial, religious, and sexual minorities-we can see the methods used to divide us. But we must never forget that the chief target of fascist politics is its intended audience, those it seeks to ensnare in its illusory grip, to enroll in a state where everyone deemed “worthy” of human status is increasingly subjugated by mass delusion. Those not included in that audience and status wait in the camps of the world, straw men and women ready to be cast into the roles of rapists, murderers, terrorists. By refusing to be bewitched by fascist myths, we remain free to engage one another, all of us flawed, all of us partial in our thinking, experience, and understanding, but none of us demons.
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