The Future of Democracy Newsletter: July 2021

The focus of our July discussion was the book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them by Jason Stanley. We discussed how fascism operates to entice people into following leaders who often act against democracy and how we might respond against what seems to be a growing trend that undermines many countries in our time.
 
The theme of this book is that fascism is based on creating scapegoats for the fears of those who believe themselves threatened. Leaders take advantage of people’s fear of losing their rights to “the other” whom they become convinced are out to steal them. These fears often are projected onto minorities portrayed as threats to the “real” national character. Following are selected quotes from the book.

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This pattern of blame by the majority of a minority has had a resurgence over the course of this young century. In Brazil, under Bolsonaro, right wing demonstrations were held across the country, calling to disband Congress and the courts. The neo-fascist party AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) now is the third-strongest party in Germany. Under Hindu nationalism in India under Modi those deemed to be non-citizens [Muslins] will be scheduled for detention and eventual deportation. In early June (2020), the Trump administration cancelled educational, recreational, and legal aid for children in detention centers.
 
Under regimes leading toward fascism there is movement toward unifying institutions around loyalty to an ethnic identity … or loyalty to a single leader. Liberal democracy is in retreat. But a tendency to blame others for the real or imagined deterioration of our society is an ancient problem.

Fascist politics includes many distinct strategies: the mythic past, propaganda, anti-intellectualism, unreality, hierarchy, victimhood, law and order, sexual anxiety, appeals to the heartland, and dismantling of public welfare and unity. In the cases of Nazi Germany, Rwanda, and contemporary Myanmar, the victims of ethnic cleansing were subjected to vicious rhetorical attacks by leaders in the press for months or years before the regime turned genocidal.

The most telling symptom of fascist politics is division. It aims to separate the population into “us” and “them.” Fascist politicians justify their ideas by breaking down a common sense of history in creating a mythic past to support their vision for the present. … Fascist politics creates a state of unreality, in which conspiracy theories and fake news replace reasoned debate.

When social rankings and divisions solidify, fear fills in for understanding between groups. Any progress for a minority group stokes feelings of victimhood among the dominant population. … As the fear of “them” grows, “we” come to represent everything virtuous.

Following the horrors of WWII, which sent masses of refugees fleeing fascist regimes, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirmed the dignity of every human being. Fascism today might not look exactly as it did in the 1930s, but refugees are once again on the road everywhere.

In all fascist mythic pasts, an extreme version of the patriarchal family reigns supreme. The function … is to harness the emotion of nostalgia to the central tenets of fascist ideology — authoritarianism, hierarchy, purity, and struggle.

The Hutu power movement was a fascist ethnic supremacist movement that arose in Rwanda in the years before the 1994 Rwanda genocide. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán … has overseen the demolition of the liberal institutions of the country. If one can convince a population that they are rightfully exceptional, that they are destined by nature or by religious fate to rule other populations, one has already convinced them of a monstrous lie.

In the US, Confederate monuments arose well after the Civil War had ended, as part of a mythologized history of a heroic Southern past in which the horrors of slavery were de-emphasized. In early 2018, the Polish parliament passed a law making it illegal to suggest that Poland bore responsibility for any of the atrocities committed on its soil during the Nazi occupation of Poland, even the well-documented pogroms during this time. Le Front National is France’s extremist far-right party, and the first neofascist party in Western Europe to achieve significant electoral success. … But during the 2017 election campaign, Marine Le Pen denied French complicity in one particularly large roundup of French Jews, in which 13,000 were gathered … and sent to Nazi death camps.

Politicians in the US Republican Party seek to harness white resentment by denouncing accurate historical scholarship about the brutality of slavery as a way to “victimize” American whites, especially from the South.

To honestly debate what our country should do, what policies it should adopt, we need a common basis of reality, including about our own past. History in a liberal democracy must be faithful to the norm of truth, yielding an accurate vision of the past, rather than a history provided for political reasons.

It is standard in fascist politics for harsh criticisms of an independent judiciary to occur in the form of accusations of bias, a kind of corruption, critiques that are then used to replace independent judges with ones who will cynically employ the law as a means to protect the interests of the ruling party.​

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that people are not naturally led to self-governance but rather seek a strong leader to follow.

The chief reason we have free speech in democracy is to facilitate public discourse about policy on the part of citizens and their representatives. But the kind of debate where one shrieks insults at another … is not the kind of public discourse that free speech rights are meant to protect. Fascist policies seek to undermine public discourse by attacking and devaluing education, expertise and language. Intelligent debate is impossible without an education with access to different perspectives. … In fascist ideology, there is only one legitimate viewpoint: that of the dominant nation. Reality is always more complex than our means of representing it.

Fascist politics exchanges reality for the pronouncements of a single individual, or perhaps a political party. Anyone looking at current US politics, or Russian or Polish, would immediately note the presence and political potency of conspiracy theories … aimed at some out-group, and in the service of some in-group. Fascist politicians discredit the “liberal media” for censoring discussion or outlandish right-wing conspiracy theories. Because the audience for conspiracy theories readily discount their own experience, it is often unimportant that conspiracy theories are demonstrably false.

Fascist politics seeks to destroy the relations of mutual respect between citizens that are the foundation of a healthy liberal democracy, replacing them with trust in one figure alone, the leader. Since Plato and Aristotle wrote on the topic, political theorists have known that democracy cannot flourish on soil poisoned by inequality. According to fascist ideology, nature imposes hierarchies of power and dominance that are flatly inconsistent with the equality of respect presupposed by liberal democratic theory.

The idea of liberal democracy is that all of us are equally deserving of the basic goods of society. This kind of nationalism is therefore in no sense opposed to equality. Fascist nationalism is a repudiation of the liberal democratic ideal; it is nationalism in the service of domination.

We tend to describe the actions of those we regard as one of “us” quite differently than the actions of those we regard as one of “them.” If someone we regard as one of “them” does the same thing, we tend to describe the action more abstractly, by impugning bad character traits to the person committing it. They are criminals. We make mistakes.

In fascist ideology, the rural life is guided by an ethos of self-sufficiency, which breeds strength. Most often American opposition to welfare is represented as a manifestation of a commitment to individualism, of support and desire for nurturing an ethic of self-sufficiency. Many Americans hold false beliefs about who is poor. There is widespread ignorance of the fact that those who benefit from the majority of welfare programs are white. The “hard work” versus “laziness” dichotomy is, like “law-abiding” versus “criminal,” at the heart of the fascist division between “us” and “them.”

Adding race and previous incarceration together makes employment prospects dramatically worse. In the 1960s, the Kennedy and Johnson administration responded to the civil rights movement by pairing job training and antipoverty programs with punitive anticrime measures. When Richard Nixon ran in 1968, he used urban unrest to change the subject from social justice to law and order … he inherited a penal system that had been shedding prisoners.

In functioning unions, white working-class citizens identify with black working-class citizens rather than resent them. According to fascist politics, unions must be smashed so that individual laborers are left to fend for themselves. When poor white workers lack class identification with poor black workers they fall back on familiar lines of racial division and resentment. … “Right to work” is an Orwellian name for legislation that attacks workers’ ability to collectively bargain, thereby robbing workers of a voice.

Fascist movements share with Social Darwinism the idea that life is a competition for power, according to which the division of society’s resources should be left up to pure free market competition. The fascist vision of individual freedom is similar to the libertarian notion of individual rights — the right to compete but not necessarily to succeed or even survive. … Freedom is defined by unconstrained free markets. In the 2012 American presidential election, vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan repeatedly spoke of American society being divided into “makers” and “takers.” A generous social welfare system unites a community in mutual bonds of care, rather than dividing it into factions that demagogues can exploit.
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We can expand our understanding of “us” by … considering both the people living in refugee camps of the world and the residents of small towns in Iowa to be our neighbors.

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Our group then discussed how to move past the inroads that fascism seems to be making in many countries. How do we create a world where we move toward its opposite — which is democracy — and work with others toward a more equal society?
 
Part of the fascist mentality is characterizing people by the groups to which they belong rather than their individual actions. We can criticize fascist elements where we see them yet this often results in a circle of blame.
 
But as individuals, we each can move toward a more democratic society by striving to see people more as they are beyond race, religion, gender, political preference and every other type of label we place on them.
 
All of us at times engage in unfair judgments, and then sometimes look back and regret our actions as having been harmful when we may not have meant them to be. But if we learn from our very human pattern of judging others and begin to treat them with greater respect we can contribute to a more fair and equitable world.
 
Perhaps we can begin to realize that the needs of others — for recognition of both their value as people and their physical needs — also are our needs. If our actions in our personal and political lives move us toward a world that maximizes the value and potential of everyone, those benefits also accrue to ourselves. This is the essence of democracy.
 
Also, I recommend this article about the deterioration of democracy in Nicaragua as an example of what has happened to many countries in this century:
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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/04/opinion/daniel-ortega-nicaragua-election.html

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Your comments and thoughts always are welcome. Also, don’t forget to look at our blog site renewingdemocracy.org

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