Name: How Fascism Works
ISBN: 9780525511830

How Fascism Works

As the child of refugees of World War II Europe and a renowned philosopher and scholar of propaganda, Jason Stanley has a deep understanding of how democratic societies can be vulnerable to fascism: Nations don’t have to be fascist to suffer from fascist politics. In fact, fascism’s roots have been present in the United States for more than a century. Alarmed by the pervasive rise of fascist tactics both at home and around the globe, Stanley focuses here on the structures that unite them, laying out and analyzing the ten pillars of fascist politics—the language and beliefs that separate people into an “us” and a “them.” He knits together reflections on history, philosophy, sociology, and critical race theory with stories from contemporary Hungary, Poland, India, Myanmar, and the United States, among other nations. He makes clear the immense danger of underestimating the cumulative power of these tactics, which include exploiting a mythic version of a nation’s past; propaganda that twists the language of democratic ideals against themselves; anti-intellectualism directed against universities and experts; law and order politics predicated on the assumption that members of minority groups are criminals; and fierce attacks on labor groups and welfare.

What Hacker News says

adriandSep 2025

If you’re interested in this topic, I really recommend reading How Fascism Works, by Jason Stanley. [1] It’s a remarkable book - slim, easy to read, and enlightening. What was most astonishing to me was that there is a playbook: ever wonder why these regimes always target LGTBQ people, for example? It’s explained here, along with everything else you need to know about the mechanics of prosaic, predictable type of government.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Fascism_Works

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aguavivaDec 2024

But revolutionary fascism is but one variant within a broader palette, is it not?

If we substitute "The West and its degenerate values" for the usual enemies, then Stanley's definition seems to describe Putin's regime quite succinctly:

  In his book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2018), Jason Stanley defined fascism thusly:

   [A] cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of humiliation brought on by supposed communists, Marxists and minorities and immigrants who are supposedly posing a threat to the character and the history of a nation ... The leader proposes that only he can solve it and all of his political opponents are enemies or traitors.

I would agree that Putin is not an archetypal fascist in all categories - but he does seem be on the spectrum.

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disabledJul 2020

Because “riots”, “mobs”, and “chaos” are racially charged words that are used in lieu of the proper terminology—protests.

See: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/10/protes...

Also, Jason Stanley’s book, “How Fascism Works” also has a write up on this usage of language too.

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disabledJul 2020

This is from Jason Stanley’s book, “How Fascism Works”:

Politicians who describe whole categories of persons as “criminals” are imputing to them permanent character traits that are frightening to most people, while simultaneously positioning themselves as our protectors. Such language undermines the democratic process of reasonable decision making, replacing it with fear. Another salient example in the U.S. context is the use of the term “riot” to describe political protests. In the United States in the 1960s, the civil rights movement included black political protests in urban areas against police brutality (most famously in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles and the Harlem district of Manhattan). These protests were regularly described in the media as “riots.” As James Baldwin wrote at the time about the media description of these protests, “when white men rise up against oppression, they are heroes: when black men rise, they have reverted to their native savagery. The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto was not described as a riot, nor were the participants maligned as hoodlums: the boys and girls in Watts and Harlem are thoroughly aware of this.” 2 Such misrepresentations allowed Richard Nixon to run for office in 1968 on a “law and order” platform. Nixon’s administration is generally viewed as laying the groundwork for the subsequent mass incarceration of black American citizens.

In 2015, widespread protests by largely black crowds against police brutality occurred in Baltimore after the killing of Freddie Gray by police. In an article for Linguistic Pulse in April 2015, Nic Subtirelu compared different media outlets’ use of “protest” versus “riot” to describe the Baltimore protests. Subtirelu found that Fox News, the United States’ far-right media outlet, used “riot” in its coverage of the Baltimore unrest with more than twice the frequency of its use of “protest.” CNN, by contrast, used “riot” with only slightly more frequency than “protest,” and MSNBC used “protest” with only slightly more frequency than “riot” in its coverage of the unrest in Baltimore. 3 The misrepresentation of political protests as riots was a factor in the election campaign of Donald Trump, whose campaign had strong echoes of Nixon’s. Nixon, however, campaigned at a time of rising rates of violent crime. Trump’s successful “law and order” campaign took place under the conditions of some of the lowest rates of violent crime in recorded U.S. history.

Discussion that uses terms like “criminal” to encompass both those who commit multiple homicides for pleasure and those who commit traffic violations, or “riot” to describe a political protest, changes attitudes and shapes policy. A good example of what can result when language that criminalizes an entire group of people distorts debate and leads to unreasonable outcomes is the mass incarceration of American citizens of African descent.

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