Fascist law-and-order rhetoric is explicitly meant to divide citizens into two classes: those of the chosen nation, who are lawful by nature, and those who are not, who are inherently lawless.
— Jason Stanley, “How Fascism Works”
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“Fascism is not just some ghost of Europe's past, it's a recurring skin disease on the flesh of civilization.” (17 May 2025)
youtu.be/jk2r5yjibVs?...
The mechanisms of fascist politics all build on and support one another.They weave a myth of a distinction between “us” and “them,” based in a romanticized fictional past. Fascist politics traffics in delusions that create false distinctions between groups, regardless of obvious reality.
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Stark economic inequality creates conditions richly conducive to fascist demagoguery. It is fantasy to think that liberal democratic norms can flourish under such conditions.
—Jason Stanley
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Fascist movements share with social Darwinism the idea that life is a competition for power. In an ideology that measures worth by productivity, propaganda that represents members of an out-group as lazy is a way to justify placing them lower on a hierarchy of worth.
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The “hard work” versus “laziness” dichotomy is, like “law-abiding” versus “criminal”, at the heart of the fascist division between “us” and “them.” Fascist movements then use these rhetorical divides to attempt to transform myths about “them” into reality through social policy.
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In fascist ideology, in times of crisis, the state reserves support for members of the chosen nation, for “us” and not “them.” The justification is because “they” are lazy and cannot be trusted with state funds and because “they” are criminal and seek only to live off state largesse.
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These authentic American symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy. (2/2)
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Robert O. Paxton,
“THE ANATOMY OF FASCISM”
The language and symbols of an authentic American fascism would not be the same as the original European fascisms. No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance. (1/2)
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Fascist ideology rejects pluralism and tolerance. In fascist politics, everyone in the chosen nation shares a religion and a way of life, a set of customs. The diversity, with its concomitant tolerance of difference, in large urban centers is therefore a threat to fascist ideology.
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This. It's important. @defiance13.bsky.social is well spoken, wise, and his words pack a punch. Please stay for the whole thing. #onfascism #fascism #standup #speakout
Hitler’s denunciations of large cosmopolitan cities, and their cultural productions, is standard in fascist politics. For fascists, “Hollywood,” or its local proxy, is always destroying traditional values and culture by producing “perverted” art.
— Jason Stanley
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Since fascist politics has, at its basis, the traditional patriarchal family, it is characteristically accompanied by panic about deviations from it. Transgender individuals and homosexuals are used to heighten anxiety and panic about the threat to traditional male gender roles.
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The final outcome was that the fascist regimes drove themselves off a cliff in their quest for ever headier successes. The fascisms we know seem doomed to destroy themselves in their headlong, obsessive rush to fulfill the “privileged relations with history” they promised their people.
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Any threat to patriarchal manhood and the traditional family undermines the fascist vision of strength. Fascist propaganda promotes fear of race mixing, of corrupting the pure nation with, in the words of Charles Lindbergh, speaking for the America First movement, “inferior blood.”
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Fascist propaganda doesn’t merely present members of targeted groups as criminals. To ensure the right kind of moral panic about these groups, its members are presented as particular kinds of threats to the fascist nation— most important, a threat to its purity.
— Jason Stanley
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Fascist regimes embrace radicalizing impulses from below. The party and its militants were themselves a powerful force for continued radicalization. Popular movements helped fascists to achieve power, monopolize political activity, and play a major role in public life.
—Robert O. Paxton
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Fascist regimes had to produce an impression of driving momentum—“permanent revolution”—in order to fulfill their promises. Without it, fascist regimes risked decaying into something resembling a tepid authoritarianism. With it, they drove toward a final paroxysm of self destruction.
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Fascist regimes tried to redraw so radically the boundaries between private and public that the private sphere almost disappeared. For some observers, this effort to have the public sphere swallow up the private sphere entirely is indeed the very essence of fascism.
—Robert O. Paxton
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Timothy Snyder,
“ON TYRANNY”
#RecurringHistory
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In fascist politics, women who do not fit traditional gender roles, non-whites, homosexuals, immigrants, “decadent cosmopolitans,” those who do not have the dominant religion, are in their very existence violations of law and order.
— Jason Stanley
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A healthy democratic state is governed by laws that treat all citizens equally and justly. Fascist law-and-order rhetoric is explicitly meant to divide citizens into two classes: those of the chosen nation, who are lawful by nature, and those who are not, who are inherently lawless.
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Fascists despised the small truths of daily existence, loved slogans that resonated like a new religion, and preferred creative myths to history or journalism.
Post-truth is pre-fascism.
— Timothy Snyder
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Fascist regimes contained no mechanisms by which citizens could choose representatives or influence policy. Parliaments lost power, elections were replaced by yes-no plebiscites and ceremonies of affirmation, and leaders were given unlimited dictatorial powers.
— Robert O. Paxton
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In fascist states, individual rights had no autonomous existence. The State of Law vanished, along with the principles of due process. A suspect acquitted in a German court of law could be rearrested by the regime and put in a concentration camp without any further legal procedure.
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Fascist politics deliberately exploits the emotion of victimhood, manufacturing a sense of aggrieved victimization among the majority population, directing it at a group that is not responsible for it and promising to alleviate the feeling of victimization by punishing that group.
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Fascist regime in Europe wasn’t conceivable without terror. Nazi violence was omnipresent after 1933. The concentration camps were not hidden, the executions of dissidents were meant to be known.The publicity of violence, however, doesn’t mean the support for the regime was coerced.
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Fascist politics covers up structural inequality by attempting to invert, misrepresent, and subvert the long, hard efforts to address it. The experience of losing a once settled dignity—the dignity that comes with being white—is easily captured by a language of white victimization.
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