Yale Professor Jason Stanley Identifies 3 Essential Features of Fascism: Invoking a Mythic Past, Sowing Division & Attacking Truth

New books on fas­cism are pop­ping up every­where, from inde­pen­dent press­es, for­mer world lead­ers like Madeleine Albright, and aca­d­e­mics like Jason Stan­ley, Jacob Urowsky Pro­fes­sor of Phi­los­o­phy at Yale Uni­ver­si­ty. Stanley’s lat­est book, How Fas­cism Works: The Pol­i­tics of Us and Them, has been described as a “vital read for a nation under Trump.” And yet, as The Guardian’s Tom McCarthy writes, one of the ironies Stan­ley points out is that—despite the wide­spread cur­ren­cy of the term these days—fascism suc­ceeds by mak­ing “talk of fas­cism… seem out­landish.”

Is it?

The word has cer­tain­ly been dilut­ed by years of mis­use. Umber­to Eco wrote in his 1995 essay “Ur-Fas­cism” that “fas­cist” as an epi­thet was casu­al­ly thrown around “by Amer­i­can rad­i­cals… to refer to a cop who did not approve of their smok­ing habits.” When every author­i­ty fig­ure who seems to abuse pow­er gets labeled a fas­cist, the word los­es its explana­to­ry pow­er and its his­to­ry dis­ap­pears. But Eco, who grew up under Mus­soli­ni and under­stood fas­cist Europe, insist­ed that fas­cism has clear­ly rec­og­niz­able, and portable, if not par­tic­u­lar­ly coher­ent, fea­tures.

“The fas­cist game can be played in many forms,” Eco wrote, depend­ing on the nation­al mytholo­gies and cul­tur­al his­to­ry of the coun­try in which it takes root. Rather than a sin­gle polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy, Eco argued, fas­cism is “a col­lage… a bee­hive of con­tra­dic­tions.” He enu­mer­at­ed four­teen fea­tures that delin­eate it from oth­er forms of pol­i­tics. Like Eco, Stan­ley also iden­ti­fies some core traits of fas­cism, such as “pub­li­ciz­ing false charges of cor­rup­tion,” as he writes in his book, “while engag­ing in cor­rupt prac­tice.”

In the short New York Times opin­ion video above, Stan­ley sum­ma­rizes his “for­mu­la for fascism”—a “sur­pris­ing­ly sim­ple” pat­tern now repeat­ing in Europe, South Amer­i­ca, India, Myan­mar, Turkey, the Philip­pines, and “right here in the Unit­ed States.” No mat­ter where they appear, “fas­cist politi­cians are cut from the same cloth,” he says. The ele­ments of his for­mu­la are:

1. Con­jur­ing a “myth­ic past” that has sup­pos­ed­ly been destroyed (“by lib­er­als, fem­i­nists, and immi­grants”). Mus­soli­ni had Rome, Turkey’s Erdoğan has the Ottoman Empire, and Hungary’s Vik­tor Orban rewrote the country’s con­sti­tu­tion with the aim of “mak­ing Hun­gary great again.” These myths rely on an “over­whelm­ing sense of nos­tal­gia for a past that is racial­ly pure, tra­di­tion­al, and patri­ar­chal.” Fas­cist lead­ers “posi­tion them­selves as father fig­ures and strong­men” who alone can restore lost great­ness. And yes, the fas­cist leader is “always a ‘he.’”

2. Fas­cist lead­ers sow divi­sion; they suc­ceed by “turn­ing groups against each oth­er,” inflam­ing his­tor­i­cal antag­o­nisms and ancient hatreds for their own advan­tage. Social divi­sions in themselves—between class­es, reli­gions, eth­nic groups and so on—are what we might call pre-exist­ing con­di­tions. Fas­cists may not invent the hate, but they cyn­i­cal­ly instru­men­tal­ize it: demo­niz­ing out­groups, nor­mal­iz­ing and nat­u­ral­iz­ing big­otry, stok­ing vio­lence to jus­ti­fy repres­sive “law and order” poli­cies, the cur­tail­ing of civ­il rights and due process, and the mass impris­on­ment and killing of man­u­fac­tured ene­mies.

3. Fas­cists “attack the truth” with pro­pa­gan­da, in par­tic­u­lar “a kind of anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism” that “cre­ates a petri dish for con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries.” (Stanley’s fourth book, pub­lished by Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty Press, is titled How Pro­pa­gan­da Works.) We would have to be extra­or­di­nar­i­ly naïve to think that only fas­cist politi­cians lie, but we should focus here on the ques­tion of degree. For fas­cists, truth doesn’t mat­ter at all. (As Rudy Giu­liani says, “truth isn’t truth.”) Han­nah Arendt wrote that fas­cism relies on “a con­sis­tent and total sub­sti­tu­tion of lies for fac­tu­al truth.” She described the phe­nom­e­non as destroy­ing “the sense by which we take our bear­ings in the real world.… [T]he cat­e­go­ry of truth vers­es false­hood [being] among the men­tal means to this end.” In such an atmos­phere, any­thing is pos­si­ble, no mat­ter how pre­vi­ous­ly unthink­able.

Using this rubric, Stan­ley links the tac­tics and state­ments of fas­cist lead­ers around the world with those of the cur­rent U.S. pres­i­dent. It’s a per­sua­sive case that would prob­a­bly sway ear­li­er the­o­rists of fas­cism like Eco and Arendt. Whether he can con­vince Amer­i­cans who find talk of fas­cism “outlandish”—or who loose­ly use the word to describe any politi­cian or group they don’t like—is anoth­er ques­tion entire­ly.

FYI: You can down­load Stan­ley’s new book How Fas­cism Works, as a free audio­book if you want to try out Audible.com’s no-risk, 30-day free tri­al pro­gram. Find details here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Umber­to Eco Makes a List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

Han­nah Arendt Explains How Pro­pa­gan­da Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Moral­i­ty: Insights from The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism

George Orwell Tries to Iden­ti­fy Who Is Real­ly a “Fas­cist” and Define the Mean­ing of This “Much-Abused Word” (1944)

20 Lessons from the 20th Cen­tu­ry About How to Defend Democ­ra­cy from Author­i­tar­i­an­ism, Accord­ing to Yale His­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness