Chapter 1
When Democracy Faces Its Darkest Hour
In 2016, Donald Trump resurrected the "America First" slogan-a phrase with troubling historical roots in Charles Lindbergh's pre-WWII movement that opposed fighting Nazi Germany while promoting white supremacist ideals. This wasn't mere coincidence. When Trump's strategist Steve Bannon spoke of making America's future "as exciting as the 1930s," he was evoking the era of America's greatest sympathy for fascism. Jason Stanley's "How Fascism Works" arrived as a timely warning, quickly becoming essential reading for those concerned about democracy's fragility. The son of Holocaust survivors, Stanley brings both scholarly precision and personal urgency to his analysis of how fascist tactics operate in modern politics. The book has been praised by scholars across the political spectrum and cited by journalists documenting democratic backsliding worldwide. Its central insight-that fascism begins not with violence but with words-makes it particularly relevant as populist movements gain momentum globally.
Chapter 2
The Mythic Past: Nostalgia as Political Weapon
Fascist movements begin by breaking down shared historical understanding and replacing it with a mythic past that justifies their vision of hierarchy. This imagined history portrays a pure, tragically destroyed heritage that was religiously, racially, or culturally homogeneous, with traditional family structures reigning supreme. Mussolini openly admitted this strategy in 1922, declaring, "We have created our myth... the greatness of the nation!" This deliberately mythical past harnesses nostalgia and connects it to fascist tenets of authoritarianism, hierarchy, and struggle.
The patriarchal family occupies a central position in this mythology. In fascist ideology, the nation's leader functions as the father figure, deriving authority from strength just as the father's power is the source of moral authority over children and wife. Nazi propaganda chief Gregor Strasser declared military service as man's most valuable form of contribution, while motherhood fulfilled this role for women. Paula Siber, head of the Association of German Women, defined womanhood entirely through motherhood and service to the nation. This gender inequality was as fundamental to Nazi thinking as racial inequality.
These patriarchal ideals continue to define political movements today. Poland's Law and Justice Party centers on returning to conservative Christian traditions, opposing homosexuality, restricting immigration, and attempting extreme restrictions on abortion. Neo-Nazi figures like Andrew Auernheimer claim patriarchal gender roles are central to European history, part of white Europe's "glorious past." Similar gender-based divisions appeared in Rwanda's Hutu Ten Commandments before the 1994 genocide.
The mythic past requires erasing inconvenient historical truths. Confederate monuments arose well after the Civil War to mythologize a heroic Southern past while de-emphasizing slavery's horrors. In Myanmar, ethnic cleansing of Rohingya includes erasing all physical and historical traces of their existence. Poland and Turkey have passed laws making it illegal to suggest national responsibility for historical atrocities. When Marine Le Pen claims French children shouldn't be taught about their nation's complicity in the Holocaust, or when AfD's Alexander Gauland describes Nazi rule as "just a speck of bird poop" in Germany's thousand-year history, they're engaging in this same pattern of historical revision.
What makes this strategy so effective is that it doesn't just distort history-it replaces it with an emotionally powerful alternative narrative that explains present grievances through the lens of lost greatness. The mythic past provides both diagnosis (we've fallen from our former glory) and prescription (return to traditional hierarchies) for society's ills. By controlling the narrative of the past, fascists gain tremendous power to shape the future.
Chapter 3
Propaganda: The Strategic Manipulation of Ideals
Fascist propaganda operates through a cunning inversion-it conceals problematic goals by masking them with widely accepted ideals. Richard Nixon's "war on crime" exemplifies this tactic. His chief of staff's diary revealed Nixon's explicitly racist intent, saying "the whole problem is really the blacks" while devising a system "that recognizes this while not appearing to." The rhetoric of "law and order" concealed this racist agenda behind seemingly universal values.
Corruption claims play a central role in fascist politics. Fascist movements have long used the metaphor of "draining swamps," publicizing false corruption charges while engaging in corrupt practices themselves. Paradoxically, fascist politicians are typically far more corrupt than those they seek to replace. As historian Richard Grunberger notes about Nazi Germany, corruption became "the central organizing principle of the Third Reich" despite many citizens viewing the regime as "austerely dedicated to moral probity."
For fascists, corruption refers more to the corruption of purity than law-breaking. Their denunciations evoke the usurpation of traditional order. During Reconstruction's end, fabricated corruption charges were leveled against black representatives. As W.E.B. Du Bois observed, "the center of the corruption charge...was in fact that poor men were ruling and taxing rich men." When women, Muslims, blacks, Jews, homosexuals, or "cosmopolitans" gain political power or access public goods, fascists perceive this as corruption of the natural order.
Liberty becomes perverted in fascist rhetoric. Frederick Douglass highlighted this hypocrisy in his 1852 Fourth of July speech, questioning how a nation celebrating liberty could enslave human beings. The rhetoric of liberty worked in the Confederacy by explicitly tying white southerners' freedoms to the practice of slavery. Similarly, "states' rights" defended the liberty of Southern states from federal intervention against slavery and Jim Crow laws. The liberty sought through "states' rights" was fundamentally the freedom to restrict black citizens' liberties.
Fascist leaders often gain power through democratic elections but then abandon democratic principles. Hitler praised "true Germanic Democracy" which meant absolute rule by a leader after an initial democratic vote. Today's fascists continue employing this strategy, pushing freedom of speech to its limits while suppressing others' speech. While Attorney General Jeff Sessions prosecuted a woman for laughing during his confirmation hearing, he simultaneously gave speeches defending free speech on university campuses.
What makes this propaganda so effective is its ability to cloak authoritarian goals in the language of cherished democratic values. By the time citizens realize the bait-and-switch, democratic institutions may already be severely weakened. The fascist leader can then claim to be the true defender of democracy while systematically dismantling it.
Chapter 4
Anti-Intellectualism: Undermining Knowledge and Expertise
Fascist politics undermines public discourse by attacking education, expertise, and language. Without these elements, intelligent debate becomes impossible, leaving only power and tribal identity. In fascist ideology, education either threatens fascism or supports the mythical nation by introducing students to the dominant culture and its mythic past. This explains why campus protests receive such national attention-they represent a true political battleground with high stakes.
For fifty years, universities have been epicenters of protest against injustice and authoritarianism. Unable to attack dissent directly, propagandists represent campus protests as violent and oppressive "riots." When Black Lives Matter spread to the University of Missouri in 2015 through the Concernedstudent1950 movement, media largely ignored students' legitimate concerns about racial abuse and exclusionary curricula, instead portraying protesters as an angry mob exemplifying liberal excess.
Fascist politics undermines institutions harboring independent voices until they can be replaced by compliant media and universities. One method is accusing universities of hypocrisy regarding free speech-claiming they suppress right-leaning voices while allowing protests against them. Right-wing critics position themselves as victims whose free speech rights are violated by protesters. This extends to the classroom, where activists like David Horowitz target "dangerous" leftist professors and courses.
Horowitz created numerous organizations attacking universities since the 1980s, including the Individual Rights Foundation fighting campus speech codes and Students for Academic Freedom promoting conservative faculty hiring under the guise of "intellectual diversity." Once a fringe figure, his tactics have moved mainstream with the Trump administration aggressively pursuing his agenda. The David Horowitz Freedom Center has supported key Trump officials including Sessions, Miller, and Bannon, with Horowitz describing Miller as "a kind of protege of mine."
In 2017, Missouri representative Rick Brattin attempted to ban tenure at public universities, calling it "un-American" and claiming professors shouldn't engage in "political stuff." This reveals the right wing's desire to control acceptable inquiry while hypocritically claiming to defend free speech. Fascist politicians specifically target professors they deem too political-typically those labeled "Marxist"-a term employed without connection to Marx but as a way to malign equality.
Fascist opposition to gender studies stems from patriarchal ideology. Like Nazis who viewed feminism as a Jewish conspiracy to destroy Aryan fertility, modern fascists see universities as subverting masculinity and traditional family values. Russia's Vladimir Putin has repurposed universities as ideological weapons against Western feminism, persecuting institutions like the European University of St. Petersburg for teaching gender studies.
What makes anti-intellectualism so dangerous is that it doesn't just attack specific ideas but undermines the very concept of objective truth and expertise. When facts become mere opinions and expertise is dismissed as elitism, society loses the common ground necessary for democratic deliberation. Without shared facts and respect for knowledge, power alone determines what's "true."
Chapter 5
Unreality: The Destruction of Shared Truth
When propaganda succeeds at undermining ideals and delegitimizing universities as sources of knowledge, reality itself becomes contested. Fascist politics replaces reasoned debate with fear and anger, leaving its audience with a destabilized sense of loss and mistrust. A fascist leader can replace truth with power, ultimately lying without consequence and destroying the shared information space needed for democracy.
Conspiracy theories serve as powerful tools in fascist politics, not only delegitimizing opponents but actively shaping reality. Poland's ruling PiS party rose to power through fantastical conspiracy theories about the 2010 Smolensk plane crash that killed President Kaczynski and political elites. Despite investigations concluding pilot error was to blame, PiS promoted about twenty different conspiracy theories implicating both Polish and Russian governments, using these narratives to undermine faith in democratic institutions.
Similarly, Hungary's Viktor Orban invented a "Soros Plan" conspiracy claiming the Jewish philanthropist intended to flood Hungary with non-Christian migrants. These theories function by creating widespread mistrust and paranoia, justifying extreme measures against "enemies of the state" and the "liberal media." As Hannah Arendt noted, modern masses "do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations," making them susceptible to consistent systems rather than observable facts.
The notion that truth naturally prevails in a "marketplace of ideas" fails when confronted with fascist politics. While John Stuart Mill argued that even false opinions should be aired because knowledge emerges from the "collision of truth with error," this assumes words are used only in their "descriptive, logical, or semantic sense." In fascist politics, language primarily elicits emotion rather than conveys information.
The Russian network RT's motto "Question More" exemplifies how presenting every possible perspective-from neo-Nazis to far leftists-doesn't produce knowledge but undermines the shared reality necessary for democratic deliberation. Productive disagreement requires common presuppositions; when conspiracy theories destroy this foundation, citizens can no longer evaluate information rationally. Instead, they turn to tribal identifications, personal grievances, and entertainment. News becomes spectacle with the strongman as its star.
Fascist politics creates a paradox where demagogues who openly lie are perceived as more authentic than those who adhere to norms of respect and honesty. Politicians exploit resentment through coded language, redirecting anger toward minority groups rather than economic elites. In response to perceived political hypocrisy, voters crave politicians who "tell it like it is." Rather than championing democratic values, some politicians signal authenticity by openly rejecting them-siding with one group over another or brazenly lying.
The destruction of shared reality is perhaps fascism's most insidious achievement. When citizens can no longer agree on basic facts, democracy becomes impossible. Without common ground, we cannot deliberate, compromise, or hold leaders accountable. In this information vacuum, power alone determines what's "true," and the strongman's voice becomes the only authority.
Chapter 6
Hierarchy: Nature's Supposed Order
Fascist ideology exploits humanity's tendency to organize hierarchically, presenting these arrangements as immutable natural law rather than social constructions. While liberal citizenship has historically expanded to include all races, religions, and genders, fascism insists that nature imposes hierarchies incompatible with democratic equality. These hierarchies function as mass delusions, studied by social psychologists as "legitimation myths." Fascists invoke nature to justify placing certain traditions and groups over others, claiming that equality violates natural order.
Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens' 1861 Cornerstone Speech exemplifies fascist logic by declaring that the Confederacy was founded on "the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man." He claimed abolitionists were "warring against a principle" by "attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal." This reasoning continues in modern discourse through academics who call for "reasoned discourse" about genetic differences between races in intelligence or violence propensity.
In modern politics, fascist hierarchies manifest through distinctions between "deserving" and "undeserving" citizens. During the 2016 election, Trump supporters often expressed disdain for "undeserving" recipients of government assistance, typically coded language for racial distinctions. When pressed, Americans using such vocabulary invoke "hardworking" versus "lazy" rather than explicit racial terms, but this language has historically associated blackness with laziness. Such reasoning fundamentally misunderstands liberal democracy, which holds that all citizens deserve basic goods regardless of perceived work ethic.
Those who argue for inherent differences between groups while claiming to value equal dignity face a historical contradiction. As W.E.B. Du Bois noted regarding women's exclusion from democracy, believing in hierarchical differences inevitably undermines equal treatment. Critics from both left and right challenge liberalism: leftists argue it fails to remedy historical inequalities, while right-wing critics warn that equality threatens the privileged status of dominant groups.
Fascist politics exploits this tension, portraying liberal equality as a Trojan horse that allows marginalized groups to seize power. Empires in decline are particularly susceptible to fascist politics due to the sense of lost status and national humiliation. This explains why Donald Trump's politics resonated in 2016 as American imperial power waned-when hierarchy collapses, fascist politics thrives on the resulting sense of victimization among formerly dominant groups.
The appeal of natural hierarchy is its simplicity. Rather than wrestling with complex historical injustices or addressing systemic inequalities, natural hierarchy offers a comforting explanation: the world is ordered as it should be. Those at the top deserve their position; those at the bottom deserve theirs. By anchoring these hierarchies in nature rather than human choices, fascism attempts to place them beyond political debate or moral questioning.
Chapter 7
Victimhood: The Powerful as the Persecuted
In fascist politics, equality and discrimination become deliberately confused. When the 1866 Civil Rights Act granted minimal rights to freed slaves, President Andrew Johnson vetoed it as "discrimination against the white race." This pattern continues today, with many white Americans believing they face more discrimination than minorities despite vast economic inequality. Research shows dominant groups experience increasing minority representation as threatening, with studies revealing that merely mentioning America's coming "majority-minority" demographic shift increases white Americans' support for right-wing policies.
Historically, oppressed groups have formed nationalist movements as responses to discrimination, but these equality-driven movements differ fundamentally from fascist nationalism. The anguish of losing privileged status can feel like genuine marginalization to those accustomed to dominance-when holidays, media representation, or gender roles shift toward equality, dominant groups experience this as oppression.
Fascist propaganda exploits this genuine sense of loss into aggrieved victimhood to justify oppression. The Men's Rights movement exemplifies this dynamic-middle-class white men feeling victimized despite their continued societal advantages. Manufacturing victimhood among majority populations allows fascist politics to direct anger at innocent groups.
Serbian nationalism demonstrates how genuine historical oppression can be weaponized against marginalized populations. When powerful groups appropriate the language of victimhood, they obscure the contradiction between equality and dominance. Nationalism creates dangerous "them" categories against which national identity is defined, as seen in Orban's portrayal of Christian Europe under threat from immigrants.
What makes this inversion of victimhood so effective is that it contains a kernel of emotional truth. When accustomed privilege erodes, the psychological experience genuinely feels like persecution. The fascist leader validates these feelings, transforming them into righteous anger directed at convenient scapegoats. By positioning the dominant group as victims requiring protection, fascist politics justifies increasingly extreme measures against "oppressors"-who are, ironically, society's most vulnerable members.
This victimhood narrative serves another crucial function: it absolves the dominant group of responsibility for addressing historical injustices. If you're already a victim, you can't possibly be expected to make amends for past wrongs. The fascist leader thus liberates followers from both historical guilt and present responsibility, offering the seductive promise of righteous innocence.
Chapter 8
Law and Order: Criminalizing the Other
In fascist politics, "law and order" rhetoric divides citizens into two classes: those of the chosen nation, inherently lawful by nature, and those who are inherently lawless. This division targets women outside traditional gender roles, minorities, homosexuals, immigrants, and religious outsiders as violations of law and order by their very existence. By portraying certain groups as threats to law and order, demagogues create a strong sense of national identity requiring protection from these supposed threats.
The National Socialist movement exemplifies fascist identity formation through criminalization. Beginning in the 1880s, the volkisch movement defined German identity in contrast to Jews, portraying them as threats to law and order. By 1936, Jews with minor infractions like traffic violations were labeled "criminals" and sent to concentration camps. This pattern repeats today, as seen in Switzerland's 2016 referendum to expel immigrants with minor violations and Trump's rhetoric about "criminal aliens."
Psychologists have identified how we describe actions differently depending on whether someone is "us" or "them." When "one of us" does something bad, we describe the action concretely ("stealing a chocolate bar"). When "one of them" does the same thing, we describe it abstractly, attributing character flaws ("he's a thief"). The reverse applies to good actions. This linguistic bias reveals and reinforces group boundaries, with terms like "criminal" marking people as permanent outsiders rather than individuals who made mistakes.
Political protests by marginalized groups are often mischaracterized as "riots," while similar actions by dominant groups receive more sympathetic framing. James Baldwin noted that white uprisings against oppression made participants "heroes," while black resistance branded them as "savages." This misrepresentation enabled Nixon's 1968 "law and order" campaign, which laid groundwork for mass incarceration. Media analysis shows right-wing outlets use "riot" far more frequently than "protest" when covering black political demonstrations.
From 1980 to 2013, America's prison population exploded from half a million to 2.3 million, disproportionately affecting Black Americans. Despite being only 13% of the U.S. population, Black Americans represent 9% of the world's prison population. This occurred while crime rates were dropping-similar to Canada's experience, which saw no comparable increase in incarceration.
From Hoffman's 1896 "Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro" to the 1996 "Body Count" with its "super-predator" theory, pseudoscientific literature has persistently linked criminality with Black Americans. DiIulio's super-predator theory, despite contradicting actual falling crime rates, greatly influenced public discourse and policy, contributing to juveniles being charged as adults-with Black juveniles disproportionately affected.
Jennifer Eberhardt's research demonstrates how racial propaganda affects perception and judgment: subjects shown more Black faces were significantly less likely to support reforming California's draconian three-strikes law. This propaganda ultimately casts certain groups as irredeemable threats to the nation's purity, particularly through the crime of rape, which raises sexual anxiety and creates a perceived need for protection by fascist authority.
Chapter 9
Sexual Anxiety: Fear as Political Weapon
If the demagogue serves as father of the nation, then threats to patriarchal manhood and traditional family undermine the fascist vision of strength. Fascist propaganda promotes fear of interbreeding and race mixing, characteristically magnifying this fear by sexualizing the threat of the "other." Transgender individuals and homosexuals are used to heighten anxiety about traditional male gender roles, especially effective when economic forces already threaten these roles.
In post-WWI Germany, propaganda about supposed mass rapes by African soldiers serving with French occupation forces was widely disseminated, particularly resonating in "the racially sensitive" United States. This propaganda attracted significant American support, including a Madison Square Garden rally drawing 12,000 people. Hitler himself promoted the conspiracy theory that Jews orchestrated these imagined rapes to destroy the "white race" through "bastardization"-a theory shared by the American KKK in the 1920s.
Angela Davis identifies the fraudulent rape charge as "one of the most formidable artifices invented by racism" in American history. Southern politicians like Senator Benjamin Tillman and Rebecca Latimer Felton promoted hysteria about Black men as sexual predators to justify lynching. Despite Ida B. Wells's documented findings that most lynching victims weren't even accused of rape, white Americans remained convinced of this fabricated epidemic, using sexual anxiety to mask deeper insecurities about accepting Black citizens as equals.
Trans women pose a particular threat to patriarchal ideology because they "choose" femininity despite inheriting male privilege, casting doubt on male supremacy. Politicians foment hysteria about trans women as a manifestation of fascist tactics. The politics of sexual anxiety undermines liberal democracy by presenting freedom and equality as threats-portraying gender expression, abortion rights, and intermarriage as dangers to traditional families and men's protective role. This tactic allows fascist politicians to attack liberal democratic ideals without explicitly rejecting them.
Sexual anxiety provides fascist politics with its most visceral emotional fuel. By portraying certain groups as sexual threats to women and children of the dominant group, fascist leaders activate primal protective instincts. This transforms political opposition into a moral imperative-protecting "our women" becomes synonymous with defending the nation itself. The language of contamination, pollution, and purity that characterizes fascist rhetoric about race finds its most powerful expression in sexual terms, where racial mixing becomes not just undesirable but an existential threat to national identity.
Chapter 10
The Rural Heartland vs. Urban Corruption
Fascist politics portrays cities as sites of sexual deviance and corruption, drawing on biblical imagery of Sodom and Gomorrah as places of sexual sin. Cities represent decadence where homosexuality, race mixing, and other "sins" against fascist ideology flourish.
Hitler's writings reveal his hatred for cosmopolitan cities like Vienna, which he described as a "poisonous snake" dominated by Jews and racial mixing. In Nazi ideology, pure German values were rural values, while cities were sites of racial defilement. The Nazi party officially declared farmers "the main bearers of a healthy folkish heredity, the fountain of youth of the people, and the backbone of military power," positioning family farms as the cornerstone of national values.
The rural-urban divide remains a fertile ground for demagogues today. In Minnesota's 2014 elections, Republicans capitalized on rural voters' perception that "big-city Democrats were inflicting their values on small towns while hoarding the spoils of the state treasury," despite metro areas actually generating tax dollars that flow outward to rural areas. This mirrors fascist politics historically, where rural support for Nazism was extensive, particularly in areas with small farms, homogeneous social structures, and strong local solidarity.
Trump's campaign rhetoric about "crime-infested inner cities" despite historically low urban crime rates similarly follows fascist tradition of portraying cities as centers of disease containing despised minorities. Even in Turkey, Erdogan's increasingly authoritarian power depends on rural support, with all three largest Turkish cities voting against his 2017 referendum granting him dictatorial powers.
In fascist ideology, rural life embodies self-sufficiency and strength, contrasting with urban "parasites" dependent on the state. Hitler condemned welfare as "ridiculous and useless," while Nazi ideologue Richard Walther Darre argued that "true freedom is realized only in the rural agrarian life." Fascists promote large families with traditional gender roles, blaming cities for declining birthrates due to cosmopolitanism weakening the population. As Mussolini declared, "The city dies, the nation is made up of people who are old and degenerate."
Contemporary polling shows this divide persists-rural Americans are significantly more likely to blame poverty on "lack of effort" rather than "difficult circumstances" compared to urban residents. Fascist politics characteristically represents urban minorities as "parasites" living off rural labor, with Hitler describing Jews as avoiding "work with his hands" while "living off the sweat of his neighbors."
The rural-urban divide works so effectively because it maps onto genuine cultural and economic differences. Rural communities often do have stronger religious traditions, more homogeneous populations, and different economic challenges than urban centers. Fascist politics exploits these real differences, exaggerating them into moral absolutes and casting urban diversity as degeneracy rather than an alternative way of life. By glorifying an idealized rural past, fascist movements tap into genuine nostalgia while directing resentment toward convenient scapegoats.
Chapter 11
When Myths Become Reality
In fascist ideology, state support is reserved exclusively for members of the chosen nation-"us" not "them." This division became starkly visible in 2017 when many Trump voters who received hurricane relief in Texas questioned whether Puerto Ricans deserved similar aid, despite both being American citizens. The justification follows classic fascist reasoning: "they" are lazy, criminal, and untrustworthy with state funds, while "we" are hardworking and deserving.
What's most terrifying is how fascist movements transform myths into reality through policy. As Hannah Arendt observed, fascist propaganda deliberately transforms lies into reality-when German Jews were driven across borders as refugees, they appeared to confirm Nazi stereotypes about homeless parasites. This "fascist unreality" serves as a prelude to fascist policy, where those in power make their fantastical claims increasingly plausible.
Frantz Fanon precisely identified this mechanism: "It is the racist who creates the inferiorized." French colonial police treatment of Algerians created the very behaviors that reinforced stereotypes-anyone regularly stopped by police develops a "hunted, evasive look of distrust." America has its own history of policies that manufacture stereotypes. The stark disparity in incarceration rates between black and white men (one in three versus one in seventeen) is compounded by devastating post-release employment barriers.
Nixon's 1968 campaign shifted national focus from social justice to "law and order" despite declining incarceration rates. His administration abandoned Johnson's antipoverty programs in favor of punitive crime measures targeting urban black communities while building prisons at unprecedented rates. The combination of harsh crime policies with cuts to social welfare has created a self-reinforcing pattern of stereotypes and policies.
Labor unions represent a fundamental threat to fascist politics by creating solidarity across racial and ethnic lines. Fascist politicians understand this, which is why they target unions despite their rhetorical condemnation of "elites." Hitler explicitly attacked trade unions in Mein Kampf, claiming they hindered economic efficiency while serving Jewish and Marxist interests. The real reason fascists oppose unions is that they create mutual bonds along class lines rather than race or religion.
Right-to-work laws, now passed in twenty-eight states, originated in 1940s Texas through the explicitly racist efforts of Vance Muse and his Christian American Association. Muse openly declared himself "for white supremacy" and opposed unions because they forced white workers to call Black workers "brother." His organization advanced anti-union legislation using fascist rhetoric about communists seeking racial equality.
Hitler appreciated private enterprise for its hierarchical structure, seeing in the CEO-employee relationship a model for his leadership principle. He viewed democracy as "the principle of destruction" opposed to "the principle of achievement" represented by individual authority. The tensions between democratic norms and economic hierarchy create ongoing struggles in liberal democracies.
Fascism promises to resolve these tensions by making all institutions follow the Fuhrer Principle, where the father leads the family, the CEO leads the business, and the authoritarian leader leads the state. When voters yearn for a CEO as president, they respond to implicit fascist impulses. Fascist politics simplifies existence by creating a "them" whose supposed laziness highlights "our" virtue, encouraging identification with forceful leaders who denigrate democratic institutions.
The mechanisms of fascist politics build upon each other, weaving a myth distinguishing "us" from "them" based on a romanticized fictional past. "They" are portrayed as lazy criminals who mask destructive goals with liberal language, while "we" are industrious and law-abiding. The threat of normalizing fascist myths is real-as research shows, previously unacceptable behaviors gradually come to be seen as less bad and less worthy of outrage.
Today, we've normalized extreme policies like racialized mass incarceration and the brutal treatment of refugees. Fascist politics lures audiences with promises of freedom while masking that its alternative can't sustain a stable nation. Given climate change, social instability, and economic inequality, we face growing refugee movements that fascist leaders will recast to fit racist stereotypes. By refusing to be bewitched by fascist myths, we remain free to engage with one another as flawed but fully human.
