With How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, author Jason Stanley reminds us that any society is susceptible to fascist influences. Societies with widespread economic insecurity, such as today’s United States and much of Europe, are especially vulnerable to fascism. Stanley describes how fascism gains a foothold on power and entrenches itself in everyday life.
One thought that alarms me is that during the last great flourishing of fascism, it was primarily the Western liberal democracies that fought back and defeated the scourge of Nazism and fascism in general. Today, most of those countries that won the second world war are themselves now flirting with fascism. When fascism once again threatens world domination, will there be anyone left to fight back against it?
A couple passages in the book really stuck out for me. One was a quote from Mein Kampf:
All propaganda should be popular and should adapt its intellectual level to the receptive ability of the least intellectual of those whom it is desired to address. Thus it must sink its mental elevation deeper in proportion to the numbers of the mass whom it has to grip…. The receptive ability of the masses is very limited, and their understanding small; on the other hand, they have a great power of forgetting. This being so, all effective propaganda must be confined to very few points which must be brought out in the form of slogans.
I think that explains well the phenomenon of Trumpism. If there is any silver lining, it is that Trump’s narcissism prevents him from being able to fully exploit his fawning masses.
Stanley ends his final chapter with this:
Stark economic inequality creates conditions richly conducive to fascist demagoguery. It is fantasy to think that liberal democratic norms can flourish under such conditions.
Or, as Louis Brandeis once said:
We can have a democratic society or we can have the concentration of great wealth in the hands of the few. We cannot have both.
Given where this country is right now in terms of economic inequality, I think we’re treading on very dangerous ground.