[This book is a liberal analysis and critique of fascism. Reviewer
Shaw offers a critique.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

HOW FASCISM WORKS: THE POLITICS OF US AND THEM  
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Devin Zane Shaw
May 13, 2020
Marx & Philosophy Review of Books
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_ This book is a liberal analysis and critique of fascism. Reviewer
Shaw offers a critique. _

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_How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them_
Jason Stanley
Random House
ISBN 9780525511830

Jason Stanley’s _How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them_ is
a succinct book of philosophy written for a popular audience. It might
be the best-known contemporary book on fascism by a philosopher, if
not the best-known contemporary liberal antifascist critique of
fascism. Stanley focuses on how ‘fascist tactics [are used] as a
mechanism to achieve power’ (xiv). He identifies a number of (often
overlapping) discursive tactics common to fascist movements, all which
function to distinguish a community (‘us’) against outsiders
(‘them’) along supposed ethnic, religious or racial differences.
Each chapter is dedicated to one tactic: the trope of the mythic past,
the use of propaganda, anti-intellectualism, the erosion of common
standards of reasoned debate, anti-egalitarianism, the cultivation of
victimhood, law and order rhetoric, the sexual anxieties of
heteropatriarchy, anti-cosmopolitanism, and fascist attitudes toward
work (in short, their false theory of producerism and their opposition
to unions). Many of the themes will be familiar to scholars and
activists fighting fascism, and the point-by-point organization of the
argument is similar to Umberto Eco’s ‘Ur-Fascism.’ Nonetheless
_How Fascism_ _Works_ fails to integrate its compendium of instances
of fascist tactics and wide erudition into a compelling and complete
account of how fascism works and, _crucially_, how to fight it.

There are numerous threads within the argument that pose philosophical
problems that Stanley fails to resolve. Instead, they are truncated by
an assumption that is challenged by his own subsequent references and
citations. He writes: ‘I have written this book in the hope of
providing citizens with the critical tools to recognize the difference
between legitimate tactics in liberal democratic politics on the one
hand, and invidious tactics in fascist politics on the other’ (xvi).
But we should reject the assumption that there is a clear demarcation
between legitimate liberal norms and illegitimate fascist tactics­­
– especially in a settler-colonial society built upon the pillars of
black slavery and indigenous genocide and dispossession. Given the
long co-existence of liberalism and settler-colonialism, a better
application of liberal norms is not enough to extirpate the threat of
fascism. Instead, we need to extirpate the conditions that make
fascism in countries such as the United States or Canada possible:
settler-colonialism and capitalism themselves.

Though Stanley asserts a distinction between liberal norms and fascist
politics, he himself builds a case that upends the assumption that
there is a clear line demarcating liberalism and, given that _fascism_
is a misleading term in this context, the systemic white supremacy
that animates and perpetuates settler-colonialism. Upending this
assumption is crucial, because there is a not insignificant portion of
his readership who might be given to the belief that the threat of
fascism is extinguished if Donald Trump is defeated in the next
presidential election.

Stanley’s analytic method lapses into anachronism. By _analytic_, it
can be understood that the author begins with a definition of fascism
and then identifies which tropes, rhetoric or discourses are fascist
on the basis of this definition. He defines fascism as
‘ultranationalism of some variety (ethnic, religious, cultural),
with the nation represented in the person of an authoritarian leader
who speaks on its behalf,’ and thus typically those statements that
fulfil some condition(s) of this definition are henceforth considered
to be fascist (xvi). Even if we grant that this definition correctly
identifies fascism as an ideology, it omits any discussion of that
feature which distinguishes it from something like ‘merely’
ultranationalist dictatorship: a relatively autonomous and insurgent
(potentially) mass base. (This stipulation rests on arguments which I
elaborate elsewhere on the basis of discussions between militant
antifascists such as Don Hamerquist, J. Sakai, and Matthew N. Lyons)
(Shaw 2020). We will return to this problem, but for the moment
suffice it to say that once fascist rhetoric is untethered from its
historical conditions, it becomes more difficult to disambiguate it
from other forms of racism, heteropatriarchy and xenophobia. This
problem, which is manifest in Stanley’s anachronism, undermines our
ability to formulate how to fight fascism and systemic forms of
oppression, because organizing to combat far-right social movements
and organizing to fight systemic forms of oppression call for
different strategies.

Stanley makes three notable anachronistic moves in his discussion of
fascism; each refers to an instance of nineteenth-century American
racism. The first occurs in chapter two, in the midst of a discussion
of fascist propaganda. He notes that in the antebellum period,
Americans commonly celebrated the United States as a beacon of liberty
despite the ongoing dispossession of indigenous peoples and black
slavery because they shared the belief that these nonwhite peoples
‘were not suitable recipients of the goods of liberty’ (30). He
then immediately remarks that ‘this is classic fascist ideology with
a hierarchy of value of worth between races’ (30). Next, in chapter
four, when discussing how fascist ideology asserts social hierarchies
as the product of natural law, he analyzes the speech, now known as
the ‘Cornerstone Speech,’ that Alexander H. Stephens (the vice
president of the Confederacy) delivered in 1861. Finally, in chapter
six, while outlining how fascism cultivates the perception of
victimhood among ‘dominant groups at the prospect of sharing
citizenship and power with minorities,’ his first illustration of
this phenomenon references Andrew Johnson’s justification for
vetoing the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (95). Stanley observes: ‘As
W.E.B. Du Bois notes, Johnson perceived minimal safeguards at the
start of a path toward future black equality as “discrimination
against the white race”’ (93).

The crux of the present intervention rests on how we interpret these
anachronistic references to nineteenth-century American racism as
fascism. They are anachronistic because, while numerous scholars
categorize the first Klu Klux Klan (founded in 1865) as proto-fascist,
Stanley draws the historical timeline backwards, past Johnson, past
the Confederate Stephens, back to antebellum American ideology writ
large – which is not a historical periodization shared within the
scholarly consensus about fascism. It might be defensible (though, I
believe, still wrong) if he provided argumentation in favor of this
reclassification, but he does not. Indeed, he doesn’t acknowledge
the anachronism. If we were more analytically-inclined (in the sense
of the philosophical school), we might accept that Johnson or Stephens
used fascist tactics but then debate how many instances of fascist
tactics are sufficient for a fascist movement, but from our
perspective such a debate makes two fatal mistakes. First, it
conflates the conditions that make fascism possible in North America
with fascism itself; e.g. it conflates settler-colonialism and
anti-black racism with fascism, when the former are some of the
conditions that make the latter possible. Second, such a debate
assumes that fascist ideological tactics are _sufficient_ for the
emergence of a fascism, which occludes an analysis of fascism as an
insurgent (potentially) mass social movement.

We might suggest an alternative, militant approach derived in part
from the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, which is also a frequent point of
reference in Stanley’s book. Although Stanley cites both _Darkwater_
(1920) and _Black Reconstruction_ (1935), he does not engage with the
earlier book’s discussion of ‘the souls of white folk’ and
summarizes only in passing the description of the ‘public and
psychological wage’ of whiteness in _Black Reconstruction_ (21-23)_.
_In _Darkwater_, Du Bois proposes that whiteness is a social category
that signals both a right to dominion, sovereignty, or ownership
(consider, for example, what grounds settler-colonialism has to
dispossessing indigenous land _other_ than assertions of white
supremacy) and an entitlement to access to political and cultural
power (access to prestigious forms of work or education). Furthermore,
Du Bois argues that whiteness as we know it is the result of a late
nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century political compromise
between the bourgeoisie and the white working-class _against_ the
‘darker peoples’ around the globe – and, in a nutshell, this
interpellation of ‘personal whiteness’ animates far-right and
fascist movements.

There is a burgeoning literature within indigenous studies and
critical race theory that begins from a critique of whiteness along
the lines suggested by Du Bois, which demonstrates how whiteness as
possession and entitlement functions in the ongoing dispossession of
indigenous peoples and anti-black racism. In the American context,
Cheryl Harris observes that ‘after legalized segregation was
overturned, whiteness as property evolved into a more modern form
through the law’s ratification of the settled expectations of
relative white privilege as a _legitimate and natural baseline_’
(Harris 1993: 1714). In addition, prison abolitionists have argued
that the prison industrial complex perpetuates the caste system of
American segregation in a new form of Jim Crow.

A truly emancipatory, militant antifascism must reckon with the
conclusions of these fields and movements in both our organizing and
our critique of fascism. Though Stanley touches on these themes, he
nonetheless truncates his analysis of fascism, severing it from its
settler-colonial roots. As a result, one the one hand, he conflates
some institutional features of the North American settler-colonial
project with fascism, while on the other, he inflates the antifascist
credentials of contemporary liberal norms. By contrast, I contend that
settler-state hegemony is constituted through a compromise between
liberalism (or bourgeois democracy) and the forces of white supremacy
(Shaw 2020).

In general, the present system of institutionalized white supremacy,
capital accumulation, racism and heteropatriarchy poses a greater
danger to our communities than the insurgent forces of fascist
movements. But we also maintain that fascism emerges as a dangerous
social force, with some degree of relative autonomy within broader
settler-colonial hegemony, when white settlers perceive that their
interests are no longer advanced by bourgeois institutions. I propose,
therefore, the following thesis on the relationship between the
far-right and settler-colonialism: _Far-right movements are
system-loyal when they perceive that the entitlements of white
supremacy can be advanced within bourgeois or democratic institutions
and they become insurgent when they perceive that these entitlements
cannot._ But whether they are system-loyal or insurgent, far-right and
fascist movements demand the intensification and re-entrenchment of
the settler-colonial project itself. There is no meaningful sense in
which fascism can be defeated without overthrowing the conditions that
make it possible – in North America, those include capital
accumulation and settler-colonialism. Given their long historical
imbrication in settler-colonialism, merely appealing for a return to
liberal norms and ideals won’t make that happen.

 

References

* Harris, Cheryl 1993 Whiteness as Property Harvard Law Review Vol.
106, no. 8, pp. 1701-1791.
* Shaw, Devin Zane 2020 Philosophy of Antifascism: Punching Nazis
and Fighting White Supremacy London: Rowman and Littlefield
International

* Fascism
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* fascist ideology
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* U.S. history
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* white supremacy
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* Liberalism
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