Tag: Jason Stanley

Should we ever compare modern situations to Hitler’s fascism?

We originally posted this in 2018:

Good historians are extremely cautious about comparing problems–even very serious ones–to Nazism. Claiming that someone is “like Hitler” or “as bad as Hitler” cannot be done lightly. The enormity of the crimes committed by fascists in Europe before and during WWII is so overpowering that a slipshod or weak comparison diminishes both the horror of the Nazis and the credibility of the warning one is trying to raise in the present day.

So we were cautious when we heard about this short video by Jason Stanley, a philosophy professor at Yale, that’s been going around. But we feel it is on target, and so we link you to If you’re not scared about fascism in the U.S., you should be.

This post is even more relevant today, and we were never more furious and distraught at being right.

If the link doesn’t work, or you don’t have access to the NYT, here’s the outline, with terrible yet completely foreseen updates.

2018: Historian Jason Stanley begins by saying “it might seem like an exaggeration to call Trump a fascist: after all, he’s not imprisoning his own people without due process.”

2026 update: there will always be those who cling to what Trump and his lackeys are not yet doing, no matter how much what they are doing clearly demonstrate what they are eventually going to do.

2018: “Fascism begins when politicians conjure up faith in a mythic past supposedly destroyed by liberals, feminists, and immigrants. Fascists create an overwhelming sense of nostalgia for a past that is racially pure, traditional, and patriarchal.”

2026: We’re living this every day in America, where a white male straight Christian past that never happened must be our future. Which can also never happen, and the fascists know that, and they embrace the perpetual war this creates, because that gives people a sense that someone powerful should be in charge during wartime…

2018: “As long as he remains in power, everything is possible. Without him the whole system collapses.”

2026: And that’s why the U.S. will either have rigged mid-term elections this year or no elections at all.

2018: “Once you’ve got your mythic past, you need the next ingredient: division. Whether it’s citizens and foreigners, whites and blacks, fascists succeed by turning groups against each other. The Nazis said Jews had no value because they supposedly did not mental or physical work… When you divide, it’s easier to control.”

2026: The obvious relevance of this to the war on people of color, all of whom are now treated as some kind of “immigrant” because America is naturally white, and on all women who must be reduced to service animals to bear white children, is infuriating.

2018: Then you attack the truth because truth is central to a free democracy. This creates a petrie dish of conspiracy theories… including that the “deep state” is trying to bring down Trump. With truth under attack and lies running wild, no one can agree on what’s true anymore, and fascists love that.

2026: We are now barricaded behind whatever we choose to believe is true, and those who believe fascism is truth walk our streets with submachine guns and unlimited license to kill.

2018: “I want you to be scared about encroaching fascism in America, because if you don’t, before long, it will start to feel normal. And when that happens, we’re all in trouble.”

2026: That has happened, and we’re all in trouble.

We all celebrated the holidays last month as if we still lived in a democratic America. We all talk about summer vacation and school, we commute to work and try to make our deadlines. We watch TV and shovel snow. Those things have to go on, maybe, but they should be what we do in our spare time, time we’re not devoting to fighting fascists in our government, local and state and federal.

Demand more of your elected officials. Attend protests. And be ready to fight right now to protect what should be our mid-term elections. Those happen locally, in your local school gyms and town halls. Don’t let anyone tamper with those elections, and if federal officials interfere, be ready to protest to whatever level is required to stop them.

Fascism is not entirely in place right now. Real Americans will put demolishing it ahead of any other work or concern in 2026.

Truth v. mythologizing the past

We were reading an interview with Jason Stanley, who has a new book out called How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. Of course when he mentioned truth v. myth, the HP’s bat senses were alerted:

Q: Anti-intellectualism has been present throughout much of American history. How is the kind of anti-intellectualism linked to fascist ideas different? Or is it the same?

A: Our suspicion of elites and what could be seen as anti-intellectualism can be healthy at times; we can see the American philosophical traditions of pragmatism and empiricism in this light, which can in fact serve as counterweights to the grandiose myths of fascist politics. But even this version has proven to be a weakness, one that makes us more susceptible to being manipulated politically. We have seen this play out in the case of climate change, where essentially apolitical scientists were successfully demonized as ideologues. We also have a history of what I think of as more classically fascist anti-intellectualism.

Fascist anti-intellectualism sets the traditions of the chosen nation, its dominant group, above all other traditions. It represents more complex narratives as corrupting and dangerous. It prizes mythologizing about the nation’s past, and erasing any of its problematic features (as we see all too often in histories of the Confederacy and the Reconstruction period, or of the treatment in history books of our indigenous communities). It seeks to replace truth with myth, transforming education systems into methods of glorifying the ideologies and heritage of the members of the traditional ruling class. In fascist politics, universities, which present a more complex and accurate version of history and current reality, are attacked for being places where dominant traditions or practices are critiqued. Fascist ideology centers loyalty to power rather than truth. In fascist thinking, the university is simply another tool to legitimate various illiberal hierarchies connected to historically dominant traditions.

If readers of the HP know anything, it’s that history is complex. That’s why we end up writing so many 12-part series on what seem like the simplest events. Anyone looking for a quick fix on the “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermon we all read in college or high school, or on the Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech, or “Who was Anne Hutchinson?” will look in vain for the “short version,” the crux of the argument, in the first 3 or even 4 posts. A lot of context has to be set to make sense of that crux when it does come.

So while the words “Welcome to our series on…” may strike boredom or terror in the hearts of HP readers, we feel that in the end that careful and thorough setting up of a problem or question or person or event is necessary. That’s all we have to say here.