Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7
Summary by James R. Martin, Ph.D., CMA
Professor Emeritus, University of South Florida
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Contents, Introduction and Chapters 1, 2,
and 3 |
Chapters 8, 9, 10, and the Epilogue
Fascist politicians exchange reality for the pronouncements of a single individual or political party. A fascist leader attempts to replace truth with power making it impossible to assess arguments by a common standard. Specific techniques are used to alter or destroy information channels and break down reality. Using conspiracy theories is one of those techniques.
Conspiracy theories were common in Nazi Germany, and they are common today in many countries including Russia, Poland, and the United States. A conspiracy theory is focused on an out-group target to serve some in-group. Their function is to raise suspicion about the credibility of the target. For example, conspiracy theories are frequently used by fascist politicians to delegitimize the mainstream media by claiming that they are biased for not covering their false conspiracies.
A famous conspiracy theory became the basis of Nazi ideology. Although it was published under various titles (The Conspiracy, or The Roots of the Disintegration of European Society) it indicated that the Jews were at the center of a global conspiracy to control the mainstream media and the global economic system for Jewish interests. Hitler and the Nazi leaders believed this to be true.
Another more recent example is the "Pizzagate" conspiracy in the 2016 U.S. presidential election where leaked emails were said to describe trafficking of young children for sex with Democratic congressmen conducted from a pizzeria in Washington, D.C. The purpose of the theory was to connect Democrats to acts of extreme depravity. It was apparently believed by a man who showed up with a gun at a pizzeria in North Carolina to free the supposed sexual slaves.
Donald Trump became politically popular by attacking the media for not reporting on his "birtherism" conspiracy. As this example shows conspiracy theories are tools to attack those who would otherwise ignore their existence.
Poland's far-right party's conspiracy theory related to the 2010 plane crash carrying president Lech Kaczynski provides another example. Shortly after the crash PiS politicians began to promote the idea that Poland's moderate government and Russia were involved in a conspiracy to down the aircraft and cover up the crime. This and many other related theories were used to undermine faith in the country's institutions, the government, and the press. The purpose of conspiracies is to cause wide mistrust, justifying measures such as censoring or shutting down the liberal media and imprisoning "enemies of the state."
Another example involved George Soros, an American billionaire philanthropist who has been involved in democracy-building efforts in more than a hundred countries including Hungary. In 2017 Viktor Orban claimed that Soros was attempting to flood Hungary with non-Christian migrants to dilute the nation's Christian identity although there was no evidence that it was true. Orban was simply manipulating reality.
According to Hannah Arendt (in The Origins of Totalitarianism) conspiracy theories become important because the masses "do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself." Since people discount their own experience, the fact that the theories are demonstrably false is often unimportant.
Other examples of conspiracies include that Muslims are trying to transform Texas into an Islamic republic (following the theory that Obama is a secret Muslim pretending to be Christian to overthrow the U.S. government). However, the Texas conspiracy was taken seriously. House Bill 45 was signed by Texas governor Greg Abbott in June 2017 to block Muslims from bringing Sharia law into Texas.
In his defense of "freedom of speech" John Stuart Mill said that true belief becomes knowledge only when emerging from the din of argument, disagreement and discussion. However, this view of free speech is based on the assumption that conversation works by the exchange of reasons, where one party's reasons are countered by another party's reasons until the truth emerges. But fascist use language to elicit emotion, not reasons. Free speech works only if the underlying members of society accept the force of reason over the power of irrational thinking. Reason cannot be used to counter language that sows fear, accentuates prejudice, and calls for revenge against members of opposing groups.
Responsible media in a liberal democracy cannot give every opinion serious time for consideration since this would destroy the possibility for knowledge formation via deliberation. They must instead try to report the truth and resist the temptation to report on every possible fantastical theory. This prevents fascist politics from transforming the news from a conduit of information and reasoned debate into a spectacle with the strongman as the star. Fascist politics destroys the relations of mutual respect between citizens that are the foundation of a healthy liberal democracy.
Two things have eroded the protections that representative democracy is supposed to provide. First, candidates must raise huge sums of money to run for office, and as a result they represent the interest of their large donors. But they must pretend that they represent the common interest and the multinational corporations that help fund their campaigns. Second, some voters do not share democratic values and politicians must also appeal to this group. When large inequalities exist the problem becomes more difficult. Unmet expectations can be redirected against minority groups who are viewed as not sharing the country's dominant traditions. This causes many politicians to exploit resentment as in the Republican Party's Southern strategy against blacks, e.g., forced busing, states' rights, and cutting taxes.
One way a politician can appear to be sincere is to stand for the division and conflict, e.g., openly siding with Christians over Muslims, or native born Americans over immigrants, or whites over blacks. The more important point is that inequality poses a mortal danger to the shared reality required for a healthy liberal democracy. Extreme economic inequality is toxic to liberal democracy because it creates delusions that mask reality, and reduce the possibility for joint deliberation to solve society's problems. To completely destroy reality, fascist politics replaces the ideal of equality with hierarchy.
Most liberal thinkers have recognized a universal human status of dignity that includes the ability to feel physical suffering and emotions, and to express identity and empathy in multiple ways. However, fascist ideology is based on the view that nature imposes hierarchies of power and dominance that are inconsistent with the equality of respect assumed by liberal democratic theory. These hierarchies are mass delusions or legitimation myths that are studied under social dominance theory. There is a human tendency to organize societies hierarchically and fascist politicians promote this to legitimize their hierarchies as indisputable facts. Their main justification is that natural law places men over women, and members of the chosen fascist group over all other groups. The principles of liberty in the U.S. Constitution are considered as violations of the laws of nature.
The Confederacy, like Hitler's Reich was built to defend the principle of racial hierarchy. Fascist argue that natural hierarchies of worth exist and their existence undermines the obligation for equal consideration. Trump exploited the history of ranking Americans into a hierarchy of worth by race referring to the deserving versus the underserving. But the basis given for this distinction is typically hardworking versus lazy, clearly not a valid justification for separating individuals by race. Liberal democracy views everyone as equally deserving of the basic goods of society and there is no persuasive evidence for establishing hierarchies of worth based on gender, race, or ethnic groups.
According to fascists, political equality is an illusion given that nature requires one group to lead and dominate. They argue that liberals and Marxists promote the ideals of equality and liberty to get the dominant group to give up their power. Women's equality would destroy the patriarchal society that is the basis for the fascist myth. Hierarchy protects the patriarchal society, the argument against immigration, and the myth of the dominant groups superiority. The author believes that Trump's 2016 campaign was effective because it came at a time of decline for the American empire. During this period fascist politicians fed off the sense of victimization caused by a loss of hierarchal status. Fascist politicians thrive off the aggrieved loss and victimization that results from defending a sense of national superiority.
In 1866 The Civil Rights Act made black Americans U.S. citizens and protected their civil rights. Later that month President Andrew Johnson vetoed the legislation on the grounds that it discriminated against the white race. Today white Americans over estimate the progress that has been made toward racial equality between black and white Americans that is approximately at the point it was during the Reconstruction. The average black family has about 5 percent of the wealth of the average white family. However, there is a feeling of victimization by the white majority of eventually sharing power equally with members of minority groups. This perceived shift to a majority-minority country has significantly increased white Americans perception of a threat to their dominant status, and promoted their support for right-wing policies. Exploiting this feeling of victimization is another useful technique of fascist politics.
A sense of loss of status is manipulated by fascist politics into aggrieved victimhood and exploited to justify past, continuing, or new forms of oppression. Although there is strong evidence of how the system provides status to white Americans that is not available to black citizens, white nationalist propaganda found no racism against blacks in 2017 America. Fascist cover up structural inequality by inverting it, misrepresenting it, or subverting the effort to address it. Affirmative action was falsely represented as uncoupled from individual merit and a detriment to hardworking white Americans.
Some white men feel like victims because they are mislead by a mythical hierarchal past that creates unreasonable expectations. Fascist politicians use this to create a sense of victimization directing it at groups that are not responsible. This leads to attacks on these groups such as anti-immigrant propaganda representing them as threats to public health, law and order, or civilization in general.
Nationalism is the fundamental concept of fascism. Collective victimhood is used to create a sense of group identity that is by its nature opposed to liberal democracy. Fascist nationalism creates a dangerous group of "them" to guard against, battle with, and control to maintain or restore dignity to the in-group "us."
This chapter begins with Donald Trump's call for the execution of the "Central Park Five" in 1989. Five black teenagers who were arrested for the gang rape of a white woman jogger in New York City's Central Park. Although they were innocent and completely exonerated, Jeff Sessions praised president-elect Trump's 1989 comments about the five as a commitment to "law and order." Fascist law-and-order rhetoric is designed to divide citizens into two classes, those who are lawful by nature, and those who are naturally lawless. In fascist politics, natural violations of law and order include women who do not fit traditional gender roles, non-whites, homosexuals, immigrants, and those who do not embrace the dominant religion. This fascist rhetoric has created a strong sense of white national identity that requires protection from the nonwhite threat.
National socialism in Austria and Germany beginning in the 1880s provides a good example of ethnic nationalism. The movement was rooted in the notion of the purity of the German Volk where anti-Semitism was part of the definition, i.e., Volk were defined by contrast to the Jews who were the enemy and threats to law and order. Hitler later began by arresting all Jews with criminal records including traffic fines. In 2016 a right-wing group introduced a referendum in Switzerland to expel immigrants found guilty of as little as a few parking violations. In the U.S. Donald Trump won the 2016 presidency with a call to expel "criminal aliens" and he has continued to promote fear of immigrants by attempting to connect them to various crimes. Fascist politicians who describe whole categories of people as "criminals" assign a permanent character to "them" while simultaneously placing the fascist as the nation's protectors. This undermines the democratic process of reasonable decision making and replaces it with fear. Another twist of law and order rhetoric is to refer to political protest as riots. Fascist terminology changes attitudes and shapes policy.
Black Americans are much more likely to be incarcerated than white Americans even for the same crime (e.g., drug crimes), and the percentage of blacks incarcerated is much greater than the percentage of whites. Locking up blacks supposedly reduces crime, but studies indicate the opposite. Incarceration substantially increases crime rates because formerly incarcerated individuals have much greater difficulty finding employment. Studies also show that incarceration leads to more crime, not less.
Two books published a century apart provide examples of the pseudo science associated with black Americans: Frederick Hoffman's 1896 Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, and Body Count: Moral Poverty...and How to Win America's War Against Crime and Drugs published in 1996 by William Bennet, John Dilulio Jr. and John Walters. The thesis of the 1896 book is that black Americans are violent, lazy, and prone to disease. The thesis of the 1996 book is that a new generation of mostly young black men are prone to cruel violent acts and are incapable of honest work. These publications and others have contributed to a public culture where black juveniles are viewed as significantly more inclined to criminal behavior than white juveniles. However, W.E.B. Du Bois pointed out in 1898 that the evidence for proving definite conclusions about the tendencies of millions of American Negroes does not exist. But years of racist propaganda has resulted in the mass incarceration of Americans of African descent, and a massive over representation of this group in the U.S, prison system.1
Fascist propaganda goes further by emphasizing that targeted groups (e.g., blacks and immigrants) will rape members of the chosen nation and pollute its blood. Using the crime of rape is a basic technique in fascist politics because it raises sexual anxiety and the need for protection by the fascist authority.
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1 From the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners in 2022, Table 5. The incarceration rate of Black people is six times the rate of white people. The number of people incarcerated in state and federal prisons per 100,000 is 911 for Blacks, 801 for American Indians or Alaska Natives, 188 for Whites, 426 for Hispanics, and 71 for Asians.
Go to Chapters 8, 9, 10 and Epilogue
Related summaries:
Anonymous. 2019. A Warning: A Senior Trump Administration Official. Twelve: Hachette Book Group. (Summary).
Ben-Ghiat R. 2023. Epilogue in Rosenfeld, G. D. (Editor) and J. Ward (Editor). 2023. Fascism in America: Past and Present. Cambridge University Press. (Summary).
Eley, G. 2023. Liberalism in Crisis: What is Fascism and Where Does it Come from? in Rosenfeld, G. D. (Editor) and J. Ward (Editor). 2023. Fascism in America: Past and Present. Cambridge University Press. (Summary).
Martin, J. R. 2024. Distribution of U.S. Household Wealth 2024.
Martin, J. R. Not dated. Policies of a Second Trump Presidency.
Martin, J. R. Not dated. Summary of Trump's Seven Part Plan to Overturn the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election.
Rosenfeld, G. D. (Editor) and J. Ward (Editor). 2023. Fascism in America: Past and Present: Introduction and Contents. Cambridge University Press. (Summary).
Specter, M. and V. Venkatasubramanian. 2023. "America First": Nationalism, Nativism, and the Fascism Question 1880-2020 in Rosenfeld, G. D. (Editor) and J. Ward (Editor). 2023. Fascism in America: Past and Present. Cambridge University Press. (Note).
Weber, T. 2023. Anarchy and the State of Nature in Donald Trump's America and Adolf Hitler's Germany in Rosenfeld, G. D. (Editor) and J. Ward (Editor). 2023. Fascism in America: Past and Present. Cambridge University Press. (Summary).