Chapters 8, 9, 10, and the Epilogue
Summary by James R. Martin, Ph.D., CMA
Professor Emeritus, University of South Florida
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8. Sexual Anxiety
The politics of sexual anxiety is effective when traditional male roles are threatened in various ways. These include the crimes of rape and assault, and the fear of interbreeding and race mixing. Transgender individuals and homosexuals are used to increase the threat to the traditional male gender roles. This chapter includes a number of examples of how fascist politics uses the technique of sexual anxiety.
The author begins with German propaganda about the supposed rape of German women by French soldiers from African colonies. According to Hitler, Jews were promoting the use of black soldiers to rape pure Aryan women for the purpose of destroying the white race. This was also a conspiracy theory used by the American Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.
In the United States, the fraudulent rape charge is perhaps the most significant deception invented by racism. The practice of lynching black men in the U.S. was justified by alleging the need to defend the purity of white American women. Various books by Ida B. Wells countered this narrative of black rapist showing that the majority of black lynching victims were not even accused of rape.
Similar cases of the use of sexual anxiety have been repeated around the world. In 2017 the people of Rohingya suffered a similar fate when hundreds of villages were burned to the ground based on theories of Muslim sexual schemes to prey on Buddhist women. In India, Hindu nationalists have frequently called attention to a supposed threat Muslim men pose to Hindu masculinity, a "love jihad" that compelled Hindu women to convert to Islam by marriage and deception. In 2017 there was a report that Syrian refugees raped a five-year old girl. It grew out of a story in Twin Falls Idaho where three refugee boys aged seven, ten, and fourteen had some kind of sexual activity with a five-year old American girl. It is not clear there was any incident at all, and the police said the descriptions of it on the internet were 100 percent false. At the time this book was published Donald Trump was denouncing Mexican immigrants to the U.S. as rapists, and he continued to call immigrants rapist throughout the 2024 presidential election.
Men who are already anxious about increasing gender equality are easy targets for fascist politics that intentionally distort the source of fear that their family is under threat. The 2016 Bathroom Bill in North Carolina provides an example. The bill establishes that transgender individuals have to use the bathroom of their birth sex. It focuses on the supposed threat that transgender girls are likely sexual predators, and the bill is necessary to protect the women of North Carolina. But fascist politicians view the real threat of transgender girls as the threat to the fascist patriarchal family. Transgender girls distract from the ideals of patriarchy, hierarchy, and domination by physical power.
Fascist politicians cannot attack freedom and equality to achieve their goals, but they can use the politics of sexual anxiety as a way to undermine the ideals of liberal democracy without being viewed as doing so explicitly. By promoting homosexuals and transgender women as a threat to women and children they challenge the liberal ideal of freedom. Representing abortion as a threat to children, or one religion, or race as a threat is similarly a way to question the liberal ideal of freedom. The politics of sexual anxiety is a powerful technique to present freedom and equality as fundamental threats without explicitly appearing to reject them.
This chapter begins with a discussion from Mein Kampf related to why Hitler described cities like Vienna as a "poisonous snake." According to Hitler, cities are dominated and controlled by Jews who insult the traditional German culture, and include a mixture of different cultural and racial groups. Pure German values are rural values. Cities ruin the pure Nordic blood with a mixture of others. Hitler said cities are hotbeds of blood mixing and bastardization where maggots of the international Jewish community flourish and cause the decay of people. Hitler's denunciation of large cosmopolitan cities is standard fascist politics. The countryside is considered pure, and the true values of the nation are found in the rural population along with the backbone of military power.
More recently, the attitudes of those living in cities and those living in rural communities was illustrated in a 2017 Washington Post survey of seventeen hundred Americans. Forty-two percent of rural residents agreed with the statement that "Immigrants are a burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing and healthcare." Only 16 percent of urban residents agreed with the statement. During the 2016 presidential election Donald Trump's anti-immigration rhetoric was particularly popular in rural areas. Fascist politics focuses its message on the people outside large cities. The message is a mythical perception that city dwellers are living off the taxes of the hardworking rural population when in fact the typical metro area generates tax dollars that flow out to every part of the state. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump regularly referred to American cities as sites of carnage and blight, "burning and crime-infested inner cities of the U.S." During this time cities were at their lowest crime rates in generations with record low unemployment.
Fascist ideology rejects pluralism and tolerance of difference. Everyone in the chosen nation shares a religion and a set of customs. Rural life according to fascist politics is guided by self-sufficiency and not dependent on the state like the parasites in the city. Urban centers are a threat and classic enemy of fascist ideology.
Fascist movements view large families raised by dedicated homemakers as the goal. This explains their obsession with reversing declining birthrates that are blamed on the cosmopolitan population where men and women are less capable of completing their traditional gender roles. There is clear evidence of this ideology in the United States. In the 2017 poll mentioned above the responses of rural and urban residents were very different. When asked "In your opinion, which is generally more often to blame if a person is poor?" Forty-nine percent of rural residents agreed with the response "lack of effort on their part." Only 37 percent of urban residents chose the same response. At least part of the difference in the attitudes of urban and rural residents is that fascist politics represents minority populations residing in cities as parasites living off the honest hard work of rural populations.
10. Arbeit Macht Frei (Work shall make you free)
This chapter begins with a comparison of the Federal reactions to the 2017 hurricanes in Houston and Puerto Rico. Residents in Puerto Rico were left without power for months while Americans who got hurricane relief in Houston justified Trump's differential responses to the disasters as appropriate because Puerto Ricons were lazy and lacked a work ethic. The fascist view is that "they" can be cured of laziness by hard labor. That was the message on the gates of Auschwitz following the Nazi ideology that Jews were lazy, corrupt criminals who created no value. The fascist remedy is to dismantle the state and replace it with the nation where there is no welfare.
American opposition to welfare is derived from a commitment to individualism and an ethic of self-sufficiency. The American attitude toward welfare programs is based on their perception that black people are lazy. However, there is widespread ignorance of the fact that the majority of those who benefit from welfare programs are white. The main point is that fascist ideology uses hard work as a weapon against minority populations. The dichotomy of hard work versus laziness is used by fascist like law-abiding versus criminal to distinguish between "us" and "them." Fascist go further by attempting to transform myths about "them" into reality with social policy. Refugees coming across borders require state aid and support before entering labor markets. By sending refugees across borders into other countries fascist can create support for their claim that members of that group are lazy and dependent on state aid or petty crime. The author provides several examples of the idea that fascist politics and fascist policy are used together to create the perception of reality.
The history of policing and incarceration in the United States, and the white reaction to it explains how mass incarceration legitimizes negative group stereotypes. Black American men have a 1 in 3 chance of being incarcerated at least once in their lifetime. For white men it is 1 in 17. A person's history of incarceration is a negative credential, or a scarlet letter for employers. Studies show that both race and previous incarceration have a drastic effect on one's employment chances. Radicalized mass incarceration of black Americans is part of a long tradition of justifying the black population as lazy and supposedly unwilling to gain employment. Republican attempts to eliminate the U.S. social welfare state while simultaneously making the criminal justice system more punitive creates the conditions that allow racist stereotypes to flourish so that politicians can continue to exploit fascist tactics for political gain.
Labor unions provide a roadblock to the fascist agenda described above. The trade union is the chief mechanism a society has to bind different groups of people together by providing cooperation, community, and wage equality. Labor unions create mutual bonds related to class rather than race or religion. For this reason fascist politicians attack unions. Fascism requires individuals in a society to avoid or lose connections across differences. In addition, fascist politics is most effective when there is economic inequality. However, labor unions are the best antidote to mass inequality. Countries with high union density have low income inequality (Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Iceland) and the high inequality countries have low union density (U.S., Chile, Mexico, Turkey).
Today, "right to work" legislation forbids unions to collect dues from employees who do not wish to pay them, but require unions to provide employees who do not choose to pay dues equal union representation and rights. The purpose of the legislation is to destroy labor unions by removing the needed financial support. When this book was published 28 states had "right to work" laws with their anti-union agenda, i.e., to maintain the white racial hierarchy and prevent solidarity across races and religions.
Fascist movements are based on the idea that the division of society's resources should be based on pure free market competition, hard work, private enterprise, and self-sufficiency. Resources should go to "makers" not "takers." Those who do not compete successfully are not worthy of value. Propaganda to represent an out-group as lazy justifies placing them on a hierarchy of worth. Regulations that would protect consumers or workers, as well as protections provided by welfare programs and unions are antithetical to the fascist agenda.
The liberal democrat does not pit "makers" against "takers" in a competition for value. A generous social welfare system unites a community rather than dividing it into factions to exploit. Labor unions bring workers from different ethnic, religious, gender, and sexual orientation groups together to cooperate and bargain for a better deal. Democratic citizenship requires a degree of empathy, insight, and kindness that demands a great deal from all of us. Unfortunately, the pull of fascist politics is powerful, particularly under conditions of stark economic inequality that create an environment conducive to fascist demagoguery.
Donald Trump's continuing actions and speech that used to be considered remarkable have real and disturbing consequences because they are coming to be seen as more normal. In the United States we have seen normalization of extreme politics such as mass incarceration, and an increase in mass shootings. Normalization transforms the morally extraordinary into the ordinary. Fascist politics leads its audiences with the temptation of freedom from democratic norms while masking the fact that the alternative is not a form of freedom or a guarantee of liberty. It is instead a state-based ethnic, religious, racial, or national conflict between "us" and "them."
Increased climate change and political and social instability will create a growing global economic inequality and large movements of disadvantaged people across borders. Refugees, including legal immigrants will be treated as racist stereotypes by leaders using fascist politics. From the treatment of the direct targets of fascist politics (refugees, feminism, labor unions, racial, religious, and sexual minorities) we can see the techniques used to divide us. By refusing to be bewitched by fascist myths, we remain free to move in a different direction.
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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).