Contents, Introduction, and Chapters 1, 2, and 3
Summary by James R. Martin, Ph.D., CMA
Professor Emeritus, University of South Florida
Note: The author focuses on what he refers to as the ten pillars of fascist politics and how they separate people into an "us" and "them." Some might prefer to call these pillars political techniques of far-right nationalism, or ultra-nationalism of some variety such as ethnic, religious, or cultural. However, whatever we call them, all of the techniques described in this book are used by Donald Trump and his supporters. Note also that fascism is a controversial topic and there have been many versions of fascism on both the left and the right (See Rosenfeld and Weber summaries below).
In the 1920s and 30s Lindbergh's views against immigration (particularly non-Europeans) were shared by many Americans. The America First movement was the face of pro-fascist sentiment in the United States at that time. The immigration Act of 1924 strictly limited immigration into the U.S. and was intended to restrict both nonwhites and Jews.
In 2016 Donald Trump revived the "America First" slogan and pursued travel bans on immigration singling out Arab countries. He also promised to deport millions of nonwhite undocumented workers from the U.S. and to end legislation protecting their children. Trump's campaign also referred to a vague point in history to "Make America Great Again." From 2016 comments by Steve Bannon, that point appears to be the 1930s when the U.S. had the most sympathy for fascism.
The author chose the label "fascism" to represent the various types of ultra nationalism, (e.g., ethnic, religious, cultural) that are guided by an authoritarian leader. The main emphasis of the book is on how fascist tactics are combined into a mechanism to achieve power. Fascist political strategies include: the mythic past, propaganda, anti-intellectualism, unreality, hierarchy, victimhood, law and order, sexual anxiety, appeals to the heartland, and the dismantling of public welfare and unity.
One of the dangers of fascist politics is the way it dehumanizes various segments of the population leading to the justification of inhumane treatment from repression of freedom to mass imprisonment and in some cases mass extermination. It should concern all Americans that Trump has explicitly insulted and attempted to dehumanize immigrant groups.
A most obvious symptom of fascist politics is division to separate the population into "us" and "them." The politics of division can appeal to ethnic, religious, or racial distinctions to shape ideology and policy.
Fascist justify their ideas by creating a mythic past to support their view of the present. This is accomplished by twisting ideals through propaganda and promoting anti-intellectualism that leads to a state of non-reality where conspiracy theories and fake news replace reasoned debate. Fascist ideology can then naturalize group difference providing the appearance of a hierarchy of human worth. Minority groups produce feelings of victimhood among the dominant population. Law and order politics follows when "us" lawful citizens are victimized by "them" lawless, lazy criminals who pose an existential threat to the nation by exploiting our welfare system. Sexual anxiety is also a typical component of fascist politics where the patriarchal hierarchy is threatened by a growing gender equity. Fascist politicians also view labor unions as corrupt institutions. Each fascist tactic builds on all the others.
In 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (lead by Eleanor Roosevelt) affirmed the dignity of every human being. It was a liberal democratic understanding of personhood to include the entire world community binding all nations and cultures to a shared commitment to value the equality of every person. It affirmed the right of every person to seek asylum. But refugees are again on the road everywhere and their plight reinforces fascist propaganda that the nation is under siege.
The purpose of developing a mythic past in fascist politics is to harness the emotion of nostalgia to the central tenets of fascist ideology, e.g., authoritarianism, hierarchy, purity, and struggle. The mythic past can be religiously pure, racially pure, culturally pure, or all of the above, but it has a common structure. It is designed with an extreme version of the patriarchal family, a time of glory of the nation with able-bodied loyal warriors whose wives were at home raising the next generation.
These myths become the basis of the nation's identity under fascist politics. They are usually based on fantasies of nonexistent uniformity with traditions of small towns that have not been polluted by the liberal decadence of cities. The past invariably involves traditional patriarchal gender roles, and authoritarian hierarchical ideology. The mythic past exist to help change the present.
Using the patriarchal family, the leader of the nation is analogous to the father of his nation. His authority derives from his strength. Gender roles are supported with reference to history. In European cultures (except for Jewish societies and some gypsy groups) women were traditionally regarded as property.
After Donald Trump made harshly demeaning comments about women in 2016, Mitt Romney (the Republican Party's 2012 presidential nominee) and Paul Ryan (Republican Speaker of the House) criticized Trump's comments, but their remarks described women in terms of subordinate roles in families as wives and daughters or objects of reverence. This shows that the patriarchal family in fascist politics is embedded in a larger narrative related to national traditions.
Fascist politics is a politics of hierarchy where in the United States white supremacy demands and implies a perpetual hierarchy that replaces reality by power. Convincing a population that they are rightfully exceptional is convincing them of a monstrous lie.
It is typical for fascist to develop a country's history as a narrative concocted by liberal elites to victimize the people of the true nation. Fascist politics repudiates dark moments of a nation's history. For example, in 2018 the Polish parliament passed a law making it illegal to suggest that Poland was responsible for any of the atrocities committed during the Nazi occupation of Poland. In France, the role of French police in rounding up French Jews to be sent to Nazi death camps was also covered up so that French children could be proud of being French again.
In the U.S. a mythologized history of a heroic Southern past was written with the horrors of slavery de-emphasized. Trump denounced the task of connecting this past to slavery as an attempt to victimize white Americans for celebrating their heritage. The U.S. narrative of the Reconstruction following the Civil War is another false history. Black men were allowed to vote after the war until Southern whites enacted laws that had the practical effect of banning black citizens from voting. The myth described this as necessary because black citizens were unable to self-govern. W.E.B. Du Bois's 1935 work, Black Reconstruction provides a refutation of the official history of the Reconstruction.
When the fascist politicians do not invent a past they instead cherry-pick the past avoiding anything that would diminish the nation's glory. However, honest debate about what a country should do, or what policies it should adopt needs a common basis of reality including its own past. Advancing a false narrative for political gain is transforming history into propaganda.
Propaganda is used by fascist to conceal their problematic goals by masking them with ideals that are widely accepted. Richard Nixon's "war on crime" provides a good example. Nixon used the rhetoric of "law and order" to conceal a racist political agenda. According to H. R. Haldeman (Nixon's chief of staff) Nixon said, "You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks."
"Draining the swamp" is a another frequent fascist tactic where publicizing false charges of corruption by the opposition is claimed while engaging in corrupt practices themselves. The fabricated charges of corruption that led to the end of Reconstruction provides a good example. The main argument was that poor white men were ruling and taxing rich men. The negro was named as the main cause of the corruption. When women attain positions of political power, or when Muslims, blacks, Jews, or homosexuals share the public goods of a democracy such as healthcare, that is perceived as corruption. Using anticorruption to mask their own corruption is a hallmark strategy of fascist propaganda.
Fascist politicians focus on dismantling the rule of law to replace it with the dictates of individual rulers. This includes harsh criticisms of an independent judiciary (e.g., accusations of bias) to replace independent judges with judges who will use the law as a way to protect the interest of the fascist ruler. In this way fascist politicians attack and diminish the institutions that would otherwise be expected to check fascism.
As fascist are attacking the rule of law they claim to protect freedom and individual liberties. A famous Fourth of July speech by Frederick Douglass in 1852 provides a classic fascist ideology with a hierarchy of value between the races. Douglass called out the hypocrisy of a country that practices human slavery while celebrating their country as the beacon of liberty. The native population, as well as the imported enslaved population from Africa were not suitable recipients of liberty. The Southern states instead used the concept of liberty to defend the practice of slavery by calling for "states rights."
Book 8 of The Republic argues that democracy is a self-undermining system with ideals that lead to its own demise. One of these ideals is freedom of speech, and fascist use this ideal to subvert others' speech. Free speech in a democracy facilitates public discourse about policy, but denouncing protest by insulting others is not what free speech is meant to protect. The author refers to a 2017 case where a man engaged in anti-Muslim insults involving two young women, and allegedly stabbed three people who tried to intervene. When he entered the courtroom to be arraigned he shouted "Free speech or die... You call it terrorism, I call it patriotism." This kind of speech destroys rather than facilitates the possibility for public discourse.
Fascist attack and devalue education, expertise, and language to undermine intelligent debate. In fascist ideology there is only one legitimate viewpoint that should be introduced to students as the dominant culture and mythic past. Education poses a threat to fascism unless it is under fascist control. Fascist politics attempts to undermine the credibility of institutions with independent voices of dissent to be replaced by media and other universities that embrace the fascist views. Charging universities with hypocrisy on the free speech issue is a common tactic. According to fascist politics, universities suppress any voices that don't lean left by allowing protests against them on campus. Legitimate protesters are accused of denying non-protesters of their own free speech. David Horowitz published a book listing 101 most dangerous professors in America and created a number of organizations to promote his ideas, e.g., hiring professors with conservative worldviews. The Trump administration pursued Horowitz's agenda by declaring campus free speech a vitally important topic. Horowitz denounced leftist as enemies of free speech.
Horowitz's free speech attacks on universities are not valid since universities in the U.S. are the freest domain of expression of any workplace. Free speech is a fantasy in private work-places where workers are regularly subjected to nondisclosure agreements, and workers can be fired for political speech on social media. Attacking universities for standing up for public reason and open debate is a manipulative propaganda tactic concealed under the cloak of those very ideals.
Fascist go further by denouncing entire areas of study including gender studies, African American studies, and Middle Eastern studies. For example, women's movements and feminism have been described as a Jewish conspiracy to destroy the fertility among Aryan women.
Fascist politics does leave room for the study of myths as fact. The function of the education system is to glorify the mythic past emphasizing the achievements of those who belong and obscuring the history and achievements of those who don't belong. The goal is to instill pride in the mythic past including the hierarchal norms and national traditions. Part of the fascist agenda is to stack schools and universities with teachers more sympathetic to the nationalist or traditional ideals. Efforts to shape curricula to nationalist ends are under way around the world, e.g., Hungary, Turkey, the United States. Fascist politicians reject the value of expertise to remove any requirement for sophisticated debate. For example, climate science is mocked by Trump and his administration.
The fascist goal of oration is not to convince the intellect, but to influence the will. Reasoning does not matter, but emotion does. The goal is to replace reasoned argument with irrational fears and passions. According to Steve Bannon, ..."Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls."
_________________________________
Related summaries:
Anonymous. 2019. A Warning: A Senior Trump Administration Official. Twelve: Hachette Book Group. (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).
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).