More relevant than ever at six years old - How fascism works
"The three pillars of fascism [...](1) Demonization of domestic enemies [...](2) Preposterous lies [...](3) Contempt for democratic institutions [...]MAGA is fascism At this point, the main reason why most Democrats and the media haven’t clearly declared that MAGA is a form of fascism is that, unlike the 1920s and 30s, the movement’s apparent leaders are clowns. Donald Trump? Rudy Guiliani? Marjorie Taylor Greene? They’re far more like Colonel Klink than Hermann Göring. P - But Trump and his cronies don’t really run MAGA. Right-wing media, especially social media, have turned so many conservatives into fascist mythology-believing extremists that candidates have to mirror that extremism to win Republican primaries; nearly every Republican candidate who rejects fascist lies is doomed. In other words, the real leaders of the movement, the billionaires who finance extremist media, are as clever and determined as any fascists from history. P - So sorry that MAGA leaders are upset to be called fascists. Sure, it’s a slap across the face. But the mainstream media, pundits and average Americans need that slap. Millions of Americans are simply unaware of the danger we face; they don’t know the stakes. ————- *** Condensed from Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works: the politics of us and them..."
Related: "Loyalty czars." As God created ordinary people in his own image, will Trump recreate the U.S.A. in his. [...] [...]While editing Project 2025, Paul Dans and Steven Groves had assistance from 34 authors, 277 contributors, a 54 member advisory board and a coalition of more than 100 conservative organizations (including ALEC, The Heartland Institute, Liberty University, Middle East Forum, Moms for Liberty, NRA, Pro-Life America, and the Tea Party Patriots). P - Project 2025 represents a serious effort to make America a fascist country if Trump returns to the White House. The Trump campaign recently posted (and later deleted) a video on Trump’s Truth Social media account depicting the former president’s 2025-2029 administration as a “Unified Reich.” (That phrase evokes Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, which ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945.) https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174576309
A Yale philosopher on fascism, truth, and Donald Trump.
by Sean Illing Updated Dec 16, 2018, 3:06 AM GMT+11
Nearly 100,000 Nazi storm troopers are gathered to listen to a 1933 speech by Adolf Hitler on “Brown Shirt Day.” Shutterstock
“Fascism” is a word that gets tossed around pretty loosely these days, usually as an epithet to discredit someone else’s politics.
One consequence is that no one really knows what the term means anymore. Liberals see fascism as the culmination of conservative thinking: an authoritarian, nationalist, and racist system of government organized around corporate power. For conservatives, fascism is totalitarianism masquerading as the nanny state.
A new book by Yale philosopher Jason Stanley .. https://www.amazon.com/How-Fascism-Works-Politics-Them/dp/0525511830 .. is the latest attempt to clarify what fascism is and how it functions in the modern world. Stanley focuses on propaganda and rhetoric, so his book is largely about the tropes and narratives that drive fascist politics.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
Almost everyone means something different when they use the word “fascism.” What do you mean by it?
Jason Stanley
I think of fascism as a method of politics. It’s a rhetoric, a way of running for power. Of course, that’s connected to fascist ideology, because fascist ideology centers on power. But I really see fascism as a technique to gain power.
People are always asking, “Is such-and-such politician really a fascist?” Which is really just another way of asking if this person has a particular set of beliefs or an ideology, but again, I don’t really think of a fascist as someone who holds a set of beliefs. They’re using a certain technique to acquire and retain power.
Sean Illing
So fascism isn’t a discrete category — it’s a spectrum? Or a sliding scale?
Jason Stanley
Right. And my book identifies the various techniques that fascists tend to adopt, and shows how someone can be more fascist or less fascist in their politics. The key thing is that fascist politics is about identifying enemies, appealing to the in-group (usually the majority group), and smashing truth and replacing it with power.
“Freedom requires truth, and so to smash freedom you must smash truth”
Sean Illing
We’ll get into some more of those techniques, but I’m curious why you think fascism is so hard to pin down as an ideology. People on the left see fascism as the endpoint of right-wing reactionary thinking, and people on the right see fascism as nanny-state totalitarianism. Obviously, it can’t be both of these things.
Jason Stanley
I think it’s clearly right-wing. Part of the problem is that “right” and “left” are tricky to talk about, and it’s true that there are dangerous forms of extremism on both sides, but fascism tilts pretty heavily to the right in my view.
Featured Videos From Vox Why you get colder as you get older And the special kind of fat that kids have more of.
If you think about fascism as a sliding scale, ordinary conservative politics is going to find itself somewhere on that scale — which is not to say that it’s fascist at all, any more than ordinary Democratic politics is communist. But just as extreme versions of communism suppress liberty on behalf of radical equality, so too do extreme versions of right-wing politics, namely fascism, suppress liberty in favor of tradition and dominance and power.
Sean Illing
Your specialty is propaganda and rhetoric, and in the book you describe fascism as a collection of tropes and narratives. So what, exactly, is the story fascists are spinning?
Jason Stanley
In the past, fascist politics would focus on the dominant cultural group. The goal is to make them feel like victims, to make them feel like they’ve lost something and that the thing they’ve lost has been taken from them by a specific enemy, usually some minority out-group or some opposing nation.
This is why fascism flourishes in moments of great anxiety, because you can connect that anxiety with fake loss. The story is typically that a once-great society has been destroyed by liberalism or feminism or cultural Marxism or whatever, and you make the dominant group feel angry and resentful about the loss of their status and power. Almost every manifestation of fascism mirrors this general narrative.
“We’re not on the brink of some fascist takeover. But there are reasons to be concerned, and we should always be on guard — that’s the lesson of history.”
Sean Illing
Why is the destruction of truth, as a shared ideal, so critical to the fascist project?
Jason Stanley
It’s important because truth is the heart of liberal democracy. The two ideals of liberal democracy are liberty and equality. If your belief system is shot through with lies, you’re not free. Nobody thinks of the citizens of North Korea as free, because their actions are controlled by lies.
------ [Insert: livefree_ordie, Your lack of empathy for all of those who have felt some discomfort with the gender assigned to them at birth is not surprising. You do come across as a rather unenlightened conservative. Why no understanding... [...]You will never ever livefree if you don't keep up with science. And change. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174317473
Truth is required to act freely. Freedom requires knowledge, and in order to act freely in the world, you need to know what the world is and know what you’re doing. You only know what you’re doing if you have access to the truth. So freedom requires truth, and so to smash freedom you must smash truth.
Sean Illing
There’s a great line from the philosopher Hannah Arendt, I think in her book about totalitarianism .. https://www.amazon.com/Origins-Totalitarianism-Hannah-Arendt/dp/0156701537 , where she says that fascists are never content to merely lie; they must transform their lie into a new reality, and they must persuade people to believe in the unreality they’ve created. And if you get people to do that, you can convince them to do anything.
Jason Stanley
I think that’s right. Part of what fascist politics does is get people to disassociate from reality. You get them to sign on to this fantasy version of reality, usually a nationalist narrative about the decline of the country and the need for a strong leader to return it to greatness, and from then on their anchor isn’t the world around them — it’s the leader.
Sean Illing
This is partly why I think of fascism as a kind of anti-politics. I remember reading a quote from Joseph Goebbels .. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/02/06/fascinating-fascism/ , who was the chief propagandist for the Nazis, and he said that what he was doing was more like art than politics. By which he meant their task was to create an alternative mythical reality for Germans that was more exciting and purposeful than the humdrum reality of liberal democratic politics, and that’s why mass media was so essential the rise of Nazism.
Jason Stanley
That’s so interesting. The thing is, people willingly adopt the mythical past. Fascists are always telling a story about a glorious past that’s been lost, and they tap into this nostalgia. So when you fight back against fascism, you’ve got one hand tied behind your back, because the truth is messy and complex and the mythical story is always clear and compelling and entertaining. It’s hard to undercut that with facts.
Sean Illing
This is probably a good time to pivot to the glittering elephant in the room: Donald Trump. Is he a fascist?
Jason Stanley
I make the case in my book that he practices fascist politics. Now, that doesn’t mean his government is a fascist government. For one thing, I think it’s very difficult to say what a fascist government is.
For another thing, I think the current movement of leaders who use these techniques (Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Viktor Orbán in Hungary .. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/9/13/17823488/hungary-democracy-authoritarianism-trump .. , to name a few) all seek to keep the trappings of democratic institutions, but their goal is to reorient them around their own cult of personality.
---- [Att: B402 - Understanding Today’s Populism as Ethnic Nationalism " Far-Right Extremism Is a Global Problem 'What’s New About the New Authoritarianism? Three recent books considering 21st-century political systems arrive at very different answers to these questions. One demonstrates how today’s autocrats prefer manipulating their citizens to outright repression; it may be the most sophisticated and robust account of the new alternatives to democracy. Another identifies mistakes that liberal democracies keep making with regard to the new autocrats. And the last points to a supposed factor in the decline of democracy—increasingly diverse societies and the difficulties of dealing with them—without arguing that democracies are necessarily doomed. [...]There is a widespread sense that today’s autocracies differ from previous dictatorships in that rulers ruthlessly concentrate power but do not officially abolish institutions such as parliaments. Nor do they actually disavow democracy, for that matter. Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman’s Spin Dictators substantiates this intuition with data. Guriev and Treisman, social scientists who specialize in Russia, distinguish between “fear dictatorships,” a more traditional model relying on terror to enforce ideological conformity, and “spin dictatorships,” a newer kind that refrain from widespread repression but that ensure a change of power is nearly impossible."" https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174490843] ----
Again, I wouldn’t claim — not yet, at least — that Trump is presiding over a fascist government, but he is very clearly using fascist techniques to excite his base and erode liberal democratic institutions, and that’s very troubling.
But the blame there is as much on the Republican Party as it is on Trump,because none of this would matter if they were willing to check Trump. So far, they’ve chosen loyalty to Trump over loyalty to rule of law.
“Part of what fascist politics does is get people to disassociate from reality”
Sean Illing
In the book, you imply that there’s something inherently fascist about American politics, or at the very least that fascism has always been a latent force in America. Can you elaborate on that?
Jason Stanley
Well, the Ku Klux Klan deeply affected Adolf Hitler. He explicitly praised the 1924 Immigration Act .. https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/immigration-act , which severely limited the number of immigrants allowed to enter the US, as a useful model.
The 1920s and the 1930s was a very fascist time in the United States. You’ve got very patriarchal family values and a politics of resentment aimed at black Americans and other groups as internal threats, and this gets exported to Europe.
----- [ American Nazism and Madison Square Garden ------ from previous here .. "Team Trump’s axis with Hitler’s American friends: The ex-president’s family and allies are teaming up with Nazis and antisemites "Trump Doral speaker Scott McKay, who has a streaming show on Rumble, has claimed that Jewish people orchestrated 9/11 and were responsible for the assassinations of Presidents Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and William McKinley. He has also said that Jewish people routinely torture children and eat their hearts. Trump Doral speaker Charlie Ward, who also streams a show on Rumble,..." [...] One, Scott McKay, claims that Jews were behind 9/11 and the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, [...]April 14, 1921 Top Image: German American Bund rally New York, Madison Square Garden, February 1939. Image courtesy of the Department of Defense. P - The birth of American fascism is nearly impossible to identify within the context of history. The American fascist movement in the 1930s and early 1940s, until recently, was arguably the most organized attempt to bring Nazism to the forefront of American society. While not the earliest pro-Nazi American organization, the German-American Bund was one of the most successful. The Bund was founded in 1936 with a goal to empower German-American citizens to spread Nazi ideology in the United States and to create an American counterpart to the German Nazi Party. The culmination of the German American Bund’s work would be a February 20, 1939 rally at Madison Square Garden in Midtown Manhattan where 22,000 members gathered amidst a flurry of American and Nazi imagery. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174098215] -----
So we have a long history of genocide against native peoples and anti-black racism and anti-immigration hysteria, and at the same time there’s a strain of American exceptionalism, which manifests as a kind of mythological history and encourages Americans to think of their own country as a unique force for good.
This doesn’t make America a fascist country, but all of these ingredients are easily channeled into a fascist politics.
Sean Illing
And yet at the same time there are countervailing forces that push us in the opposite direction, and so America exists in this perpetual tension between liberal democracy and reactionary fascism.
Jason Stanley
Absolutely. America is exceptional in good ways as well.
We have an exceptional devotion to liberty and equality, as embodied in our struggle for civil rights and our fight against fascism in World War II. I’m corny about these things, and I believe America has had truly great moments and has made a lot of progress.
But, as you said, the fascist threat is always lurking, and we just have to be aware of it.
Sean Illing
What does your book have to say about the way forward? If we are indeed threatened by fascist movements, both here and abroad, what can citizens and governments do about it?
Jason Stanley
We should heed the warning of the poem on the side of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum .. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/martin-niemoeller-first-they-came-for-the-socialists , which says, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not Jewish. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.” At a certain point it’s too late.
We learned first from that poem who the targets are. The targets are leftists, minorities, labor unions, and anyone or any institution that isn’t glorified in the fascist narrative. And even if you’re not in any of those groups, you have to protect those who are, and you have to protect them from the very beginning. Simple acts of courage early on will save you impossible acts of courage later.
To be clear, this isn’t alarmist. We’re not on the brink of some fascist takeover. But there are reasons to be concerned, and we should always be on guard — that’s the lesson of history. Our weapons are our high ideals of liberty and equality, and we have to fight to keep those American ideals.
We’re fortunate enough to have liberty and equality baked into our founding ideals. We have a long history of people appealing to those ideals and saying, “We might disagree on a number of things but we agree that truth, liberty, equality are things we stand up for.” So whatever happens, we have to continually double down on those ideals — that’s what will save us.
This article was originally published on September 19, 2018.
This is the reason some people are drawn to “strongmen” leaders
CNN
165,335 views Feb 25, 2022 Political scientist & author Brian Klaas says “strongmen” leaders like Vladimir Putin activate a template in the human brain, causing many to gravitate toward them. Klaas tells Reality Check’s John Avlon about his research into sociopaths - how they are naturally drawn to power and all too often, succeed in getting it.
How Chaos Theory Explains Trump’s Rise To Power | Amanpour and Company
Amanpour and Company
191,568 views Feb 7, 2024 #amanpourpbs In his new book, political scientist Brian Klaas asks whether every move we make could potentially produce a domino effect. With reference to the mathematical concept of chaos theory, Klaas draws attention to the fact that small, seemingly trivial events can have far-reaching consequences. The author speaks with Walter Isaacson about his belief that randomness shapes our world, from personal circumstances to geopolitical events.
Update: This one goes somewhat to Klaas's words in the 2nd video:
It's a long while since we played dominoes, and neither of us remembers much about the rules, but it has been interesting to see commentators polish up the Vietnam-era metaphor of the 'Domino Effect' to describe what has been happening in financial markets in recent weeks. Turn to Wikipedia to find a definition of the Domino Effect, and it suggests that it is "a simple chain reaction that occurs when a small change causes a similar change nearby, which then will cause another similar change, and so on in linear sequence". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_Effect
This suggests a flaw in the metaphor as currently used: the financial crisis—and several other challenges we now face—are non-linear. Maybe the appropriate metaphor for the moment lies in Chaos Theory instead. Relying on Wikipedia again, we are reminded that while the behavior of chaotic systems appears to be random, their dynamics are “fully defined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved”.
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
