Jacob Stanley: How Fascism Works
By uncovering disturbing patterns that are as prevalent today as ever, philosopher Jacob Stanley reveals in How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them that the stuff of politics—charged by rhetoric and myth—can quickly become policy and reality. Only by recognizing fascist politics, he argues, may we resist its most harmful effects and return to democratic ideals.
For this conversation Stanley is joined by Harvard associate professor of History Elizabeth Hinton.
Racism makes societies vulnerable to fascism
37:36
look I’m white but it’s in my
self-interest to fight against racism
because it opens my society to fascismAre economics responsible for fascism?
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for family issues back in Ohio and I
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would go through rural Ohio but I see no
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feline annex and I’d see poverty and
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nobody Cambridge you about under and and
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it wasn’t covered you know and so I
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always say follow the money and there’s
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no money in the rural areas and
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globalism works in Boston and San
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Francisco but it doesn’t seem to work in
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rural America and so I always think that
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globalism is doomed and democracy is
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doomed if they can’t figure out a way to
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put rural Americans into this economy
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that doesn’t that that doesn’t seem to
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have happened I was I was in southern
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Ohio and a family gathering in Lebanon
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Ohio and the fireman was talking to me
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in there was part of the group and he
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said he’s retiring early because he
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can’t stand picking up opioid addicts in
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a little talons Ohio with 10,000 people
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he’s got a five six calls a day take
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care of over those people and people
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shooting out in cars
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so yeah and this is little little
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hometown you know Warren Ohio is dead so
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you’re raising a couple different relate
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related points but both very important
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first of all we haven’t talked much
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about political economy and I think it’s
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very important to talk about political
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economy as as a factor also in the
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factor in the far-right movement like
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what’s happening it’s all right now
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fascism is not fascist politics not
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being used to like buttress military
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empire as much as its used to other one
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other than Yemen and so it is but but it
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it’s being used to like funnel money
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into oligarchs hands and blah and sort
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of like throw sand in the face of people
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with genuine economic concerns but the
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OPA
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I mean it’s not just the rural Midwest
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like my partner is a doctor physician in
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New Haven New Haven Connecticut has a
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horrific OPA opioid problem I mean the
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pharmaceutical companies I mean they
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delivered a whole bunch of opioids to a
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lot of people and and it’s a problem
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that is the dhih industrialized areas
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I mean opiates horrific it’s like what
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60,000 deaths last year 70,000 deaths so
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so but and it’s it’s tricky figuring out
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you know Carl Hart’s work would say it’s
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it’s mainly an economic problem you
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solve people’s economic issues and
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they’re not gonna be opioid addicts but
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but but you’re you’re I mean one thing
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about the economic anxiety point is that
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if you look at who was affected by the
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Great Recession the group that was most
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affected by the Great Recession I think
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were people of color but they didn’t
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flee into the arms of fascism you know they
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didn’t start voting for or you know they
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didn’t vote for Trump so I I don’t think
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so it can’t I think that economic and
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and then you look worldwide my book is
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about the world and you look at Poland
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like the Civic Platform in Poland
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like the Civic Platform expanded the GDP
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radically Poland was doing really well
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economically and then law and justice
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came in and did all these tactics and
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one look at Bavaria one of the richest
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areas in the world Bavaria is filled
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with this you say oh say offer so the
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economic anxiety does not match all the
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areas it can explain it can explain why
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some groups in some areas fall prey to
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this politics but looking
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internationally the politics gets a grip
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and even looking nationally because it
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gets a grip on some groups and not the
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other others and if you look at if you
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look at and my book is about why it gets
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a grip when it’s so obviously a false
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promise and so in the United States when
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we talk about the poor working class we
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– we – the white working class we forget
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a chapter and Du Bois as black
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reconstruction is a poor white you know
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we have to talk about the psychological
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wages of whiteness we have to talk about
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and and the response is of course an
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economic response is a labor movement a
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labor movement you know when they smash
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the labor movements in the Upper Midwest
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suddenly people felt much more prey to
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this kind of politics and so you know so
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I think we do face this crisis we need a
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labor movement that’s why they went
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after the labor movement we’re in a
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crisis after the Janice decision and and
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so we have to rebuild the labor we
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wouldn’t give people economic hope I’m
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not sure it’s as globalization as much
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as it’s the lack of a of a of a labor
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movement in the United States
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I mean German manufacturing is doing
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fine and German labor is doing fine
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history and making history no but I
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guess how do you make it known
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given that the I mean given what you’re
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talking about you know the attack on
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truth the discrediting of sources the
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control of educational boards or
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institutions by people who might not be
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in their interest a place you know I
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mean so what I don’t know if that’s I
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mean if doing it’s having conversations
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like this I mean I think it’s it’s it’s
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really up to us and this is like in
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terms of thinking about what is the role
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of academics right now I mean people who
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do research is – it’s one I think that
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qualitative research in general is just
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D legitimized and it’s it’s dismissed as
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not being true despite the fact that you
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know my I don’t use my data doesn’t come
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from surveys it’s not in document since
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the ways in which I’m interpreting those
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documents just like it’s the ways in
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which other people are interpreting
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their quantitative data and so I think
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that you know right now the other kind
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of struggle going on in universities is
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the growing attack in many ways on the
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liberal on liberal arts in general which
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is tied to the developments that Jason
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described so eloquently in the book so I
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think part of it is you know doing the
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work of having discussions like this
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it’s amazing that there’s so many people
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here and we’re having this really engage
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an important discussion that takes a lot
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out of us but that’s I think part of our
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responsibility as as researchers as
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scholars as intellectuals to try to
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write in accessible ways Jason was just
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telling me that he’s been on the radio
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for like ten hours this week that’s
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doing the work that’s doing that
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important work and I think part of the
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difficulty is in many in in many
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instances we we end up kind of preaching
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to the choir you can only go on Berkeley
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radio so many times I mean
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– is also kind of moving into different
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spaces where we might be less
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comfortable when I get invited to speak
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with libertarian or white ring groups
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are I’m happy to go because knowing that
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I might be walking into an abrasive
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situation you know I tried to make my
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book and my research as undeniable as
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possible and I think the argument that
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you’ve laid out in this book is also
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undeniable and that’s how I think we can
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begin to think about re-educating
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correcting the false narratives and
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erasing the untruths the mythic past
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that’s been created in history is I
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think really historical work is really
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key to that we don’t know how we got
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here unless we really really understand
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the past yeah I just want I just want to
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say you know that’s why do boys ends
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ends black reconstruction at the
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propaganda of history and that’s why
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he’s so corny and capitalizes truth you
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know that’s that’s that’s what gets me
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upset when people attack for instance
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african-american studies as as has been
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happening a lot or Gender Studies
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because they’re trying to tell the
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actual truth of a story that’s not told
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and you know and that that’s that’s why
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dude you know Dubois is always so corny
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about truth see like he’s like you know
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when you know erasure and erasure is
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never truth you know so and of course
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the backlash is always like a little bit
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of like at Yale what happened the I mean
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I could have told my colleagues the
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English department they added googy Wafi
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Unga this this goes back to you they had
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a GUI hua Theon go to one course and and
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there were like 20 articles from
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right-wing media about how they’re
63:15
eliminating Shakespeare at Yale and it
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hit them so by surprise I was like my
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colleagues in the English department
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like what happened what happened we’re
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gonna go as death threats I’m like yeah
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you added an African writer to a
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required course you know so that’s the
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and we we have academic administrators
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here they can tell you about this but
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there’s there’s you know the very ID so
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true like multiple perspective
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which doesn’t mean multiple perspectives
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doesn’t mean there’s many truths there’s
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only one truth that’s why Dubois
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capitalizes it but the truth involves
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you know that the Nate what happened to
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the indigenous populations as well as
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what happened to Dale Carnegie
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[Music]
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[Applause]
How to tell what the Republicans are going to do next.
Published: Nov 8, 2021
Question:
I’m a small-government conservative ..
How are you (a non-Republican) so good at consistently predicting what the Republicans will do next?
I’m a Republican and I can’t guess what they’re going to do next!
Could you please send me whatever method you use to make your predictions?
Scroll down to see video about 14 characteristics
Ur-Fascism
Freedom and liberation are an unending task.
1 2 3 4
abc bcd cde def
Suppose there is a series of political groups in which group one is characterized by the features abc, group two by the features bcd, and so on. Group two is similar to group one since they have two features in common; for the same reasons three is similar to two and four is similar to three. Notice that three is also similar to one (they have in common the feature c). The most curious case is presented by four, obviously similar to three and two, but with no feature in common with one. However, owing to the uninterrupted series of decreasing similarities between one and four, there remains, by a sort of illusory transitivity, a family resemblance between four and one.
Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist. Take away imperialism from fascism and you still have Franco and Salazar. Take away colonialism and you still have the Balkan fascism of the Ustashes. Add to the Italian fascism a radical anti-capitalism (which never much fascinated Mussolini) and you have Ezra Pound. Add a cult of Celtic mythology and the Grail mysticism (completely alien to official fascism) and you have one of the most respected fascist gurus, Julius Evola.
But in spite of this fuzziness, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.
1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition. Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counter-revolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but it was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of them indulgently accepted by the Roman Pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages—in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little known religions of Asia.
This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, “the combination of different forms of belief or practice”; such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a sliver of wisdom, and whenever they seem to say different or incompatible things it is only because all are alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth.
As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.
One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements. The most influential theoretical source of the theories of the new Italian right, Julius Evola, merged the Holy Grail with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alchemy with the Holy Roman and Germanic Empire. The very fact that the Italian right, in order to show its open-mindedness, recently broadened its syllabus to include works by De Maistre, Guenon, and Gramsci, is a blatant proof of syncretism.
If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge—that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.
2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism. Both Fascists and Nazis worshiped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon Blood and Earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life, but it mainly concerned the rejection of the Spirit of 1789 (and of 1776, of course). The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.
3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.
4. No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.
5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.
6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old “proletarians” are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.
7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside. In the US, a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson’s The New World Order, but, as we have recently seen, there are many others.
8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.
9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such a “final solution” implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.
10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak. Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people of the world, the members of the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians. In fact, the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler. Since the group is hierarchically organized (according to a military model), every subordinate leader despises his own underlings, and each of them despises his inferiors. This reinforces the sense of mass elitism.
11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Falangists was Viva la Muerte (in English it should be translated as “Long Live Death!”). In non-fascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.
12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.
13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view—one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. To have a good instance of qualitative populism we no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.
Because of its qualitative populism Ur-Fascism must be against “rotten” parliamentary governments. One of the first sentences uttered by Mussolini in the Italian parliament was “I could have transformed this deaf and gloomy place into a bivouac for my maniples”—“maniples” being a subdivision of the traditional Roman legion. As a matter of fact, he immediately found better housing for his maniples, but a little later he liquidated the parliament. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in 1984, as the official language of Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.
On the morning of July 27, 1943, I was told that, according to radio reports, fascism had collapsed and Mussolini was under arrest. When my mother sent me out to buy the newspaper, I saw that the papers at the nearest newsstand had different titles. Moreover, after seeing the headlines, I realized that each newspaper said different things. I bought one of them, blindly, and read a message on the first page signed by five or six political parties—among them the Democrazia Cristiana, the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Partito d’Azione, and the Liberal Party.
Until then, I had believed that there was a single party in every country and that in Italy it was the Partito Nazionale Fascista. Now I was discovering that in my country several parties could exist at the same time. Since I was a clever boy, I immediately realized that so many parties could not have been born overnight, and they must have existed for some time as clandestine organizations.
The message on the front celebrated the end of the dictatorship and the return of freedom: freedom of speech, of press, of political association. These words, “freedom,” “dictatorship,” “liberty,”—I now read them for the first time in my life. I was reborn as a free Western man by virtue of these new words.
We must keep alert, so that the sense of these words will not be forgotten again. Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt’s words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling: “I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.” Freedom and liberation are an unending task.
Let me finish with a poem by Franco Fortini:
Sulla spalletta del ponte
Le teste degli impiccati
Nell’acqua della fonte
La bava degli impiccati.Sul lastrico del mercato
Le unghie dei fucilati
Sull’erba secca del prato
I denti dei fucilati.Mordere l’aria mordere i sassi
La nostra carne non è più d’uomini
Mordere l’aria mordere i sassi
Il nostro cuore non è più d’uomini.Ma noi s’è letto negli occhi dei morti
E sulla terra faremo libertà
Ma l’hanno stretta i pugni dei morti
La giustizia che si farà.
* * *
(On the bridge’s parapet
The heads of the hanged
In the flowing rivulet
The spittle of the hanged.On the cobbles in the market- places
The fingernails of those lined up and shot
On the dry grass in the open spaces
The broken teeth of those lined up and shot.Biting the air, biting the stones
Our flesh is no longer human
Biting the air, biting the stones
Our hearts are no longer human.But we have read into the eyes of the dead
And shall bring freedom on the earth
But clenched tight in the fists of the dead
Lies the justice to be served.)
—poem translated by Stephen Sartarelli