Wednesday, September 19, 2018

Jason Stanley on Fascist Rhetoric

Sean Illing of Vox interviewed Yale philosopher Jason Stanley about his new book on Fascism:
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. . . .

Sean Illing
There’s a great line from the philosopher Hannah Arendt, I think in her book about totalitarianism, 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, 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.
I think this is interesting but I would say that it misses something big about Fascism: the fascists' love of strong emotion and distrust of cool reason. Fascists especially seem to love dark emotions like hate, anger, and cruelty. Much of Fascism is shot through with sado-masochistic sexuality. Fascists have also tended to love "action" and dismiss reflection; the thing is to act, preferably with speed and violence. So to me it is not just that Fascists focus on enemies of "the people", it's the deliberately cruel, sneering way that they do it; it's not just that they are creating an alternative reality, it's that the alternative reality they create is one that celebrates kicking people in the face.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

I think this is right, and I think one should extend it as well to nationalist politicians in general. Spreading the feeling of victimhood and stolen glory is job 1 in the playbook of nationalists from Bannon to Orban to Netanyahu to Modi, none of whom necessarily embrace fascism's more extreme theatrical and ideological aspects. Modi for example doesn't, so far as I can tell, talk much like an Italian futurist about "the philosophy of pure action" and so on, but he's very energetic in propagating notions of Hindu victimhood.

Indeed, I would say the feeling of victimhood is much more central to nationalism than that of superiority.

leif said...

@David, agreed. it's an easier sell to tell people they're victims, rather than tell them they are übermenschen. i will hazard a guess that virtually everyone feels some kind of anxiety, exclusion or worry, and many feel cheated, swindled or short-changed, and these are powerful, latent feelings that generally lack specific causes in one's long-term memory. to hear over and over that some outgroup caused it, that's pretty convincing for some if heard perpetually and emphatically, especially if that messaging titillates the biased lessons one learned in the blurry past.

Anonymous said...

What is happening now in Catalonia/Spain is a current example....

John said...

My point is that not all nationalists are fascists, nor is everyone who plays the card of victimhood. To me something else is necessary to turn a grouchy nationalist into a fascist.

Unknown said...

@John

I wouldn't disagree. The term fascist is certainly overused, both in the sense that it is applied to folks to whom it shouldn't be, and in the sense that too many think that, if you can label an opponent a fascist, you've struck a key blow against them, and if you can't, they go free. In other words, to say someone like Bannon isn't a fascist may be right, intellectually somewhat interesting, and a worthy puncturing of a tiresome rhetorical trope, but in the final analysis it's not very important politically. He and his fellow travelers--Modi et al.--may not be fascists, but IMHO they're no less bad and dangerous for all that.

Anonymous said...

Well,nationalism can be the way.... Ask the other half of the population, urban population which vote weigths less, about the breaking of the constitutional law.... Anyway, we, hopefully, will see in a few years what we deserve. It comes from far away: my wife (a maths teacher with 5 years university degree) wasnt allowed to work in public school in Catalonia because she didnt have knowledge of catalan (by the way, very easy to understand after a few months of whatching public catalonian tv). It happened in 1996. Fascism is rising everywere....