How Fascism Works: Jason Stanley’s warning is now available in paperback

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Anyone with a family history like that of the philosopher Jason Stanley simply cannot turn a blind eye when their country is heading down a fascist path. Stanley now teaches at the University of Toronto in Canada. In 2025, he left the US, where he had been teaching at the highly regarded Yale University. One of the reasons he gave for the move was that he did not want to raise his children in a country “that is heading towards a fascist dictatorship”. And this did not only become clear to him during Trump’s second term in office. He had already written about it during his first term. Namely, in this book.

‘How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them’ was published in 2018; the German translation was released in hardback in 2024, and now the paperback is available for anyone who refuses to be lulled into complacency by the growing normalisation of fascist rhetoric and thinking, which is once again taking hold in Germany. As if we’d learnt nothing from it.

But Jason Stanley does something that is rather rare in the usual descriptions of fascism: he shows how fascist thinking emerges right in the midst of a functioning democracy, how it is, in part, even part of the dark legacy of the great democracies, and how it slowly seeps into society as a whole, gaining ever more ground and ultimately making thinking in fascist terms so taken for granted that citizens no longer even realise how they have gradually slipped into a fascist dictatorship.https://vg06.met.vgwort.de/na/0d0f56b97ecc47f48ebbf3d6ce084d4d

Obsessed with Decline

The dictatorship is at its end. That is when people take it for granted that an authoritarian party curtails their rights and freedoms, or even abolishes them altogether. With justifications drawn from the treasure trove of misanthropy, which initially still sound somewhat ‘logical’. Not to mention the instilled fear and the systematically propagated image of perpetual decline.

None of this is new. Yet Stanley also shows how such mechanisms operate in countries we would not describe as fascist, but where authoritarian parties employ precisely this repertoire and systematically dismantle fundamental democratic freedoms – as seen, for example, in Turkey, India, Myanmar and, more recently, in Poland and Hungary.

And time and again, the same tactics are employed – the very ones that Jason Stanley observed in his own country during Donald Trump’s first term in office – ranging from invocations of a mythical past in which everything was supposedly better (“Make America great again”) to completely unrestrained propaganda that effectively declares political opponents to be arch-enemies, right through to the wholesale denigration of entire sections of the population, who are accused of secret machinations. This is why anti-Semitism has been a fundamental constant of fascist thinking for over 100 years.

Sometimes it is disguised in wild rumours of mysterious elites who apparently harbour sinister plans to replace the entire population. This can be found just as much in today’s talk of the ‘Great Replacement’ as it was in the fabricated ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, which have been part of the repertoire of fascist rumour-mongering since 1903.

Exclusion and criminalisation

The exclusion, the verbal separation of those who, in the speakers’ view, do not belong to ‘us’, affects not only Jews, but now entire groups of people who, from the perspective of fascist ideologues, are seen as contaminating the imagined ‘national body’. And it is precisely these chapters that reveal just how deeply this ‘us’ and ‘them’ mindset has long been embedded in seemingly ordinary democratic politics, where hardliners in conservative parties go to great lengths to define those who do not belong and must be ‘deported’ as a matter of urgency. Or massively criminalised, as continues to happen to this day with the Black population in the USA.

Which, of course, leads Stanley to scrutinise the entire history of the United States and show how the old ways of thinking about slavery and racism have never really disappeared and keep returning to American politics in ever-new waves of resurgence. Mostly without even being noticed by the politicians who are driving the crackdown on people of colour and believe that it all has to do with a ‘genetic predisposition’ that makes Black people (and Mexicans, Arabs, Somalis …) are, by their very nature, more criminal than white people.

That said, Stanley does not overlook the fact that this very mindset is also linked to fears of losing status. And we are shown why a figure like Donald Trump regards the 1930s in the USA, of all periods, as a golden age – the era when, in his view, America was still great.

For it was a time when fascist movements also enjoyed enormous popularity in the US, closely linked to traditional racism. And some of Hitler’s racial laws have their origins and models precisely here.

Sinister forces everywhere

But Stanley also shows how conspiracy theories operate within this fascist and post-fascist cosmos, how society is infiltrated by these fabricated stories – which prophesy of sinister forces working in secret – , gradually poisoning the atmosphere and leading more and more people to believe the rumours. Because, of course, politics is always about psychology as well. And people are incredibly easy to influence.

No matter how daft or mendacious the story may be – if it is simply repeated over and over again, it becomes part of people’s way of thinking. And people who already feel that they are constantly being wronged are all too easily swayed into believing these myths.

For fascist movements also draw their supporters from something that is all too readily ignored in our modern society: the fact that millions of people are indeed disadvantaged and are actually experiencing the seemingly stable foundations of their lives being shattered – jobs are being destroyed, entire industries are disappearing, communities are becoming impoverished and whole regions are being left behind.

It was precisely in these ‘Rust Belts’ that Donald Trump found his voters. And he dangled a carrot in front of them with ‘Make America Great Again’. Even though he never intended to improve these people’s lives.

The scapegoat is to blame

Fascism draws its strength precisely from this (growing) divide between rich and poor. And when politicians then go on to provide a scapegoat who is apparently to blame for the plight of struggling industrial workers, the violence that ensues is given a target and a semblance of justification. And one need not look only to the US.

German politicians also operate with such insinuations – and not just those from the AfD, for whom the issue of ‘migration’ is at the very heart of their argument. And their claims that minorities are more or less to blame for the country apparently going to the dogs strike a chord that historians have, in fact, been aware of for 100 years. For, as Jason Stanley puts it: ‘Fascist politics feeds on a sense of grievance caused by the loss of hierarchical status. – For this reason, empires in decline are particularly susceptible to fascist politics, as it is in their very nature to create a hierarchy. Great powers legitimise their colonial ventures through a myth of their own exceptionalism.”

And fascist movements capitalise on this sense of ‘national humiliation’. Stanley doesn’t even need to mention Britain and Brexit. This humiliation is also being experienced by the US, France and Germany, whose glorious roles as ‘leading nations’ are melting away in the face of growing competition from the Far East and the South.

The ‘lazy bums’ as the enemy

Suddenly, stress arises. At every level. And politicians from the conservative parties suddenly start complaining about a lack of willingness to work. It’s the lazy bums down there who are to blame if the country can no longer keep up. They’re always taking sick leave and refusing to work.

That these politicians do not exactly stand out for their rational analysis of reality – fair enough. This way of thinking in terms of performance is part of their legacy. And it is – as Jason Stanley notes – now, unfortunately, a fascist legacy. For it is with such arguments that trade unions and social security systems are attacked. The thinking behind it: ‘The answer lies in social Darwinism, which underpins their ideology. – For this is the source of the notion that life is essentially a struggle for power and that the distribution of social resources should be left to the unhindered competition of the free market. Fascist movements glorify the ideals of hard work, private enterprise and self-sufficiency.”

Any form of social solidarity is anathema to these ideologues. And there is another factor, one that is almost always underestimated: the fascist ideology’s contempt for intellectuals, science and rationality. This is why a Trump, in his second term, is also systematically attacking the media and American universities. But because a ruthless unleashing of the so-called ‘free market’ destroys jobs on a massive scale (namely millions of once highly skilled industrial jobs), the workers thus cast out of the race are now being persuaded, with neoliberal rhetoric, that they simply need to try hard enough and work even harder to succeed again. Carrots for everyone, one might say.

The result: a pervasive sense of constant shame. The mantra: it’s your own fault.

The work ethic and racism

But because that doesn’t win votes, the clueless politicians point the finger at those who are even weaker: Black people, refugees, recipients of basic income. “It’s their fault.” The hypocritical (fascist) work ethic aligns itself with racism and homophobia.

This, too, is nothing new, notes Jason Stanley, who repeatedly refers to a book by his grandmother, Ilse Stanley, which was a success in its day and in which she published her memoirs in 1957. She espouses a completely different ethos: namely, to help the vulnerable in dark times and to enable them – as was the case between 1936 and 1939 – to escape from concentration camps or to flee Germany before the outbreak of the Second World War.

And one can sense why fascists so despise solidarity and empathy: these are values that stand in stark contrast to their social Darwinism. Fascism divides – even in its early stages, when it may appear to be nothing more than ruthless neoliberal politics – the world into a mythical ‘us’ and a simplistic ‘them’, tearing society right down the middle and creating simplified images of the world that make more and more people susceptible to the stereotypes of fascist thinking. Or, in Stanley’s words: “Fascist politics exerts a particular appeal. It simplifies human existence by offering us a target, a ‘them’, whose supposed laziness highlights our own virtue and discipline, it tempts us to identify with a strong leader who explains the world to us, and whose ruthlessness towards the ‘unworthy’ seems refreshing.”

The role of inequality

And right at the end, he adds a punchline that shows how disparaging politics quite naturally paves the way for fascism: “Inequality creates conditions that are extremely conducive to fascist demagoguery. To believe that liberal-democratic norms can flourish under such conditions is a pipe dream.”

One can certainly feel as though one has been transported to the year 2026, even though the book was written back in 2018. The work is – as Rahel Jaeggi writes in the foreword to the German translation – “a guide to the early detection” of fascist tactics. “The timing of the German translation’s publication could therefore not be better,” she wrote in 2024. But what’s the point if responsible politicians don’t read such books? And then go on spouting slogans that quite clearly already belong in the vocabulary of fascism? Whether this is intentional or simply down to sheer stupidity is entirely irrelevant.

Jason Stanley, *How Fascism Works*
, Westend-Verlag, Neu-Isenburg 2026, 14 euros