Understanding fascism, its current American incarnation, and its attacks on reality, history, the free press, and our educational system (book recommendations, set 1)
This is an introduction to the first set of four reads I'm hoping to cover here, with a description and rationale for their choice
A shift in American democracy towards a political system with a significant resemblance to fascist regimes past and present now appears well underway, and this will undoubtedly accelerate under our incoming administration. To understand what this means for our lives and society, the four books recommended and summarized below seemed an good place to start and should lay a foundation for exploring other aspects of what we are facing and how different categories of division/partisanship have been used, historically and during current times, to foster intolerance and division, create a culture of ‘us versus them,’ and erode our free society and democracy.
I’ll provide a brief overview and link to the book below and then plan to do a weekly deeper dive into each of these reads, with a summary of chapter topics and contents, key points, examples and quotes, and additional information, such as representative interviews with the author about the book. How much I do with each book may depend upon whether or not it appears to warrant a deep dive to capture all of the fundamentals, so that will likely vary from week to week. I’m also going to put together a starting list of authors/books/topics and would welcome suggestions regarding other content or topics to tackle.
Brief summaries of the first set of book recommendations are:
How Fascism Works: the Politics of Us and Them - 2018 by Jason Stanley
How Fascism Works -link to the Amazon page
This is a terrific primer to understand ten core principles of fascism (and in an interview, he does make the joke that it has to be ten because it’s a trade publication, after all). Stanley initially describes the general principles by which fascist regimes acquire power and erode prior norms and political structures of liberal democracies by establishing the ‘politics of us versus them’. The underlying motivation is to document the progress that we have made towards fascism in the modern United States, which is likely to accelerate under our incoming administration.
The book is written in a very engaging and accessible style, with ample documentation, and features examples of each principle from around the world, both historically, including in Nazi Germany and hearkening back to prior fascist trends in earlier 1920s-30s United States history, as well as a comparative description of worldwide contemporary fascist movements in places as diverse as Hungary, Poland, India, and Myanmar, and comparison with these trends in the current United States, also adding in additional examples of similar authoritarian tactics in current use in Russia under Putin. Drawing upon these examples, Dr. Jason Stanley explains why fascist ideology has particular appeal during times of socio-economic transition (e.g. modern globalism/neoliberalism) and extreme inequality, both current conditions that render us vulnerable in the US at the current time.
Dr. Jason Stanley (Yale, Philosophy) is an expert academician on fascism who has written six books on politics and presents regular news segments and academic and classroom lectures on this subject. As the child of refugees of World War II Europe and a renowned philosopher and scholar of propaganda, Jason Stanley’s father came to the USA with his grandmother—a noted Jewish singer in Poland—as Jewish persecution by the Nazis forced their emigration. He therefore has a deep understanding of how democratic societies can be vulnerable to fascism. He states that nations don’t have to be fascist to suffer from fascist politics. In fact, fascism’s roots have been present in the United States for more than a century.
Alarmed by the pervasive rise of fascist tactics both at home and around the globe, Stanley focuses here on the structures that unite them, laying out and analyzing the ten pillars of fascist politics—the language and beliefs that separate people into an “us” and a “them.” He knits together reflections on history, philosophy, sociology, and critical race theory and makes clear the immense danger of underestimating the cumulative power of these tactics, which include exploiting a mythic version of a nation’s past; propaganda that twists the language of democratic ideals against themselves; anti-intellectualism directed against universities and experts; law and order politics predicated on the assumption that members of minority groups are criminals; and fierce attacks on labor groups and welfare. These mechanisms all build on one another, creating and reinforcing divisions and shaping a society vulnerable to the appeals of authoritarian leadership.
Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future -2024 by Jason Stanley
From an interview with Jason Stanley: “I faced a puzzle when writing this book: Why is it that authoritarians always target schools and universities? So, we see that all over the world. We see that with Viktor Orbán, who provides a kind of template for U.S. authoritarianism. He attacked Central European University for “gender ideology” and leftism and being pro-immigration. And so, we know about the courts, the authoritarians targeting the courts. But why do authoritarians always target…schools and universities?
So, last year, when the anti-genocide, antiwar protests on campus were happening, I thought about the international context. I thought about what happened in India in 2019, when they passed the Citizenship Amendment Act, which made Muslims into second-class citizens. And there were nonviolent protests on campus, denounced as anti-Indian, so — and violent, militarized responses. So, this tactic of tarring school teachers, tarring university professors as Marxists and communists and ruining the country, and replacing this kind of education, replacing Black history, replacing LGBTQ perspectives by a kind of grandiosity of white Christian nationalism, as we’re seeing right now, this seemed to me a democratic emergency”.
A followup to his 2018 book (How Fascism Works) and published in fall of 2024, Erasing History provides a gripping look at a key strategy of fascist movements throughout history, including the right wing fascism that has taken hold in the United States: corruption and co-opting of our educational system to undermine democracy and usher in fascist politics.
Democracy requires a common understanding of reality and shared view of what has happened that informs ordinary citizens’ decisions, now and in the future. Authoritarian and fascist movements target this shared understanding, seeking to separate us from our own history to destroy our self-understanding and leave us unmoored, resentful, and confused. Upon setting us against each other, they represent themselves as the sole solution. In authoritarian countries, critical examination of a nations’ history and traditions is discouraged if not an outright danger to those who do it. Instead, warped and propagandistic narratives replace fact-based curriculum in our schools.
And so it is no accident that local and global institutions of education have become a battleground, where learning and efforts to upend a hierarchical status quo can be put to end by coercion and threats of violence. Democracies entrust schools and universities to preserve a common memory of positive change, generated by protests, social movements, and rebellions. The authoritarian right must erase this history, and, along with it, the very practice of critical inquiry that has so often been the engine of future progress.
In Erasing History, Yale professor of philosophy Jason Stanley exposes the true danger of the authoritarian right’s attacks on education, identifies their key tactics and funders, and traces their intellectual roots. He illustrates how fears of a fascist future have metastasized, from hypothetical threat to our present reality. And he shows that hearts and minds are won in our schools and universities—places that in democratic societies across the world, including America, are now ill-prepared to defend against the fascist assault currently underway.
Erasing History is an important read as we face the present threat to our educational system, fact and reason based discourse and, accordingly, democracy, and is a very compelling read for anyone interested in these topics.
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America -2008 by Chris Hedges
This book, written in 2008, provides a journalistic account of some aspects of US history over the last 40+ years, describing how a particular variety of christofascism has become dominant in America and now threatens democracy at every level. An expose of the political ambitions of the Christian right when it was initially published, American Fascists provides a step-by-step breakdown of how the non-secular agenda gained momentum through alternative networks, schools, and publishers. This book challenges popular opinions that equate extreme Christian ideals with patriotism and warns readers that another national crisis may enable the Christian right to seize political power. Since its publication, these trends have only continued to gain momentum and, under the incoming administration, they appear to represent a clear and present danger to US democracy.
Chris Hedges is a veteran journalist and author of the National Book Award finalist book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Here, Hedges challenges the Christian Right's religious legitimacy and argues that at its core it is a mass movement fueled by unbridled nationalism and a hatred for the open society. Hedges knows of what he speaks having trained in divinity school and grown up in the rural parishes in upstate New York where his father was a Presbyterian pastor. This book uses investigative journalism—conducting interviews and 'deep dives’ into various aspects of conservative/evangelical American religion and its relationship with right wing politics in the US, to explore the many ways in which the wall between church and state has been dismantled and reasoned inquiry has been supplanted by an intolerant, rigid, and warped vision of a Christian America.
Twenty-five years ago, Pat Robertson and other radio and televangelists first spoke of the United States becoming a Christian nation that would build a global Christian empire. Today, it is clear that these christofascist efforts since then have matured, have infiltrated many aspects of our American society, and now pose a threat to our freedom and democracy.
Hedges highlights the hundreds of senators and members of Congress who have earned between 80 and 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian Right advocacy groups as one of many signs that the movement is burrowing deep inside the American government to subvert it. This book is interesting in that, since its 2008 publication, Christian programming and propaganda in American life has become even more pervasive and mainstream in our radio and television programming, and now in our public spaces and governments.
American Fascists takes a journalistic approach, covering a different aspect of this trend in each chapter, including interviews and coverage of events such as pro-life rallies and week-long classes on conversion techniques, and examining the movement's origins, its driving motivations, and its dark ideological underpinnings. Hedges argues that the movement currently resembles the young fascist movements in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, movements that often masked the full extent of their drive for totalitarianism and that were willing to make concessions until they achieved unrivaled power.
Hedges central argument is that the ideological architecture of a Christian fascism is being cemented in place. Since its publication in 2008, we have seen many of these trends gain momentum and affect many aspects of our lives. Therefore, I think this is a useful read to assess how christofascism in the USA may have gotten its start and where we may be headed today.
Ministry of Truth: Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past Hardcover –2024 by Steve Benen
A useful complement to the work above, this book documents the efforts of the Republican party to rewrite recent history, replacing fact with propagandistic false narratives, even for events experienced by many Americans in the recent past, literally in real time. An instant NYT Bestseller, Benen provides a detailed, gripping, investigative look at how the Trump administration and republican party has used the age old strategy of using their power to create myths, spread propaganda, mischaracterize their opponents and erase or rewrite what others have done, and even to cover up their own crimes. The author documents how these steps are dangerous and include brazen promulgation of false narratives around many recent events.
From GOP rebranding of the efforts of Putin to influence the 2016 election (and Putin's continued influence in our incoming administration), to the rewrite of the January 6th insurrection as a 'false flag' operation of antifa activists or (when that didn't work) as 'just tourists with strollers' and police celebrating with the members of the mob, to T*#@p's 'perfect phone call' with Zelensky where the quid pro quo ("but I'd like you to do me a favor") began, to the whitewashing of and attempts to erase the second impeachment, the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the economy under the Tr*@p administration, one can argue that we no longer live politically in a world based--at least for one of our ostensible political parties--on reality. The gaslighting started early, with the Tr*#p’s propagandistic strategies for gaining power, such as the ‘birther’ conspiracy about President Obama, through Sean Spicer's claim that the 2016 inauguration crowd was "the biggest ever, period" and the audacity of the recent history rewrites just grew bolder from there.
This tactic was pursued in parallel with the destruction of an independent media and replacement with one that will act—for all intents and purposes when the next admin takes over and beyond, as state controlled media--what we now have in Sinclair and Faux and most other right wing owned media that now blankets and delivers most information to the red state middle of the country.
This is the classic playbook of authoritarian takeovers of government through many times and countries, with one only having to look at the key elements of Putin's takeover in Russia—well laid out in "Nothing is True and Everything is Possible" by Peter Pomerantsey—with which I keep comparing the events unfolding here in the US.
A highly relevant read, Steve Benen's "Ministry of Truth", documents and highlights the danger of the GOP war on the reality of our shared, recent past.
Hopefully this will serve as an introduction to my first four book recommendations, with more detailed looks at each of the books, their contents, chapter summaries, quotes, and related video interviews with the authors in my next several posts. I can already tell that my coverage of each book is going to differ in depth, as some of the books I’m reading really warrant a detailed analysis and documentation of the underlying contents (like the Stanley reads above, which seem critical to delve into to fully understand the fascism we are faced with), while the journalistic ‘story-based’ reads may not warrant such a deep dive.
I’m currently planning for subsequent sets of book recommendations that focus more comprehensively on intersections of specific topics with movement toward a liberal democratic versus fascist/white christian nationalist society and power structure, including:
How our societal divisions based upon education and our interactions with the broader world (credentialed/college educated or not) affect our politics and society, and how ‘meritocracy’ has been used in different ways by both the right and left over the last 40 years, to justify and solidify systems of income inequality/oligarchy, and the resulting populist resentment against ‘elites’ in the USA.
How class divisions and economics (structural inequality and lack of social mobility; capital versus labor) feed into our current political time and the rhetoric (versus the reality) of equality of opportunity and potential to rise/social mobility.
The relationship of our current political time with evangelical movements/prosperity gospel, other conservative Christian religions, and their practice in support of fascism versus freedom of and from religion.
Other dividing lines being exploited for fascist takeover by the right at the current time, for example the counterfactual fascist false narratives and gaslighting of our public focused on promoting hierarchies based on sex, race/ethnicity, citizenship status-immigration/nationalism, rural vs urban, local versus global, etc.
Please let me know of any suggestions of books/authors/topics I should add to my list for next consideration/analysis, other materials I should look at related to these topics (lectures, public interviews and book club/discussion group videos or transcripts, classroom materials, etc).
Also happy to start an asynchronous chat on any of these topics and, if there is interest, to suggest them for a formal author invitation and discussion as part of the Open Democracy Book Club or other similarly focused book clubs, lecture series, classroom activities that are openly available to the public. As one example, the book club I mention above has had a series of authors in to discuss their books, including Heather Cox Richardson (Democracy Awakening) - Dr. Richardson also has a substack here that I follow, so we may well be able to make connections with these groups and authors rather organically here and elsewhere. We can likely also find public venues in which to engage with these authors, can reach out to some of them directly, and/or can invite them to speak on their work at institutional forums (for example, our Academic Women’s Network has had a number of my favorite women-and-work/life balance authors like Joan Williams speak on campus). If anyone has connections to thinkers/writers on these topics, connects with them on substack elsewhere, etc. please let me know and we’ll use those inroads to get a conversation started.