Angry Planet - The Lingering Aftertaste of Fascism

Episode Date: December 3, 2020

What’s a fascist anyway?It’s a word we heard a lot over the past few years. If you’re on one side of the political debate you probably used this word earnestly. If you’re on the other side, you probably think people use it because they’re too embarrassed to call their political opponent Hitler.But it’s an important word with several very real definitions. Musolini is not Hitler is not, dare I say it, Tr0ump. But, from a certain point of view, all these men are fascists. Worth noting at the top here that Jason doesn’t  agree with me on this point. Or, at least, doesn’t always agree with me. With all this baggage around the term fascist, is it even worth using?Here to help us figure that out is Jason Stanely. Stanley is a professor of Philosophy at Yale and the author of the book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. Sir, thank you so much for joining us.11/23/20Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. I debate this with people. You could say that he tried to be a fascist leader, but just was so weak and incompetent that he couldn't do it. Or you can say that he just, he didn't, he didn't. If you look at say the Turkish, coup against Erdogan. That didn't succeed. They didn't have the kind of follow through. And Trump has not shown that. Maybe he's not interested in showing that. Obviously, if you go that route and you fail, there are very bad consequences. So he didn't follow through. He didn't try to completely, he did try to take over the party. The justices he appointed are still ruling in according to accordance of law. I don't want to be cliche here, but our system has so far, at least, worked. One day, all of the facts in about 30 years' time, will be published.

When genocide has been cut out in this country, almost with impunity, and when it is near to completion, people talk about intervention. They will be met with fire, fury, and frankly, power, the likes of which this world has never. see before. Hello, welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Field. So what is a fascist anyway? It's a word we heard a lot over the past few years. If you're on one side of the political debate, you probably use this word earnestly. If you're on the other side, you probably think people use it because they're too embarrassed to call their political opponent Hitler. But it is

an important word with several very real definitions. Mussolini is not Hitler, is not, dare I say it, Trump, but from a certain point of view, all of these men are fascists. Worth noting at the top here is that Jason doesn't agree with me all the time on this particular point. With all this baggage around the term fascist, is even worth continuing to use the word. Well, here to help us figure this out is Jason Stanley. Stanley is a professor of philosophy at Yale and the author of the book How Fascism Works, the Politics of Us and Them.

Sir, thank you so much for joining us. thank you so much for having me on. All right. So I want to say we are recording this on the 23rd of November. It is Thanksgiving week. There's been a lot of bizarre political things happening in the past few weeks since the election. Can I get a temperature check from you as someone who follows this and as somebody who's interested in fascism? How scared are you of Trump in a transition of power like just right now at this moment? I think there's a, the, the, the, the, the,

group I'm scared of is not exactly Trump. It's the Republican Party. And the Republican Party is not going to be out of office anytime soon. The Republican Party has shown that it's completely willing to back an authoritarian takeover. And that should alarm everyone. Trump will not succeed at this authoritarian takeover. But that's on him, as it were. If he were more efficient if he was more able, if he were more competent, if he played less golf, what would we be facing right now? That's what keeps me up at night. Do you think, though, that it's, I have this sense from them that to a certain extent they're just trying to keep the baby happy until they can get it out of there? They refused to acknowledge

that the election results were what they were. This is criminal. This is the message it's to international leaders to other countries, to Belarus, where people are being tortured as we speak, journalists are being tortured? What message is this sending? What are we talking about when we talk about? This is people's lives. And when the American president,

when the ruling party, which is a minority party, with a minority of the country behind them, which repeatedly gets a minority amount of the votes, but runs state houses, courts, and the Senate across the country, nevertheless, when they clearly are like, ah, we'll go with it if it works, which is what they're saying.

Will it work? Can we get away with it? We'll go with it then. That sends a terrible international message, and it sends a message that will affect our politics for decade from now on. Yeah, this is another one of those things what I think about Trump is that I worry about the next guy that's more effective.

Tucker Carlson, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, there's a bunch of them. And let's not forget Trump got elected, which means Donald Jr. might get elected. It means Ivanka might get elected. It means that our politics is not what you think it is. Since we're having a very political conversation, sometimes we try to stay down in the middle of the line, but it's hard to in this case. I was just going to say that we have Donald Trump Jr. He seems like a laughable figure, but then again, to a lot of people, other historical figures have seemed pretty laughable at the time, too. Actually, they made a lot of fun of Hitler for his gesturing and the way he spoke. The more the intelligentsia did anyway.

That's the key to this politics. As Hannah Arendt said in origins of totalitarianism in the section in part three entitled, the temporary alliance of the masses and the elites. He said a group of people formed both across classes who loved the idea that the elites would have to bow and scrape to someone to a humble house painter, someone they regarded as vulgar. This is what we call owning the lives. The delight in this politics is that you appoint someone

and you know the people in Manhattan or in San Francisco, the coastal elites, will feel enraged and humiliated. There's a great line from Peter Pomerantza book. I don't know if you're familiar with him. I'm surprised with Peter. I teach his work. He's been on the show twice.

Like him quite a bit. This is the show for me then. Something to the effect of in his most recent book, it was like these figures, Trump and Putin give people permission to indulge like baser urges, right? Yeah. When you don't condemn again, Arantt talks about this. Both Peter and I are deeply influenced by Arendt, of course.

And when Rent says, when the Nazis refused to condemn things, they gave them permission. So when there was street violence and the Nazi government refused to condemn it, that gave people permission. So that's part of the signaling mechanism that occurs. And part of this whole thing, this politics is it's an attack on elites. And of course, elites do need to be attacked. The elite institutions are part of the problem. The institution I'm in, it's part of the problem. It's why people feel disenfranchised, lack of power, lack of voice.

But these figures, they offer a false promise. They offer to represent, even though they're not representing the material interests. They're representing the cultural, the cultural stance. And it's not the cultural stance you necessarily want. It's not some traditional evangelical Christian leader who's living. But his main thing is, if you appoint me, I will enrage the people you hate. Let's back up because I want to get something we like to do at the top of the show that we didn't do this time because we just jumped right into it is define some basic stuff. So can you give me your definition of fascism?

Fascism is a cult of the leader who promises national restoration. in the face of supposed humiliation by immigrants, minorities, liberals, and leftists and socialists. He says these groups that we face, the leftists and communists are promoting a race war, trying to get the minorities to take over. They're bringing immigrants in to destroy your culture. And it's a war. And only I can save you. The liberals, the media, they're all controlled by the communists and the socialists.

and only I can save you. So that is fascist ideology. That doesn't sound familiar at all. That's really, that's some definition. Just what happens when it's on the left? Can you have fascism from the left? No. You just...

Okay. Look at the side of the Martin Niemler poem on the side of the Holocaust Museum. And they alighted terribly. I think it's terrible. They did this, The full poem is, first they came for the communists, and I said nothing because I was not a communist. Then they came for the socialists, and I said nothing because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, the labor unions, and I said nothing because I was not a member of a labor union. Then they came for the Jews, and I said nothing because I was not Jewish. Then they came, finally they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me. From this, we learn the targets of fascism. communists, socialists, labor unions, and minorities. So now, of course, leaders like Mussolini, Mussolini had been a Marxist, but he then moved to become a fascist. He replaced class as the organizing principle with nation.

And the Nazis go one further and replace nation with race. So I want to drill down on a couple different things here. One is that fascism, as I understand it, is a what Echo would call a fuzzy ideology. And I think that it's important that we highlight, as you just did with that Mussolini example, that it is changeable. And there are certain features of it that kind of can be traded out. And I'm wondering if you can talk about that a little bit and also put yourself, where do you differ from, say, Echo's definitions of fascism and Arendt's definitions of totalitarianism. Good.

So I'm probably closest to ACCO's definitions. So first of all, on the differences between fascism, the one spectrum of difference is they're different countries. One time I was lecturing at the University of Southern California's School of Architecture about fascism. And then it turned out that everyone who had written a dissertation on fascist architecture in Italy and Germany was in the audience. And I don't know anything about fascist architecture.

And it turns out that Italian fascist architecture looks completely different than German fascist architecture. Any theory of fascism will explain that by saying that fascism is ultranationalism. It's the country's traditions exaggerated and brought out. So an American fascist would be a NASCAR-loving cowboy rodeo, American football loving. It would be un-Americans American. Famously during the fascist internationality period, being 1928, 1935, a Spanish fascist was asked to speak. And he said, I'm not a fascist, I'm Spanish. So there's going to be radical national differences.

You can have fascist. There's also going to be, you also need to think about, there's good, So let's talk about fascist ideology rather than, say, the structure of the regime or the style of architecture. There is a big difference between Italian fascist ideology and German fascist ideology. Both are built around nation, but Hitler defines nation in terms of race, and Mussolini doesn't. So Mussolini's fascism for many years was not racist. It was racist against Africans. It was racist. but it was not anti-Semitic.

There were many Jewish Italian fascists, and it was about the nation, and Italians aren't going to be told that Jews can't be Italian. That's just not very Italian. So all fascism is based around nation, the powerful nation, the leader is the father of the nation,

the spokesperson for the nation, but some fascism, but most fascisms will narrowly define nationhood in terms of race or religion, as we see in the case of India today with Hindutva. Now, about totalitarianism, Rent's book is clearly about fascism. She only mentions communism in part three. Part one is called anti-Semitism.

Part two is called imperialism. Fascism is based on colonialism. The first chapter of part two of imperialism is called race-thinking before racism, and it's about how, Racism underlies colonialism and domination. So communism has none of those things. Only in part three does she come to communism. And what she says about communism is that communism and fascism differ

in that communism is fascism with race, with class replacing race as the organizing principle. So she, in her taxonomy, she has both communism and fascism as two kind, very different kinds of totalitarianism, both of which deny truth, engage in conspiracy thinking, unify everything behind one organizing principle with fascism, its race, or with Italian fascism, nation, with communism, it's class. But they're very, very different.

You can think of communism as enlightenment rationality gone mad. How do we do the great leap forward? We'll kill 20 million people so that eventually our society will be perfect. fascism is very different. It's, it denies rationality. It's about the will, conquest. So you would say that Stollett and Mao are not fascists? No, they aren't fascists. They're terrible, horrible, just as bad as fascists, but they're different. I think that personally, when you get down to it, there's a very interesting book by Gregory, James Gregory, called The Fascist Persuasion in Radical Politics, where Gregory

he argues that all radical movements end up being fascist. So he argues that Stalin in the end becomes an anti-Semitic Russian nationalist who's doing genocides of non-Russians. When you're mass-slaughtering people because of their ethnicity, you're on the fascist side. Right now, we can wonder the degree to which the Chinese Communist Party with its persecution of the Uyghur Muslims is taking Han nationalism as their creed rather than Congress. communism. And so far as Xi is the dictator of a Han nationalist one-party state, it's close to fascism. So you're saying that they're almost incompatible ideas and one will supplant the other at a certain point. If you're on a totalitarian bent. Yeah, communism and fascism are locked in

eternal combat. It was the communists who beat the fascists. And communism is an authoritarian system. Communism, there could be, there are varying degrees. I don't think that communism has ever been practiced according to its correct ideals. It's always been despotic authoritarian and has resulted in terrible horrors. But it's just an extremely different ideology. It's not based on race, on religion, on maleness, on machismo. Of course, when you look at these individual leaders, they turn out to be racist, ethno-nationalist, macho men. And then you can say anti-gay. And then you can say that doesn't look very communist.

You can't really be an anti-gay communist. People push back on the use of the term fascist a lot. And I think this is my own theories like talking, like thinking it through actively on this podcast right now, that it is partly because, It is so, as Echo again said, fuzzy, that there aren't, the coherent ideology of it is more like these markers, these checkboxes. The ideology is literally incoherent.

Because on the one hand, it denies reason. The fascist leader speaks from his gut, rejects authority and science. On the other hand, they say Hitler appeals to the aristocratic principle in nature, social Darwinism, one group must always rule. It's a law of nature. The Confederacy says it's based on nature. law, in the cornerstone speech, the nature is supposed to have decided that whites rule over blacks. So on the one hand, you're appealing to nature. On the other hand, they don't want to say

that the Confederacy is fascist, that it's fascist elements. But you don't have fascism without unions and communism. So it appeals to nature, but it repudiates nature. It repudiates science at the same time. How far back does fascism go? Is fascism an arc something from the 20th century, 21st century? So there's a large rift in the fascism scholarly community about this. One group of fascism scholars says, it's a local thing that happened in Italy and Germany and a few other places. And it's gone and we don't, maybe we'll have to worry about it some other time, but it's a very specific thing. Then there are theorists like me and Frederico Finkelstein and others who say, no, it's the modern form of something very ancient that dates all the way back

to book eight of Plato's Republic. Plato talks about how democracy leads to its own demise in book eight of the republic because he says, democracy allows freedom of speech, and freedom of speech will allow a tyrant to arise, a tyrant who raises fear of one group and promises that he will protect the people against that group, and he drips blood from his mouth. And so Plato said democracy will lead immediately to tyranny. So there's always been in Western political theory, this figure of the tyrant. Now, the tyrant and the tyrant represents himself as protecting you against the enemy other.

Now, fascism, in my view, is the post-industrial version of that. It takes, it's one post-industrial version. Fascism requires, it says, fascism says the communists are here, the labor unions, they're going to steal your property, will protect your property. So you absolutely need, you absolutely need, you need this post-industrial setting. You need this fear that the socialists are coming and they're going to take your property,

this fear of the communists, this fear that the liberals really are communists in disguise. So that dialectic arises after capitalism. And fascism presents itself as the defender of a certain kind of capitalism, certainly as the defender of the people's private property. And it always raises communism and socialism as its enemy. It's one of the things that really surprised me about this election cycle.

I thought communism was gone. I didn't know Joe Biden was a communist? I quite literally did not. But I didn't think that there were any communists around. I thought that was very, very odd. something in the Republican Party that needs to bring back socialism? Absolutely. Yeah, because it's the politics. Fascist politics needs socialism and communism as enemies. They can vilify. And as Goebbels says in his 1935 speech, communism with its mask off, he says, you know, the

Bolsheviks are right around the corner, ready to take your home. So that is part of this politics. the Ku Klux Klan, they say the communists are behind labor unions. Labor unions want, labor unions will force you to work alongside black people, the racial other. So this idea that communism is trying to create a race war to overthrow the white Christian order. That's central to the Ku Klux Klan, central to Nazi ideology. So then we'll alienate half of our audience more so than we already have. You would say then outright that Donald Trump is a fascist. No, I wouldn't. I've never said that. I would say that he's cynically using a certain kind of playbook, and it's unquestionable the political playbook he's using as a fascist political playbook. Hitler and Mussolini believed in what

they were doing. This was their religion. Hitler hated Jewish people. Does Donald Trump hate black Americans? I don't know. I think he wants to be rich. He's using it cynically. He's using it. I think there are other people in this country who are very dangerous, powerful figures who seek authoritarianism. I think Trump is a wannabe autocrat authoritarian. I think he sees this white grievance politics. He understands it as a long history in the United States. He understands that figures like McCain and Bush were reluctant to use it. and he used it. He understood it. It's power. You touched on something that I want to drill down on, because the reason I wanted to have you on is I heard you on the fifth column podcast.

And you said something that I wish that they had asked you a follow-up about, so I'm going to do it now. You said that, I think you said, no, Donald Trump isn't a fascist, but he does a pretty good impression of one. Yeah, exactly. What is the material difference, do you think, between being a fascist and doing a pretty good impression of one? That's a great question. So first of all, I think there's one area of policy where he's been clearly pretty fascist, and that's immigration. And unsurprisingly, because Stephen Miller is, this is what is. And we can't view this as non-American. When Hitler, if you read my book, that Hitler praises the United States as immigration laws, our eugenics programs, or immigration

laws. Trump drops a lot of those comments like when he talks about help people, shithole countries versus he has a lot of just background eugenics. When Minnesota, when he contrasts people, he says you're like healthy versus the Somalian immigrants. So there's a lot of that background talk. That's American. It's also fascist. Trump didn't, he didn't start, he always step back a little. He didn't execute, but he didn't, he went as if he was going to start arresting peaceful protesters, do what we're seeing in Belarus. But he didn't. He did, he did some. That's, that's the, so immigration full bore. They really, the motto of Oswald Mosley's British Fascist Union was Britain for the British, full stop on immigration. He's done that.

The attack on university, he was announcing a lot of things like attacking, like patriotic education. That should not, we should, nobody should, should, you know, that's very grim. The Chinese Communist Party does patriotic education. That's classic authoritarianism. But he didn't, we, I debate this with people. You could say that he tried to be a fascist leader, but just was so weak and incompetent that he, didn't, who couldn't do it? Or you can say that he just, he didn't, he didn't, if you look at, say, the Turkish coup against Erdogan, that didn't succeed. They didn't have the kind of follow

through. And Trump has not shown that. Maybe he's not interested in showing that. Obviously, if you go that route and you fail, there are very bad consequences. So he didn't follow through. He didn't try to completely, he did try to take over the. the party. The justices he appointed are still ruling and according to accordance of law. I don't want to be cliche here, but our system has so far at least worked. I think when he appointed justices, he thought they just do what he said, but they actually haven't. So does that mean that he didn't want to be a fascist? Does not mean, I'm not sure were people preventing him? Nobody really knows. but it does show that if you had someone in there who did have that ambition and was very smart,

the Republican Party might go along, and the Democratic Party would be incredibly weak at doing their feckless thing. So it worries me about the structures of American democracy. With the judiciary, one of the key points seems to have been to get justices with very strong Christian beliefs into the judiciary. So I'm wondering how Christianity filters into this, the role that it plays for people. Yes. White Christianity, white nationalist Christianity. There's a lot of recent work on this. It is clearly a white Christian evangelical movement that is backing Trump. And there are, democracy needs to be secular and liberal. Religion has a place, but not in the public sphere. There's a reason. Religion has a hierarchical authoritarianism.

construction. God, priests. It trains you to think anti-democratically. So when you have that in the public sphere, and then you have the idea that the only save people are of one religion, you're giving up democracy. So the politicization of fundamentalist Christianity, of fundamentalist Judaism, I'm Jewish, I see all my Orthodox relatives that are very strong Trump supporters, this idea that there's a strong man here to save you, and he's going to put Christianity, make the country Christian again. It is, it is, and that group is going to be looking for another representative. And what they've shown, they're my relatives, I love them dearly, but they don't have the kind of view of liberal democracy that I have, where you need to protect the public sphere,

you can't have. So, yeah, we've learned a lesson that political philosophy has been talking about for centuries, which is that religion and liberal democracy are going to be intentioned. All right, we're going to pause there for a break. You're listening to Angry Planet. We're on with Jason Stanley talking about fascism. All right, Angry Planet listeners, welcome back. We are getting back to our conversation with Jason Stanley, all about fascism.

It sounds or maybe it feels like this way to me that we have now entered this world where people are practicing politics based on what they are afraid of, either fascism or communism, and what they dismiss on the other side is either fanciful, right? So I think most of us would say, like, the idea that Biden and Kamala Harris are communists is laughable on its face. But then Trump's supporting family I have would tell me that the idea that Trump is a fascist is laughable on its face. Is there a way to have a conversation about this stuff anymore in a real way? Yeah, it's a great point. One of the things that suppose you say is, does Trump appeal to white nationalists? It's just not possible to not deny that. You can say that not all Trump supporters are white nationalists.

That's clearly true. My Orthodox Jewish relatives are not white nationalists. But though complicated. But Trump does appeal to those people. Now, then you need a long conversation about the connection between American white nationalism and European fascism. Actually, American white nationalism deeply affects European fascism. So now there are plenty of Trump supporters who just want a tax cut. There are plenty of Trump supporters who just and who are Trump supporters because they're

religious and they, one issue voters, abortion. They want religion in the public sphere. They want certain justices. Plenty of Trump supporters. But racism, but the fact that he appeals to white supremacists is not turning them off. And that's a problem. And that's something, a place that I found it helpful to begin. I said, I understand that you have, don't have a racist bone in your body. And I understand that that you think that the police can be problematic. And I understand that you agree with a lot of things that I agree with. It's just that you think that we should have, we should have many fewer taxes, Trump boom, the economy or whatever. I understand that. But you have to see that you're supporting someone who appeals to the following people. And then I open my computer

and I go to various websites. And I say, is it really worth it? Is that worth it? Yeah, and it doesn't take long. And nobody, no communist is out there supporting Joe Biden. Yeah, they're all very, very upset at him today in particular, actually. Yeah, you're not going to find websites. So like, really, we're going to make, whereas there's lots of anti-Semitic websites. And obviously, the charge of anti-Semitism is very complicated because plenty of people who hate Jews love Israel. So that's the complicated factor in American politics. Bibi also makes it even more complicated.

There are plenty of people in Israel. who question his democratic bona fides. Oh, yeah, he's another authoritarian autocratic wannabe, ethno-nationalist wannabe. So he's part of the team that the Putin, we don't talk about Netanyahu as much, but we should. Who are you tracking? Who are you worried about, not just in America?

Like, when you look abroad, what are the worrying? What are the flashpoints and the worry signs? The country I'm most concerned about is India. A lot of my book is about India, about the rise of Hindutfa. Americans don't realize that in 2002, Modi was anathema. He was supervised over a pogrom against Muslims in India. He was, as a child, he was in RSS, which is like being in the Nazi Party. India has turned, India, you have a real,

alarming situation because the majority of the country is Hindu and a clear minority is Muslim. And even though Modi has tanked the economy, he's brought Dalits poor Hindus to his side. So I recently had an interview with the Economic Times of India. I'm very involved with the politics there. And they were trying to sort of like do barbs about Americans' flirtation with authoritarianism. And I said, and I just flipped it back at them every time they're like, How can there be, how can there be poor whites who support a president who's just gave a $1.5 trillion tax cut to the wealthiest Americans? He seems not at all concerned with the economic well-being of the white working class. From an international perspective, we don't understand that.

I flipped it around. I said in 2019 Dalits, the untouchable class, voted for the first time for BJ. because they were won over by the anti-Muslim politics. That structure where you say, as long as it's a rich Hindu, a rich Hindu is still a Hindu. So India, I'm very worried because I don't think they have the same, I'm not sure there's the same commitment to secular liberal. There is a big commitment to secular liberal democracy, but it's already further down with journalists being targeted. And we have that targeting here. Frankly, it's been tough to be a

journalist these past four years. Nicole Hannah-Jones recently tweeted the letters she gets. Yeah, they're on, yeah, she's in the new. Trump goes after journalists by name. That's how it happens. And then in other countries, Brazil, another country I'm very involved in, you know, Bolsonaro has to lose in 2022. If he does in Brazil's democracy. may be gone. What would have happened to us? If Trump had won, do you see something similar here?

It all depends on, if Trump had won, I think, given how he ran, it would have been, it would have been, you don't know because of this performative point that Matt was talking about. Like how much,

when he says he's going to target radical professors, hey, I'm a radical professor. Trump said in his RNC acceptance speech, he's going to target me. and he's going to promote patriotic education. What, our kids are going to be learning about the great Robert E. Lee? All of that.

How much would he have tolerated? Yeah, if he had won going after the media is next. And Hungary and Poland, Orban, who's extremely sophisticated, took down the whole media. Poland left, Poland first did the judiciary, now they're turning to the media. Trump's done the judiciary. What I think he would have targeted the media was all sorts of ways you can do that. Can you explain Hungary a little bit more? Because I think that that's a really telling example right now. Yeah. So Hungary is where I started doing this work in 2010. I spent the summer there doing a summer school at Central European University when an Arban had just won.

It was a thriving liberal democracy in the European Union and Orban just took it down. He just, he ran against non-existent, non-existent immigrants. He ran saying, that the immigrants are going to overrun the country. He ran against, against non-existent Jews, although there, too, the Orthodox community, such as it is, loves him because they love Putin, too. So because the far-right fundamentalists are the far-right fundamentalists. Then Orban, like, took over the country. He forced, he used the courts. He didn't use violence. He used, first he emptied out the courts, placing his own judges in there by various legal shenanics. and then he used the courts in civil processes to force the media to sell their companies to his friends. And then he took a cut out of every contract. So he's a multi-billionaire now.

His son-in-law is a multi-billionaire who gets all these government contracts. The EU sends them billions of dollars and it goes into our bonds family's pockets. And now he set himself up as as a ruler for life, he forced the greatest university, central European university, out of the country by attacking them and representing them as a den of leftist gender ideology and Marxism. So you destroy the intellectual class. That's a way that communism differed from this kind of politics.

Because the communist stories, okay, we've got to have some good academics around. We have to, whereas these folks are just like, no, get all the things, like attack academia, attack the universities. And then Arban, last time I was in, I spoke at Central European University a month before they were forced out of the country in September, a year ago. And I spoke with the last remaining free press, which is a Belgian media organization who does a radio channel. And they said, yeah, we're allowed to criticize Orban as long as we don't criticize his family members. But he did it all without violence. He did it by large lawsuits. When you control the courts, then you can do huge civil fines against people, and it just becomes

economically impossible to remain in the country, to have assets in the country. So Poland is now turning to that. They're using the courts to force the press to sell themselves to allies of PIS, of law and justice. Of course, the courts are... Nobody actually has to sue the media into not. non-existence. Local journalism is pretty much on its last legs right now. The business model for whatever, for many reasons, is just not sustainable. Do you see that as having a major impact going forward? Absolutely. And after World War I, Walter Lipman got extremely concerned about the fact that

the American public had so easily been drawn into World War I. So together with some others, he raised I forget the name of the foundation, the Gardner Foundation? I can't remember exactly now, but they paid to finance international journalists and local papers, international reporters. And the point was to get many different views of what was happening in other countries to ordinary Americans. When we get all of our news from, when we get local journalism from one site and one source, when Sinclair Media, who controls local journalism and the Pittsburgh paper, the Cleveland paper

can't send someone to another country to find out what's happening then we're in peril. So yeah, that's been a huge and we should probably constrain who's allowed to call themselves news something, but we're in a drastic information

epistemological crisis in this country. Do you worry about I worry about this. So do you worry that people are less willing to talk about fascism and kind of recognize it because of the unique quality of Donald Trump over the last four years? Because he is such a clown and a buffoon. Because I watched and I wrote a lot of these articles, sorry, I wrote a lot of these articles four years ago too, as I was watching him and going down the checklist and be like, oh, this is probably bad. lots and lots of fascism scholars sent up signal flares over the last few years. Timothy Snyder was writing about it and Applebaum.

Just lots of people were calling this out. And at a certain point, people, I think, especially right now, because everything is so surreal and ridiculous, and there's so much infighting amongst his troop, do you worry that this kind of dilution of the term fascism And this idea that perhaps folks like you have cried wolf may be a problem going forward when the next guy comes along? I think that my work specifically is about how fascism is a permanent feature of societies. It could be, it's very different from, say, Madeline Albright, who represents the United States as this wonderful liberal democracy. and then this Russian agent came over and brought this European disease. That is not my perspective at all, as for my work.

My perspective is we've always had white nationalism. We've always had the Ku Klux Klan. We've always had these very frightening aspects to American politics. We've had courageous Republicans and conservatives who have refused to go there. McCain is an obvious example, but many Republicans have refused to go there. These are demons that every country has. the United States certainly has the demon of racism and white nationalism. We just have had it, have had it became anathema.

You didn't even find it for all of his sins, and I think Bush was had a lot of sins, the Iraq war and torture. He didn't go after Muslims the way that. So this kind of politics, it's international. It's not just the United States, but we also have a long history of it here. So with Trump, I think the sense that Wolf has been called, is due to normalization. There are so many more extreme things that happen.

It's just that every time something really extreme happens, it becomes normal. And then everyone's, wait, I'm not in a concentration camp, so it's not fascism. So actually, it's much more extreme than anything I thought would happen. He pressed the rule of law way beyond what I thought was possible.

He stacked the courts. He allowed, he completely shut down the borders. How many things can you do in four years. He completely shut down immigration in the United States. It's hard to hire people, high-skilled workers in universities. Students are having a hard time. We have the greatest university system in the world. He is breaking our university system. Graduate student researchers can only come for the visa system he's been messing with. Sending, then lots of steps towards authoritarianism, like the protesters, challenging the protesters. So,

I think it's been, he took over the Republican Party in a way that I didn't think was possible. Far more, he made it into a cult of the personality. He created a bond between himself and his supporters that I didn't think was possible in the United States. We're a democratic country, the democratic ethos. We're people that loves not to be just in worshipful, in worship of a champion who we view as our unique champion. But all the authoritarianism literature says, in social psychology, says there's a tendency of people to want an authoritarian, to want to say he's our champion. I think we've seen that to a degree that I did not think possible four years ago. When Donald Trump said I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a single supporter, I think a lot of us thought he was kidding.

He wasn't kidding. Now it's undeniable what he said. So I'm not sure what calling wolf means. I wish I had been like, yeah. Let me ask it a different way then. Do you think the buffoonishness of some of these characters shields them in a way? So, as Jason said, buffoonishness is normal with these authoritarian personalities. Look at Putin's hockey games.

When I'm sad, I go to YouTube and I watch Putin dominate the Russian All-Stars, of scoring eight goals and 10 goals. And that takes buffoonish to another level. Donald Trump isn't out there with 40, 45-year-old basketball stars, like scoring 60 points on them. You know, I mean, so I think we have to be careful here. What Trump wasn't was a, he wasn't as effective as he could have been. He was a bit lazy.

He didn't get out of bed maybe. He didn't have that closing thing. He didn't poison anyone. He didn't. So I'm not sure that's buffoonishness. The buffoonishness is a character that trait that Mussolini had, that Idi Amin. We have to remember, Eid Amin was very efficient at taking over a country. Bolsonaro, much more buffoonish than Trump.

The buffoonishness is neither here nor there. That's part of the charm. That's part of what gets the supporters to like him because they know that the elites find it. but find it vulgar. It's owning the lips. But what Trump didn't have was hardworkingness. He didn't have follow through, perhaps. He wasn't as merciless as you need to be to pull this off. And that shows probably to me that he is not ideologically a fascist, that he isn't deep down, that he's more just out for himself. And he doesn't want to destroy the world and die trying. He just wants, he recognizes. He He recognizes that there's a very compelling way to win elections to appeal to some.

And you can create this bond between you and people. So I just have one more question. And Matthew, you may have others, but will Joe Biden make it all better? That's funny. Cards on the table, I'm a leftist. So, you know, Joe Biden is, to me, he's a Republican. He's look at his cabinet is already. I think what you need to make, to address the kind of longstanding racism, longstanding poverty,

longstanding destruction of unions, food insecurity, health insecurity of Americans from all across, all around the country is you need something that makes them not insecure. And when you make them not insecure, then they're less, when people are less permanent, to having their resentment and anxiety aimed at immigrants and minorities. We need a massive program to make people, like, give them nice overtime pay and health insurance and to just feel secure. And I'm very concerned that the structural problems that this country faces, I don't think, I'm not sure how much Joe Biden could do even if he was willing to deal with those

structural problems, to take on the ruling class, to take on the elites, to make college education more affordable. Like the republic, it's going to be stasis in Washington. And it's going to be stasis because the Republican Party knows that when people are miserable, they will fall for demagogic politics. So in a sense, I'm outside of the political parties in that regard. Do you, what happens to Trumpism now specifically, then, do you think, over the next four years? Great question. So what we've learned is that something like Trumpism is possible, that devotion, slavish devotion, love for a leader that is, that is a kind of, we've always had Obama had people admires, but I have friends who love Obama, but it's not like that. They're still highly critical of him.

They're still, they love him in a kind of, he's my brother. He's my, he's not a savior. He's not like he's going to bring, solve everything. He is, he's the, so we have Trumpism. We know that Trumpism is possible. Trump might use Trumpism. He has this bond with these supporters. As we said, many people voted for Trump, not because they're of Trumpism,

but because he would cut their taxes because he would bring religion to the, to the, to to public sphere who do things that they were interested in. But there are a lot of people who love Donald Trump and love him in a way that is unhealthy in a democratic society. I don't want to like my presidents. I want them all to be people who I'm criticizing all the time. I really don't want to like my presidents. So I certainly don't want to worship them. So I think Trumpism is this anti-democratic movement between leader and followers. And the Republican Party has to confront it. We know that these sorts of movements can only, on the right and the left, can only be defeated by members of that party. Like, you need conservatives standing up to this and saying, this is not, we don't want, this is not a monarchy.

This is not a dynasty. Do you see a continuity, and maybe this just betrays the kind of reading that I've been doing lately, Do you see a continuity between him and other Republican leaders in the post-war era? I'm thinking specifically of Goldwater and Reagan. Yeah, Goldwater Nixon. Right straight from Nixon's playbook. Nixon would, I don't know, be a socialist now or whatever. Reagan would be a socialist now.

But absolutely, Nixon, Goldwater, yes. Goldwater created Reaganism. He created that movement, and he was considered far too right-wing, far too much of an extremist at his time. But now that is the mainstream in the Republican Party. Nixon used what we have in America as we have as long as we don't deal with racial injustice, we will always have this cycle of black political protest against police brutality and then demagogic politicians using it.

It happened under Obama. It happened under Trump Brown against Black Lives Matter in 2016. It doesn't matter who the president is. They can be a Democrat. They can be Republican. They can be black or white. As long as our cities are brutally divided by racially. And the massive titanic racial wealth gap remains at 12 to 1 or 20 to 1 or whatever

it is now, somewhere between 12 to 1 and 20 to 1, what an average white family has versus an average black family. You're going to have black political protest and you're going to have some politicians saying they're going to do a war on drugs, a war on crime. They're going to save you. Reagan played the politics of race. He announced his run for president in Mississippi in a county fair right near where the three civil rights workers, Schwerner, Cheney, and Goodman were killed. So that was a clear message. So we have this racial politics. Goldwater, same thing. The Goldwater Campaign Ad, Choice, 30-minute campaign ad is all about radicals, radical students, and black protest. So this is the line

running through all of these demagogic, these politicians who uses these demagogic techniques. And as soon as black Americans are born into, do not suffer this incredible goutic, at birth of wealth and education, etc. Plenty of them will be Republicans. So I think that that politics of race underlies at all in this country. It's different in other countries. But in this country, it's the protest against police brutality

against brutal conditions, then that gets represented as lawless crime and rioting and you need a law and order leader and time and time again. Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, Trump. Clinton. Don't forget Clinton.

Clinton, yeah, Clinton's a good example in there, actually. Very good. Because he did use that, he did take. Yeah. I mean, he flew back to oversee the execution of a mentally impaired black man when he was running.

Ricky Ray? Yeah. I think, yeah. Yeah, this is Democrat and Republican. And Joe Biden, of course, is the face of the 1994. No, crime had been dropping. I always do this with my students.

Do you know under one New York City mayor did violent crime start rapidly dropping? Do either of you know? Yes. No, that's a jail. Jason's the New Yorker. Well, I still remember plenty of crime with Koch. There was a lot of crime with Koch.

Was it Dinkins? Dinkins. You're supposed to say Giuliani. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was Dinkins. And it was because crime was just dropping nationally. But throughout the 90s, violent crime has dropped. New York City had 2,300 murders in 1991.

And last year it was 310, 320. That is nuts. So this cycle, but nevertheless, throughout the 90s, you had these after crime had started dropping. You had these incredible vilification by the Democrats and Republicans. So this is a bipartisan issue. And until we deal with racial injustice, we're always going to have demagogues.

Because as Plato reminded us, it's about creating fear and then presenting yourself as the protector. And I think that's, is that the good place to end? Mr. Fields, are you happy? I'm scared. Yes. Well, that's how we like to go out on this show.

On a down note. All right. Jason Stanley, the book is how fascism works, the politics of us and them. Thank you so much for coming on to Angry Plan. and walking us through this. Thank you so much. That was a great discussion.

Really enjoyed it. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners, if you like the show, please, we have a substack. It's at AngryPlanet.substack.com. You can afford $9 a month, just $9 a month to get access to two bonus episodes. Again, that's at AngryPlanet.substack.com. Angry Planet is me, myself, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin Nodell, who's created by myself.

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