How Fascism Works
The Politics of Us and Them
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- 5,49 €
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “No single book is as relevant to the present moment.”—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen
“With unsettling insight and disturbing clarity, How Fascism Works is an essential guidebook to our current national dilemma of democracy vs. authoritarianism.”—Jelani Cobb, New Yorker staff writer
A Yale philosopher identifies the ten pillars of fascist politics, and charts their horrifying rise and deep history.
As a scholar of philosophy and propaganda and the child of refugees of WWII Europe, Jason Stanley has long understood that democratic societies, including the United States, can be vulnerable to fascism. In How Fascism Works, he identifies ten pillars of fascist politics—an appeal to the mythic past, propaganda, anti-intellectualism, unreality, hierarchy, victimhood, law and order, sexual anxiety, favoring “the heartland,” and a dismantling of public goods and unions—that amount to an urgent diagnosis of the tactics right-wing politicians use to break down democracies and a critical lens on the current moment.
Stanley knits together reflections on history, philosophy, sociology, and critical race theory with stories from contemporary Hungary, Poland, India, Myanmar, and the United States, among other nations, making clear the immense dangers of language and beliefs that separate people into an “us” and a “them.” By uncovering disturbing patterns that are as prevalent today as ever, Stanley reveals that the stuff of politics—rhetoric and myth—can become policy and reality all too quickly. Only by recognizing them, he argues, can we begin to resist their most harmful effects and return to democratic ideals.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stanley (How Propaganda Works), a Yale philosophy professor, delivers an instructive and poignant examination of fascism a resurgent presence in both developed and developing nations, including the United States in this cogent and accessibly written book. He cites past and present examples of fascist behavior from politicians from Hitler, Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, and Benito Mussolini to Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump and draws on sociology and critical race theory to identify 10 concepts and tools employed by political leaders to promote a fascist politics that rely on an "us-versus-them" mentality. Liberal democracies, he writes, have seen immigrants, refugees, and city dwellers, among others, treated as "them." The 10 tactics, which include propaganda, anti-intellectualism, and "victimhood," will be eerily familiar to observers of today's political landscape; for example, the Trump administration's rhetoric surrounding the media is recalled by Stanley's statement that "Reality itself is cast into doubt.... Fascist politics exchanges reality for the pronouncements of a single individual, or perhaps a political party." Stanley is an erudite guide, and his convincing analysis of forces at work in present-day politics is accessible to experts and novices alike.
