The Secret of Jason Stanley's Fascist Spectrum
POLITICAL GORGON 1
This is for you, normal person
You may not think of yourself as a normie, but you do think that you are more “conventional” than us. For a long time it seemed like the space between us was too large to communicate over: more of an abyss than a gap. We saw one USA and you saw another. Our vision was apocalyptic. The word apocalypse comes from the Greek word apokalyptein, which means to uncover, disclose, pull away. We thought the veil was lifted, and behind the veil we saw cops murdering innocent people in dead alleys, humans locked in cages forever, drone bomb death, ecocide, and the murder of environmental activists by a right-wing regime put into power by Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
This vision made it extremely difficult to communicate. One good definition of a “normal” person is someone who does not believe they are in the midst of an apocalyptic process. Normal is on the other end of the spectrum from apocalypse. But now (it seems) that the apocalypse is coming closer to the United State. Grotesque mass shootings haunt the media, large blocs of left and right believe the state illegitimate, massive open air drug markets exist within global alpha cities. What is going on?
DEEP SOCKS
What you’re reading right now is part of a book called DEEP SOCKS serialized on this Substack, that strives to answers the question “what is going on” at the deepest level possible. Timespan is one way to think about what “deep” thinking means in terms of politics. Shallow politics has a very rapid timespan, specifically, the time of the news cycle, which is somewhere between an hour and a week. Something happens, people yell about it, and then something else happens. Although both the nature of events and the way we talk about these events changes, the short-term form persists. In fact, the attention cycle seems to be getting shorter and shorter. A stereotypical zoomer consumes media in 15 second chunks, each chunk algorithmically fed. We wrote a very complicated article about this, which you can read here.
Deep politics, on the other hand, tends to have longer timespans. The essay that begins, today, for instance goes all the way back to the 1850s. Railroads had already existed since the beginning of the 19th century, but the 1850s was when (in the United States, at least) they “scaled.” The book to read on this is “The Visible Hand” by Alfred Chandler, if you’d like to skip ahead, read chapter 3. Very helpful stuff. Basically, in order to operate a train system at national size, you needed to create a new kind of administrative structure operated by a new class of human being: the manager. To us, a manager is a very normal thing. Almost everyone manages something. We manage our lives, we manage our careers, we manage nonprofits, we manage companies, we manage political campaigns, we manage states.
The disease, not the symptom
According to Curtis Yarvin, the United States is now in a “cold civil war.” Yarvin is, according to his own description, America’s leading absolutist monarchist blogger. We’ll look more closely at his theory about fascism in our second reflection, but the framework of a “cold civil war” is a useful way to understand the current situation of managerial rule in the United States. Blue America, which Yarvin characterizes as “Elf” America, supports competent managerial rule. They believe in science, rationality, high moral values. Red Americans, which Yarvin characterizes as “Hobbits”, distrust managers and elites. They suspect that the managerial elite does not hold their best interests at heart. They are not wholly mistaken!
Talking about polarization is a cliché of shallow politics. What we would like to do, instead, is take you on a safe but thrilling ride into the scariest concept in the American English political unconscious: fascism. Directly considering Fascism is obviously “triggering.” It is the Medusa of politics, a regular Gorgon lurking in your political subconscious. Many snakeheads, all of them terrifying and grim. So, instead of looking straight at Fascism, like Perseus we’re going to look at reflections of fascism, three of them.
The first reflection is Yale philosophy professor’s Jason Stanley’s book “How Fascism Works.” In a very caricatured but also true sense, the book is a couple hundred page explanation of why Trump is Hitler. But the specific way that Stanley constructs the Trump = Fascism identity can teach some surprising lessons about the contemporary American “cold civil war.” The second ‘reflection’ is the way that the aforementioned Yarvin understands fascism — basically, as a failed monarchy, specifically, a monarchy that looses all of its intelligentsia to the liberal West. While this sounds obscure, a closer examination will (once again) educate us in useful ways. The last reflection of Fascism is much older: a 1934 painting from Salvador Dali called “The Weaning of Furniture Nutrition.” Dali first painted a Nazi swastika on the central figure in the painting. One critic described it as a “hitlerian wetnurse.” According to the art historian Robin A. Greeley, “surrealists forced Dali to remove the image.” Also appearing in this final installation is the surrealist psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whose theory of paranoia is alarmingly applicable.
Outside of sheer intellectual enjoyment, there is a practical reason to take this “ride.” By virtue of being able to read this essay, you are likely in a relatively high position within the managerial class that rules the world, and you are also likely uncomfortable with this description.
What is fascism, then?
Let us begin with an examination of this discomfort by asking you to think: What is fascism? And how does it work?
We will start with Jason Stanley’s answer, because defining and safeguarding society against fascism is a personal mission of Jason Stanley, it is what he set out to do. His own grandmother was deeply involved in resistance to the government of Germany in the 1930s, and this has created a particular sense of political mission that has helped his stature rise beyond the milquetoast philosopher to a political commentator who Says Important Things and Writes to Be Remembered.
Stanley outlines 10 overlapping domains of fascist politics:
The Mythic Past
Propaganda
Anti-intellectualism or Anti-intellectual institution
Unreality
Hierarchy
Victimhood
Law and Order
Sexual Anxiety
Sodom and Gomorrah or the Fixation with sin and righteousness
Arbeit Macht Frei, or Anti-labor, pro-manager & pro-owner politics
His conclusion was that fascist politics are deceptive, propagandistic, based on a divide-and-rule principle, deeply Machiavellian, patriarchal, racial, pro-agrarian and nationalist, and slavishly oriented around the profit system. He has successfully described the fundamental political strategies of at least half of all American politicians since Thomas Jefferson. Were he to dig deeply into the actual thoughts and beliefs of Americans in the 1930s, he would discover that his own grandmother escaped as a refugee to a nation that by his own definition was on a short road to fascism.
This is perhaps the most cynical takeaway from Jason Stanley’s “How Fascism Works.” This takeaway is only possible because of a mistaken identification of a ‘right wing spectrum’ with no clear division between has often been considered a relatively ‘safe’ type of conservatism with fascism. Though what Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan claim to believe is certainly incompatible with the more cosmopolitan worldview of their counterparts in the Congress, they are deeply amenable to mutually beneficial compromise and are a mere decade or so behind on social mores. Current political paralysis is a mere symptom of a far deeper issue than ‘polarization,’ polarization is a name for the symptom, it is not the name of the disease. Fascism is a failure condition of institutions combined with a deep yearning for a restoration of monarchical and imperial authority—for someone to set the world right.
This essay is not meant as a critique of Stanley’s identification of hypermodern conservative/Trump-style politics with fascism. Indeed, he is not entirely wrong, though he is far from correct. Critically, under his own theories of knowledge, his experience with fascism is made willfully incomplete by his own personal mythologized past about fascism. The dividing lines between ‘normal’ politics and ‘fascist’ politics are far beyond a difference of technique, they are a difference of quality and kind. To see these dividing lines, we’ll have to look at Stanley’s cosmogony of Fascism.
How does fascism work then?
To be fair to Stanley, he outlines an impressive formal system that outlines an effective way to see what Fascism is to a mainstream political thinker in America. According to Stanley, through the aforementioned 10 interlocking domains. A Social Darwinist mass political movement, centered around a charismatic leader and some mountain of money, will construct an idealized past, the Mythic Past in which the wrongs of the present day never happened. This is the model and vision, the standard around which we shall all rally to rebuild the motherland. This is a narrative that is typically racialized, populist, pro-agrarian. It also seeks to create the Volk, the people, who exist in opposition to the wreckers, the foreigners, the invaders. The Mythic Past is served by Propaganda, a strong and heavily coded stream of messages that target the Volk and get their blood boiling. These two elements create the foundations of a political religion, centered around the charismatic leader. In order to safeguard against falsification and counterpropaganda, this propaganda is usually inflected with Anti-intellectualism, directed at the extremely wealthy, extremely expensive elite-producing machines of high quality research universities, as well as their allies, journalists. This spawns a state of Unreality where the susceptible Volk have now a competing heuristic for all events that is approximately as coherent and descriptive as any other, though obviously less rigorous and much more manipulated.
This competing heuristic has multiple fixations that cover most domains of human experience and all domains of news entertainment. There is a strong belief in Hierarchy, this is where both Social Darwinism and the long tradition of the Prosperity Gospel come into play, a crude equation of wealth = power = right is extended across history without contextualization. All hierarchies are present because nature is hierarchical. This fallacy justifies any amount of viciousness you could dream up. But people don’t like to be abusers or bullies or even tyrants. Victimhood is a core part of this heuristic—not only if they lost, did they deserve it, but if we lost, they deserved it. This is the toxic part of the heuristic, where benefits or victories by any group other than the Volk are an insult to the Volk. These losses promise to be avenged by a return of Law and Order, which will punish the wicked and avenge the just. Victimhood is tempered by Sexual Anxiety, the fear of women’s liberation and all forms of feminism, and a love of some ersatz traditionalism. This is further tempered by the conception of Sodom and Gomorrah and its inverse, the Shining City on the Hill. Sexual sin, degeneracy, drug addiction, vice and license are all to be shunned and despised as a subtype of the detestable feminist or anti-Volkisch impulse. Their prevalence in society stokes the sense of Victimhood and harkens back to the Mythic Past where there was no such thing.
Finally, this is all backstopped by the ordering concept of the mutability of the Volk itself, that there is a kind of work that will liberate and make you one of the Volk. Or kill you, neither is a problem in this fascist cosmology. The idea is that Work Makes You Free, Arbeit Macht Frei. The negative character of the untermenschen can be reformed, and the pure character of the Volk can be refined and honed, all through the power of the competitive free market, where labor’s rights are purely those of the contract and nothing more.
The cordon sanitaire
This is an appealing universe of fascism, because it is tidy, reflexive, and references the past in many telling ways. It establishes a clear line between good Republicans, like Eisenhower, and bad Republicans, like Nixon, who are protofascist at best. But, Stanley is transparently a partisan for an equally contemptuous political party. This book is an attempt at shifting the boundaries of a fence inside one political camp, from the outside.
The ostensible audience of this book, “How Fascism Works” is the “Never Trump” camp of the GOP, those people who had sincere policy disagreements for Barack Obama but could never countenance voting for such a crude and distasteful man as Trump. This is approximately 2-5% of the national electorate, based on recent election results. It’s important to remember how minuscule this imagined audience actually is, because it is a book focused on electoral politics and hopefully influencing their outcome, one that sees itself arming citizens of a liberal democratic society with the tools to resist not just demagoguery, but the no-good, rotten, bad sort of demagoguery.
Of course this is not the actual audience of the book, but an intended one. In reality, this book appeals strongly to those who are exhausted with electoral politics being a competition and the seeming inability of conservatives to get with the times quickly enough. The audience is people who wish for a society that rejects their premises of patriarchy, naturalized racial and economic hierarchy, and wishes for rational, scientific management of the nation. They wish for a complete quarantine of anything that stokes their fear that the past will come to consume them, or that they might become party to the pinnacle of evil.
The typology error
The audience is a numbers and charts type at heart, and they understand politics as a team sport like baseball, played to gain marginal advantages which round out to win or loss states. Concepts like triangulation and opinion polling help them understand politics spatially and mathematically. These people see society as existing on a number of spectra, politics being a biaxial spectrum, ranging on one axis from state-control to market-freedom, and on the other from property-absolutism to property-abolition. To see this is to see fascism as coordinates in a space called ‘The Right’ on the grid we called ‘Politics’ and to reduce it into a number of precepts and techniques, shared by those adjacent to and within the coordinates. Fascism is the part of ‘The Right’ with the death camps, and the goofy white guys marching about how they don’t get enough respect, and the hate, and the crazy conspiracy theories.
As we alluded previously—this is a failure state of thought. It others the past and present and precludes understanding, it fails to see the historical and human nature of politics and instead makes it quantitative, spatial. It invites thresholds for moral categories, things to the left or right of position X are good or bad. Today, we read ourselves as ‘good’ and our enemies as ‘bad.’ Were we to take this moral axis backward with us, unknowingly, to the political axis, we would see different points, different fields, even different quadrants on the plane as being ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ Moral good and moral bad are weak categories to align politics with. It takes little effort to find that political history is a long story of culpability being dodged with additional, grander crime and adroit mythmaking.
Historical movements are first and foremost qualitative and not quantitative in kind. The modern fixation with the political spectrum and the desire to place as many behaviors and phenomena on such a scientific and profound concept as a spectrum is tempting. But it is an error of type, a mistake of identification, and it divorces politics from history in an attempt to level all politics to the present, where morality influences our judgment.
Grappling with history requires the understanding that first and foremost events in history are not quantifiable. Though you may be a materialist, and think that the number of bullets spent is indicative of a war, you can only be half right.
Let’s return to fascism
Fascism in the early 20th century was a response to two things: the final death of the absolute monarch, the unifying central figure of the state and the rise of the ‘centerless’ political system in World War 1, and the second was the colonization of Asia, which demolished national power and the divine monarch and replaced him with the tender mercies of the French, British, and Japanese imperial systems.
It was, in a sense, a right wing response to massive and total institutional failure. The techniques deployed were thoroughly modern and common to left and center at the time. Stalin had his purges, FDR had his camps, and Churchill starved India while presiding over a vicious global empire. The tactics and crimes are not at the heart of fascism—they are at the heart of politics—rather it is the disruption in the order of things that creates a vacuum where some nebulous Father of the Nation steps in to shoulder the crimes of statecraft and great power competition. To want this, you need the kind of institutional failure that gives you trench warfare and a couple of whiffs of mustard gas too many. The sort that has your nation subjugated to a foreign power. It is hard to overstate the trauma of the first 20 years of the 20th century in Europe, or the first 50 in Asia.
Fascism does not merely require the mass die-offs and political collapses following failed wars, it also requires, crucially, the failure and death of institutions. Throughout his book, Stanley alludes to this, but he only sees it as a window of opportunity exploited by the evil fascist. This is why his outline of fascist politics fails to describe any extant fascist system, but only political leaders who are protofascist at best: corrupt, deceitful, powerful, violent, police-friendly and volk-pleasing and ruthless, yes. Then again, so are Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau. (Ask a Yellow Vest or one of those convoy people who came for them in jackboots, and who they worked for.)
In addition to catastrophe, the containment of the fire has to occur. The whole Reichstag has to come down. Institutions have to fail. Liberal politics, the center of the managerial system, has to fail to come up with an acceptable response. Socialist politics, Marxists and their fellow-travelers must also fail to seize power or provide an acceptable mass line. These are not moral failings, but failures of vision and power.
Fascism is properly conceived of as a historical contingency—the end state of the failure of both institutions and competing brands of politics. Seeing Stanley’s examples of fascism: a political party being explicitly racist in the 1970s, running religious people in the most religious developed country on Earth, and playing on ethnic grievance in a country that has for decades imported millions of foreign nationals to depress wages in low-skill labor, we find ourselves a far cry from the right wing revolution brought on by the collapse of the state and any boundary between conservatism and a yearning for a new Caesar.
We’re not there yet, at least.