The 10 tactics of fascism | Jason Stanley | Big Think

• Fascism is a cult of the leader, who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by immigrants, leftists, liberals, minorities, homosexuals, women, in the face of what the fascist leader says is a takeover of the country's media, cultural institutions, schools by these forces.

And that's why you need a really macho, powerful, violent response. The fascist leader says he will solve the problem. Fascism is right-wing by nature. It's based on ultra-nationalism.

However, you can have ultra-nationalist movements that are ultra-nationalist movements of minority groups. There is left-wing authoritarianism. There are bad things on the left. Stalin killed many, many people. Mao killed many, many people. These are terrible figures.

But not all terrible things are fascist. Fascism is a very particular ideological structure. When thinking about fascism, you can't think about these individual elements in isolation. They come as a bundle.

My name is Jason Stanley. I'm the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University and the author of five books, most recently, "How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them." We forget that many fascist regimes started off as democratic political parties.

We forget that Hitler, the Nazi Party, ran in an election. Fascist parties start as fascist social and political movements before they come to power. So it's important to see that these tactics occur even in societies that do not have a fascist regime.

(dramatic music) All nationalism involves a mythic past. You can say, "Look, we're Polish people," people who spoke Polish and were sheep herders and another bunch of Polish people who were fishermen, and you can talk about how things were wonderful when we were all Polish together.

That's a fine mythic past, but then there's the fascist mythic past. In the past, we were great. Wherein did our greatness consist? In our military. And in the past, the dominant racial group ruled over others.

And then the fascist leader says, "That has been taken from you by the leftists and communists. They wanna weaken our military. They wanna weaken our greatness." Propaganda is ubiquitous, and everyone uses propaganda.

In political propaganda, your main message is something other than the information you're conveying. Fascist propaganda is a very particular structure. It's based around a friend/enemy distinction.

The political opponent, they are a merciless threat to your very existence and your traditions. They are the other. When they are in charge, it subverts the nation. So the structure of fascist propaganda is based on the idea that the other are fundamentally opposed to the nation.

As Hitler says in "Mein Kampf," "Science is only useful insofar as it strengthens the nation." Fascism is a cult of the leader. It involves the leader setting the rules about what's true and false.

So any kind of expertise, reality, all of that is a challenge to the authority of the leader. If science would help him, then he can say, "Okay, I'll use it." Institutions that teach multiple perspectives on history in all its complexity are always a threat to the fascist leader.

The center of democracy is truth. You're not free if you've been lied to. Nobody thinks the people of North Korea are free. The people of North Korea will vote for Dear Leader every time because they've been lied to.

It's not a free vote because they don't have access to the truth. Equality, similarly, requires truth because equality and democracy doesn't mean we all have the same amount of money. It doesn't mean we all have the same car.

It means political equality, that each of our voices matters the same. And political equality means speaking truth to power. If someone really powerful is humiliated when they're caught lying, that's the core of political equality.

So if you're gonna rip the heart out of democracy, you get people used to lies. Here's a fact about humans: we all pretty much suck to the same degree. (laughs) One group of us is not better than another group of us.

Hierarchy is central here because it's the big...