Jason Stanley, the Jacob Urowsky professor of philosophy at Yale University and author of “How Fascism Works,” gave the inaugural lecture at the Unitarian Society of New Haven’s Authors Talks on April 9. More than 250 people attended, some no doubt drawn not only by Stanley’s expertise but by his recent decision to leave Yale for an appointment at the University of Toronto because, he said, he didn’t want to raise his children in a country that is now tilting towards a fascist dictatorship.
In his remarks Stanley examined how authoritarians use racism and patriarchy to split civil society apart and dismantle democracy. He acknowledged that he was an authority on the political theory of fascism, but not on the solutions to the crisis of authoritarianism the U.S. is now facing under the Trump administration.
Stanley joins two other well-known Yale history professors, Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore, who will all take positions at Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy this fall. Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus recorded Stanley’s talk, from which the following segment is excerpted.
JASON STANLEY: Racism was used by the northern industrialists who saw the upcoming labor movement and the southern planter class to split poor whites and poor blacks apart. Similarly, patriarchy — we are seeing patriarchy and racism as Ida B. Wells emphasized, cannot clearly be distinguished.
Patriarchy, too, is a method to split us apart. In both cases, there are ways of telling men, in the one case; poor whites in another case that their real allegiance is to wealthy people who share an identity with them and not to their class interests, not to their material interests. That’s the function of racism and patriarchy.
So do racism and patriarchy split the world into oppressor and oppressed based on race or gender? No. Patriarchy oppresses men. That’s its point. And racism oppresses whites. That’s its point. One of its points. Central points. These are methods of power. They’re methods of power to tear us apart so we vote against our material interests.
So what we’re seeing today, as we see the development of a multi-racial far right, we are seeing — as my colleague Daniel HoSang discusses at length — I believe, patriarchy wielded as a powerful weapon against democracy.
There’s another concept that is crucial for understanding the current moment. And that’s René Girard’s concept of the scapegoat. René Girard, Peter Thiel’s favorite theorist, says that a political community is created by the selection of an innocent scapegoat. A political community is a diverse group of people who you unify in hatred against the scapegoat.
How do you get white supremacists, Black Americans, Latino Americans, religious, religious Muslims to align together? You pick a scapegoat that enough of these groups hate collectively that they don’t look to their left and look to their right and see who’s joining them in this hatred. That is why across the world, LGBTQ citizens are a scapegoat.
And then the concept of LGBTQ, like the concept of people of color, needs to be unpacked, because in this moment, it really isn’t the L and the G and the B that are being targeted, it’s the T that’s being targeted. And why is the T being targeted? Because it’s such a small group of people. And the smaller your scapegoat group is, the more effective your political coalition is.
So I want to address another point that you might be hearing from your friends and neighbors. And it’s that the authoritarianism we now see, is a reaction, a backlash reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement, to trans acceptance and other democratic movements for equality. So the idea is like, you deserve to you deserve it because you backed these movements for equality.
What did you expect? That’s the fault. Oh, sure. It’s too much of a backlash, but you’re actually at fault. You Unitarians who preach equality. You’re why we have fascism now. I’m sure many of you have heard this. I certainly have.
But that line of argument fails in multiple ways. First of all, this is a global movement, a global movement against democracy. Vladimir Putin, on the eve of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, gave a speech where he said that Russia has to invade Ukraine to stop the “Parent 1, Parent 2” ideology that Ukraine and the West are spreading to destroy civilization. So unless you’re prepared to say that the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was a backlash to the existence of trans women in Ukraine, then I don’t think you’re entitled to say that what happened here is a backlash to local conditions here.
It is a global movement. And there our global strategies which scapegoats are employed depends on the country. In Western Europe, the scapegoats are immigrants. It’s xenophobia and Muslims. And so that’s why you find the structure of authoritarianism in Western Europe. That’s why you find women fascist leaders because, you know, they’re trying to make the point. They’re feminism-washing Muslim bigotry, anti-Muslim bigotry.
Jason Stanley’s newest book is titled, “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite The Past To Control The Future.”
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