Jason Stanley, Como Funciona o fascismo: a política do “nós” e “eles” [versão ebook], Porto Alegre: L&PM, 2018.

Jason Stanley offers us an interesting theoretical proposal in the study of fascism, presenting it not as a political doctrine and ideology to the concrete case, but rather in the condition of modus operandi, i.e., as a way of doing politics. By rooting fascism in a set of principles linked to ‘nation’ and patriarchy, although Stanley makes use of a comparative methodology between the present – with a focus on the rise of Trumpism – and Mussolini’s fascist and Hitler’s Nazi regimes, the truth is that to most reason we can apply his theoretical device to the process of emergence of Western states in their fabrication of internal belonging and otherness vis-à-vis their neighbours. It is true that the “us” versus “them” narrative has become a mostly internal resource, since it is on social division that fascist politics bet, thus counterposing contractualism. Nevertheless, the “them” corresponds to an abstract mass of subjects composed of immigrants (1), corrupt elites and leftist defenders of minorities.

In this field, fascism as described by Stanley is analogous to the populism discussed by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in How Democracies Die, as tactics of political action that seek to achieve a social division, creating a feeling of mutual distrust between social groups, in which the “us”, that is, the “good” nationalists, gather around the demagogue politician, or in Stanley’s words, fascist. Continuar a ler “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them”