Studying Fascist Propaganda by Day, Watching Trump’s Coronavirus Updates by Night

In 2018, Jason Stanley, a philosophy professor at Yale, published “How Fascism Works.” Although it was a slim volume, it ranged broadly, citing experimental psychology, legal theory, and neo-Nazi blogs; although it was by an academic philosopher, it was a popular book that prioritized current events over syllogisms. Viktor Orbán is mentioned more times in the book than Hannah Arendt. Donald Trumpshows up dozens of times, and he is portrayed not as a distractible bozo but as a concerted aspiring strongman. “Fascist politics can dehumanize minority groups even when an explicitly fascist state does not arise,” Stanley writes. Elsewhere, in a chapter called “Sodom and Gomorrah,” he argues that Trump’s habit of extolling the heartland while decrying urban squalor “makes sense in the context of a more general fascist politics, in which cities are seen as centers of disease and pestilence.” Stanley couldn’t have known that many American cities were, in fact, about to become centers of disease, but he could have predicted that Trump would use such a development to his rhetorical advantage. “Some people would like to see New York quarantined because it’s a hot spot,” Trump said, late last month. “Heavily infected.”

Stanley isn’t, or isn’t mainly, a scholar of public policy; he is a philosopher of language. When he insinuates that Trump is a fascist—and you don’t have to be a philosopher of language to catch the insinuation—he means that Trump talks like a fascist, not necessarily that he governs like one. Still, many passages in Stanley’s book begin with a discussion of Germany in the nineteen-thirties, or Rwanda in the nineteen-nineties, before pivoting to a depiction of the contemporary United States. “Ever since my book came out, I’ve been fighting with critics who go, ‘You’re overreacting, you’re exaggerating, it’s irresponsible to call this fascism or that fascism,’ ” Stanley said. “I’ll point to a step Trump has taken—he’s using ice to round up children, he’s surrounding himself with loyalists and generals, he’s using the apparatus of government to dig up dirt on a political rival—and the response is always ‘Sure, that’s bad, but it’s not a big enough step to justify the F-word.’ I’m starting to feel like the it’s-not-a-big-enough-step people won’t be happy until they’re in concentration camps.”
Stanley, a descendant of Holocaust survivors, acknowledges that he is unusually prone to worst-case thinking. (As my colleague Masha Gessen once observed, “It is no fun to be the only hysterical person in the room.”) Stanley has written that, during his childhood, his father’s “Holocaust induced anxiety was all encompassing”; his mother taught him that “the moment where one must accept that a situation is genuinely dangerous is usually well past the time when one can exit it.” He also acknowledges, of course, that there are plenty of big steps that Trump hasn’t taken, and may never take: imposing martial law, closing the borders, indefinitely postponing the 2020 Presidential election. Still, if Trump were ever going to be tempted to try something like this, wouldn’t now be the time? “A lot of us who were deeply worried about Trump from the beginning were specifically worried about what would happen when he got his Reichstag-fire moment,” Stanley said. (The Reichstag, a government building in Berlin, was set ablaze in an arson attack, in 1933; Hitler’s government blamed the arson, falsely, on Communist agitators, and used it as a pretext to suspend civil liberties.) “Trump is lucky, in a way, because the coronavirus is a real crisis,” Stanley continued. “He didn’t have to manufacture one. And now he’s acting the way strongmen always act in a time of crisis—grandstanding, hogging the media spotlight, demanding obedience. So far, at least, his approval rating seems to have held fairly steady.”