Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (New York; Random House, 2018)
By Ira Sharkansky
JERUSALEM — We read on the jacket that Stanley is a named Professor of Philosophy at Yale, who has received a number of awards for his writing, is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others.
And this book may also get good grades, but it doesn’t seem to fit the notion of a serious philosophy. We can describe it as good writing or bad, depending on perspective.
The writing flows well, but there is no sharp analysis of his concepts. He describes fascism as made up of various elements, and his chapters put the emphasis on A mythic past; Propaganda; Anti-intellectual, Unreality, Hierarchy, Victimhood, Law and order, Sexual anxiety, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Arbeit macht frie. Yet there is no effort to justify one or the other, or to deal with what seems the similarities or difference between, for example, anti-intellectual and unreality. Examples provided skip from one age to another, and one country to another. They come from prominent and other sources. Items in one chapter beg the question of why there and not elsewhere, and there is a repetition of themes, as well as an avoidance of prominent examples.
Us and Them are separated by closeness to a regime, ethnicity, religion, color, sexual orientation, and rural vs urban residence.
Which is more or less important seems to have slipped through whatever the author uses to select what he writes about.
The chapter on arbeit macht frei begins with a comparison of US treatment of hurricane losses in Puerto Rico and Houston, and wanders to work related issues only later.
All told, it seems clear that Donald Trump fits the model of fascism coming or arrived, but there is no assessment of institutions capable of controlling what comes from the top.
Neither Palestine nor Israel are covered in the book. Yet one provides a death penalty for anyone selling land to a Jew, and the other has been featured in campaigns to boycott, divest, and sanction due to alleged discrimination and other actions meant to downgrade Palestinian and Arab populations.
Both fit what is often provided as the author’s concern with Nazi Germany and Jews, yet their absence is one of the great wonders of the book.
All told, the book reads like something put together on the fly, without serious consideration of what should be in it or not, where should it be put, and what is the fate of the US and other countries touched by fascistic themes.
All told, it doesn’t add to the reputation of political philosophy.
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Sharkansky is professor emeritus of political science at Hebrew University. He may be contacted via ira.sharkansky@sdjewishworld.com