9 PRINCIPLES FROM HOW FASCISM WORKS BY JASON STANLEY THAT I LEARNED - The Politics of Us and Them [Personal Reflection]

9 PRINCIPLES FROM HOW FASCISM WORKS BY JASON STANLEY THAT I LEARNED - The Politics of Us and Them [Personal Reflection] There is a curious thing that happens when we talk about political ideas. We like to imagine them as foreign objects, distant from the fabric of our everyday lives. Fascism, for instance, often appears in our minds as grainy black-and-white images of parades, banners, and uniforms from another era. We consign it to the past, to Mussolini’s balcony speeches or Hitler’s rallies, as if it belonged to history textbooks rather than to the present moment. But Jason Stanley, in his book How Fascism Works, challenges this easy compartmentalization. He suggests that fascism is not an artifact of the past but a recurring pattern, a set of strategies that surface whenever fear and division take root in a society. When I first encountered his writing, I expected a dry dissection of authoritarian regimes. Instead, what I found was something much more unsettling. Stanley isn’t describing just the collapse of faraway democracies; he is holding up a mirror to our own societies. The language he examines, the appeals to identity, the insistence on a glorious mythic past—all of these are closer to our lives than we might be willing to admit. That recognition is not comfortable. Grab a copy of this book now!