Jason Stanley isn’t afraid to use the F-word when talking about President Donald Trump. The author of How Fascism Works and Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future is clear: He believes the United States is currently under an authoritarian regime led by a fascist leader.
At a time when the Trump administration is putting increasing pressure on private and public universities to conform or lose funding, Stanley recently left his position at Yale University and moved his family to Canada, where he’s now the Bissell-Heyd chair in American studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. The move, he says, has allowed him to talk about the US in a way that wouldn’t have been possible if he remained in the country.
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“I knew that if I stayed at Yale, there would be pressure not to bring the Trump administration’s wrath onto Yale,” he says. “I knew that Yale would try to normalize the situation, escape being in the press, urge us to see the fascists as just politically different.”
On this week’s More To The Story, Stanley traces the recent rise of fascist regimes around the globe, and explains why he describes what’s happening in the US today as a “coup” and why he thinks the speed and scope of the Trump administration’s hardline policies could ultimately lead to significant pushback from those opposed to the president.
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This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.
Al Letson: So your new book, Erasing History, focuses on what you call the rise of global fascism and specifically on the role of education in authoritarian regimes. Tell me about that.
Jason Stanley: It’s really a prequel to my 2018 book, How Fascism Works. So I’m a philosopher first and foremost, so what I’ve been doing, really, I envisage a kind of trilogy eventually with the third book being what to ho, how to stop this, but How Fascism Works is about fascist politics, how a certain kind of politics works to catapult people into power when they use it as a practice, whether they might be ideologically fascist or not. I think everybody accepts that whatever the Trump machine believes behind the scenes, they’re employing techniques familiar from the Nazis. It’s the same set of scapegoats except not the Jews, but immigrants, LGBTQ citizens, opposition politicians, et cetera.
So for fascist politics to be maximally effective, you need a certain kind of education system that tells people that their country is like the greatest ever. And as I show in the book, Hitler is extremely clear about this in Mein Kampf, he speaks in very clear terms about education and the necessity of having an education system where you promote the founders of the nation, the great Aryan men who founded the German nation as great exemplars and models, and you base the education around that.
And hey, in the United States we already had an education like system like that. So if that is your background education system, then you can set up great replacement theory. You can say America’s greatness is because it had these great white Christian men. And so if you try to replace those men, if you try to replace white Christian men in positions of power by non-whites or women, or non-white women most concerningly from this perspective, then that’s an existential challenge to American greatness.
Just for basis of this conversation, can you give me your definition of fascism?
Many countries have fascist, social, and political movements, and have them in their history. The United States certainly does: eugenics, the immigration laws that Hitler so admired. And in the United States, in the black intellectual tradition you consider Jim Crow a fascist social and political movement. And Jim Crow, the second Ku Klux Klan was, ideologically very similar to German fascism particularly.
But whereas in Europe you had–and this is what we think of when we think of fascism–you had a cult of the leader. So I would go with something like a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by immigrants, minorities, LGBTQ citizens, feminists, and leftists. Jim Crow South did not have a cult of the leader, wasn’t organized around a Trump figure, but what we now have in the United States is something that looks a lot closer to German fascism.
You consider President Trump a fascist?
Oh, yeah. And even more… I mean, if you think of fascism as a set of tactics and practices, yes. What President Trump has in his heart, I don’t know.
Do you feel like America is living in an authoritarian state?
Of course. I think right now, the Trump regime has decided it has enough of the levers of power that they don’t need to have public support anymore. And it is not clear to me whether or not they’re correct on that. They might be wrong. They might have just misstated the moment, and in fact, there will be civil resistance. The institutions will see that they have to unify. That might happen. Civil society is not, I think, buying the propaganda line of the regime. So I’m not saying by any means that things are lost. And in fact, the rapidity by which this has happened might actually work against this coup that is now happening.
But the problem is the Supreme Court is nothing but a far-right Trump loyalists, nothing but, so everything they’re going to do, they rule almost entirely in favor of Trump. They’re not minds on that court for the most part, the conservative majority, they’re only there for the purposes of keeping Trump in power and whatever far-right machine replaces him. And things are moving quickly, they’re seizing the levers of power. But I do not think they have popular support, and I think they will have even less popular support as this proceeds.
You just used the word coup. Do you think that a coup is happening in the United States?
Yes, a coup is happening in the United States.
Walk me through that. Why do you think it’s a coup, in the sense of, I mean, these guys were elected? I’m just curious why you use that word, that’s all.
Right, let’s look at what’s happening with the boats that they’re blowing up and now in the Pacific, first in the Caribbean, now in the Pacific, they’re just simply assassinating people for no reason whatsoever. It’s completely illegal. In fact, what it now means is that Trump could just kill anyone anywhere just by saying they’re a terrorist. The way it’s going to work is they’re going to say, “Okay, these narco traffickers are terrorists. Oh, the immigrants are terrorists. Anyone protesting ICE now is a terrorist. If you’re against us blowing up boats without any legal justification or evidence, or if you are against ICE brutalizing little kids, you are a terrorist. The Democratic Party are terrorists.” So they’re trying to illegalize the opposition.
What they’re doing is so far beyond what’s legal, so there’s no legality anymore. Everybody who supports Trump gets pardoned. Trump tells people, tells the military the real enemy is within, namely the opposition. The Democratic states and Democratic cities will have the military, the National Guard, the red states are essentially invading the blue states. All of this is an overthrow of the Democratic order, and it’s already happened.
So you’ve been studying this for a long time. You’re watching America change or maybe kind of realize the destiny that’s kind of always been under the surface because I would argue that what we’re seeing now was set up long time ago. And it just took a little while for it to come to the surface. In seeing all that, was that a part of why you decided to leave the United States?
I knew when I made the decision in March that people were going to be harshly critical. Somebody yelled at me the other day, they were like, “You are safe, you’re a Yale professor.” I just didn’t want to deal with the whole structure. I knew that if I stayed at Yale, there would be pressure not to bring the Trump administration’s wrath onto Yale. I knew that Yale would try to normalize the situation, escape being in the press, urge us to see the fascists as just politically different, and talk about polarization, which is just fascism. All the people talking about polarization are just fascism enablers. They’re almost worse than the fascists because they’re just like, “Hey, how do I keep getting money in power?” I’ll say the fascists are normal.
And so I was just like, “Okay, I have this great opportunity.” And I thought that without that pressure, because I do love Yale, and so I love my time there. I love my colleagues, I love my students, I love the institution as a home to do my work, and I just felt I would be torn. I couldn’t hit hard in the way that I’m hitting hard now with you and I’m hitting hard when I go on TV and I’m hitting hard when I write my op-eds, I can say whatever I want in Toronto about the United States and about global fascism, and I’m building an institute here to create fellowships for journalists from all around the world to figure out what’s going on and how to respond to what’s going on. And I don’t think I could have done that in a university in the United States.
So the Trump administration is targeting funds for private universities in hopes of pushing them into a more conservative agenda. And as of this recording, it’s closing in on a deal with the University of Virginia. You’ve called this a war. So how would you advise other universities, given where we are in the world, but also the desire within those universities to protect the institution?
Everyone has to say fuck you. I mean, it’s the only way to… I mean, you could say Yale predates American democracy, which is true, but a university in a democracy is a core democratic institution. That’s why they attack universities first and the media. They’ve taken the court. Obviously, the Supreme Court is taken. So unfortunately, what you have to do, every single democratic institution has to band together and defend each other.
And we’ve already had that total breakdown because starting in 2015, we had this Coke-funded movement creating a moral panic about universities, and the New York Times piled on this moral panic. You couldn’t open the New York Times for years without reading another op-ed about hysterical moral panic about leftists on campus. All the while it was a total fiction that the whole time the right-wing press from Turning Points USA’s Professor Watchlist, originally Breitbart, Campus Reform, there was this massive attack on progressives and universities where progressive professors were terrified of being targeted by the conservative students and universities completely. So the media viciously attacked universities and set the groundwork for Trumpism. So that has to stop, and the both-siderism has to stop. The whole stuff about polarization, that’s just enabling fascism.
Yeah, explain that to me because you don’t like when people talk and say polarization, because the polarization, the idea that things are more toxic than they’ve ever been, and people are choosing sides, and all of that. Specifically, why don’t you like that?
Because one side is led by fascists. I mean, it’s like saying the Civil War, the problem with the Civil War was polarization. It’s literally like that. History will look back at this time at figures who talk about polarization exactly like history looks back on people who called John Brown a crazy person or who said, “Oh, it’s too early for abolition. It’s, oh, terrible, polarized time.” One group thinks that slavery is good, and the other group thinks it’s bad, terribly polarized. Or Nazi Germany. One group thinks Jews should be killed, the other one thinks they’re okay, it’s Polarized. It’s nonsensical. It’s just fascism enabling.
Let me ask you this: do you think Benjamin Netanyahu is a fascist?
Oh, well, of course, more so than Trump even.
You’ve said in the past that Jews in particular need to speak out about what’s happening and how history will look back at this time period. Why do you think it’s so important for Jewish people to speak up at this time?
Well, first of all, because the genocide is being perpetrated in our name, there’s a long tradition of European Jews from which I come who do not accept, from my father’s side. My mother’s Polish Jewish and has very different views about Israel than I do, and I’m not questioning, I don’t know what it means to question the existence of a state as Israel’s there, nobody should be killed in Israel, nobody should be moved away from Israel, it’s there, but Israel should stop the practice of apartheid. Obviously, they should not commit a genocide, and it’s the first televised genocide in human history.
Jan Karski spent… of the Polish Home Army spent… deeply risked his life visiting the Warsaw Ghetto, infiltrating the death camp system to spread word of what was happening in Poland with the death camp, with the Nazi death camps, and no one… Roosevelt didn’t believe him. Now we’ve got it all on social media. So Jews have to speak out about that. We have to say this is not in our name, and we have to do that in a way that makes it clear that we’re not calling for the end of… for anyone to be thrust out of Israel. Palestinians and Jews should have equal rights, and apartheid has to end. And then Jewish people have suffered fascism.
I mean, Russians have suffered fascism too, but they’re still awfully fascist, so that’s what we learned from Israel as well. But my Judaism, my version of Judaism is the tradition of liberalism. And we Jews did represent liberalism, the idea that a nation cannot be based on an ethnicity or a religion, the idea that if you are in a place, that is your home, and it doesn’t matter what your religion or ethnicity is, that’s why we were killed and why we were targeted.
What is it about this moment in time that we are seeing fascist movements all over the planet happening and gaining power? What is it at this moment that we’re seeing all this?
Well, one thing I think is essential to see is the global nature of this. You cannot investigate Trumpism just by looking at the United States. Now we’re seeing Trump offer $20 billion to Argentina to support their far-right leader. I mean, that’s a crazy amount of money. And they’re saying, “Well, you better keep them in power.” So these are connected movements.
I’ve been thinking about writing about this for months, but now it’s getting more attention now that Homeland Security has tweeted it, but remigration. It’s very clear there are powerful links between Germany’s fascist party, Alternative für Deutschland, and the Trump regime since the Munich Security Conference at least. Vance went over and met with the head of AfD and not with the Chancellor of Germany who’s a conservative. And then there was all this stuff about Germany threatening to ban AfD. That became central to the Trump regime. So when Homeland Security tweets remigration, which is not a word in the English language. It’s a word created by Martin Zellner who intended it to mean taking citizenship away from non-white, from Muslims.
Right. When we look back on moments like Nazi Germany and wonder why people didn’t do something about these atrocities faster, do you think that people just at some point become complacent?
Yeah. I mean, people just don’t get that under fascism or virtually any kind of authoritarianism, you can still go to the club, there are still raves, there are restaurants, there are bars. They’re like, “How could it be fascism because I can go to the restaurant and complain about the government to my friends?”
So it’s like what you’re saying, a large chunk of the population are still living their regular routine, going to work, coming home, taking care of their kids, all of that, but they’re oblivious to… or they’re tuning out what’s happening to people in the margins?
Yeah. I mean, we’re creating large concentration camps for immigrants. Lawyers can’t get into these places. Congress people are being blocked from their oversight role. So we now have concentration camps in the United States. We have people in masks kidnapping people off the streets. I don’t even like to say, “Oh, now it’s going to go to protesters,” which it obviously will, but because it’s bad enough that little kids are watching their parents snatched away in immigration courts, that’s bad enough. And all the people who are enabling this, all the people who are normalizing this, I don’t myself believe in hell, but I think there’s a lot of people out there who are patting their wallets, getting that extra attention by normalizing this, by saying, “Oh, maybe we need to really… This cruelty is okay, it’s part of… It’s just you disagree with it. We’re polarized.”
Yeah. Well, I think that we have, in many ways, been dehumanized by the media we consume. When you look back at the civil rights struggle, when those images came on TV, it made change…
Exactly.
… because we were in a different place.
Now, the reaction is when young people rise up, when they see images on the screen or they see what’s happening to immigrants or they’re seeing what’s happening to democracy, heads are getting cracked or they’re threatening to crack heads. I mean, I think this is what I was saying before, I’m not sure they’re going to be successful on this because I think civil society is really pushing back, and they’ve threatened people if they showed up at the No Kings demonstrations, but people still showed up, so it kind of didn’t work.
What do you see for the near future for the United States?
Well, I’m actually heartened by certain things, I’m heartened by the… I see that the regime has… So the regime is going hog wild. They’re soaking themselves in cruelty and corruption and illegality, and their justifications for this are not playing with the American people. Most Americans are starting to get that we’re facing a dictator, an out of control dictator. I think that what you’re going to see as people see the American Republic being cracked apart and sold for parts to the tech fascists, to anyone really. Basically, Trump is saying, “Line up behind my corruption, line up behind my brutalization of immigrants, my targeting of domestic opponents, and you’ll profit, you’ll get that $50,000 signing bonus for ICE, you’ll profit, you’ll get the government contracts, the courts will rule in your favor.”
But I think it’s becoming clearer and clearer to many Americans what’s going on. The problem is fascism and dictatorship, and the regime went over its skis. So that’s where I see the hope here, that I think they went too fast. So it’s a bad time, but I think that there is a lot of civil society reaction, and so we just don’t know what’s going to happen right now.
Yeah. Jason Stanley, thank you so much for taking your time to talk to me, man. This was great.
Yeah, great conversation in difficult times.
