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Community-Building Book Club: How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley

  • Solid State Books 1809 14th Street Northwest Washington, DC, 20009 United States (map)

The Community-Building book club will aim to give people the resources and education necessary to fight tyranny in their communities. For people who want to help but don’t know where to start. For people who have been doing the work and want to connect with new people to join the fight. Enact change with small acts of kindness and love.

A Yale philosopher identifies the ten pillars of fascist politics, and charts their horrifying rise and deep history—now with a new preface.

As a scholar of philosophy and propaganda and the child of refugees of WWII Europe, Jason Stanley has long understood that democratic societies, including the United States, can be vulnerable to fascism. In How Fascism Works, he identifies ten pillars of fascist politics—an appeal to the mythic past, propaganda, anti-intellectualism, unreality, hierarchy, victimhood, law and order, sexual anxiety, favoring “the heartland,” and a dismantling of public goods and unions—that amount to an urgent diagnosis of the tactics right-wing politicians use to break down democracies and a critical lens on the current moment.

Stanley knits together reflections on history, philosophy, sociology, and critical race theory with stories from contemporary Hungary, Poland, India, Myanmar, and the United States, among other nations, making clear the immense dangers of language and beliefs that separate people into an “us” and a “them.” By uncovering disturbing patterns that are as prevalent today as ever, Stanley reveals that the stuff of politics—rhetoric and myth—can become policy and reality all too quickly. Only by recognizing them, he argues, can we begin to resist their most harmful effects and return to democratic ideals.