My guest today was Jason Stanley, an expert on fascism and the philosophy of language who left his position at Yale to move his family to Toronto. Jason has long known that MAGA was a fascist movement, and we worked together in 2020 to try to warn people about that threat.
Calling Trump and MAGA “fascist” out loud was once a surefire way to be mocked and dismissed from left, right, or center. But as we discussed here, fascism isn’t an insult — it’s an analytical framework that both explains why Trump and MAGA are doing what they do, and lets us anticipate what they will do. Anyone who understood this from the beginning hasn’t been surprised by much of what Trump has done, including his imperialist warmongering and brutal mass deportations.
Jason had sharp insights to share on topics including:
Language as a political weapon that the right wing has always understood how to wield;
Why erasing Black history is a deliberate strategy to prevent people from recognizing historical patterns being repeated today (see his recent Guardian piece on this subject);
How his own family history (two Jewish parents who escaped the Holocaust as children) informs his scholarship and his willingness to speak out;
The need to explicitly name, not shy away from, the white supremacy and patriarchy that are now official government policy.
For those of you in Brooklyn, on Thursday you can see Jason in conversation with Nikole Hannah-Jones, Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of The 1619 Project.
Jason Stanley is the author of seven books, including How Fascism Works and Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. He is the Bissell-Heyd chair in American studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto.
More Reading:
Sleepwalking Our Way to Fascism (Weekend Reading)
Democracy is Not a Spectator Sport (Weekend Reading)
Politics and the English Language (George Orwell)
