‘Reclaim the Working Class and Get Women Out in Front’: A Jason Stanley Q&A
Returning to RadPod Ep86 with How Fascism Works author Jason Stanley on an as-needed basis
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“Somehow we have to convey the message that the actual cowards and wimps are the ones who line up behind this billionaire wannabe, fascist dictator.”—Jason Stanley, RadPod Ep86
When asked today how I became a woman who fights for democracy full-time, my response was:
I was raised by German immigrants and called Nazi as a kid, so by the age of 7 or 8, my relatives had sent me every book on the Holocaust so I would know what happened, as they knew what happened. I knew in 2016, what we were experiencing was fascism, and I wrote about it and never stopped
As a veteran investigative reporter in the second largest market in the country, I had investigated Trump and knew him to be a con. The victims of his various criminal schemes only learned that fact after they’d given him all their money, only to lose everything and wind up suing him in court
I work a strong spiritual program
I am fueled by punk rock, and it has given me strength to face life’s challenges without fear
So it’s with great sorrow that I learned today that much of the punk rock scene has been captured by Trump, and I also learned that many rank and file blue-collar union members have been captured by Trump.
How is that possible? That the music that fuels rebellion and the lifeblood of the middle-class can be captured by a conman?
As always, I turn to my archives to find the clues and solutions, and here in RadPod Ep86 are the words of Jason Stanley, on how we reclaim the working class.
“We have to reclaim the working class by pointing out that the policies that they are backing will result in the people — many of the people that oppose the autocrats — being humiliated and harmed. But they need to know it's the billionaire class behind this.”—Jason Stanley, RadPod Ep86
Stanley, the author of How Fascism Works, The Politics of Language, and upcoming Erasing History, cautions that a future under Trump may look a lot like Orbán’s Hungary and how to message the stakes to prevent the worst.
He also said women, who have everything to lose, have to take the lead in messaging the stakes.
Stanley, the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, has been a consistent muse for me in this fight, and I am grateful for his wisdom.
‘Reclaim the Working Class and Get Women Out in Front’: A Jason Stanley Q&A
Heidi Siegmund Cuda: I hear echoes of your book How Fascism Works in my daily reporting, and why is there, still, in your mind, a disconnect about how our Fourth Estate is reporting this moment in time? I am not encouraged at the continual normalization coverage of this race.
Jason Stanley: It's scandalous. If Trump wins, it's a historical failure on the part of outlets like the New York Times, who are influenced by a staff that is totally cynical about the situation. That it’s just ‘another election — whiners and haters are saying it's different’. I mean, they'll say things like, ‘Oh, how can you risk another four years of Trump?’ Another four years of Trump!? Do you think Putin stays in for four years? It's absurd.
It's not another four years of Trump. When you end the democratic system, it's not another four years of a leader. Maybe it'll be a different Trump — maybe it’ll be Donald Jr or our first Jewish President, Ivanka. But reporting on it, like the risk is just another four years of Trump, is a fail.
We have a far-right, undemocratically appointed, Supreme Court — the majority was appointed largely by a President who didn't win the popular vote. They are showing themselves to be simply there to grease the wheels to end democracy — to end the rule of law. So it's a terrible situation. And the newspapers are reporting it like a horse race, like it's just another Democratic and Republican election. And anyone who points that out is called a hysteric.
HSC: Yes, or called a conspiracy theorist. I focus on the disinformation component so let’s talk about your latest book, The Politics of Language. Can you explain how words are misused by fascist leaders and the dangers that poses — our mutual friend Ruth Ben-Ghiat calls it ‘the upside-down’.
JS: The Politics of Language helped me think through the kind of language we're seeing from the far right — the kind of authoritarian ‘cult of the leader’ kind of speech. It's an academic book. And I’ve also been working on a new book Erasing History, which documents how fascists rewrite the past to control the future.
That is about the attack on our schools, the education system, universities, the way that country after country around the world is rewriting its textbooks, attacking university professors — trying to stack the universities in the schools with ultra-nationalist supporters of whoever the autocratic leader there is.
I'm trying to tie the threads together, as you also often do on your program, between different countries and the far right movement — the far right autocratic cult of leader movement — we face in the United States today.
And what I’m finding with the language of propaganda — I call it undermining — when you use words in the reverse meaning.
So [the cult leader says], ‘You're the ones threatening democracy’, which is just an old one — projection.
But they empty the vocabulary of its meaning by using it in the service of goals that are quite the opposite of the words’ actual meaning.
So, Trump did this with the word corruption. He said, ‘I think the system is corrupt’. And Trump is not wrong about that — that's one of his advantages — that things aren't great.
But really, things are great, the stock market is hot. So, fascism is helped greatly when people have the correct sense that the system is only working for a few and in those conditions, you get either socialism or fascism, depending upon how you want to correct the system.
So the point is, Trump is aiming to get out of corruption charges, he is clearly personally corrupt. Now, he's trying to aim it at Biden, of course. Now he's trying to aim the ‘threatening democracy’ charge at Biden. And what these autocrats do is drain the words of any force or meaning.
Russia did this — Vladislav Surkov did this as a political technologist. They would back opposition movements, who are like official ‘liberal’ opposition movements, who are bound to failure, so people would lose all faith in democracy. Democracy became meaningless. And that's what Trump is very astutely doing with the vocabulary of democracy.
HSC: Trump is what Ruth calls a ‘superb propagandist’ and thank you for explaining how words are drained of meaning. I have been investigating House Speaker Mike Johnson and his ties to Russian oligarchs who make munitions for Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine and his tentacles to the Council for National Policy network. He’s spent a career trying to take away my rights and your rights, and is now holding up support for Ukraine, and my point is, you’ve been to Ukraine recently and taught there. How do we wake people out of this stupor to see that if the West does not do everything we can to help Ukraine fight Russian imperialism, our allies can no longer trust us, and we’re certainly not helping ourselves.
JS: It’s the complete destruction of the United States as an international power. Now, as a leftist, I'm not completely opposed to that. However, not this way, please. Literally, the United States has become an international clown show.
I hope we are leaders of liberal democracy by example, and I hope we help democratic regimes against autocracy and not invade countries in the name of democracy, when it's really fallacious. But Ukraine is a very clear case. It's an extremely clear case, and it looks like there is from what one hears, Russian funding flooding into the United States, literally.
Traitorous politicians are undermining our standing internationally. It'd be one thing if there were politicians saying, ‘We're going to undermine the United States’ position internationally, because we disagree with empire’.
‘Undermining Propaganda’
But that’s not it. It’s ‘undermining propaganda’, it's robbing words of meaning. They're supposedly doing it to prop the United States as ‘standing up’. If you care about which countries have a say in international affairs, and of course, the United States has a decidedly mixed record in world affairs, but if you care about the United States’ standing, what this far right program is doing is undermining the United States. It’s threatening our economic system by repeated government shutdowns, which means that the interest on our loans go up — there are a lot more risky loans. So that means we all pay more. Eventually, it may threaten the dollar as the world's currency.
Domestically, they're literally undermining faith in the United States, economically, and politically — domestically and internationally.
It is literally an attack on the United States. If you want that, go ahead, but label it correctly.
It's a very effective attempt to destroy our economic system by creating domestic unrest and destroying our standing internationally. I'm not making claims about whether that's good or bad. I'm just stating a fact.
The enemies of the United States couldn't have wanted anything more than Mike Johnson and Donald Trump.
It’s astounding. Ukraine is fighting against a clearly fascist empire that Mike Johnson is threatening — and just completely needlessly kowtowing to — to hand them the country of Ukraine. Ukrainian soldiers are willing to fight and die en masse to fight Russia, they just need weapons. They're not asking for anyone to fight for them.
They've been fighting for two years. But Mike Johnson single-handedly might be responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of people — for the complete destruction of Ukrainian culture and language — torture camps, mass rape — we know what Russia does when it invades a city, when it attacks a city. You want to see that happen to Kyiv?
HSC: Thank you. We keep trying to wake people up to the stakes and to explain the cynical motivations behind much of what we see.
JS: Fascism is sometimes described in certain political traditions as oligarchical, finance capital-backed nationalism to trick the working class. And that's classically what we're seeing.
We're seeing the billionaire class fund fascism, using homophobia, racism, patriarchy, to create what one headline called the ‘rainbow coalition of hate’. So it's gonna be a multicultural, multiracial movement, where you have white supremacists, anti-Semites, sexists, homophobes, you're gonna draw in the Christian right, because they're drawn in by the anti-LGBT stuff, the anti-abortion line.
This is familiar from the past — plenty of people who wouldn't self describe as fascist, plenty of people who wouldn't describe themselves as white supremacist, they're ‘anti trans, they're not a white supremacist’.
Each group has its own target that they hate — Muslims, immigrants. So we're gonna have black Trump supporters who don't like immigrants or Muslims or LGBT. We're gonna have white Trump supporters who like his macho posturing and domination of black Americans. We're gonna have a lot of men who like to see someone who has been accused multiple times of sexual assault and get away with it. We're going to have religious conservatives, who like the stacking of the Supreme Court with far right justices who seek to evermore constrain women's rights.
So this is the situation, and it's all funded by billionaires who want to get rid of regulations, so they can plunder the earth and survive climate change in their giant bunkers in Hawaii.
HSC: I keep on thinking about how much I learned from you about America's original sin in the sense that we have not worked out our racial issues. We've also not worked out our misogyny issues, and I bring this up, because I've been doing a deep dive into the 2016 election attack. Because we don't deal with our vulnerabilities, we are continually getting wedged apart and weakened by those who wish to destroy our imperfect democracy. Again, how can we wake people up to the fact that if we don't heal, and work our sh*t out, we really won't have anything left resembling a democracy?
JS: I think Biden tried to do that, but it's kind of been working in slow motion. I saw an interview with a top UFC fighter, who was like, ‘I represent the Trump guy. I'm the working-class white Trump supporter’. The social identity that he has created among the white working class — it's literally your identification as a tough guy, white working-class person — is now a Trump supporter.
So that is really difficult in that situation, because it is beyond rationality. It means that it's about humiliating the liberal elites, getting women back in their place, it's about social identity. ‘You're a wimp unless you're a Trump supporter’.
So somehow we have to convey the message that the actual cowards and wimps are the ones who line up behind this billionaire wannabe, fascist dictator.
HSC: 18 months or so ago, when I interviewed you for Byline Times, you said what we need to do in the face of fascism is we have to have a broad coalition. And we have to ‘vote vote vote’, that it might be the last election that matters. And here we are, lurching toward November. What can you tell us? What do we need to do?
JS: Well, Trump is very cleverly targeting the ‘anti-democracies’ — trying to deflate the vocabulary of democracy. I wish we could get to the skeptics and doubters in the major media, but they're sealed off from the rest of us.
So what do we do? We have to broadcast the stakes of these elections — getting women out to vote. They’re very clearly going to go after IVF [in vitro fertilization]. Fertility was an eight-one vote in the Alabama Supreme Court, by all these far right, anti-democratic appointees. The Trump cult has taken over much of the legal system. So that's how things work.
At some point, we're going to get legal targeting of opponents, probably through the tax system or something like that, if they're going to continue to imitate Viktor Orbán.
I don't think we'll get a Putin-style assassination of political opponents here. I think it'll be like Hungary where, anti-Trump business people will have to sell their businesses and will get pressure on them.
I mean, we have a complicated country to bring under autocracy. But Russia does, too. We have a more unruly federalist system. So that will provide some protections.
But emphasizing the democracy message helped in the midterms. Now, it appears Americans are already totally okay with the person who loses the popular vote becoming President. I mean, Republican Presidents, that's just what they do, they lose the popular vote. And nobody seems to mind.
So I'm worried that the democracy message won't have the force of ‘we have the Christian Taliban coming’, because they're one of Trump’s support mechanisms, and it’s part of the Great Replacement Theory ideology: ‘You need more babies, you need more white babies. Otherwise, you're gonna get immigration. Population decline is an enormous threat’. Even though you could just bring in immigrants, and there wouldn't be population decline.
But it’s that Great Replacement Theory — people talking about the dangers of population decline. It’s meaningless. It's senseless, given the number of people who would live in the United States. It's un-Christian — Christianity is all about being a universal religion. It's not nationalist.
Christianity doesn't tell you, you need more white babies. So we need to talk about a politically powerful message and the message is the super harsh train that's coming down the tracks towards women's rights.
We can see that we have something like what's already long happened in Russia, where we have LGBT flight. We have LGBT flight from multiple states in the South. That's a terrible warning.
Now, LGBT Americans are an easy internal enemy, because they're ten percent of the population. An even better internal enemy are transgender Americans, because they're a tiny slice of the population.
I'm not sure how much the culture war thing is going to help Republicans. But the Democratic Party needs to fight that. I think it's looking like — although I'm not an expert — it’s looking like the basis for that should be women's rights.
The patriarchy is taking over the racism, although they are of course linked because you can't really disentangle patriarchy and racism. Underlying racism is a white panic about black men… it’s patriarchal because this whole ‘protect our white women’ — is patriarchy. Ida B. Wells points this out in the 1890s.
The Republican Party, besides destroying the United States from inside and out — our economic system, wracking us up with debt so we can't pay, destroying all regulations so the billionaire class can do whatever the hell they want — are going after controlling women. That's what's gathering them a big base.
And so the Democratic Party has to be very clear that the Republican Party is turning to patriarchy as a mainstay.
My 13-year-old talks about how his friends are being exposed to (accused human trafficker) Andrew Tate and all these ‘manosphere’ YouTube videos. And so (the message) is patriarchy, it's women's rights. Women have to be out there. Because, a significant portion of the Republican base wants them to be having babies at home.
HSC: Exactly as the Third Reich did. You wrote a brilliant essay on how we are now entering fascism’s legal phase, and as you know, my podcast partner Jim Stewartson is being sued by disgraced former Trump national security advisor Mike Flynn — and we’re fighting, we got 10 of the 14 charges already dropped. But is this a thing? Why sue a blogger?
JS: To send a message. The United States laws allow you to tie someone up in court indefinitely, and bankrupt them with legal fees. So, it's sending a message against political dissent. This is what I was talking about with Viktor Orbán strategies. Viktor Orbán uses the courts to try to tie anyone up who is not a supporter. It’s all about corruption. Ultimately, it's all about getting the money into the hands of the billionaire class, getting the money into the hands of the oligarchy benefits the autocrat and his friends. And so, you set an example using the courts. And unfortunately, our courts, our laws, allow anyone to sue anyone for anything.
HSC: To continue on that theme of what the US would be like as it relates to Hungary, I have written about them taking media freedoms away, and you have also taught me why big business has historically backed fascism. But we know eventually anyone can end up being targeted.
JS: I would say that a loyalist system, where those loyal to the autocratic dictator get all the gains of the society, is not capitalism. Do they want to see Trump supporters stacking the Commerce Department? That is not good for business. But you select the wealthy people in this kind of system that we’re headed into who are the favorites, and then you use the courts to funnel money to them.
So again, I don't think that we're going to get a Russian-style, violent (system). I don't think they're going to be imprisoning people. I think they're going to be doing what they did to (Jim) and tie people up in courts and use the legal system to target opponents, but not in the brutal ways that Russia does, but more in the ways that Orbán does.
So we're already seeing the media being taken over by Clear Channel, by Sinclair Broadcasting — local radio, local TV news. This is how it works. We're gonna see more local TV being forced to sell to these giant, far right media conglomerates, who will continually send the same messages to listeners. And even if you're skeptical of those messages, it takes a toll. It has a psychological effect.
HSC: A big takeaway for me is to focus on reclaiming the working class. I absolutely love that. I do have a personal question. How do you feel being off Twitter?
JS: Oh, yeah. Well, I just wasn't gonna be on a platform that Musk owns. So it was an easy decision. Twitter is a mechanism for mass attacks.
There's again, this inversion, like, ‘Oh, it's the leftists who are doing the mass attacks, it's the woke people’. And they're out there — there is some of that, and it’s problematic. I don't denounce that. But when I was on Twitter, some far right Trump supporters like Jack Posobiec or someone else masking themselves as a centrist would target me and then thousands of thousands of people would be tweeting about me, and it was psychologically difficult when I was on Twitter.
Now, I never look at Twitter. I don't care what happens on Twitter. It's no longer a weapon against me, because I don't open Twitter. I don't even have any means. I'm grateful to Musk for making it that you have to have (a Twitter account) in order to see Twitter.
Also, Twitter hurt my brain. I'm a fast reader. And I found that Twitter cut down on my ability to speed read. It has this effect on your actual attention, and your cognitive ability. I've been able to write much more off Twitter.
I finished the scholarly book I've been working on for eight years, The Politics of Language with David Beaver, a linguist. And I wrote a new book from scratch. What enabled me to do things like go to Yale’s library and get out volume after volume of Nazi teacher union collections and read through them in German is because I wasn't checking Twitter every five minutes. I could do the deep scholarly dive that is required for genuine inquiry. So get off Twitter.
HSC: ‘Thank you for not smoking Twitter’. I love that. Okay, last bit — I feel like we are conflicted in that voters have been showing up at the polls from Kansas to Ohio sending a loud message that people do not want to take women's health care rights away. And yet everybody acts surprised when we see political criminals do criminal things. And I have this sense that people are obeying in advance, which is what Timothy Snyder taught us not to do. One more zinger from you on how we wake people up. I like the metaphor of the harsh train. Is there any other seed to plant as we fight back with our own narrative warfare?
JS: Democracy is imperfect, we must admit that the spoils go too often to the wealthiest among us, who are themselves the ones who are undermining democracy. And we have to reclaim the working class by pointing out that the policies that they are backing will result in the people — many of the people that oppose the autocrats — being humiliated and harmed. But they need to know it's the billionaire class behind this.
And cultural elites are being targeted, like Yale professors, and maybe we certainly deserve some of that, but waging this targeting are the business elite, they’re behind these attacks. For the working class to treat Elon Musk as a hero of the working class — that hypocrisy must be uncovered and explained. Like, why is someone with hundreds of billions of dollars your representative? So yes, reclaim the working class and get women out in front.
Transcripts lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
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