How Fascism Works

Stanley is a philosopher at Yale whose father fled Nazi Germany and whose mother survived the Warsaw Ghetto. He spent years studying fascist politics across history and distilled the pattern into ten tactics: the mythic past, propaganda, anti-intellectualism, unreality, hierarchy, victimhood, law and order, sexual anxiety, Sodom and Gomorrah, and us versus them. Each chapter names a tactic and shows it operating across historical and contemporary examples — not to make a partisan argument but to give readers a diagnostic tool. Once you have the vocabulary, you cannot unsee it. The essential companion to How Democracies Die — that book shows the mechanism, this one names the ideology running it.