Yale Prof.: No Accountability for Jan. 6th Emboldened Putin

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, manifestations of fascist ideology infiltrate democratic nations and illiberal democracies have gained a solid foothold in some parts of Europe. Jay Stanley is the author of “How Fascism Works.” And he examines Putin’s brand of that ideology in his latest piece for “Tablet” magazine. He joins Hari Sreenivasan to explore this version of fascism and how it targets the West’s vulnerabilities.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. Jason Stanley, welcome back to this program. You have written authoritative book on fascism. I want to look a little bit at the type of fascism that maybe is playing out in front of our eyes in the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and how that’s different from the definitions that we might have seen in our text books.

JASON STANLEY, AUTHOR, “HOW FASCISM WORKS”: So, Russian fascism, and I think it’s just an almost unmistakable species of fascism, it is a classic kind of fascism in its colonial aspects. So, fascism is typically linked to empire, the desire to restore empire. We find fascism — fascist leaders gaining popularity, when they can talk about lost empire and tell their citizens that they’re going to be the leader who’s going to violently restore their empire and their place in the world. So, in that sense, it’s a classic kind of fascism, and in its violence and militarism, it’s a classic kind of fascism. And in the way that it appeals to anti-LGBT sentiment in a number of other ways, it’s classic fascism. But Russia seeks to, as it were, because it cannot dominate the world militarily anymore, economically, it’s really not a super power like China or the United States, it’s really seeking to dominate the world ideologically. And what does that mean here? What it means is Putin seeks to be the leader of the world’s traditionalists, the ethnonationalists, the patriarchal, antidemocratic, in the United States white supremacists. He seeks to say, I am going to defend traditional values against decadence and weakness. And so, in this way, he’s going to gather all the different ethnonationalist movements to him. And also, he’s traditionalist members of minority groups who might not be led to follow a kind of strict ethnic nationalism.

SREENIVASAN: One of the rationales that Vladimir Putin explicitly gave anyway was that he wanted to denazify Ukraine and almost indemnify himself from this idea that he was perpetrating an aggressive act.

STANLEY: This is classic fascism. Classic fascism involves what calling your enemy — calling your enemy what you yourself are. So, Putin is clearly doing this in Ukraine. By denazification, Putin means that he’s going to go into Ukraine. He’s going to take the democratic ideology that Ukraine has embraced since the Maidan Revolution of 2014. He’s going to remove it from institutions and schools and politics. He’s going to place the leaders on trial, in show trials, reminiscent of Nuremberg, execute or imprison them, and replace them with Russian fascist ideals, and extinguish Ukrainian democratic identity and Ukrainian identity full stop.

SREENIVASAN: So, what can the democracies that are standing around the planet do in the face of this? In the absence of a military intervention, we obviously have put in economic sanctions that are slower working than many people would like. But how does ideologically democracy stand up in the face of this?

STANLEY: So, recall from our — the beginning of our discussion that Putin’s version of fascism is not specifically about Russian ethnic Russians dominating the world, as German fascism was. German fascism was about Aryans dominating the world. It’s about traditionalists ethnonationalists dominating each of their countries with a strong, powerful, masculine leader. So, it could be a woman, I suppose as we see in France’s elections. But it’s about a kind of — it’s about protecting supposedly traditional values against democracy, decadence, et cetera. So, what democracies must do is that they must show that they’re not corrupt decadent and weak. That’s what Putin believes. That’s what Putin fosters. And I don’t want to say Putin is the singular agent here. The United States has long had antidemocratic forces of this sort that Putin allies with. But democracies have to show that they are strong, and democracies can show they are strong. Ukraine is showing that it is strong. I remember my grandmother in her book, “The Unforgotten,” a 1958 book, talks about how she’s with my father in New York City, they had just come from hitter’s Germany. And my father is looking at these soldiers marching down Broadway, it’s 1941, chewing gum and slapping each other’s backs. And my father says, they’re never going to beat the Nazis, because he had seen the Nazi army march down the Kurfurstendamm in Berlin in strict order. And my grandmother said, no, that’s exactly why they will beat the Nazis. And that’s what Ukraine is showing right now. Ukraine is showing that democracies have strength and democracies have value. Democracies have strength when they stand up for their values, when they prove accountability. And what Putin thinks, you know, rightfully so, is that democracies have proven themselves to be hypocritical and weak. Look, our democracies have always been partial. So, the best thing we can do is we can show that our democracies stand up for the values that they represent, freedom, and equality.

SREENIVASAN: Do you think that the events of the past few years in the United States has weakened the brand of democracy that we’ve been exporting around the world? And does Putin pick up on that and say, look at this, you can meddle with an election, you can cause, you know, internal strife, but then you can have people attack its own capitol, and frankly, you know, not be held accountable?

STANLEY: That’s exactly right. I don’t think like the language of exporting because, frankly, when we tried to export democracy, it’s typically been at the barrel of a gun, and that is not how you export a democracy. You export democracy by standing up for its values at home, and we failed to do that. From our own, we failed in accountability, from our own imperial wars of aggression, like the Iraq war, we failed with accountability for the financial crisis, and we failed most recently with accountability for the attack on our own democracy. So, obviously, Putin is right to think that democracies are weak and don’t stand up for their values. If we can’t hold accountable the figures who led us into wars that caused terrible devastations, if we can’t hold accountable business leaders who destroyed our academy, and if we can’t hold accountable a president who tried to steal the election and destroy American democracy together with the numerous senators and congressmen who helped him, then in what sense are we a democracy, where we don’t have the rule of law? And so, in what sense do we have free and fair elections? The threat to autocracies is free and fair elections. You know, Putin can look at the United States and he can direct the world’s gaze to the United States, and show — and say, see, look at what they’re doing. They have nonexistent voter fraud, yet, they’re fighting it with electoral police, with numerous legislations, essentially, to restrict voting and to potentially steal another election. So, democracies do seem openly hypocritical and weak. And that is obviously — that is what Russia wants. Russia’s not going to dominate the world. Russia is not a world power. But Russia can help destroy democracy worldwide, and thereby, preserve its own autocratic regime at home.

SREENIVASAN: One of the chapters in your book deals with sexual anxiety that is often used in fascism. And I wonder what you think when you look at the number of laws that are now making their way through state legislatures, either restricting women’s control of their bodies or LGBTQAI rights in the United States.

STANLEY: Right. So. we should always remember, we citizens of a democracy, that the principal values of democracy are freedom and equality. And among the freedoms that citizens of a democracy enjoy are the freedoms for — the freedoms to identify how they want to have the partners — to have the adult partners they want. And this freedom is under attack. Now, this kind of attack on LGBT citizens is very Eastern European in character. It comes in the wake of an attack on so-called critical race theory, but the attack is really not on a critical race theory, it’s an attack on the teaching of our history, the teaching of our antidemocratic racist history. And now, we have an attack on LGBT rights. And this is extremely — this puts us into the worldwide autocratic context. If you look at autocrats and would be autocrats all over the world, from Russia’s gay propaganda law in 2013 that prohibits teaching minors about nonstandard life styles, of nontraditional lifestyles that was passed in 2013 and had a terrible effect on LGBT community in Russia. If we look at Viktor Orban’s Hungary, the recent election was dominated by attacks on LGBT. We look at Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and he won election on — with attacks on LGBT. We see the American right now embracing this worldwide, far-right, autocratic attack on freedom. And so, this is just putting us in line with the rest of the fascist rights worldwide.

SREENIVASAN: What is it about this that you think historically has stuck, and even today, makes it something that people can campaign on?

STANLEY: In the United States, the base for this far-right politics includes white nationalists. But if you want to include some people who aren’t white, go after a small minority, like transgender Americans, a tiny group of Americans, then you can gather a lot of people because, you know, everyone is like, I’m not that, and so, maybe I can join the group and vilify them. So, this group of traditionalists can then gather. And then, even though this — you know, in the United States, the audience here includes white nationalists who very prominently want to return to sort of a white state that prioritizes white Christianity. You’re never — they can have plausible deniability because they can say, look, we’ve got black members of our movement who also share with us this antipathy to LGBT. So, it’s about gathering a larger coalition by ever greater vilification of a small minority while winking to the part of the coalition, the large part of the coalition that this is really helping, in the case of the United States, that would be sort of white Christianity.

SREENIVASAN: There was a piece in the “New York Times” recently, I think it’s Elizabeth Diaz and Ruth Graham, talking about how the growing religious fervor in the far-right movement is starting to include religious iconography, it is including praise music, it’s almost a little bit of a little revival. Now, not everybody under the tense, so to speak, is coming for a church service but it’s certainly pulling in people who are devout.

STANLEY: So, that’s because the global far-right fascist movement presents itself as the defender of traditional values. And this is not new. This is textbook fascist politics. If you look at Joseph Goebbels’ speech, “Communism with a Mask Off,” in 1935, Goebbels says that Jewish bolshevism is threatening religious faith, Christianity, and that the only protection is national socialism. So, what Putin is doing is he’s reviving these themes. He’s saying, liberalism is a threat to tradition. Of course, liberalism is not a threat to tradition. Liberalism says that my orthodox Jewish cousins can live however they want, and other people who aren’t religious can also live however they want. But the idea here is to create this fear among people who choose to live traditionally that other people’s choices threaten them. And in particular, threaten their children. And then, you say to them, look, they’re going after your children. You need us to protect you. And then, you say, look, you know, we can’t play fair anymore. What democracy is — and this goes back really to some of the oldest and worst tropes of the 20th century, like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. What democracy is, is it’s this method for pretend equality, it says, everyone can live what they want — how they want. But then, really what it does is these liberties allow them to get at your children and corrupt your children. And so, you create such fear among traditionalists that they abandon democracy.

SREENIVASAN: There’s an example of that, Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted the other day, “Democrats are the party of killing babies, grooming and transitioning children, and pro pedophile politics.” In a recent poll, 49 percent of Republicans said it was “definitely or probably true that top Democrats were involved in elite child sex trafficking rings, QAnon conspiracies.” These are going viral. And I’m wondering, this is not a small population of people until the United States that believe these things.

STANLEY: Let’s be very clear. QAnon, as all scholars who have written on it have said, Thalia Lavan (ph), David Livingstone Smith, is connected clearly — is clearly descended from blood liable, the conspiracy theory against Jews, that Jews were stealing Christian babies for their religious rituals and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It’s this conspiracy that there’s a global cabal of elites, and the global cabal of elites is seeking to conquer the institutions, to get at your children and control your children. And so, it’s not — there’s no fairness anymore, it’s just war, and you’re not a man if you can’t stand up to this because they’re going after your women and children. It’s that level of fear and paranoia, that has seeped into — I don’t even think seeped into is the right word anymore — that has permeated much of American politics. And so, it’s a very extreme time when these sorts of old conspiracy theories have inflected the body politic.

SREENIVASAN: Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale, thank you so much for joining us.

STANLEY: Thank you so much.