Defeating fascism’s ‘loneliness and alienation’ has a simple solution: author

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/how-to-defeat-fascism-solution/

By  John Stoehr                                                      March 14, 2022

Interview with author Nathan Crick who has written a new book focused on John Dewey entitled:  “Dewey and the New Age of Fascism”

The former president held another of his tiresome rallies last night. I say “tiresome” because it was more of the same spleen and bile.

But he did say something useful to my purposes, which is talking about John Dewey in a world gripped by tyranny. Below is a long interview with Nathan Crick. He wrote Dewey and the New Age of Fascism.

Amid Donald Trump’s laundry list of grievances, including reiterations of the Big Lie, he said: “Getting critical race theory out of our schools is not just a matter of values, it’s also a matter of national survival.”

“We have no choice,” he said:

The fate of any nation depends upon the willingness of its citizens to lay down – and they must do this – lay down their very lives to defend their country. If we allow the Marxists and communists and socialists to teach our children to hate America, there will be no one left to defend our flag or to protect our great country or its freedom.

That’s boilerplate fascism.

Just ask Jason Stanley. In 2018, he told Vox:

The story is typically that a once-great society has been destroyed by liberalism or feminism or cultural Marxism or whatever, and you make the dominant group feel angry and resentful about the loss of their status and power. Almost every manifestation of fascism mirrors this general narrative.

Per usual, the crowd was so rapt with attention, so immersed in the grume and gall, you wonder if it’s possible to reason with fascists.

Yes and no.

“You can’t argue a person out of a cult by walking into it,” Nathan told me. “There is hope only when they step outside of that experience.”

One does not ‘reason’ with fascists. It is more that you get outside the fascist vocabulary and talk about something different. The hope is by connecting with ordinary experience, perhaps they find life is more valuable than Donald Trump’s talking points.

What would that “outside life” look like? For Dewey, it meant more than protecting and advancing democracy. It meant protecting and advancing the capacity all humans have to be more fully human.

But first, get them out and back into ordinary experience.

As Nathan said:

Propaganda is totalitarian when it encircles a person. It creates an entire identity for them that tolerates no gods before it. It is a lifestyle and gives you an identity that you can share with other like-minded people.

(Continues with interview at link above)