Sandbox books: “How Fascism Works” and “Erasing History”

I’m bringing two books I recently read into the Sandbox: Jason Stanley’s books How Facism Works: the Politics of Us and Them and Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. 

Jason Stanley’s books explore fascist tactics and how they are used to achieve power.  In How Fascism Works, he lays out 10 fascist tactics used in the past and today.  In Erasing History, he focuses in on one of those tactics, the rewriting of the past. 

In both his books, Stanley pulls from examples across the world and across time. He explores 1930s Germany along with 1990s Serbia, 2010s Myanmar, and the India, Hungary, and Turkey of today. 

He also includes the United States, past and present in his books - laying bare the fascist tactics used in the U.S. since before the Civil War - and tying U.S. fascist tactics directly to anti-Blackness. 

In this, Jason Stanley is different from many people today who talk about fascism in the United States. For years, the prevailing U.S. (white) discourse around fascism could be summarized as “fascism was something bad that happened in other countries (notably Germany) and in other times (i.e. 1930s and 40s)”. As a secondary Social Studies teacher and curriculum developer, I remember teaching and writing to standards that talked about fascism as something new that rose up in the 1920s in Europe. Today, I hear people talking about how “we’ve never seen fascism in the United States before”. These messages make us feel good as white Americans .. .and are completely false. 

Stanley illuminates this falsehood through examples of U.S. fascist tactics from the 1800s through today. He talks about the fascist tactics used in the law and order campaigns of the 1970s-90s and in the lynchings of Black people in the 19th and 20th centuries, He writes about how U.S. History has been erased in the creation of textbooks and monuments through the Lost Cause movement of the early 1900s and how it is being erased today through anti-DEI curriculum and book bans. Through his examples, Stanley firmly places the United States within a fascist tradition and shows how fascism is nothing new to the U.S.; it has just been ignored, unrecognized, and denied since it was mostly directed at Black people.

Stanley’s books help us understand fascism, both in the U.S. and abroad and provide a crucial picture of our landscape as we fight against fascist tactics in 2025. 

Have you read Stanley’s books? What did you take away?