Fascism Expert Jason Stanley on the 5th Anniversary of Jan. 6 Capitol Attack

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Well, a lot can change in five years and many people watching the January 6th insurrection on this day and 2021 might not have predicted Donald Trump’s re-election. When he returned to office last January, Trump pardoned groups of supporters who stormed the Capitol after he lost the 2020 election. While the president has made no official mention of the anniversary today, some protesters marched to the U.S. Capitol to commemorate Ashli Babbitt and four others who died in the rioting. Pardoning the insurrectionists is just one of many actions Trump has taken since returning to office that critics call an attempt to reduce January 6th to an afterthought in American history.

Philosophy professor and author of “How Fascism Works,” Jason Stanley says the U.S. Supreme Court has played an outsized role in those efforts. And he joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss why.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Bianna, thanks. Jason Stanley, welcome back to the program. You are joining us on January 6th. It’s the fifth anniversary and, of the January 6th insurrection. You served on, and as an expert advisor to the January 6th committee. And about a year after you wrote that America was entering, quote, “a legal phase of fascism” warning that the insurrection was being followed by legal and legislative mechanisms like rewriting election laws and restricting voting rights. Here we are now, five years later. Has your opinion changed?

JASON STANLEY: No, and I think the Supreme Court ruling that has given the president essentially, well carte blanche over so-called official acts makes the situation we face even more dire, as we’ve seen in this past year.

SREENIVASAN: I want to get to the legality of the Supreme Courts in a second, but let’s talk about Venezuela. Right now, does the, you know, does the end justify the means? Because there are people that are rejoicing in Venezuela and outside who – even the Nobel Prize winner Maria Corina Machado, she celebrated this operation. She said in a statement, “As of today, Nicholas Maduro faces international justice for the atrocious crimes committed against the Venezuelan people and against citizens of many other nations. In light of his refusal to accept a negotiated solution, the government of the United States has fulfilled its promise to uphold the rule of law.” I mean, is there justification in the eyes of the administration saying, This was a despicable human being, and he should not have been in power, we tried to negotiate an end to it, but didn’t work out?

STANLEY: Well, what would you think if another country kidnapped president Trump saying that he has done all these illegal things, he’s not very popular, he’s despotic? Obviously that would be a violation of

 international law. Obviously Maduro is horrific. Obviously, Venezuela has faced terrible things under his rule and under the prior rule of Chavez. However none of that is an excuse just as it would not be – you know, Trump’s misrule, Trump’s open illegality would not be any kind of excuse for, to take out Trump. Similarly, Trump isn’t suggesting at all that Putin should be, should be taken out in any possible way. And Putin is in, has destroyed his own country, killed hundreds of thousands of his own citizens in a pointless war, killed thousands of Ukrainians. There are plenty of despots.

But what’s the difference here? The difference here is that Trump can – there’s oil in Venezuela, and Trump can benefit those who support him. Trump can benefit, can benefit companies. Look, this connection between oligarchical interests and autocrats is well known from history and the current moment. If you support the oligarchs the, if you support the autocrat, he will enrich you.

So that’s what we’re seeing now. Presumably there are oil companies, oil executives who are going to profit from this as well as people close to the president. So the motivation here is clear. It’s nothing to do with democracy or the betterment of the Venezuelan people. Also, Trump has used this to say he’s going to target other countries. Columbia. Columbia has a leftist president. He said that he’s now threatening Columbia. There’s no sign that Columbia is collapsing in any way. And now he’s saying he’s going to target Greenland. And Greenland obviously is not – Denmark has not subjected Greenland to any kind of autocratic rule.

SREENIVASAN: So, you know, you have documented and pointed out that there is a global shift towards the right. And I wonder what the actions of the United States in the past week, in the past year – what they do to other authoritarians, other despots, other dictators around the world? 

STANLEY: Well, Trump is clearly signaling to Putin and Xi that they can do whatever they want in their local areas. And of course his Ukraine policy has immensely favored Vladimir Putin. And now these actions are a signal to Putin that there is no international order left. That every authoritarian leader, every dictator can exert power over neighboring countries or any countries they wish to profit from. Trump is signaling that there is nothing the United States would do. In fact, the United States is taking the lead on just these kinds of actions.

SREENIVASAN: The response from most people, when they hear you, and as you draw these parallels and these comparisons, they’re gonna say, Look, it’s not fair to compare the United States to a place like Hungary or wherever. We have these institutions that are checks and balances on the White House. So let’s, first, let’s talk a little bit about the Supreme Courts. What layer of confidence do you have that the Supreme Court is going to be able to be any sort of a check on a rise in executive power?

STANLEY: None, because the Supreme Court seems fully committed to keeping this far right machine in power. So even well after Trump we can expect the super majority, the conservative super majority – many of whom were appointed by presidents who were not elected by the popular vote – we can expect this conservative super majority to legislate in such a way that keeps the machine behind Trump in power. We’ve seen that with the use of the shadow docket. The shadow docket – they have ruled again and again, and again and again for the Trump administration. This Supreme Court was a block on the Biden administration. They halted the Biden administration’s policies across the board. Most, one of the most notable examples would be the attempt to forgive student loans. So the disparity between their relationship to the Trump regime and their relationship to the Biden administration is notable.

That disparity shows that this is simply a partisan – partisan, really undersells what we’re seeing here. This is a Supreme Court that’s gonna block anything, any Democratic administration is going to do. They blocked so much of what the Biden administration was trying to do, and they’re going to use the shadow docket, they are going to use various methods to simply overrule lower court’s decisions that find problems with the Trump, with what the Trump administration is doing. And they’re just going to keep handing this administration what they want. And they’ll keep on doing that for whoever is in power as long as they are part of this far right machine. So that’s a problem that’s going to extend well past Trump.

SREENIVASAN: Are there not lower courts that are handing losses to the Trump administration?

STANLEY: Absolutely, again and again. But the Supreme Court continually overrules those lower courts. So, you know, that’s our problem. That’s our problem. You – some future legislative action is going to have to deal with this. But it’s just gonna be an immense struggle because this Supreme Court stands for nothing other than a set of far right principles. And they’re going to do everything they can to stymie any legislative action that will run counter to this far right agenda. So we do have, we do have – the lower courts are helping. We also see that juries are helping, grand juries are helping. Some of the – the clear weaponization of the Justice Department has run aground in some of these cases, because grand juries have refused to indict. We’ve seen the cases collapse.

So I do think, I think several things here along the general question of institutions that you are, that you’re framing here. I think that this administration thinks that no Democrat will ever be in power again. It’s the only way to make sense of their actions. The only way to make sense of the actions of MAGA Republicans is that they believe that Democrats will never be in power again. However, I think that’s incorrect. I think that they have overplayed their hand. I think they no longer have public opinion behind them. And I think that institutions, you know, they don’t, they don’t have, they haven’t been able to target successfully all the people they tried to target.

SREENIVASAN: You know, this was part of the reason, when we spoke last time, about why you had personally chosen to move to Toronto, move to a university there, because you felt like the views that you express could be targeted.

STANLEY: Yeah, I mean, I’m of two minds about that. I mean, I think my move to Toronto will make sense if what I can build here along with others at the Munk School, at the University of Toronto, can help U.S. democracy. If it can be a place where people can come and we can bring people who are free to speak and free to strategize about how we can get out of this situation and a liaison with other people from countries like Ukraine, Russia, Brazil, who have faced, or who have faced or do face similar situations, then the move will be positive. I think, you know, it goes, I don’t think that this regime has been successful in targeting. I mean, I think they have too many targets now, right? I mean, I think they’re brutally targeting non-citizens.

So many people in the United States are now wondering whether they’re a target. And I think what we’ve seen is a normalization of that. When I go to the United States, now, what I see is this very crazy situation being normalized. And people are like, see, you could have stayed. And I think I could have stayed without a doubt, at this point. But you know, this situation where you constantly have, you’re like, Wow, legally they could target this huge swath of people. And that might include me, or definitely could include me, because I’m definitely calling the Trump administration fascists. So, but they can’t target everyone. And there’s a lot of incompetence here. So, does that mean you’re safe? Does it mean you’re not safe? Who knows? And, and I think people in the United States are learning to live with that situation. And so you see this incredible normalization, which is kind of remarkable to me. 

There’s a term that’s emerging “sane-washing” that I think you find the media doing. That is it’s a related but different concept than normalization. Sane-washing is sort of representing what this administration is doing. The extreme actions they’re taking as sane, trying to find some rationale for them. The normalization seems to me something sort of more in the air when I go to the United States, people are more careful about what they say. People are, are sort of accepting the craziness of the situation. And the situation does seem crazy from the outside. But personally, I think, you know I, I, I, as things have emerged one year later you know, are they targeting regime critics as harshly as, as they could have not now. And the incompetence blocks ’em from doing it. I mean, Kash Patel is not Brendan Carr he’s not as effective of a of, of a, of a person. The Justice Department people have not been as effective at targeting the broad swath of Americans that that they’ve now said they can target.

So, so I go back and forth about my decision. I mean, my decision had multiple elements. I it’s been very hard. It’s been, it’s, it’s really hard at the age of 56 to uproot yourself from your home, to separate yourself from all of your friends to start anew, in a completely new place. That has been much harder than I accepted. And I meant my decision less to be a decision about myself, more and more to be an expression of a political statement about the United States. And I think it was a political statement about an effective political statement about the United States. It did express to the world, okay, when, when people leave that is, that, that is concerning. It’s probably more effective than any other political statement I’ve made.

SREENIVASANL You know, we’ve also witnessed the sort of dismantling of certain agencies. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for example, or even just in the last couple of weeks, we had Donald Trump add his name to the Kennedy Center Building. And, you know, when you’re talking about normalization. Do you see this sort of – whether it’s collusion, marriage, cooperation – between state and corporate interests getting any better? Because it seems like if it has essentially four years – at least two years plus two more – to flesh itself out, that we might be at a point of no return.

STANLEY: I don’t – we are at a point of no return. There is no return from, and, right. The merging of state and corporate interests is of course a signature sign of fascism. But we are at a point of no return. What are we gonna return to? I mean, how would you reimpose you know, I mean, any future president can become a, you know, make billions of dollars now. What are you gonna say? You’re gonna say, you know, you, suddenly the rules apply again. You know the future of the United States is very, very unclear. The reputation of the United States is in tatters. America is very unpopular. America will never stand for democracy again. America stands for cruelty and white supremacy right now in the world. America, inside America the banks – you know Jamie Dimon, it was reported today, has made over 700, has something like $700 million in compensation. The billionaire – you know, people are just gobbling up the mon the, the, the profits. And we have this classical structure of throwing, you know, cultural meat to poor men, and then just the corporations and the oligarchs gobbling up the money. How do you return from this level of corruption? I don’t see how you can return from it. The question is just how we build something new. There’s gotta be something new that is built. Mamdani in New York is kind of possibly sketching that. It’s gotta be something that stands up to this merging of state and corporate interests. But it’s gotta be something new. There is no return. There has to be, some future politician will have to sketch a new vision for America and really some kind of new country.

SREENIVASAN: Professor Jason Stanley from the University of Toronto, thanks so much for joining us.

STANLEY: Thank you.