Hi it's Diane on my mind what is fascism the term fascist has been lobbed at Donald Trump since he entered the race for president

with talk of Mexican rapists and drug dealers.

Now the label has become central to the argument against Trump in the closing days of this year's election.

It's been used to describe him by his former chief of

staff John Kelly, the former chairman of the joint chiefs, Mark Millie and Vice President Kamala Harris.

At long last the Democratic Party is finally labeling reality and is getting a little less afraid.

Jason Stanley is a philosophy professor at Yale.

He is the author of the 2018 book,

How Fascism Works.

His latest is Erasing History,

How Fascists rewrite the past to control the future.

We spoke Thursday morning.

Jason, for years people have been tossing around the term fascism. Fascism.

Can you briefly explain to me exactly what fascism is?

No, I don't think those explaining explaining exactly what fascism is because after all, Italian fascism and German fascism looked very different from each other.

So to explain exactly something that's a vague concept would be a mistake.

However, there's a, furthermore, you can talk about,

it's typical in the literature to distinguish between a fascist social and political movement,

as we are seeing today in the United States, from fascism and power, a fascist regime.

So I'll get to that later in the conversation, how you tell those things apart, how you tell a fascist social and political movement apart from other movements in a democratic society.

So fascism relies on this idea of a mythic past, of a great mythic past.

In the past, the country was great. it was great and it was innocent and it was pure and

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