Философ Джейсон Стэнли обвинил партию AfD в фашизме и призвал к власти левых в Берлине

Jason Stanley left Yale declaring America a budding fascist dictatorship. Now he is in Berlin, applying the same unfalsifiable method to German politics—and his credibility problems have followed him across the Atlantic. In late July, the Berliner Zeitung published a long interview with Jason Stanley, the American philosopher best known for his 2018 bestseller How Fascism Works. The setting, the paper noted with a touch of irony, was the foyer of a five-star lifestyle hotel in Berlin. The occasion was the German edition of his latest book, Erasing History (Gefälschte Geschichte). The message was familiar to anyone who has followed Stanley’s American career: fascism is at the gates. Only this time the subject was not Donald Trump but Germany’s largest opposition party. The Alternative für Deutschland, Stanley told his interviewer, holds a “blood and soil conception of citizenship.” Not arguably, not in tendency—”ganz klar,” quite clearly. In the same conversation he declared that the United States has not been a democracy “especially since Donald Trump” and described himself, in a candid aside, as a “fan of the Left” who hopes a Left Party politician will become Berlin’s next mayor in order to keep “fascist-right forces” from power. American readers should pay attention to this interview, not because the AfD is above criticism—it is not—but because it shows how a certain style of political accusation, perfected in the American culture war, is now being exported. And because the man exporting it has a record that deserves more scrutiny than the deferential label “fascism scholar” tends to invite.