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.
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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.
An argument that cannot lose
To her credit, the Berliner Zeitung interviewer pushed back. “Blood and soil” is not a loose synonym for a restrictive immigration policy; it is a specifically National Socialist doctrine fusing racial descent with territorial destiny. If the AfD actually held such a view, she noted, the party would long since have been banned under German law. What is the evidence?
Stanley’s answer is worth quoting for what it reveals about his method. He is a philosopher of language, he explained, and political communication does not consist only of what is literally said. Parties send messages they never state openly—”plausible deniability”—precisely so they can later deny having sent them. The Nazis, too, did not announce in 1932 that they would strip Jews of citizenship. Therefore, one must look past the words to the communication as a whole.
As a general observation about politics, this is true enough. Dog whistles exist; strategic ambiguity exists. But notice what the argument does in Stanley’s hands. If the party says something incriminating, that is evidence. If it does not say it, the silence is evidence of concealment. If it explicitly denies the charge, the denial is evidence of the concealment strategy. There is no conceivable observation that could count against the thesis. A hypothesis that is compatible with every possible state of the world is not scholarship. It is suspicion wearing the costume of scholarship.
The one concrete example Stanley offered makes the problem vivid. Asked for specifics, he pointed to symbolism: a party that holds its convention on a “historically charged date” and then calls the timing coincidental should at least face questions about the intended message. He is evidently alluding to the AfD’s federal party convention in Erfurt in early July 2026—a hundred years after the NSDAP party congress held in nearby Weimar on July 3 and 4, 1926. This temporal coincidence, converted first into an insinuation and then—once denied—into proof of a deniability strategy, is a malicious interpretation, not a finding. From a scholar who has built a second career on the charge that others manipulate history, one might expect a higher evidentiary standard for the heaviest accusation the German language contains.
The irony sharpens when one looks at how Stanley handles accusations directed at himself. On Israel, he insists in the same interview—reasonably—that he must be free to criticize the Israeli government harshly without being presumed an antisemite: judge the stated position, he says in effect, not an imputed hidden identity. That is a sound principle. He simply declines to extend it to his political opponents, whose stated positions he overrides in favor of an imputed hidden ideology.
The credibility question
All of this might matter less if Stanley’s own record as a witness were unimpeachable. It is not—and the most damaging doubts come not from the political right but from within Germany’s Jewish community and from Stanley’s own academic milieu.
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Last November 9, Stanley delivered a speech commemorating Kristallnacht at the Jewish community center in Frankfurt. Afterward he told the German press that he had been shouted down over his critical remarks on Israel, threatened, forced to break off his speech, and escorted out through a side entrance to escape a “mob” — an experience, he said, more disturbing than anything he had ever encountered. German newspapers ran the story as a scandal: proof that the Jewish liberal tradition of open debate was collapsing.
Then the people who had actually hosted him spoke up. Benjamin Graumann, chairman of the Frankfurt Jewish community, publicly stated that “nobody chased Jason Stanley off the stage” and accused him of spreading untruths about the evening. Daniel Neumann, head of the association of Jewish communities in Hesse, wrote in the Jüdische Allgemeine that the real scandal was not the event but the press coverage: German journalists, he argued, had constructed a scandal out of Stanley’s “abenteuerliche Geschichten”—his fanciful tales—without speaking to anyone else who was present. Whatever happened in Frankfurt that night, a man whose factual account of his own evening was publicly contradicted by the Jewish community that hosted him is a man whose “quite clearly” deserves a discount.
His academic peers have registered similar reservations about the larger project. Stanley’s scholarly reputation rests on technical work in the philosophy of language; reviewers noted that before 2016 he had published nothing on fascism and that How Fascism Works assembles examples without ever integrating them into a testable account. The sharpest critiques of the fascism framing came from the left: Yale’s Samuel Moyn warned that “abnormalizing Trump” as a fascist obscures how American his politics actually are, and the historian David Bell argued the label functions as hyperbole that discredits its users. None of these critics can be dismissed as AfD sympathizers or MAGA partisans. They are pointing at a methodological defect that travels with Stanley wherever he goes.
The prophet who prospered
Which brings us to the third exhibit. In March 2025, Stanley announced he was leaving Yale for the University of Toronto because, as he put it, he did not want to raise his children in a country “tilting towards a fascist dictatorship.” The departure was covered breathlessly—CNN, NPR, PBS—as a modern echo of the intellectuals who fled Europe in the 1930s.
Consider what that comparison asks us to overlook. The scholars who fled Berlin in 1933 lost their chairs, their citizenship, their libraries, and in many cases their lives. Stanley spent the Trump years publishing bestsellers denouncing the government, holding an endowed chair at Yale, and appearing on national television to call the administration fascist—activities that, in an actual fascist state, end differently. He then departed not into exile but into a prestigious appointment, from which he continues to tour, publish, and give interviews in five-star hotel lobbies. This year he told PBS viewers that “ethnic cleansing is coming to America.” The prediction may be tested; the pattern is already visible. Every previous alarm has been survivable, and every survivable alarm has been followed by a louder one.
What is actually at stake
The AfD is a right-wing party—part of the same national-conservative and populist wave that now sits in parliaments and, in some cases, in government in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Britain, and elsewhere in Europe. Much is made of the fact that Germany’s domestic intelligence service has designated it “confirmed right-wing extremist.” American readers should understand what that agency is: the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz is not a court but a subordinate federal bureau reporting to an interior minister drawn from the AfD’s direct political competitors. When a party that ranks among the strongest in the national polls can be officially branded a threat to the constitution by an agency answerable to its rivals, the designation may say less about the AfD than about the logic of what political scientists call a cartel democracy—a system in which the established parties jointly manage the terms of competition—as opposed to a genuinely competitive one. The party is, in any case, contesting the classification in court.
Against that background, Stanley’s method matters all the more. Germany, of all countries, has reasons to keep its heaviest historical concepts sharp. “Blood and soil” describes a doctrine that ended in Treblinka. If the term can be applied, without textual evidence and with denials counted as confirmation, to any party favoring a descent-based citizenship law—a principle that governed German nationality law without interruption until 2000—then the term no longer describes anything. The singularity of Nazi crimes does not license looser analogies to them; it demands stricter ones. The heavier the historical concept, the heavier the burden of proof must be. That standard would serve Stanley’s own anti-fascism better than the one he currently employs, under which the case can never be lost because it can never be tested.
Stanley warns that fascists rewrite the past to control the future. The warning is worth taking seriously—seriously enough to notice when the past is being flattened into an all-purpose indictment by the people most loudly claiming to defend it.
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