Without very specific and pedantic characteristics, it’s just sparkling tinpot dictatorship.
Ana Kasparian go on the Rubin Report, it’d be so embarrassing, it’d be so funny
She’s shopping for a spot at Daily Wire
This has exactly the same energy, as the rule nerds who will patiently spend hours explaining that what’s happening in Palestine is not a genocide, it’s just ethnic cleansing.
This is simply a semantic argument, that is so caught up on legalistic definitions, that it’s unable to see the forest for the trees.
It turns out that when fascism takes its mask off in the imperial core 80 years after its “defeat” in Europe, it looks a little different. Material conditions change, Mussolini and Hitler were fighting large communist organizations within their country, the largest left wing organizations in the United States, are hilariously impotent in comparison.
Meanwhile a majority of Republicans, and a large minority of Democrats approve of the idea of putting undocumented workers in literal camps.
people literally think hitler is the single end-all-be-all of fascism. removed didn’t even invent it
didif fascism comes to the united states it will be cloaked in a flag of course, but more importantly 80% of this idiot country will confidently declare it isn’t because it doesn’t come from a bavarian beerhall or some shit. the american people are unintellectual
Killing anyone not of the master race is very much not inherent to fascism, see Italy, but she is at least accidentally right that Trump isn’t a fascist. He likes certain superficial allusions to fascism, but I don’t think there’s any real difference in his mind between Hitler, Xi, and Putin (not unlike many neoliberals), he just thinks “Strong, intelligent man with power over a country” but he’s also too cowardly to rock the boat as hard as Hitler did and doesn’t really understand any of Hitler’s ideology beyond “Aryan good, non-Aryan bad, Jew evil”, something that we don’t have evidence for him believing beyond the way Aryanism permeates most white American culture.
She does, at least accidentally, have the point that Trump doesn’t have a paramilitary or anything like it. He has enabled death squads at the border, but, well, at least as far as I know, we don’t have evidence either that they are loyal to him or that they’d be willing to turn their guns on either American civilians or on cops. The people Trump has are a huge mass of car pool cleaning equipment dealers, of whom a fraction of a percent are willing to draw blood or even fire a warning shot in his name. That’s not a militia, that’s just a somewhat rowdy fan base.
Also he just, like, clearly doesn’t have the ambition to smash the mechanisms in place to limit presidential power. He had lots of chance to try that and the most you can really say is he abused what was already there with executive orders, something he is not alone in doing.
She’s still an absurd reactionary and the accolades she cites are all equally absurd. For example, he didn’t want the liability to his image of starting a new war [nor did he have a pressing reason to start one] and spun it to his convenience.
She does, at least accidentally, have the point that Trump doesn’t have a paramilitary or anything like it.
The “Proud Boys” wanted to be that very, very badly, and even got senpai to notice them sometimes like with that “stand by” speech.
Ok. Fine. I’ll bite. […] I’m the “fucking stupid” one. Okay.
Good meme potential on this one
Ok. Fine. I’ll bite. You said a “jackdaw is a crow.”
Is it in the same family? Yes. No one’s arguing that.
As someone who is a scientist who studies crows, I am telling you, specifically, in science, no one calls jackdaws crows. If you want to be “specific” like you said, then you shouldn’t either. They’re not the same thing.
If you’re saying “crow family” you’re referring to the taxonomic grouping of Corvidae, which includes things from nutcrackers to blue jays to ravens.
So your reasoning for calling a jackdaw a crow is because random people “call the black ones crows?” Let’s get grackles and blackbirds in there, then, too.
Also, calling someone a human or an ape? It’s not one or the other, that’s not how taxonomy works. They’re both. A jackdaw is a jackdaw and a member of the crow family. But that’s not what you said. You said a jackdaw is a crow, which is not true unless you’re okay with calling all members of the crow family crows, which means you’d call blue jays, ravens, and other birds crows, too. Which you said you don’t. But I’m the “fucking stupid” one. Okay.
conquest/imperialism
What the FUCK do you think America loves doing exactly?
Militarised citizenry
Somehow forgotten about the literal armed fascist militias? Memory holed those I guess. Even if at large the citizens are not currently militarised they can be at any point mobilised into mass violence and have the weaponry to do so.
Elimination of our government bodies
Don’t need to eliminate what doesn’t work in the first place. There’s no communist opposition the government bodies were built from the ground up to serve fascists so they don’t need elimination
Trump isn’t facist… America is fascist
Militarised citizenry
Isn’t that just the police now. I think they’re classified as civil servants too, not professional soldiers.
local PDs have MRAPs in towns with 0.5 homicides a year
And how many local shithead militias have close ties to local PDs all across the country? Remember Patriot Prayer setting up a fuckin sniper nest in a parking garage in 2020?
Oath Keepers were running over the rooftops and streets when Ferguson was going down.
‘thank you for your service (and only means of not going into debt when buying a house or acquiring an education)’
I think her reasoning is not very strong but as to whether trump or these populist right wingers are “fascists” I’m on samuel moyn’s side that they’re an entirely new modern terrible thing and that the more rigorous you want to be when comparing them to real historical interwar fascism the less accurate the description becomes.
The mass politics aren’t there, neither for them nor for us, neither is the civil militarization, not nearly at the level where it’d actually be relevant. So you’re just kinda left with, “they’re racist and want to reverse rights”, yeah that’s called being a conservative and a reactionary, but it’s not fascism. And that goes both for trump (who’s brand of populism is more like classic american white nativism than a fancy european ideology) and for the surging far-right in europe. The strongest claim one can make is that they’re “like” fascists, or they’re “neo-fascists” or something, but a 1 to 1 comparison I think loses power the more these parties turn out to not do the most significant things that fascists do, because they can’t, you can’t conjure up a mass social movement out of the current moment.
The 2 exceptions I make are India, since the BJP’s oficial militarized gangs resemble fascist militias way more than anything in europe and north america (but that might just be my ignorance about the country).
And Israel. And I think it says a lot how much money academics, journalists, pundits, “human rights advocates” and center-left activists have made by painting the contemporary right or far-right as fascist, but are COMPLETELY SILENT about the categorization when faced with a real contemporary example.
As to whether it’s good that we call all these people fascists now as a political move, if you’re one of those “you gotta understand something to fight it” guys then you probably oppose it on that principle but I think after a few years of this political climate you can see how there’s good and bad things about it as a strategy.
The good is that it’s basically “red-tagging” (when you call every lib a communist) but for conservatives, by labeling people much to the right of where they actually are based on 1 or 2 positions, in theory that brings the overton window and the range of acceptable politics left, and that remains while the accusation has credibility, which is until the political center starts taking positions from the far right (on say migration), because the centrists CAN’T be the fascists.
The bad is that it creates an emergency situation, which might drive some people towards real (not online) leftist militancy (that’s what happened to me) but it probably drives far more people into the center, because if “the fascists are coming” and you have hitler on your mind, then you’re not gonna bother with radical politics, you should be afraid, and if you’re afraid you’re gonna want to give power only to people who uphold “democratic” institutions like parliaments, laws and norms, and not all radicals want to uphold those norms for good reason. And we’ve seen what that entails, it’s getting in line “anti-fascitly” behind Biden-Harris, Macron (which is what the NFP still did with their alliance) or Costa (Portugal).
I had the thought just the other day that the US might be best described as “post-fascist”, seeing as how elimination of any real left is an already completed project, suppression of marginalized groups and workers is fully institutionalized, and then there’s of course the historical slavery and genocide that most people now just shrugs at if they’re even mentioned all.
I am admittedly an idiot though, so yeah.
That part about you being an idiot is the only part you’re wrong about 🤗
Oh you
seeing as how elimination of any real left is an already completed project, suppression of marginalized groups and workers is fully institutionalized
Yeah that’s a big factor too that I forgot to mention, I remember when Biden just straight up called off that big railworkers (I think) strike, or how Macron can push his retirement age reform even through mass contestation. We talk about fascists ultimately serving capitalism to fight violently fight the worker militancy in germany and italy (I read an interview once where an old german guy said that if you moved into their city, and you didn’t immediatly join a party or a labour union, you would get beaten up and harassed, because it was assumed that you were there to be a scab, that’s the level of militancy there was), but you don’t need that kind of violence to defeat the current level of militancy, you just sign the act to make the strike illegal and workers understand that if they keep going you’ll send in the national guard, or, like Macron, you wait them out.
In a way, it’s like you don’t NEED fascism when centrists can accomplish some of the same goals.
I tend to frequently at the moment call every lib/conservative a fascist these days on Hexbear, but honestly you’re probably more spot on with this.
The question is if it matters. To me, what you describe is just fascism in the 21st century. Whereas Israel and BJP are more traditional 20th century style fascism. It’s a good discussion to have!
I tend to frequently at the moment call every lib/conservative a fascist
Yeah so do I, I called the german green party Nazis the other day, sometimes you just wanna let out how much you hate these people.
To me, what you describe is just fascism in the 21st century. Whereas Israel and BJP are more traditional 20th century style fascism.
Yeah that’s what makes the most sense to me too, to say that these people ARE fascist but they’re, just, fascists with the material conditions that we have now, which make them not actually resemble or be able to do what old-school fascism actually was.
Dang this is one of the best comments I’ve seen on this site
gonna end all my posts from now on with “But I’m the ‘fucking stupid’ one. Okay.”
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This is what happens when you start with the assumption that the USA doesn’t currently show signs of Fascism, and that Fascism must be done to the US.
The Citizenry is currently engaged in a series of events of stochastic terrorism
Congress is entirely undemocratic
The USA does plenty of massacres, while those are mostly outside of the US. What ICE does is within the US. But Non-citizens don’t count I guess.
—
US has always been fascist
That’s a lot of words to say you don’t know what fascist means, but you want to carry water for them
But I’m the “fucking stupid” one. Okay.
Okay! On to the next problem!
fascism requires the notion that everyone who isn’t part of the master race should be massacred
That’s Nazism. Fascism is the Mussolini thing.
