From How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley, which I'm reading now. It's eye opening -- I should have read it a couple of years ago. For now we have dodged a bullet, though not without some permanent (probably) damage. I suspect his book will come in handy as we go forward.
"What happens when conspiracy theories become the coin of politics, and mainstream media and educational institutions are discredited, is that citizens no longer have a common reality that can serve as a background for democratic deliberation. In such a situation, citizens have no choice but to look for markers to follow other than truth or reliability. What happens in such cases, as we see across the world, is that citizens look to politics for tribal identifications, for addressing personal grievances, and for entertainment. When news becomes sports, the strongman achieves a certain measure of popularity. Fascist politics transforms the news from a conduit of information and reasoned debate into a spectacle with the strongman as the star.
"Fascist politics, as we have seen, seeks to undermine trust in the press and universities. But the information sphere of a healthy democratic society does not include just democratic institutions. Spreading general suspicion and doubt undermines the bonds of mutual respect between fellow citizens, leaving them with deep wells of mistrust not just toward institutions but also toward one another. Fascist politics seeks to destroy the relations of mutual respect between citizens that are the foundation of a healthy liberal democracy, replacing them ultimately with trust in one figure alone, the leader. When fascist politics is at its most successful, the leader is regarded by the followers as singularly trustworthy."
15 comments:
David -- Explaining how fascism works is useful, However, attempts to apply that explanation to today's politicians are generally not a good idea. In particular, finding a few similarities between the behavior of real fascists and current politicians is usually frivolous.
Was Barack Obama a fascist when he criticized Fox News? Were Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer fascists when they pursued a conspiracy theory based on the preposterous Steele dossier? Of course not.
There certainly is a problem today of people believing things that aren't so. Is it worse than it used to be? I'm not sure. However, I don't think it's illuminating to bring fascism into that discussion.
Cheers
David, Trump is a fascist up and down the line. He checks all the boxes of a fascist score card. None of those you mentioned come anywhere close, of course.
I don't have time to go into it much right now. But reading the book, Trump is clearly a fascist through and through. Look what he's doing right now, trying to steal the election. He lies constantly. He expects loyalty without question. He disrespects experts and science -- in fact, he insults them regularly. He's encouraged his followers towards violence. He said some Nazis were good people. He sucks up to dictators. He didn't care at all when one of his favorite dictator put bounties on the heads of US soldiers. He would restrict the media if he could. He lies about the media and attempts to dismiss them. He pardons his friends even when they commit war crimes. He has no empathy -- Brad Parscale said Trump would have easily won election if he could have shown some empathy during the pandemic. But there is no such emotion inside Trump -- he is void of sympathy and empathy and feeling for others.
Trump is a fascist A-Z. It's only our strong democratic institutions that have prevented him from turning the US into a fascist state. The sad thing is that 70 M Americans support a fascist and apparently support a fascist US state.
I would encourage you to read the book. It's only 190 pages, not dense reading, and besides Trump writes about Hungary, Poland, Russia, Nazi Germany, the Confederacy, Mussolini's Italy....
David - I'm afraid your comment at 2:09 has a number of false statements.
1. Trump is using the courts to prevent fraudulent votes from being counted. That's no more fascistic than was Al Gore's use of the courts in 2000.
2. Trump lies constantly. Yes, he does. But, many politicians lie when expedient. That doesn't mean they're fascists
3. Yes, Trump expects a high degree of loyalty. Don't most leaders expect that?
4. Yes, Trump insults experts regularly. Sometimes the experts deserve to be insulted. E.g., Trump's very successful policies involving the middle east were against the advice of experts. Early on Dr. Fauci provided bad advice regarding covid. Often Trump is wrong to reject the experts. Either way, that has nothing to do with fascism.
5. A large majority of the political violence has been by the left.
6. You should know that Trump never said Nazis were good people, because I provided his exact words to you in an earlier thread.
7. It was never confirmed that someone put bounties on American soldiers.
David, I have a lot of respect for your intellect. it's disappointing to see you parrot this kind of stuff. You should know better.
Cheers
David in Cal
Do the political test here, then look at the analysis of the 2020 US election.
https://www.politicalcompass.org/uk2019
Both Trump and Biden are up in the Authoritarian Right corner of the classification, which rather invalidates all this talk about socialism, marxism and th Democrat Left.
I've been reading a bit about Fascism.
Previous Fascist regimes then to be politically authoritaria n. They also encourage free enterprise, profit and big business.
This puts fascism in the Authoritarian Right corner of the political compass.
Since Trump and Biden are both in the Authoritarian Right corner, it would seem reasonable to describe them both as fascist.
https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2020
David,
1. Trump is trying to overturn a legitimate election. Gore wasn't. No fraud has been identified in the 2020 election and Trump has failed in his court cases by now something like 1-40. He is even calling on state legislators to do his bidding for him in states he lost by tens of thousands of votes. He is attempting to subvert the democratic process and the will of the voters. Judges, rightly, won't stand for it.
2. No other politicians lie like Trump does. Not even close. You know that.
3. Trump is firing people and installing loyalists even now in DOD. What other president has done this with 2 months left in his term. He fired Chris Krebs for saying he saw no fraud in the system. That's fascistic.
4. Which experts deserve to be insulted? Fauci? Birx? FDA scientists? Climate scientists? Trump insults experts whose work he doesn't understand in the least. That's probably why he insults them -- it's the only response ignorant people can come up wit.
>> Early on Dr. Fauci provided bad advice regarding covid.
Fauci explained that he was between a rock and a hard place -- he had to tell the public not to wear masks (in Feb, I think) because there was a shortage of PPE for health care workers. They needed to be prioritized. How would you have handled that?
Yes, insulting and dismissing experts is a characteristic of fascism. Only the strongman is right.
A large majority of the political violence has been by the left.
This is untrue but you've repeated here often. When asked for evidence you have failed to provide any. But counterevidence showing the copious violence from the far right HAS been presented here, yet you dismiss it and maintain your position.
You should know that Trump never said Nazis were good people, because I provided his exact words to you in an earlier thread.
Trump: "They didn’t put themselves -- and you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. You had people in that group. Excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.""
One of the sides was chanting "Jews will not replace us." Why aren't they Nazis? Doesn't that bother you personally?
7. It was never confirmed that someone put bounties on American soldiers.
You're right, David -- thanks for setting me straight on this. This is from Wikipedia:
"According to the New York Times, on 1 July, the National Intelligence Council, which reports to the director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, produced a two-and-a-half page document in which various intelligence agencies assessed the credibility of the existence of a bounty program based on the available evidence. Anonymous officials who had seen the memo said that the "C.I.A. and the National Counterterrorism Center had assessed with medium confidence—meaning credibly sourced and plausible, but falling short of near certainty"—that the GRU had offered bounties. Other parts of the intelligence community, including the National Security Agency, said they "did not have information to support that conclusion at the same level", and so had lower confidence in the conclusion.[36]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_bounty_program#Intelligence_gathering_and_assessment
Cheers.
E.M.,
So where would Nazi Germany appear on this chart??
David, they put Hitler as strongly authoritarian and slightly to the right:
https://www.politicalcompass.org/analysis2
Thomas, Hitler was libertarian? Wasn't Nazi Germany socialist? Wasn't the government running all industry then? I'm confused. And why Biden and Thatcher would be categorized as fascist.
David Appell
The Nazis started with plans to boost the collapsed Weimar republic by putting a lot of investment into factories and infrastructure, a bit like your New Deal.
By 1939 they had a command economy rather like the Soviet Union. That would put them on the Authoritarian Left.
"What happens when conspiracy theories become the coin of politics, and mainstream media and educational institutions are discredited, is that citizens no longer have a common reality that can serve as a background for democratic deliberation."
This is why it irks me when DiC says facts don't matter, policies do (notwithstanding his claims that we can't possibly understand policy and that's why fact checking is impossible)
This is why it irks me when he says it doesn't matter that most republicans believe QAnon conspiracies since QAnon doesn't make policy (notwithstanding the fact that the republicans have now elected QAnon to public office).
Truth matters. Facts matter. But half the US has given up on reality.
David, Hitler was authoritarian, which is the opposite of libertarian. Nazi Germany had lots of private industries, even if the government had a lot to say about what those industries should produce, especially once they got the war economy running. More like early South Korea than the Soviet Union IMHO. Despite the name the nazis didn't have much in common with socialism.
You will have to read the critera they use.
EM wrote:
By 1939 they had a command economy rather like the Soviet Union. That would put them on the Authoritarian Left.
Thanks for explaining, that helps a lot.
EM wrote:
Since Trump and Biden are both in the Authoritarian Right corner, it would seem reasonable to describe them both as fascist.
But Biden doesn't play the role of a strongman.
He doesn't try to incite division to keep out less favored classes (minorities) against the "heartland."
He isn't anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-expert, like Trump. He isn't an extreme nationalist. He isn't looking to take us back to some mythical era when all was right with the country (and when minorities, including sexual minorities, were essentially invisible). He doesn't try to demonize anyone. He doesn't play the victim.
These are why I have a hard time seeing how Biden can be classified in the fascist corner of that plot.
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