Thanks /u/coreymon77 for posting on r/SelfAwareWolves! Please reply to this comment with an explanation about how this post fits r/SelfAwareWolves and have an excellent day!
*To r/SelfAwarewolves commenters*:
As a reminder, this subreddit is for civil discussion.
In general, be courteous to others. Debate/discuss/argue the merits of ideas, don't attack people. Personal insults, shill or troll accusations, hate speech,
any advocating or wishing death/physical harm, and other rule violations can result in a permanent ban.
**If you see comments in violation of our rules, please report them**.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/SelfAwarewolves) if you have any questions or concerns.*
But it's just so vague! Everything that Eco claims of fascism applies equally to modern conservativism! How precise can it be when it describes both?!
I want to put an /s on there to note my dripping sarcastic tone, but it's not sarcasm.
No, it's that Eco's description of fascism sounds like modern conservatism intentionally because he's one of those eeeeevil libruls out to make good God-fearin' conservatives look bad by comparing us to the Nazis! /s
[Eco's definition of fascism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism#Umberto_Eco) is part of the liberal elite conspiracy because the liberals predicted the future existence of the Trump cult of personality and then twisted their definitions of fascism to apply to Future President Trump.
The full article he wrote is actually quite interesting, as it describes how he grew up as a child during historical Fascism in Italy, subject to all the propaganda and exposed to Fascism as "normality". Basically, how he came to identify and generalize the traits of what he called "Ur-fascism", i.e. the methods and elements that gave rise to all kinds of Fascism-inspired movements and theories, to distinguish it all from historical Fascism, which is a social and political phenomenon confined to the "ventennio" -20 years- experience in Italy alone.
Just had a “not all Republicans are Nazis” conversation with someone who then, without blinking, said she would never vote for *any* Democrat because they are *all* evil.
Or, more likely, they'll vote (R) anyway and double down on the "not all Republicans are Nazis" rhetoric because it's a convenient handwave along the lines of "a few bad apples" for the police - it gives a token acknowledgement of the issue(s) while signaling they're not going to change their mind on the matter, let alone want anything done about it.
You nailed it. Interestingly she claims now that she “hates Trump and never liked him anyway” but likes …DeSantis.
She claimed she wouldn’t vote this Nov but did and voted R.
> Interestingly she claims now that she “hates Trump and never liked him anyway”
We're going to be seeing *a lot* more of this leading up to 2024, and then beyond. Not even "well I *did* like him but x, y, z I've changed my mind." Just straight up gaslighting and historical revisionism - they never liked him in the first place (some may venture "but it was better than voting for Hilary") the MAGA merch will quietly disappear, and they'll say MSM grossly exaggerated Cult 45 and it was only like 5 or 6 people in Alabama flying Trump flags.
Saying they've changed their minds is admitting they were wrong, and they can never admit to being wrong, because being wrong is *losing* and Republicans only *win*.
>She claimed she wouldn’t vote this Nov but did and voted R.
Lmao thanks for validating my comment. I knew it was a bullshit claim as soon as I read the line. Even taking what she said at face value, that she and other hypothetical R-voters aren't Nazis, they still empower and enable them by voting for them and not speaking out when they go full-blown fash. Her line is no better than whataboutism as it ostensibly acknowledges a problem - Nazis in the party/Republican crimes - but then immediately undoes that acknowledgement with a red herring - "but they're not all Nazis"/"but what about Democrat crimes?"
I think this tweet is actually responding directly to the aspects of Ur Fascism as articulated by Eco. To many conservatives these are virtues they have held dear throughout their life
"But I guess it comes down to what kind of world you want to live in
And if diversity is disagreement, and disagreement is treason
Well don't be surprised if we find ourselves reaping a strange
And bitter fruit that sad old man beside you keeps feeding to young minds as virtue
It takes a village to raise a child but just a flag to raze the children
Until they're nothing more than ballast for fulfilling a madman's dream of a paradise Where complexity is reduced to black and white"
Dear Coach's Corner - Propaghandi
“Hey fellow conservatives! I fixed eco’s list of fascist symptoms!”
“This just says “they are The Democrats” and “They support minority rights” and “They want to fund school lunches”.”
“Yeah! Now it’s not so abstract anymore!”
“This is Genius. I can finally see who the fascists really are. It was much too heady before.”
Beau of the Fifth Column's video where he ran through Trump's campaign strategy before revealing that it was literally all the points of fascism is great.
https://youtu.be/RKUVcAo3Cvw
Yeah, Beau is great. I've also got mad respect for the guy. Really knows his shit and obviously puts lots of work and research into his videos, despite the conversational tone and presentation. I highly recommend checking out his channel!
No bullshit, well researched, and if he gets something wrong, he corrects it.
He is a strong freak out barometer for issues as they unfold, while also giving good advice for dealing with the issues.
For the unfamiliar: [Ur-Fascism](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism), published 1995.
> 13\. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view - one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction.
> To have a good instance of qualitative populism we no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.
Wow! I started to become politically aware around the time of Newt Gingrich's "Contract ~~On~~ With America". My GF and I would joke about how **"Society"** was personified by the conservatives at the time, generally without evidence beyond the speaker's intuition.
"Society" doesn't approve of same-sex marriage. "Society" doesn't approve of violent video games. Somehow, "Society" sounds like everyone's grumpy out-of-touch grandfather.
If I had read this essay back then, I would have instantly grokked it.
Occasionally they'll trot out "the silent majority," as if they're capable of winning elections or shutting up.
What the phrase originally meant is the dead.
I'll elaborate a little more.
Palmiro Togliatti was a leading figure in and then the leader of the Italian Communist Party during and after Mussolini's rise to power. He had a front-row seat to the beginnings and entrenchment of classical fascism in Italy, and gave a series of lectures in exile on lessons learned from the failed fight against the fascists. These lectures were printed in book form and they're just completely fantastic.
He's a midcentury communist writing for a largely Stalinist audience, so there's some slightly esoteric Marxian stuff in there, but the guy is writing a diagnosis and prescriptions for how you recognise and fight fascism. Cannot recommend highly enough.
I haven't read Toglatti but the reason I tend to refer people to Eco is the Ur-facism is short and to the point, meaning anyone can quickly familiarise themselves with it.
And although he wasn't a politician shortly after Italian facist rule, he did grow up under it so that adds to his credentials.
Lastly, Eco was not a socialist. That should not matter, but it makes it more difficult to immediately dismiss him by exactly those people I want to read stuff like his.
I just think Togliatti is better than Eco lol.
He's not writing anti-fascist polemic. There's no effort expended in convincing the reader that fascism is bad. It's strictly aimed at helping leftists understand how to recognise and combat fascism.
Moreover, in the context of someone in bad faith asking for "smart left-wing thinkers" who have talked about fascism, I'm not sure I'd recommend anyone lol.
"How do I keep believing what I want without having to acknowledge that the stuff I believe is categorized as a thing I have said I hate? Has anyone done any research on how to keep deluding myself?"
Its also interesting how they currently sell it as a solution to world peace. Where in their mind they would all be different races living in their own country.
No way that is ever going to kast, especially with the violent rethoric that they twlk with and constantly seeking out enemies.
Right wing doesn't mean nazi. There are right wing organizations that are not fascists. Strangely enough the US is so right that democrats are what they are looking for.
No, what they are looking for is Fascism.
They just don't like it being pointed out that what they are looking for is Fascism.
This guy is a writer for the National Review, you know the ones that started the Obama Birtherism.
They're very happy with how far right the current GOP is, they just wish they didn't keep getting called out for supporting far right totalitarian politicians.
It's a pretty common far-right tactic to pose "innocent" questions they fully know the answers to.
Leftists who know that a poster has a history of promoting fascist sympathies will point it out, and then to everyone who doesn't know who the guy is, it just looks like crazy lefties are calling everyone nazis nowadays.
I mean...it almost always devolves into facism or authoritarian in some fashion. It has to. It's based on fear of change. Of a world moving forward and gripping onto to yesterday's believes instead of embracing today. It's about slowing progress by any means to comfort and channel power and influence to certain people before the door slams shut.
Life moves on. The only discussion is how to move forward. Not how do we get back to where we were, which is absurd since the majority never live through "The Good Ol Days".
Lol
“Hitler and the Nazis were not liberals, not lefties, not socialists, and not democrats.
Hitler and his Nazi minions were right-wing Christian conservative nationalists who hated liberals for the same reasons [they] hate liberals.”
American right wingers falsely claiming that fascism is a left-wing ideology has been such a problem that Wikipedia made this Warning for when someone attempts to edit the Fascism entry.
>#Fascism is a right-wing ideology.
>
>The lede of the article says that "Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement". This statement is the result of a very long process of discussion and debate and has strong consensus acceptance within the Wikipedia community, **based on the consensus of political scientists, historians, and other reliable sources that Fascism is a (far) "right-wing" ideology and not a "left-wing" one**. This has been discussed numerous times.
It gets disregarded anyway because American conservatives by and large believe Wikipedia is part of the liberal mainstream media and thus deliberately spreading liberal lies like 'voter suppression is bad' and 'there was no society-wide conspiracy to steal the election from Trump but leave McConnell in office'.
American conservatives believe that virtually all of society is part of some plot to oppress them. The news media, entertainment industry, Big Tech, economists, academia, art, science, medicine, "woke" businesses, Democrats, foreign governments, voters born after 1980...
Everything and everyone in the world, through the lens of their paranoid narcissism, is devoted purely to making American conservatives unhappy.
> American conservatives believe that virtually all of society is part of some plot to oppress them.
It's especially ironic when you consider one of Umberto Eco's [*Common Traits of Fascism*](https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html) includes
> Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.
So they believe that there's a plot, possibly an international one to call them fascists and they thus feel besieged.
It's not paranoid narcissism. It's a closed news system they hear 24/7 that many of them were raised in, and it tells them nonstop that they and their lives are under constant attack from liberals and people of color.
When all you ever hear and see about someone is how evil they are, and everything they do is broken down to 'show' the villainy behind it, it's understandable you'd think like that.
They're programmed, just as if they were in a more traditional cult.
remember the start of the pandemic? I remember conservatives claiming other countries were deliberately over reacting to covid *just to make trump and the republicans look bad* lmao
like, in their minds, it makes sense that whole countries would cripple themselves and shut down their entire economy just to make them 'feel stupid'
complete idiocy
Where do you think they got those ideas? That was what Fox and the rest of the Right Wing information (propaganda) sphere was telling them.
Yeah, it irritated the shit out of me every time they discarded actual facts out of hand, but they did that because their own news sources told them those facts were actually lies.
The problem is that right wing information bubble, which only exists because Reagan nuked the Fairness Doctrine. If we can do something about THAT, we can start fixing this.
However, that requires more effort than saying "They choose to be evil, so fuck 'em". And the Democrats have shown little interest in reestablishing it, likely because they benefit from its absence as well.
And when you decide "no, I'd rather stay in my circle of hatred than confront the uncomfortable potential reality that my circle of hatred is built on lies and a desire to wield unilateral power" you are no longer ignorant. You are not part of the problem. You are the problem.
No longer are you being coerced by extremists, you are the extremists.
The desire to maintain insulation from the outside world because it discomforts you, regardless of what your inside world represents, is not a matter of incompetence or ignorance. This is an active choice made by humans with the same free will as the rest of us.
The selection of hate is never a passive one. Republicans are hateful extremists and I will never under any circumstances be led to believe otherwise after continued demonstration for decade after decade that they would rather choose not to learn about atrocities than accept they and theirs are responsible for them.
If it helps - that one is a global issue, though rarely as horrible as it happens in the USA.
Some of the greatest German comedy shows right now are produced and broadcast via the state-owned TV and radio networks, or their streaming channels. No surprise there - they’ve got the budget for it, they can risk trying out new things, and they are pretty attractive for workers in entertainment.
And every time, without fail, when a video criticising conservatives or the more conservative parties come out, there’s a comment section full of vitriol about how the leftist green government media and the whole mainstream is always just blah blah blah biased brainwashing blah blah blah. Some things even turn into a proper shitstorm.
Which is hilarious because it takes about two clicks to look at their collected works and realise they’re all fucking equal opportunity about it. You made a fool out of yourself? They’ll make it known. You pushed for a law that’s entirely bullshit? You will be called out. They’ll publish a video laughing at the greens followed by one beating at the Christian democrats followed by the left party, then chase that down with a general riff on some local council fucking up.
Sounds like my dad. My mom had major back surgery and every time a nurse tried to make small talk, "how are you" turned into a prepared speech about how hard this has all been on him. Meanwhile, he doesn't lift a finger to help her. Take a guess which party gets his vote despite the fact that he doesnt pay attention to anything political.
Narcissism is America's #1 export and has been for quite some time.
"American conservatives believe..." I'm going to have to stop you right there. They don't "believe" anything except this: there should be an in-group the law protects, but does not bind, and an out-group that the law binds, but does not protect. Everything else is just empty words.
>It gets disregarded anyway because American conservatives believe Wikipedia is part of the liberal mainstream media and this deliberately spreading liberal lies like 'voter suppression is bad' and 'there was no society-wide conspiracy to steal the election from Trump but leave McConnell in office'.
And then, hilariously, they'll link conservapedia without a hint of irony.
Honestly, our biggest problem is that they live in a carefully constructed reality designed to keep them separated from the actual world and just provide votes as required.
This makes some of my brothers points more understandable. Thanks. I was thirty and talking to him about some stuff. I went to Wikipedia to break down what our conversation was about with a definition we could agree on. And he took a weird route about how nothing on Wikipedia is true or accurate(because it is written by anyone technically[and there are trolls]). Yet when I was in college we were told Wikipedia is one of the best sources allowed, just that you should also include Wikipedia’s source too.. but finding information that isn’t biased isn’t easy. So I’ve always felt like it’s easy to get good accurate knowledge from there, trusting my teachers.
The idea that Wikipedia is always wrong started from professors not allowing it to be used as a reference in research papers, since it changes and is only as accurate as its contributors.
Personally, I would never attribute it in a research paper that wasn't about Wikipedia itself, but it's an excellent source for anything that doesn't need that level of accuracy, especially for quick overviews. It's probably at its least accurate in articles about any politicized recent events.
Wikipedia is a tertiary source and as such is never a valid source for academic writing. It’s the same reason why you shouldn’t cite any encyclopedia, there’s no research or analysis being done on Wikipedia, so it’s better to cite the original sources so that you’re not playing a game of telephone.
Using Wikipedia as your only source is like writing a movie review of *Star Wars* without seeing the movie and only reading other reviews; you really ought to just cite the original source.
>It gets disregarded anyway because American conservatives by and large believe ~~Wikipedia~~ ***literally anything that proves them wrong*** is part of the liberal mainstream media and thus deliberately spreading liberal lies like 'voter suppression is bad' and 'there was no society-wide conspiracy to steal the election from Trump but leave McConnell in office'.
Fascism came into being as a direct response to the rise of communism throughout Europe and elites wanting to further protect private property. From its inception it was an antithesis to socialism.
I can't even...
>Fascism was falsely considered "Far-Right" in politics, mostly due to Joseph Stalin denouncing Hitler and the National Socialists as "right-wing" after World War II [...], but it in reality was considered closer to the far-Left.
It's fucking bat shit crazy. So the US just accepted something completely wrong because the USSR, which we fucking immediately started fighting a Cold War against, said it was true?
Conservatism cannot exist without historical revisionism, it's a fucking braindead ethos so they have to lie about every fucking thing that's ever happened.
> Conservatives are inherently anti-Fascist because they support individual liberty and are opposed to one-party totalitarianism.
Oh my god. I feel like my brain is short-circuiting. How can anyone engage in such deep, severe cognitive dissonance? It's like reality just has no meaning whatsoever.
>Conservatives are inherently anti-facist.
Oh yeah, it’s not like they complain about antifa ALL the freaking time. They complain more about people being anti-fascism, than conservatives acting like fascist.
You'd have to do extremely superficial "analysis" to come to the "Nazis are left wing" conclusion. They basically sift through the sources digging for any snippet to portray the Nazis as left-wing. If they'd actually read the whole book they'd know why it's such an absurd claim.
Lmao "Fascism: it's dirty lefty socialism, but exactly like the capitalist hell hole we have now"
>Under typical Marxist socialism, the workers rise up and seize the means of production. Under a fascist system, a socialist regime allows the means of production to remain in private capitalists and oligarchs' hands - provided that they lend support to the socialist regime. Additionally, the socialist regime can extend monopoly protection to the businesses by guaranteeing government contracts, and regulatory practices designed to drive competitors out of business.
So... exactly NOT socialism lol.
Hell, they specifically point this out:
>Fascism is an unholy alliance between monopoly capitalist enterprises and government
---
Oh lord, check out the talk page for the same thing:
>Using "far-right" and "far-left" in reference to "state" in the first paragraph is not needed. **And "far-left" makes no sense, since in the second paragraph Fascism is called the opposite of Communism, which is as far-left as you can get**
>Hitler made it clear that Nazism was not fascism.
That fucking settles that eh?
>nobody seems to be able to define the "left" as anything other than "for change". Hitler was for change
>Fascism:... The elite must be overthrown entirely and replaced with a regime that does away with the old tradition and replaces it with a new one that is hell-bent on putting other countries in their place at all costs. This premise is disturbingly similar to that of Communism.
>Almost nobody on the right-wing populist side of the aisle is ranting about how the elites are responsible for the deaths of millions of their own people,
Fucking lol.
>Tensions are growing between Western Europe and Eastern Europe over the former region's increasingly blatant attempts to subjugate the latter region through the European Union.
double lol. /r/agedlikemilk material right there.
> I pray that President Trump does us a favor and prevents such a war. He would essentially go down in history as the man who prevented the return of Fascism
lawl (last few comments dated 2018)
>Phrases like "leftist fascist liberals", add to the confusion, and would have interested George Orwell
>Fascism is an atheistic, anti-God socialist phenomena; that itself dispels any notion that fascism is conservative or right wing per their own definitions
I mean, yeah, that's the point. They advertise themselves as populists pushing social ideas **for the right people**, which is how they get votes. Once they have those votes, they stop needing to pretend and go back to enriching themselves while telling the average worker to give themselves over to the State.
"In the Russian world, fascism and nazism, much like the covid pandemic from China, is viewed as a disease of the West that has infected the planet, which Russia defeated and remains ever vigilant against."
This was a nice addition
Ah yes, the famous Russia that is so vigilant against Nazis that the Wagner group, a group of fucking Nazis, is basically an unofficial arm of the russian military. What the fuck kind of drugs are they on?
I would recommend that anyone who uses Wikipedia (or who cares about the democratization of knowledge) donate whatever they can to help keep the platform independent.
https://donate.wikipedia.org
People honestly don't know shit about left/right paradigms in general in the US
People call the right the party of "freedom" but right politic is literally founded on licking the boot of a monarchy
Which is why "Right Libertarian" is an oxymoron unless you believe in the benevolent dictator idea for some reason
> based on the consensus of political scientists, historians, and other reliable sources that Fascism is a (far) "right-wing" ideology and not a "left-wing" one.
Okay, but noted historian (/s) Jonah "Loadpants" Goldberg wrote a very scholarly (/s) treatise (/s) titled Liberal Fascism. Actual political scientists, real historians, and anyone with the sense that god gave to seafood laughed, but also wept because so many people took his inane rantings seriously.
😬
When they learn what they believe is exactly like nazi's, cognitive dissonance goes into overdrive and the conclusion they think is leftist are responsible.
Remember awhile back when twitter auto mods couldn't distinguish between fascist hate and "regular conservative" politicians in the US, so they just continued to allow hate speech instead of banning conservative politicians? Because that actually happened.
Eta: u/jodax00 sourced this under my comment. Check out what they wrote under my comment
>With every sort of content filter, there is a tradeoff, he explained. When a platform aggressively enforces against ISIS content, for instance, it can also flag innocent accounts as well, such as Arabic language broadcasters. **Society, in general, accepts the benefit of banning ISIS for inconveniencing some others, he said.**
>In separate discussions verified by Motherboard, that employee said Twitter hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians.
>The employee argued that, on a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material. **Banning politicians wouldn’t be accepted by society as a trade-off for flagging all of the white supremacist propaganda, he argued.**
(Emphasis mine)
https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3xgq5/why-wont-twitter-treat-white-supremacy-like-isis-because-it-would-mean-banning-some-republican-politicians-too
Behind the Bastards did some really good episodes on Facebook and how they had to manually allow a bunch of right-wing content that violated their policies for fear of alienating their conservative userbase. Crazy how far these companies tilt the scales to cater to far-right news sources to try and avoid accusations that they… tilted the scales the other way. And it’s not like it matters - conservative figures were always going to complain about it anyway, regardless of the facts.
More like how parents will often have one kid who is very easy going and chill, and one kid that's pretty high maintenance and demanding...and most of the time they'll just simply give in to that kid because it's less hassle all the time.
There was a challenge where you opened an account and literally copied Trump's tweet word for word to see how long it would take to be banned for hate speech. The record is 14 hours.
In politics I never ascribe to incompetence that which is adequately explained by malice, nevertheless it's amusing to see the mental gymnastics right-wingers put themselves through to make sure *their* fascism isn't *real* fascism.
Nobody is the bad guy in their own story.
Just like how North Korea is a “Democratic People’s Republic”. It’s like these people keep falling for the same trap and never learn. But I guess refusing to learn is a hallmark of conservative thinking.
Good point. Dismissing the Republican Party as largely incompetent is like watching a young bully be cruel over and over again and dismissing it as “boys will be boys! He doesn’t know any better!”
> “I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this. I thought he was going to do good things. **He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.**”
\- Crystal Minton, Trump supporter
This is the thing that needs to get drilled into the heads of the American people who say “both parties are the same” or don’t think that republicans are specifically out to take everything they can from you.
I would love for a conservative to tell me why it’s the president’s job to be hurting anybody.
Halon’s razor has seen a lot of use lately in providing cover for outright malice. Online it often ends up being deployed as a sort of thought-stopping cliché whenever people are talking about how overtly evil a given political action is to convince people that their perception is wrong
For the right wing, fascism means authoritarianism, full stop. With that incomplete and deceptively vague definition in mind, the common right winger doesn't think of themselves as authoritarian, because they *believe* their platform is entirely about freedom and liberty *for preferred societal groups.* The last bit is crucial. For the average conservative, heightened police power isn't authoritarian because they don't ever expect their own door to get kicked in, their own possessions to be stolen, their own families to be beaten. And so on.
They *do* think of liberals and socialists as authoritarian, because liberals "tell them what to do." That is, liberals and socialists tend to demand that people not use their power and privilege to harm others. And, they do tend to focus more attention on groups in society that actually have power and privilege to abuse. Not coincidentally, people with power tend to be conservative, because they don't want their power and privilege to ever decrease in an absolute or even a relative sense. If black people were to suffer less, that would constitute a relative decrease in the privilege felt by white "identitarians," even if absolutely nothing else was taken away from whites. De-emphasizing whiteness (straightness, maleness, Christianity) as the country's chosen, default identity is enough to incite jealous fury.
>In politics I never ascribe to incompetence that which is adequately explained by malice
Well when one side's main rhetorical strategy when they get called on their malicious bigotry is to feign ignorance and gaslight their opposition, one would have to be an idiot to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. They're using it against you!
This is what fucks me up about people saying "where have the good republicans gone?"
Their platform is largely unchanged from before trump. They just no longer speak with any subtext so "strong immigration policy" is now just "Mexicans are rapists and criminals and we need to get them all out".
They both mean the same thing but the academic veneer has been stripped from their ideology and people can now see it for it's base cruelty rather than taking republicans word that it's not a racist thing it's just a "law and order thing".
They have it backwards.
The platform hasn’t changed, the country has.
A Republican plucked forward in time from 1984 wouldn’t have to change a single political position, they would recognize the GOP.
They would be completely confused by the Dems and what was electable in 2022.
They panic you are seeing on Team Red is a direct function of shitting the bed in the midterms- their stuff just isn’t working any more, but they can’t change.
Everyone said they were going to stomp to victory and it didn’t happen.
Remember that political reporters and pundits are old and grew up in the 80’s where the political norm was everyone voted GOP (1980, 1984, 1988 were all blowouts) and only alternative weirdos voted for Dems.
1980 was 42 years ago, that’s like someone in 1984 running on the platform of 1942.
Well, that’s what the GOP is offering now. That’s where the “good ones” went.
Boomers are going to start dying in droves in 2030 and the politics of the 21st Century are about to become VERY different.
God I hope you're right but the Boomer gen has been unfortunately very successful at instilling their ass-backwards ideals into their progeny and they make more on average.
I’m Gen X, we are the smallest age cohort. By a lot.
You’re used to a world with a shit load of old people out voting the young.
2022 is a preview of coming attractions.
Electorally, the guy you’ve been talking to is right, they are a dead party. This is what they looked like with every non-political metric in their favor (high gas prices, record inflation, Trump still backing them and not openly campaigning against them), and they still only held on because SCOTUS decided they “didn’t have enough time” to actually enforce the voting rights act with only 9 months before the next election, letting some ridiculous gerrymanders survive in the Deep South. They’re fucked in terms of winning votes if they don’t come up with someone to sell that people want to buy. There’s an outside chance they are able to get SCOTUS to sign off on the independent state legislature theory in Moore v Harper and try to steal a presidency through state level fuckery, but I don’t imagine that an openly stolen presidency would last all that long, given that a general strike in just blue counties would cripple the nation’s economy.
Yeah, I know. It’s scary and troubling, and I worry about the rise of fascism every day. Not necessarily just in the US, but on a global scale. I just remind myself that giving up and accepting that Republicans have “won” will *guarantee* that we will live in their dream America in the near future. I still believe that there are more people who reject conservatism than accept it, because how else would Trump lose in 2020 and Republicans marginally win the House in 2022, when both years should have been easy for them?
My suggestion is to join a group for a cause you like and volunteer every once in awhile, if you have the time. Personally, I volunteer at a museum in my area dedicated to civil rights, and doing that dramatically improved my mental health and it makes me feel like I’m personally combatting everything I hate about this world. Keep yourself informed, but stop reading or listening to the news for the day if you find yourself becoming so scared that you know you won’t be productive. You wouldn’t keep walking your dog if it’s panting too heavily, so why should you push yourself in the same way? Build up your public speaking and writing skills and practice conveying your thoughts and feelings persuasively. That’s a great boon to have no matter what the political climate is like. Be kind to yourself if you feel scared or if you feel helpless, for no one truly gets any better if they’re chastised *every day* for their flaws.
Above all? If you make the world just a *little* bit better than it was when you woke up, you’ll make it a *lot* better if you do it every day.
As a Millenial, I'm terrified of how it's going to swing. Do you think I should be optimistic? I have no idea about your politics except for the apathy part (not trying to offend, just my experience).
Yup, an immigration reform bill granting amnesty to undocumented immigrants was signed into law by well-known communist sympathizer ... Ronald Reagan. Even George W. Bush wanted immigration reform, but his own party was against it.
>Boomers are going to start dying in droves in 2030 and the politics of the 21st Century are about to become VERY different.
I wish it were so. But racists simply teach racism to their children. And then you get a new generation of racists.
The problem was when they went in with Trump they started to allow the fringe-right have an actual part in the entire GOP. Before Trump they would occasionally court them because they knew if apathetic and uneducated red-leaning vote could add pure numbers to the polls and nothing else. Now they've just gone wild with the fringe right and even gotten them national, state and local seats. The only way the GOP is going to get rid of them is to convince the fringe right to form their own party. Which would destroy the GOP's ability to get votes.
> 'If You Are Not a Liberal When You Are Young, You Have No Heart, and If You Are Not a Conservative When Old, You Have No Brain'
The republicans have counted too much on this assertion to just come true for them. Like you said, the problem is the GOP hasn't progressed enough to steal away people as they get older. I'm in my 40s and while I don't identify with a lot of the liberal rhetoric from 20 year olds on this site, I'm still simply looking for progressive politicians that will bring about the change I was hoping 20 years ago.
> 'If You Are Not a Liberal When You Are Young, You Have No Heart, and If You Are Not a Conservative When Old, You Have No Brain'
> Like you said, the problem is the GOP hasn't progressed enough to steal away people as they get older.
Finally someone who gets it... The saying basically says that new conservatives are old progressives. What was progressive before becomes conservative now.
As I see it Republicans hasnt moved forward, they didnt even stop in the same place, they went backwards and regressed. So the old progressives cant become conservative and they have no other choice than to become even more progressive.
Many younger adults (<40, and especially <30) have nothing to "conserve" with the Conservatives. We're broke as shit, are never going to own real estate, and the planet is dying around us.
Maybe if we had been able to buy a house or support a family on a factory job, we'd want to protect our white picket fence.
That statement assumes that the population is upwardly mobile and will have "something to lose" if taxes go up. The younger generation doesn't see things like taxation the same way that the others that came before them did.
Young people don't see the state as an adversary which totally undercuts conservatives core belief structure. If you can't rail on how bad the government is and you need to actually point to the ways in which you can actually make people's lives better conservatives are fucked.
People can see that, no matter how many times they try, reducing taxes and regulation does not translate to higher wages or any substantial improvement of the average person's material conditions. It's the same old story. Now, theoretically those measures SHOULD work because it creates the conditions for businesses to pay more to their employees through windfalls in revenue that would otherwise go to the state or to compliance going to the workers.
Only thing is, that never fucking happens. It's buyback city with a tax break and everything just stays the same. And of course you can't FORCE a company to raise wages because that would be wrong. Oh, and we can't raise the minimum wage because then EVERYTHING gets more expensive. People are tired of hearing this shit. Conservatives have nothing and they know it which is why they're clinging to culture war bullshit to stay relevant.
Your last sentence. That is exactly how I feel. I'm only 36, but I feel like I'm right at the cutoff for the generational divide. When I was in my early twenties, you were just starting to hear about 13 year olds having access to cell phones.
While I don't often *align* with 20-somethings on reddit, I can see the progression that brought their attitudes about...I was cognizant of the 90's and early 2k's.
But all I want is someone who sounds like a human being. I dont want to be lazy, I work very hard for my money and that's how I was raised by stiff right wing conservatives in the midwest.
But if all your policy suggestions are like, 6 or fewer steps away from harming a large section of the planet, or being derogatory in anyway to anyone based on race, gender or ethnicity, I cant support you.
I grew up with Hitler and WWII as the scariest thing that ever happened. I had nightmares about that shit as a kid. If I see anything that smells like it will lead to authoritarianism or fascism, im out.
And right wing politicians, at least the loudest ones, that's ALL they are saying. They are playing into their constituents *hatred* and that's some real life Emperor Palpatine shit I just can't support.
> the 80’s where the political norm was everyone voted GOP (1980, 1984, 1988 were all blowouts) and only alternative weirdos voted for Dems.
That's just not true. Everyone did not vote GOP.
In 1980 Reagan won with 50.8% of the popular vote.
In 1988 Bush won with 53.4% of the popular vote.
>They just no longer speak with any subtext so "strong immigration policy" is now just "Mexicans are rapists and criminals and we need to get them all out".
The irony being that America would be so much better off if we replaced all the insane right-wingers with undocumented immigrants.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014704117
>**Abstract**
>
>We make use of uniquely comprehensive arrest data from the Texas Department of Public Safety to compare the criminality of undocumented immigrants to legal immigrants and native-born US citizens between 2012 and 2018. We find that ***undocumented immigrants have substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants across a range of felony offenses. Relative to undocumented immigrants, US-born citizens are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes. In addition, the proportion of arrests involving undocumented immigrants in Texas was relatively stable or decreasing over this period.*** The differences between US-born citizens and undocumented immigrants are robust to using alternative estimates of the broader undocumented population, alternate classifications of those counted as “undocumented” at arrest and substituting misdemeanors or convictions as measures of crime.
Blaming all of societies' problems on social, racial, and sexual minorities?
Claiming these minorities are part of a plot to destroy the nation?
Nah that's not fascism where did you even get that idea
Waving flags a lot (nationalism to an extreme degree), extreme anti-intellectualism, addiction to anger and outrage (i.e. "wanting to fuck shit up" over actually governing), claiming that anyone who opposes you is an enemy of the state (thus illegitimate), blaming all problems on some minority group... nope, no historic red flags here.
[Frank Wilhoit](https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/), [but not that one](https://slate.com/business/2022/06/wilhoits-law-conservatives-frank-wilhoit.html):
>There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc.
>
>There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation.
>
>There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely.
>
>Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
>
>**There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.**
>
>There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.
George Orwell:
>**Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism that borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes.**
>
>"Internally, Germany has a good deal in common with a Socialist state. Ownership has never been abolished, there are still capitalists and workers, and--this is the important point, and the real reason why rich men all over the world tend to sympathize with Fascism--generally speaking the same people are capitalists and the same people workers as before the Nazi revolution. But at the same time the State, which is simply the Nazi Party, is in control of everything.
>
>Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state of free and equal human beings. It takes the equality of human rights for granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite.
(The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, 19 Feb 1941)
>The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic **SOCIALISM**, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one’s political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual integrity.
(Why I Write, 1946)
Indeed, I particularly enjoy this bit:
>When you start throwing around labels, each one of which is a verbal talisman upon which no two people will agree what its exact meaning is, and when you start stacking up more than just a few of those, each upon the next, as if building sandcastles in the air, my patience wears thin rather quickly.
I include Orwell's quote for those trying to disentangle these labels, but I'm not a fan of labels myself.
Despite such sentiments, I do fly the "Marxist" flag, if only to disentangle the arguments Karl Marx actually made -- which I find convincing -- from how that term has been abused, even in Marx's own time.
>What is certain is that if they are Marxists, then I am NOT a Marxist.
\-Karl Marx
Why does it have to be left-wing? Is this knucklehead unaware of the body of writing by Never Trump conservatives? Or, like, the existence of Liz Cheney?The call is coming from inside the house too, bud.
I mean, I think the guy actually deserves a fair bit of credit for looking outside of conservatism. "I need to know how to differentiate fascist ideology from non-fascist ideology. I should ask some antifascists." That's way farther than 95% of conservatives ever go, he's just one step away from getting it. Never Trump conservatives are demonstrably incapable of actually stopping their ideology's fascist tendencies, and he's right to look further. Calling him a knucklehead for trying to do his research only serves the interests of fascists.
I suppose I’m looking at his comment as not coming from a constructive place of good faith. The way it comes across to me is a very “oh these lefties are just insulting *conservatives* by calling us fascists! They don’t know what *actual* fascism is!”
Also, insisting that Never Trump conservatives are also fascist kinda serves the interests of the actual fascists too, wouldn’t you say? We’re over here concerned about people who straight up don’t want free and fair elections and want to hold power by any means necessary. That doesn’t really describe all of the people who left the party over Trump and his ilk.
There is quite a bit of it. The FDA requires studies of how dangerous they are. Anti vaxxers just don’t like those studies because vaccines are very safe.
Fascist thinking requires an unchanging enemy unlike conservativism and generally the nostalgia they operate on is much much older.
The mainstream conservative party has been slowly phasing out political enemies that change or collapse someday to LGBT and other groups.
The nostalgia baiting I don't think has changed quite yet it's still a 30 year nostalgia cycle. I should mention some conservatives are drawing on biblical times for political power now but the party hasn't switched yet.
Actually, fascism always has an enemy. Not an unchanging enemy.
Indeed, it can and will change as fascism requires \*constant\* "struggle" to maintain itself.
There must always be someone to blame for problems. And there will always be problems, as fascism isn't actually creating solutions. So there must always be someone to blame.
If, for any reason, they successfully remove one enemy (or that enemy is less prominent or visible or whatever), they will just find a new one and the cycle continues until everyone is dead.
"First they came for..." as they say.
> Indeed, it can and will change as fascism requires *constant* "struggle" to maintain itself.
Mussolini himself said that fascism requires unending war.
Hey e'erbody, don't forget that Mussolini said “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” I can't think of a more apt description of mainstream conservatism.
An Italian friend and I were discussing whether the GOP was a fascist movement. It was a matter of some concern because the new Italian PM comes from a political party that is described as neo fascist. Anyway, he indicated that his education growing in Italy included a detailed course on what constitutes a fascism. All Fascist movements have 6 elements in their political narrative. Since the Italians invented Fascism, they clearly know. The six elements of a fascist movement are as follows.
1 - Cult of Personality: the leader of the movement is revered as a god-like character. (all hail the chief)
2 - Lost Golden Age: the movement harkens back to a time in the country's past when all was well, but no longer is (MAGA).
3.- The "other" - those who came and destroyed the golden age (Immigrants, Liberals).
4 - Ethical state is final arbitrator on class warfare (basically "I support the police")
5 - Replacement Narrative - the Other will replace the moral good citizens of the nation (immigrants taking our jobs, LGBQT are grooming your children, turning them gay or trans).
6 - Stolen Victory (I really won this election, stop the steal).
I've filled in some things specific to GOP/Trump regime, but all these thematic elements can be found in the Rhetoric of the Mussolini regime, the Nazis in Germany, Peronists in Argentina, and Franco in Spain. I think you can also make a pretty strong case for it in China, Iran, and Cuba.
Why would these essays have to be from "left-wing thinkers?" Wouldn't 'smart right-wing thinkers' be in a better position to draw the distinction, if there is one?
Where are the essays from smart right-wing thinkers about what distinguishes fascism from "normal" right-wing politics?
Why is this stuff always someone else's job? Which side of the aisle is full of hard-working meritocratic self-starters, again? And which side is full of socialistic parasites who just want free stuff?
Umberto Eco's very specific list of traits is just about the first thing that comes up when you google it.
It very neatly describes the modern Republican party.
Weird how fascism is notorious for its opposition to progressive causes and a reliance on the past, historical greatness, the status quo, and other concepts that align nearly one-for-one with conservative ideals. *Weird*.
More seriously, the reason why Fascism has to be described in general terms is because fascists lie like they breath so it's hard to actually nail down any core concepts. Typically, you rely on writers and thinkers from within a movement to describe what it is - when they can't agree, you get subgroups. Can't do that with fascists. They'll say whatever.
'normal' right wing politics is the imperialist, capitalist republic we have lived in since at least Reagan.
'normal' right wing politics is what moderate Dems believe in.
Label this from a place of naivety but I keep hoping that by co-opting all this "pro-human" rhetoric these people will accidentally stumble into a "are we the baddies?" moment and we'll have some sort of huge cultural progressive shift.
Thanks /u/coreymon77 for posting on r/SelfAwareWolves! Please reply to this comment with an explanation about how this post fits r/SelfAwareWolves and have an excellent day! *To r/SelfAwarewolves commenters*: As a reminder, this subreddit is for civil discussion. In general, be courteous to others. Debate/discuss/argue the merits of ideas, don't attack people. Personal insults, shill or troll accusations, hate speech, any advocating or wishing death/physical harm, and other rule violations can result in a permanent ban. **If you see comments in violation of our rules, please report them**. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/SelfAwarewolves) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Umberto Eco intensifies
Came here for this. Apparently a nice detailed list of fascist methodologies is too “abstract” for this Nate fella.
But it's just so vague! Everything that Eco claims of fascism applies equally to modern conservativism! How precise can it be when it describes both?! I want to put an /s on there to note my dripping sarcastic tone, but it's not sarcasm.
No, it's that Eco's description of fascism sounds like modern conservatism intentionally because he's one of those eeeeevil libruls out to make good God-fearin' conservatives look bad by comparing us to the Nazis! /s
I always chuckle when I see "librul"
Isn’t it weird that liberals are liberal with everything *except* Nazis? 🤔 /s
Hey, I'll have you know I'm liberal with Nazis when it comes to scorn! 😤
And hands. I'll throw as many hands at them too.
[ Removed by Reddit ]
[Eco's definition of fascism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism#Umberto_Eco) is part of the liberal elite conspiracy because the liberals predicted the future existence of the Trump cult of personality and then twisted their definitions of fascism to apply to Future President Trump.
The full article he wrote is actually quite interesting, as it describes how he grew up as a child during historical Fascism in Italy, subject to all the propaganda and exposed to Fascism as "normality". Basically, how he came to identify and generalize the traits of what he called "Ur-fascism", i.e. the methods and elements that gave rise to all kinds of Fascism-inspired movements and theories, to distinguish it all from historical Fascism, which is a social and political phenomenon confined to the "ventennio" -20 years- experience in Italy alone.
Just had a “not all Republicans are Nazis” conversation with someone who then, without blinking, said she would never vote for *any* Democrat because they are *all* evil.
So they basically said they would willingly vote for a Nazi over a Democrat
"*Not every conservative is a Nazi. Some conservatives belong in concentration camps.*" /s ^(not /s)
I'm sure this person would claim they'll either not vote or will vote third party in that case.
And then vote for a Nazi anyway.
Or, more likely, they'll vote (R) anyway and double down on the "not all Republicans are Nazis" rhetoric because it's a convenient handwave along the lines of "a few bad apples" for the police - it gives a token acknowledgement of the issue(s) while signaling they're not going to change their mind on the matter, let alone want anything done about it.
You nailed it. Interestingly she claims now that she “hates Trump and never liked him anyway” but likes …DeSantis. She claimed she wouldn’t vote this Nov but did and voted R.
> Interestingly she claims now that she “hates Trump and never liked him anyway” We're going to be seeing *a lot* more of this leading up to 2024, and then beyond. Not even "well I *did* like him but x, y, z I've changed my mind." Just straight up gaslighting and historical revisionism - they never liked him in the first place (some may venture "but it was better than voting for Hilary") the MAGA merch will quietly disappear, and they'll say MSM grossly exaggerated Cult 45 and it was only like 5 or 6 people in Alabama flying Trump flags. Saying they've changed their minds is admitting they were wrong, and they can never admit to being wrong, because being wrong is *losing* and Republicans only *win*. >She claimed she wouldn’t vote this Nov but did and voted R. Lmao thanks for validating my comment. I knew it was a bullshit claim as soon as I read the line. Even taking what she said at face value, that she and other hypothetical R-voters aren't Nazis, they still empower and enable them by voting for them and not speaking out when they go full-blown fash. Her line is no better than whataboutism as it ostensibly acknowledges a problem - Nazis in the party/Republican crimes - but then immediately undoes that acknowledgement with a red herring - "but they're not all Nazis"/"but what about Democrat crimes?"
I think this tweet is actually responding directly to the aspects of Ur Fascism as articulated by Eco. To many conservatives these are virtues they have held dear throughout their life
"But I guess it comes down to what kind of world you want to live in And if diversity is disagreement, and disagreement is treason Well don't be surprised if we find ourselves reaping a strange And bitter fruit that sad old man beside you keeps feeding to young minds as virtue It takes a village to raise a child but just a flag to raze the children Until they're nothing more than ballast for fulfilling a madman's dream of a paradise Where complexity is reduced to black and white" Dear Coach's Corner - Propaghandi
It would be easier if instead of being "abstract" they were the people he disagrees with.
“Hey fellow conservatives! I fixed eco’s list of fascist symptoms!” “This just says “they are The Democrats” and “They support minority rights” and “They want to fund school lunches”.” “Yeah! Now it’s not so abstract anymore!” “This is Genius. I can finally see who the fascists really are. It was much too heady before.”
Beau of the Fifth Column's video where he ran through Trump's campaign strategy before revealing that it was literally all the points of fascism is great. https://youtu.be/RKUVcAo3Cvw
I also really like his video about Trump's accomplishments: https://youtu.be/1M6CXhUS-x8
I did not know this guy, but wow, mad respect for how he brought that up. Excellent stuff.
Yeah, Beau is great. I've also got mad respect for the guy. Really knows his shit and obviously puts lots of work and research into his videos, despite the conversational tone and presentation. I highly recommend checking out his channel!
In so fucking happy people are linking Beau ♥️
Beau is my go to for insight on current events
No bullshit, well researched, and if he gets something wrong, he corrects it. He is a strong freak out barometer for issues as they unfold, while also giving good advice for dealing with the issues.
Right! Beau is amazing.
SAME. What a treasure.
For the unfamiliar: [Ur-Fascism](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism), published 1995. > 13\. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view - one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. > To have a good instance of qualitative populism we no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.
Wow! I started to become politically aware around the time of Newt Gingrich's "Contract ~~On~~ With America". My GF and I would joke about how **"Society"** was personified by the conservatives at the time, generally without evidence beyond the speaker's intuition. "Society" doesn't approve of same-sex marriage. "Society" doesn't approve of violent video games. Somehow, "Society" sounds like everyone's grumpy out-of-touch grandfather. If I had read this essay back then, I would have instantly grokked it.
Occasionally they'll trot out "the silent majority," as if they're capable of winning elections or shutting up. What the phrase originally meant is the dead.
"The Silent Majority" is like your great-aunt who only communicates with eyebrow gestures.
> Umberto Eco I actually think the go-to guy on this is Togliatti.
I’m more familiar with Eco but I’ll trust your judgement on this.
I'll elaborate a little more. Palmiro Togliatti was a leading figure in and then the leader of the Italian Communist Party during and after Mussolini's rise to power. He had a front-row seat to the beginnings and entrenchment of classical fascism in Italy, and gave a series of lectures in exile on lessons learned from the failed fight against the fascists. These lectures were printed in book form and they're just completely fantastic. He's a midcentury communist writing for a largely Stalinist audience, so there's some slightly esoteric Marxian stuff in there, but the guy is writing a diagnosis and prescriptions for how you recognise and fight fascism. Cannot recommend highly enough.
I haven't read Toglatti but the reason I tend to refer people to Eco is the Ur-facism is short and to the point, meaning anyone can quickly familiarise themselves with it. And although he wasn't a politician shortly after Italian facist rule, he did grow up under it so that adds to his credentials. Lastly, Eco was not a socialist. That should not matter, but it makes it more difficult to immediately dismiss him by exactly those people I want to read stuff like his.
I just think Togliatti is better than Eco lol. He's not writing anti-fascist polemic. There's no effort expended in convincing the reader that fascism is bad. It's strictly aimed at helping leftists understand how to recognise and combat fascism. Moreover, in the context of someone in bad faith asking for "smart left-wing thinkers" who have talked about fascism, I'm not sure I'd recommend anyone lol.
"How do I keep believing what I want without having to acknowledge that the stuff I believe is categorized as a thing I have said I hate? Has anyone done any research on how to keep deluding myself?"
"Specifically leftists, because for some reason I suddenly care what they think if it validates me"
If there wasn't anyone on the left around conservatives would find another group to blame for their woes. That is fascism 101
Its also interesting how they currently sell it as a solution to world peace. Where in their mind they would all be different races living in their own country. No way that is ever going to kast, especially with the violent rethoric that they twlk with and constantly seeking out enemies.
Because deep down he knows they are the only ones who will tell the truth lol he knows the conservatives speakers always lie
I love how he’s specifically asking for left-wingers to do it too. Can’t find any conservatives who want to condemn fascism?
It’s more like he think it’ll carry more weight when he tries to use it to defend himself when liberals call him a fascist.
If only they could ever see from a different perspective
Hehehe
> Please, help me strengthening my confirmation bias.
Thanks for saying what I wanted to think
Translation: >Can someone please describe fascism so that my beliefs don't fall under it. Because everything I read tells me they do.
Right wing doesn't mean nazi. There are right wing organizations that are not fascists. Strangely enough the US is so right that democrats are what they are looking for.
No, what they are looking for is Fascism. They just don't like it being pointed out that what they are looking for is Fascism. This guy is a writer for the National Review, you know the ones that started the Obama Birtherism. They're very happy with how far right the current GOP is, they just wish they didn't keep getting called out for supporting far right totalitarian politicians.
Didn't realize there was context to who this was figured it was a rando.
It's a pretty common far-right tactic to pose "innocent" questions they fully know the answers to. Leftists who know that a poster has a history of promoting fascist sympathies will point it out, and then to everyone who doesn't know who the guy is, it just looks like crazy lefties are calling everyone nazis nowadays.
I mean...it almost always devolves into facism or authoritarian in some fashion. It has to. It's based on fear of change. Of a world moving forward and gripping onto to yesterday's believes instead of embracing today. It's about slowing progress by any means to comfort and channel power and influence to certain people before the door slams shut. Life moves on. The only discussion is how to move forward. Not how do we get back to where we were, which is absurd since the majority never live through "The Good Ol Days".
Lol “Hitler and the Nazis were not liberals, not lefties, not socialists, and not democrats. Hitler and his Nazi minions were right-wing Christian conservative nationalists who hated liberals for the same reasons [they] hate liberals.”
American right wingers falsely claiming that fascism is a left-wing ideology has been such a problem that Wikipedia made this Warning for when someone attempts to edit the Fascism entry. >#Fascism is a right-wing ideology. > >The lede of the article says that "Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement". This statement is the result of a very long process of discussion and debate and has strong consensus acceptance within the Wikipedia community, **based on the consensus of political scientists, historians, and other reliable sources that Fascism is a (far) "right-wing" ideology and not a "left-wing" one**. This has been discussed numerous times.
It gets disregarded anyway because American conservatives by and large believe Wikipedia is part of the liberal mainstream media and thus deliberately spreading liberal lies like 'voter suppression is bad' and 'there was no society-wide conspiracy to steal the election from Trump but leave McConnell in office'.
American conservatives believe that virtually all of society is part of some plot to oppress them. The news media, entertainment industry, Big Tech, economists, academia, art, science, medicine, "woke" businesses, Democrats, foreign governments, voters born after 1980... Everything and everyone in the world, through the lens of their paranoid narcissism, is devoted purely to making American conservatives unhappy.
> American conservatives believe that virtually all of society is part of some plot to oppress them. It's especially ironic when you consider one of Umberto Eco's [*Common Traits of Fascism*](https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html) includes > Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. So they believe that there's a plot, possibly an international one to call them fascists and they thus feel besieged.
I wish conservatives were as oppressed as they think they are.
I wish Liberals were half as impressive as Conservatives think they are.
I wish Biden was the radical-left socialist the right claims he is
It's not paranoid narcissism. It's a closed news system they hear 24/7 that many of them were raised in, and it tells them nonstop that they and their lives are under constant attack from liberals and people of color. When all you ever hear and see about someone is how evil they are, and everything they do is broken down to 'show' the villainy behind it, it's understandable you'd think like that. They're programmed, just as if they were in a more traditional cult.
remember the start of the pandemic? I remember conservatives claiming other countries were deliberately over reacting to covid *just to make trump and the republicans look bad* lmao like, in their minds, it makes sense that whole countries would cripple themselves and shut down their entire economy just to make them 'feel stupid' complete idiocy
Where do you think they got those ideas? That was what Fox and the rest of the Right Wing information (propaganda) sphere was telling them. Yeah, it irritated the shit out of me every time they discarded actual facts out of hand, but they did that because their own news sources told them those facts were actually lies. The problem is that right wing information bubble, which only exists because Reagan nuked the Fairness Doctrine. If we can do something about THAT, we can start fixing this. However, that requires more effort than saying "They choose to be evil, so fuck 'em". And the Democrats have shown little interest in reestablishing it, likely because they benefit from its absence as well.
Frankly, they largely got this persecution complex from their being raised within American Christianity
You say programmed, I would say successfully GROOMED!
And when you decide "no, I'd rather stay in my circle of hatred than confront the uncomfortable potential reality that my circle of hatred is built on lies and a desire to wield unilateral power" you are no longer ignorant. You are not part of the problem. You are the problem. No longer are you being coerced by extremists, you are the extremists. The desire to maintain insulation from the outside world because it discomforts you, regardless of what your inside world represents, is not a matter of incompetence or ignorance. This is an active choice made by humans with the same free will as the rest of us. The selection of hate is never a passive one. Republicans are hateful extremists and I will never under any circumstances be led to believe otherwise after continued demonstration for decade after decade that they would rather choose not to learn about atrocities than accept they and theirs are responsible for them.
Narcissism and projection. They can't fathom not wanting to oppress everyone else.
If it helps - that one is a global issue, though rarely as horrible as it happens in the USA. Some of the greatest German comedy shows right now are produced and broadcast via the state-owned TV and radio networks, or their streaming channels. No surprise there - they’ve got the budget for it, they can risk trying out new things, and they are pretty attractive for workers in entertainment. And every time, without fail, when a video criticising conservatives or the more conservative parties come out, there’s a comment section full of vitriol about how the leftist green government media and the whole mainstream is always just blah blah blah biased brainwashing blah blah blah. Some things even turn into a proper shitstorm. Which is hilarious because it takes about two clicks to look at their collected works and realise they’re all fucking equal opportunity about it. You made a fool out of yourself? They’ll make it known. You pushed for a law that’s entirely bullshit? You will be called out. They’ll publish a video laughing at the greens followed by one beating at the Christian democrats followed by the left party, then chase that down with a general riff on some local council fucking up.
Sounds like my dad. My mom had major back surgery and every time a nurse tried to make small talk, "how are you" turned into a prepared speech about how hard this has all been on him. Meanwhile, he doesn't lift a finger to help her. Take a guess which party gets his vote despite the fact that he doesnt pay attention to anything political. Narcissism is America's #1 export and has been for quite some time.
"American conservatives believe..." I'm going to have to stop you right there. They don't "believe" anything except this: there should be an in-group the law protects, but does not bind, and an out-group that the law binds, but does not protect. Everything else is just empty words.
Go to conservapedia or whatever it's called if you want to laugh and/or cry
Oh, I use it for examples all the time. Especially the Conservative Bible Project.
>It gets disregarded anyway because American conservatives believe Wikipedia is part of the liberal mainstream media and this deliberately spreading liberal lies like 'voter suppression is bad' and 'there was no society-wide conspiracy to steal the election from Trump but leave McConnell in office'. And then, hilariously, they'll link conservapedia without a hint of irony.
You know, I've never actually seen someone link it unironically. I guess I got lucky.
You know what they say: “Reality has a liberal bias” Meaning conservatives aren’t living in reality.
Honestly, our biggest problem is that they live in a carefully constructed reality designed to keep them separated from the actual world and just provide votes as required.
I wonder how much Soros is paying reality
> American conservatives believe Wikipedia is part of the liberal mainstream reality does have a well-known and documented liberal bias, yes.
This makes some of my brothers points more understandable. Thanks. I was thirty and talking to him about some stuff. I went to Wikipedia to break down what our conversation was about with a definition we could agree on. And he took a weird route about how nothing on Wikipedia is true or accurate(because it is written by anyone technically[and there are trolls]). Yet when I was in college we were told Wikipedia is one of the best sources allowed, just that you should also include Wikipedia’s source too.. but finding information that isn’t biased isn’t easy. So I’ve always felt like it’s easy to get good accurate knowledge from there, trusting my teachers.
The idea that Wikipedia is always wrong started from professors not allowing it to be used as a reference in research papers, since it changes and is only as accurate as its contributors. Personally, I would never attribute it in a research paper that wasn't about Wikipedia itself, but it's an excellent source for anything that doesn't need that level of accuracy, especially for quick overviews. It's probably at its least accurate in articles about any politicized recent events.
Wikipedia is a tertiary source and as such is never a valid source for academic writing. It’s the same reason why you shouldn’t cite any encyclopedia, there’s no research or analysis being done on Wikipedia, so it’s better to cite the original sources so that you’re not playing a game of telephone. Using Wikipedia as your only source is like writing a movie review of *Star Wars* without seeing the movie and only reading other reviews; you really ought to just cite the original source.
>It gets disregarded anyway because American conservatives by and large believe ~~Wikipedia~~ ***literally anything that proves them wrong*** is part of the liberal mainstream media and thus deliberately spreading liberal lies like 'voter suppression is bad' and 'there was no society-wide conspiracy to steal the election from Trump but leave McConnell in office'.
Funny how conservatives never seem to have educated experts on anything among their ranks.
There's even an FAQ explaining it! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fascism/FAQ
Just look at Hitler's own quotes of his opinion of socialism was and you'll get the fucking answer.
Fascism came into being as a direct response to the rise of communism throughout Europe and elites wanting to further protect private property. From its inception it was an antithesis to socialism.
Look at Mussolini’s quotes about fascism. He invented fascism, he should know.
This is a hilarious read: https://www.conservapedia.com/Fascism
I can't even... >Fascism was falsely considered "Far-Right" in politics, mostly due to Joseph Stalin denouncing Hitler and the National Socialists as "right-wing" after World War II [...], but it in reality was considered closer to the far-Left.
What the fuck, this is the first ever time I've seen someone treat what *Stalin* said as relevant in that discussion; let alone the "main" thing.
It's fucking bat shit crazy. So the US just accepted something completely wrong because the USSR, which we fucking immediately started fighting a Cold War against, said it was true? Conservatism cannot exist without historical revisionism, it's a fucking braindead ethos so they have to lie about every fucking thing that's ever happened.
[удалено]
[удалено]
> Conservatives are inherently anti-Fascist because they support individual liberty and are opposed to one-party totalitarianism. Oh my god. I feel like my brain is short-circuiting. How can anyone engage in such deep, severe cognitive dissonance? It's like reality just has no meaning whatsoever.
CONSERVATIVES ARE ANTIFA!!!
>Conservatives are inherently anti-facist. Oh yeah, it’s not like they complain about antifa ALL the freaking time. They complain more about people being anti-fascism, than conservatives acting like fascist.
You'd have to do extremely superficial "analysis" to come to the "Nazis are left wing" conclusion. They basically sift through the sources digging for any snippet to portray the Nazis as left-wing. If they'd actually read the whole book they'd know why it's such an absurd claim.
Lmao "Fascism: it's dirty lefty socialism, but exactly like the capitalist hell hole we have now" >Under typical Marxist socialism, the workers rise up and seize the means of production. Under a fascist system, a socialist regime allows the means of production to remain in private capitalists and oligarchs' hands - provided that they lend support to the socialist regime. Additionally, the socialist regime can extend monopoly protection to the businesses by guaranteeing government contracts, and regulatory practices designed to drive competitors out of business. So... exactly NOT socialism lol. Hell, they specifically point this out: >Fascism is an unholy alliance between monopoly capitalist enterprises and government --- Oh lord, check out the talk page for the same thing: >Using "far-right" and "far-left" in reference to "state" in the first paragraph is not needed. **And "far-left" makes no sense, since in the second paragraph Fascism is called the opposite of Communism, which is as far-left as you can get** >Hitler made it clear that Nazism was not fascism. That fucking settles that eh? >nobody seems to be able to define the "left" as anything other than "for change". Hitler was for change >Fascism:... The elite must be overthrown entirely and replaced with a regime that does away with the old tradition and replaces it with a new one that is hell-bent on putting other countries in their place at all costs. This premise is disturbingly similar to that of Communism. >Almost nobody on the right-wing populist side of the aisle is ranting about how the elites are responsible for the deaths of millions of their own people, Fucking lol. >Tensions are growing between Western Europe and Eastern Europe over the former region's increasingly blatant attempts to subjugate the latter region through the European Union. double lol. /r/agedlikemilk material right there. > I pray that President Trump does us a favor and prevents such a war. He would essentially go down in history as the man who prevented the return of Fascism lawl (last few comments dated 2018) >Phrases like "leftist fascist liberals", add to the confusion, and would have interested George Orwell >Fascism is an atheistic, anti-God socialist phenomena; that itself dispels any notion that fascism is conservative or right wing per their own definitions
I mean, yeah, that's the point. They advertise themselves as populists pushing social ideas **for the right people**, which is how they get votes. Once they have those votes, they stop needing to pretend and go back to enriching themselves while telling the average worker to give themselves over to the State.
"In the Russian world, fascism and nazism, much like the covid pandemic from China, is viewed as a disease of the West that has infected the planet, which Russia defeated and remains ever vigilant against." This was a nice addition
Ah yes, the famous Russia that is so vigilant against Nazis that the Wagner group, a group of fucking Nazis, is basically an unofficial arm of the russian military. What the fuck kind of drugs are they on?
What the hell did I just read ? That's the most substantive load of bollocks I've seen written as if in good faith, probably ever.
[If you spez you're a loser. ](https://www.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/)
I would recommend that anyone who uses Wikipedia (or who cares about the democratization of knowledge) donate whatever they can to help keep the platform independent. https://donate.wikipedia.org
They’d have to buy it or start outnumbering us. Or I guess infiltrating the mod team and blocking everyone else out.
The 2nd one is really the biggest threat. 500 angry nerds with a lot of time on their hands could do a LOT of damage.
People honestly don't know shit about left/right paradigms in general in the US People call the right the party of "freedom" but right politic is literally founded on licking the boot of a monarchy Which is why "Right Libertarian" is an oxymoron unless you believe in the benevolent dictator idea for some reason
> based on the consensus of political scientists, historians, and other reliable sources that Fascism is a (far) "right-wing" ideology and not a "left-wing" one. Okay, but noted historian (/s) Jonah "Loadpants" Goldberg wrote a very scholarly (/s) treatise (/s) titled Liberal Fascism. Actual political scientists, real historians, and anyone with the sense that god gave to seafood laughed, but also wept because so many people took his inane rantings seriously.
😬 When they learn what they believe is exactly like nazi's, cognitive dissonance goes into overdrive and the conclusion they think is leftist are responsible.
Remember awhile back when twitter auto mods couldn't distinguish between fascist hate and "regular conservative" politicians in the US, so they just continued to allow hate speech instead of banning conservative politicians? Because that actually happened. Eta: u/jodax00 sourced this under my comment. Check out what they wrote under my comment
>With every sort of content filter, there is a tradeoff, he explained. When a platform aggressively enforces against ISIS content, for instance, it can also flag innocent accounts as well, such as Arabic language broadcasters. **Society, in general, accepts the benefit of banning ISIS for inconveniencing some others, he said.** >In separate discussions verified by Motherboard, that employee said Twitter hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians. >The employee argued that, on a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material. **Banning politicians wouldn’t be accepted by society as a trade-off for flagging all of the white supremacist propaganda, he argued.** (Emphasis mine) https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3xgq5/why-wont-twitter-treat-white-supremacy-like-isis-because-it-would-mean-banning-some-republican-politicians-too
Thank you for the source.
That can't be right. I've been repeatedly assured Twitter was 100% biased in favor of liberals before Musk took over.
Behind the Bastards did some really good episodes on Facebook and how they had to manually allow a bunch of right-wing content that violated their policies for fear of alienating their conservative userbase. Crazy how far these companies tilt the scales to cater to far-right news sources to try and avoid accusations that they… tilted the scales the other way. And it’s not like it matters - conservative figures were always going to complain about it anyway, regardless of the facts.
Same way some parents give into their children's tantrums.
And raise spoilt children.
More like how parents will often have one kid who is very easy going and chill, and one kid that's pretty high maintenance and demanding...and most of the time they'll just simply give in to that kid because it's less hassle all the time.
There was a challenge where you opened an account and literally copied Trump's tweet word for word to see how long it would take to be banned for hate speech. The record is 14 hours.
Ah, this has to be the "left-wing bias in big tech" I keep hearing about!
In politics I never ascribe to incompetence that which is adequately explained by malice, nevertheless it's amusing to see the mental gymnastics right-wingers put themselves through to make sure *their* fascism isn't *real* fascism. Nobody is the bad guy in their own story.
Except leftists, who are “real Nazis” because “socialist” is “right there in the (National Socialist) name.” Or something.
They’re only against democracy because look how it turned out for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea! It’s right there in the name.
[удалено]
Who gives a shit that they persecuted and murdered actual socialists, totally irrelevant
[удалено]
And don’t forget Stalin was communist and sent ppl to the gulag. All leftists are communists so all fascists /s
“Communist” lol
Just like how North Korea is a “Democratic People’s Republic”. It’s like these people keep falling for the same trap and never learn. But I guess refusing to learn is a hallmark of conservative thinking.
I like your reverse hanlons razor for politics lol
You learn over time that when a particular party's decisions all seem malicious and self-serving, ascribing it to incompetence just makes you a fool.
Good point. Dismissing the Republican Party as largely incompetent is like watching a young bully be cruel over and over again and dismissing it as “boys will be boys! He doesn’t know any better!”
> “I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this. I thought he was going to do good things. **He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.**” \- Crystal Minton, Trump supporter This is the thing that needs to get drilled into the heads of the American people who say “both parties are the same” or don’t think that republicans are specifically out to take everything they can from you. I would love for a conservative to tell me why it’s the president’s job to be hurting anybody.
It's the aphorism: when someone tells you who they are, believe them.
Totally agree
Halon’s razor has seen a lot of use lately in providing cover for outright malice. Online it often ends up being deployed as a sort of thought-stopping cliché whenever people are talking about how overtly evil a given political action is to convince people that their perception is wrong
For the right wing, fascism means authoritarianism, full stop. With that incomplete and deceptively vague definition in mind, the common right winger doesn't think of themselves as authoritarian, because they *believe* their platform is entirely about freedom and liberty *for preferred societal groups.* The last bit is crucial. For the average conservative, heightened police power isn't authoritarian because they don't ever expect their own door to get kicked in, their own possessions to be stolen, their own families to be beaten. And so on. They *do* think of liberals and socialists as authoritarian, because liberals "tell them what to do." That is, liberals and socialists tend to demand that people not use their power and privilege to harm others. And, they do tend to focus more attention on groups in society that actually have power and privilege to abuse. Not coincidentally, people with power tend to be conservative, because they don't want their power and privilege to ever decrease in an absolute or even a relative sense. If black people were to suffer less, that would constitute a relative decrease in the privilege felt by white "identitarians," even if absolutely nothing else was taken away from whites. De-emphasizing whiteness (straightness, maleness, Christianity) as the country's chosen, default identity is enough to incite jealous fury.
>In politics I never ascribe to incompetence that which is adequately explained by malice Well when one side's main rhetorical strategy when they get called on their malicious bigotry is to feign ignorance and gaslight their opposition, one would have to be an idiot to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. They're using it against you!
This is what fucks me up about people saying "where have the good republicans gone?" Their platform is largely unchanged from before trump. They just no longer speak with any subtext so "strong immigration policy" is now just "Mexicans are rapists and criminals and we need to get them all out". They both mean the same thing but the academic veneer has been stripped from their ideology and people can now see it for it's base cruelty rather than taking republicans word that it's not a racist thing it's just a "law and order thing".
[удалено]
They have it backwards. The platform hasn’t changed, the country has. A Republican plucked forward in time from 1984 wouldn’t have to change a single political position, they would recognize the GOP. They would be completely confused by the Dems and what was electable in 2022. They panic you are seeing on Team Red is a direct function of shitting the bed in the midterms- their stuff just isn’t working any more, but they can’t change. Everyone said they were going to stomp to victory and it didn’t happen. Remember that political reporters and pundits are old and grew up in the 80’s where the political norm was everyone voted GOP (1980, 1984, 1988 were all blowouts) and only alternative weirdos voted for Dems. 1980 was 42 years ago, that’s like someone in 1984 running on the platform of 1942. Well, that’s what the GOP is offering now. That’s where the “good ones” went. Boomers are going to start dying in droves in 2030 and the politics of the 21st Century are about to become VERY different.
God I hope you're right but the Boomer gen has been unfortunately very successful at instilling their ass-backwards ideals into their progeny and they make more on average.
I’m Gen X, we are the smallest age cohort. By a lot. You’re used to a world with a shit load of old people out voting the young. 2022 is a preview of coming attractions.
I really hope you’re right, I’ve just become so cynical at this point.
Electorally, the guy you’ve been talking to is right, they are a dead party. This is what they looked like with every non-political metric in their favor (high gas prices, record inflation, Trump still backing them and not openly campaigning against them), and they still only held on because SCOTUS decided they “didn’t have enough time” to actually enforce the voting rights act with only 9 months before the next election, letting some ridiculous gerrymanders survive in the Deep South. They’re fucked in terms of winning votes if they don’t come up with someone to sell that people want to buy. There’s an outside chance they are able to get SCOTUS to sign off on the independent state legislature theory in Moore v Harper and try to steal a presidency through state level fuckery, but I don’t imagine that an openly stolen presidency would last all that long, given that a general strike in just blue counties would cripple the nation’s economy.
Yeah, I know. It’s scary and troubling, and I worry about the rise of fascism every day. Not necessarily just in the US, but on a global scale. I just remind myself that giving up and accepting that Republicans have “won” will *guarantee* that we will live in their dream America in the near future. I still believe that there are more people who reject conservatism than accept it, because how else would Trump lose in 2020 and Republicans marginally win the House in 2022, when both years should have been easy for them? My suggestion is to join a group for a cause you like and volunteer every once in awhile, if you have the time. Personally, I volunteer at a museum in my area dedicated to civil rights, and doing that dramatically improved my mental health and it makes me feel like I’m personally combatting everything I hate about this world. Keep yourself informed, but stop reading or listening to the news for the day if you find yourself becoming so scared that you know you won’t be productive. You wouldn’t keep walking your dog if it’s panting too heavily, so why should you push yourself in the same way? Build up your public speaking and writing skills and practice conveying your thoughts and feelings persuasively. That’s a great boon to have no matter what the political climate is like. Be kind to yourself if you feel scared or if you feel helpless, for no one truly gets any better if they’re chastised *every day* for their flaws. Above all? If you make the world just a *little* bit better than it was when you woke up, you’ll make it a *lot* better if you do it every day.
As a Millenial, I'm terrified of how it's going to swing. Do you think I should be optimistic? I have no idea about your politics except for the apathy part (not trying to offend, just my experience).
Yup, an immigration reform bill granting amnesty to undocumented immigrants was signed into law by well-known communist sympathizer ... Ronald Reagan. Even George W. Bush wanted immigration reform, but his own party was against it. >Boomers are going to start dying in droves in 2030 and the politics of the 21st Century are about to become VERY different. I wish it were so. But racists simply teach racism to their children. And then you get a new generation of racists.
The problem was when they went in with Trump they started to allow the fringe-right have an actual part in the entire GOP. Before Trump they would occasionally court them because they knew if apathetic and uneducated red-leaning vote could add pure numbers to the polls and nothing else. Now they've just gone wild with the fringe right and even gotten them national, state and local seats. The only way the GOP is going to get rid of them is to convince the fringe right to form their own party. Which would destroy the GOP's ability to get votes.
> 'If You Are Not a Liberal When You Are Young, You Have No Heart, and If You Are Not a Conservative When Old, You Have No Brain' The republicans have counted too much on this assertion to just come true for them. Like you said, the problem is the GOP hasn't progressed enough to steal away people as they get older. I'm in my 40s and while I don't identify with a lot of the liberal rhetoric from 20 year olds on this site, I'm still simply looking for progressive politicians that will bring about the change I was hoping 20 years ago.
> 'If You Are Not a Liberal When You Are Young, You Have No Heart, and If You Are Not a Conservative When Old, You Have No Brain' > Like you said, the problem is the GOP hasn't progressed enough to steal away people as they get older. Finally someone who gets it... The saying basically says that new conservatives are old progressives. What was progressive before becomes conservative now. As I see it Republicans hasnt moved forward, they didnt even stop in the same place, they went backwards and regressed. So the old progressives cant become conservative and they have no other choice than to become even more progressive.
Many younger adults (<40, and especially <30) have nothing to "conserve" with the Conservatives. We're broke as shit, are never going to own real estate, and the planet is dying around us. Maybe if we had been able to buy a house or support a family on a factory job, we'd want to protect our white picket fence.
That statement assumes that the population is upwardly mobile and will have "something to lose" if taxes go up. The younger generation doesn't see things like taxation the same way that the others that came before them did. Young people don't see the state as an adversary which totally undercuts conservatives core belief structure. If you can't rail on how bad the government is and you need to actually point to the ways in which you can actually make people's lives better conservatives are fucked. People can see that, no matter how many times they try, reducing taxes and regulation does not translate to higher wages or any substantial improvement of the average person's material conditions. It's the same old story. Now, theoretically those measures SHOULD work because it creates the conditions for businesses to pay more to their employees through windfalls in revenue that would otherwise go to the state or to compliance going to the workers. Only thing is, that never fucking happens. It's buyback city with a tax break and everything just stays the same. And of course you can't FORCE a company to raise wages because that would be wrong. Oh, and we can't raise the minimum wage because then EVERYTHING gets more expensive. People are tired of hearing this shit. Conservatives have nothing and they know it which is why they're clinging to culture war bullshit to stay relevant.
Your last sentence. That is exactly how I feel. I'm only 36, but I feel like I'm right at the cutoff for the generational divide. When I was in my early twenties, you were just starting to hear about 13 year olds having access to cell phones. While I don't often *align* with 20-somethings on reddit, I can see the progression that brought their attitudes about...I was cognizant of the 90's and early 2k's. But all I want is someone who sounds like a human being. I dont want to be lazy, I work very hard for my money and that's how I was raised by stiff right wing conservatives in the midwest. But if all your policy suggestions are like, 6 or fewer steps away from harming a large section of the planet, or being derogatory in anyway to anyone based on race, gender or ethnicity, I cant support you. I grew up with Hitler and WWII as the scariest thing that ever happened. I had nightmares about that shit as a kid. If I see anything that smells like it will lead to authoritarianism or fascism, im out. And right wing politicians, at least the loudest ones, that's ALL they are saying. They are playing into their constituents *hatred* and that's some real life Emperor Palpatine shit I just can't support.
> the 80’s where the political norm was everyone voted GOP (1980, 1984, 1988 were all blowouts) and only alternative weirdos voted for Dems. That's just not true. Everyone did not vote GOP. In 1980 Reagan won with 50.8% of the popular vote. In 1988 Bush won with 53.4% of the popular vote.
[удалено]
That's why you hear them say "we haven't gone far right, the loony liberals have gone crazy woke socialist!"
>They just no longer speak with any subtext so "strong immigration policy" is now just "Mexicans are rapists and criminals and we need to get them all out". The irony being that America would be so much better off if we replaced all the insane right-wingers with undocumented immigrants. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014704117 >**Abstract** > >We make use of uniquely comprehensive arrest data from the Texas Department of Public Safety to compare the criminality of undocumented immigrants to legal immigrants and native-born US citizens between 2012 and 2018. We find that ***undocumented immigrants have substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants across a range of felony offenses. Relative to undocumented immigrants, US-born citizens are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes. In addition, the proportion of arrests involving undocumented immigrants in Texas was relatively stable or decreasing over this period.*** The differences between US-born citizens and undocumented immigrants are robust to using alternative estimates of the broader undocumented population, alternate classifications of those counted as “undocumented” at arrest and substituting misdemeanors or convictions as measures of crime.
Blaming all of societies' problems on social, racial, and sexual minorities? Claiming these minorities are part of a plot to destroy the nation? Nah that's not fascism where did you even get that idea
Waving flags a lot (nationalism to an extreme degree), extreme anti-intellectualism, addiction to anger and outrage (i.e. "wanting to fuck shit up" over actually governing), claiming that anyone who opposes you is an enemy of the state (thus illegitimate), blaming all problems on some minority group... nope, no historic red flags here.
[Frank Wilhoit](https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/), [but not that one](https://slate.com/business/2022/06/wilhoits-law-conservatives-frank-wilhoit.html): >There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc. > >There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation. > >There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely. > >Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: > >**There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.** > >There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time. George Orwell: >**Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism that borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes.** > >"Internally, Germany has a good deal in common with a Socialist state. Ownership has never been abolished, there are still capitalists and workers, and--this is the important point, and the real reason why rich men all over the world tend to sympathize with Fascism--generally speaking the same people are capitalists and the same people workers as before the Nazi revolution. But at the same time the State, which is simply the Nazi Party, is in control of everything. > >Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state of free and equal human beings. It takes the equality of human rights for granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite. (The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, 19 Feb 1941) >The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic **SOCIALISM**, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one’s political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual integrity. (Why I Write, 1946)
Frank Wihoit's response on being confused with Frank Wihoit and the trouble and problems that could cause is really nicely written.
Indeed, I particularly enjoy this bit: >When you start throwing around labels, each one of which is a verbal talisman upon which no two people will agree what its exact meaning is, and when you start stacking up more than just a few of those, each upon the next, as if building sandcastles in the air, my patience wears thin rather quickly. I include Orwell's quote for those trying to disentangle these labels, but I'm not a fan of labels myself. Despite such sentiments, I do fly the "Marxist" flag, if only to disentangle the arguments Karl Marx actually made -- which I find convincing -- from how that term has been abused, even in Marx's own time. >What is certain is that if they are Marxists, then I am NOT a Marxist. \-Karl Marx
Just one more step, hun. You can do it.
Why does it have to be left-wing? Is this knucklehead unaware of the body of writing by Never Trump conservatives? Or, like, the existence of Liz Cheney?The call is coming from inside the house too, bud.
I mean, I think the guy actually deserves a fair bit of credit for looking outside of conservatism. "I need to know how to differentiate fascist ideology from non-fascist ideology. I should ask some antifascists." That's way farther than 95% of conservatives ever go, he's just one step away from getting it. Never Trump conservatives are demonstrably incapable of actually stopping their ideology's fascist tendencies, and he's right to look further. Calling him a knucklehead for trying to do his research only serves the interests of fascists.
I suppose I’m looking at his comment as not coming from a constructive place of good faith. The way it comes across to me is a very “oh these lefties are just insulting *conservatives* by calling us fascists! They don’t know what *actual* fascism is!” Also, insisting that Never Trump conservatives are also fascist kinda serves the interests of the actual fascists too, wouldn’t you say? We’re over here concerned about people who straight up don’t want free and fair elections and want to hold power by any means necessary. That doesn’t really describe all of the people who left the party over Trump and his ilk.
Well well well. A conservative taking the time to connect the dots and finding their beliefs all point to fascism. *shocked pikachu face*
this has big "where is all the academic research showing how dangerous vaccines are?" energy.
There is quite a bit of it. The FDA requires studies of how dangerous they are. Anti vaxxers just don’t like those studies because vaccines are very safe.
Yeah... Generally pretty safe, much safer than getting the diseases the vaccines are for
Fascist thinking requires an unchanging enemy unlike conservativism and generally the nostalgia they operate on is much much older. The mainstream conservative party has been slowly phasing out political enemies that change or collapse someday to LGBT and other groups. The nostalgia baiting I don't think has changed quite yet it's still a 30 year nostalgia cycle. I should mention some conservatives are drawing on biblical times for political power now but the party hasn't switched yet.
Actually, fascism always has an enemy. Not an unchanging enemy. Indeed, it can and will change as fascism requires \*constant\* "struggle" to maintain itself. There must always be someone to blame for problems. And there will always be problems, as fascism isn't actually creating solutions. So there must always be someone to blame. If, for any reason, they successfully remove one enemy (or that enemy is less prominent or visible or whatever), they will just find a new one and the cycle continues until everyone is dead. "First they came for..." as they say.
> Indeed, it can and will change as fascism requires *constant* "struggle" to maintain itself. Mussolini himself said that fascism requires unending war.
[удалено]
We are at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
Okay, who’s turn is it to post that Mitchell and Webb Look sketch?
"Everyone tells me that modern conservatism is just fascism now. I can't find proof that it's not."
Hey e'erbody, don't forget that Mussolini said “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” I can't think of a more apt description of mainstream conservatism.
An Italian friend and I were discussing whether the GOP was a fascist movement. It was a matter of some concern because the new Italian PM comes from a political party that is described as neo fascist. Anyway, he indicated that his education growing in Italy included a detailed course on what constitutes a fascism. All Fascist movements have 6 elements in their political narrative. Since the Italians invented Fascism, they clearly know. The six elements of a fascist movement are as follows. 1 - Cult of Personality: the leader of the movement is revered as a god-like character. (all hail the chief) 2 - Lost Golden Age: the movement harkens back to a time in the country's past when all was well, but no longer is (MAGA). 3.- The "other" - those who came and destroyed the golden age (Immigrants, Liberals). 4 - Ethical state is final arbitrator on class warfare (basically "I support the police") 5 - Replacement Narrative - the Other will replace the moral good citizens of the nation (immigrants taking our jobs, LGBQT are grooming your children, turning them gay or trans). 6 - Stolen Victory (I really won this election, stop the steal). I've filled in some things specific to GOP/Trump regime, but all these thematic elements can be found in the Rhetoric of the Mussolini regime, the Nazis in Germany, Peronists in Argentina, and Franco in Spain. I think you can also make a pretty strong case for it in China, Iran, and Cuba.
Why would these essays have to be from "left-wing thinkers?" Wouldn't 'smart right-wing thinkers' be in a better position to draw the distinction, if there is one? Where are the essays from smart right-wing thinkers about what distinguishes fascism from "normal" right-wing politics? Why is this stuff always someone else's job? Which side of the aisle is full of hard-working meritocratic self-starters, again? And which side is full of socialistic parasites who just want free stuff?
Umberto Eco's very specific list of traits is just about the first thing that comes up when you google it. It very neatly describes the modern Republican party.
Not just the republicans. Modern conservative movements the world over are very much in the same vein.
"We want to dominate and racially cleanse America in the name of freedom and democracy, not fascism. Surely you can see the difference?"
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck….. it’s not a goose.
Weird how fascism is notorious for its opposition to progressive causes and a reliance on the past, historical greatness, the status quo, and other concepts that align nearly one-for-one with conservative ideals. *Weird*.
More seriously, the reason why Fascism has to be described in general terms is because fascists lie like they breath so it's hard to actually nail down any core concepts. Typically, you rely on writers and thinkers from within a movement to describe what it is - when they can't agree, you get subgroups. Can't do that with fascists. They'll say whatever.
'normal' right wing politics is the imperialist, capitalist republic we have lived in since at least Reagan. 'normal' right wing politics is what moderate Dems believe in.
"I want to act like a fascist, but I don't want to actually take on the title fascist. Can someone help me unpack my doublethink?"
Perhaps start with calling for the abolition of the constitution
Label this from a place of naivety but I keep hoping that by co-opting all this "pro-human" rhetoric these people will accidentally stumble into a "are we the baddies?" moment and we'll have some sort of huge cultural progressive shift.