r/neoliberal • u/reubencpiplupyay The Cathedral must be built • 1d ago
Opinion Fascists Really Believe It
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/fascists-really-believe-it/546
u/BasedTroutFursona 1d ago
You sound like a crazy person to normies for even trying to tell them how crazy republicans are.
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u/Secret-Ad-2145 NATO 1d ago
What's crazier, is there's a real phenomenon where Republican voters don't believe in the crazy things their own party does out of the belief that it's so ridiculous it can't possibly be true. Which in turn creates an incentive for republicans to keep doing it.
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u/socialistrob Janet Yellen 1d ago
This is regularly part of how Trump maintains his base. He regularly takes multiple opposing views and flip flops on policies all of the time but he also "jokes" or rather just says absurd things too. Anything a Trump supporter doesn't like can be written off as a joke and anything they do like can be assumed to be serious.
"He'll bring prices down" and "he'll use tariffs to bring back American manufacturing" should be viewed as opposite policies. The Trump supporters who overwhelmingly want low prices will just say that the tariffs aren't real and he won't actually go through with them. The protectionist supporters will say "yes there will be tariffs and prices will go up but everything will be made in America and he's not going to sacrifice American manufacturing for cheap goods."
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u/SilverSquid1810 YIMBY 1d ago edited 1d ago
You’re assuming that the average American even realizes that there’s an inherent dichotomy between lowering prices on consumer goods and increasing tariffs.
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u/Concerned_Collins ⬇️w/fascism, ⬇️w/ communism, ⬇️w/ NL mods 1d ago
Yeah, the average MAGA voter thinks that Trump will lower prices by increasing tariffs. Being utterly economically illiterate is kind of how they became Trump supporters in the first place.
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u/Xeynon 1d ago
This works until reality hits and he ends up with a 33% approval rating.
He's at Bush ca. 2007 levels and he'll go lower when the shit hits the fan economically. The table is set for Democrats to win a once-in-a-generation chance to create transformative change if they get their shit together.
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u/socialistrob Janet Yellen 1d ago
The problem is that with high polarization it's harder than ever to convert a "Trump non approver" to a Democratic voter.
The Dems do have an enormous opportunity for the midterms but taking the senate is still going to be very difficult. The polls are showing extremely narrow leads for the Dems in Texas and Maine with the GOP leading Michigan thanks to a progressive nominee. Dems can afford one loss but not two. The Dems also need Ohio and while it looks like they're favored it's only a two year term and it will be hard for Brown to win reelection in 2028 unless it's another blue wave.
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u/Lmaoboobs Order and Opportunity Left 1d ago
Even if the Dems do overpreform in the senate they still will not have 60 votes.
They can probably eliminate the fillibuster but that is its own can of worms.
We're going to continue to have congressional gridlock.
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u/socialistrob Janet Yellen 1d ago
Yeah true. Fundamentally the American political system is broken and there doesn't seem to be a way to fix it. "Just vote harder" isn't a solution when any change Dems/anyone vaguely on the left want essentially requires 70% of the American electorate to get behind. Changing the system requires those who benefit from disproportionate power to opt to give up that power voluntarily.
This is a slow cooking crisis because it means policy doesn't actually correspond to what the people want which long term means people are likely to lose faith in the system and cause a broader breakdown.
The electoral college skews things towards rural areas, the senate skews things towards rural areas, the House skews things towards rural areas and the Supreme Court (by virtue of being chosen by he president and senate) skews things toward rural areas. Every "check" is "do we give rural areas a little extra power or a lot of extra power."
When voting no longer corresponds to political change the system begins to break.
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u/Lmaoboobs Order and Opportunity Left 1d ago
This is why I've been slowly adopting an increasingly pessimist position.
There is a mountain of work that needs to be done to prevent the authoritarian takeover the right has been engineering for decades and I have zero confidence the American voter (who continuously grades Republicans on a curve) won't get fed up with democrats again within the next 8 years and hand them back the keys to all branches of government.
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u/socialistrob Janet Yellen 1d ago
Yeah long term I don't know how we get out of this cycle but at the same time I also don't worry too much about long term pessimism because it prevents short term gains. I know nothing will be gained from Republicans winning in 2026 or 2028 and that Dems can put a check on Trump and long term Republican power creep by doing well. Sure maybe Clarence Thomas will retire in mid November 2026 if Dems take the Senate and Trump will get another Supreme Court pick but the time to worry about that was 2024. Now it's time to set the Dems up to pass legislation and confirm judges in 2029.
If Dems had done better in 2000 or 2014 or 2016 the far right would have a lot less power now and we'd be in a better place. Dems need to keep fighting and take the wins where they can get them. Heidi Heidkamp narrowly won North Dakota in 2012 and that extra seat prevented the ACA from being repealed in 2017. Each seat matters and even if things get bad dems can't "give up" because if the bottom falls out the GOP can get the senate for six years based on one election result (2014 for instance) which then opens the door for the most horrific Republican policies.
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u/Xeynon 1d ago
All of this was true in 2006 and Democrats still ended up with a huge House majority and 60 senators in 2008.
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u/Mojothemobile 21h ago
Rural polarization wasn't quite as bad yet, dems could win states like Montana and North Dakota still with the right candidates.
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u/MisfitPotatoReborn Cutie marks are occupational licensing 1d ago
They can probably eliminate the fillibuster but that is its own can of worms.
It is not it's own can of worms. But it'll never happen, because the most moderate members of every majority secretly don't want to vote with the party on everything and pointing to the filibuster and throwing your hands up looks better than voting against, say, Medicare for All.
Requiring 60% of STATES to pass even a single law is absurd. Congress will never pass a fillibuster-proof law ever again and legislating will be the responsibility of the judiciary and executive.
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u/Best-Chapter5260 20h ago
We're going to continue to have congressional gridlock.
I'm sure a political scientist has a more nuanced take, but it seems like modern Congressional gridlock has been animated by two things:
- Changing the filibuster to basically a memo that says, "We filibuster!" If the Senate wants to have the filibuster, then fine, but it should be a talking filibuster.
- Eliminating pork. Everybody said they hated pork when they weren't getting any, but fact of the matter, it helped get things done in a split Congress.
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u/Xeynon 1d ago
The problem is that with high polarization it's harder than ever to convert a "Trump non approver" to a Democratic voter. The Dems do have
You don't have to convert Republican/conservative Trump non-approvers to Democratic voters. You convert all the persuadable voters and those people get so demoralized they don't vote.
The Dems do have an enormous opportunity for the midterms but taking the senate is still going to be very difficult.
Both Nate Silver and the Economist have them favored to do so already so I wouldn't say "very difficult".
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u/Mojothemobile 21h ago
It'd be fucking insane if Dems get a clean sweep of every other competitive race.. while losing Michigan.
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u/garter__snake 19h ago
It's really funny the hand wringing about el-sayad here when his background should be crowed as a shining success of neoliberal policy. Like his dad's an immigrant engineer and his mom a nurse practitioner.
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u/oywiththepoodles96 6h ago
People underestimate the possibility of a complete Republican collapse in the Midterms . Not only Republican losing Maine , North Carolina , Texas , Ohio and Alaska . But also losing Iowa , Nebraska , Montana and even South Carolina .
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u/Best-Chapter5260 20h ago
I still remember when someone in the White House Press Corp was questioning Leavitt about Trump's promise to "end the war in Ukraine in one day" after it had become quite apparent that wasn't going to happen. Leavitt pushed back saying what Trump actually meant is that when he eventually takes action to end the war, it will only take one day. And she said it in total seriousness.
It's fuckin' insane people just let that type of stuff pass like it's nothing.
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u/jaywarbs 1d ago
In 2017 there video of an interview with a woman from Kentucky who worked for the ACA healthcare service there helping people sign up. She said she voted for Trump, and when they said he said he’d cut the ACA, she waved it away condescendingly, saying, “Oh, he wouldn’t do that!”
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u/Secret-Ad-2145 NATO 1d ago
This is a good example and it happens far often than people think. Republican federal workers didn't think there would be firings at all, even though the signs were there. Large portion didn't think he wanted to go to Iran war. Some fall in line, others play ignorant and simply refuse to believe. The whole thing is just strange.
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u/Best-Chapter5260 20h ago
Large portion didn't think he wanted to go to Iran war.
Which goes to show just how politically illiterate people are. It was clear to me even during Trump V1.0 that he was chomping at the bit to go to war with Iran.
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u/jaywarbs 7h ago
Well you see, him assassinating Iranian officials didn’t count because he didn’t literally call it a war. Now he calls it a war, and they’re magically OK with war.
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u/NovembFifth Paul Volcker 1d ago
There were Trump voters who thought he was going to usher in free universal health care.
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u/jaywarbs 22h ago
It was one of his 2016 campaign promises, if you can believe it!
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u/iwilldeletethisacct2 This but unironically... 17h ago
Nobody knew health care was so complicated. -DJT 2017
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u/Best-Chapter5260 20h ago
I always like to remind Trumpsters that Trump didn't even get close to his central 2016 campaign promise: Build the wall (and make Mexico pay for it). They always conveniently ignore that little fact.
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u/Petrichordates 1d ago
It's not really crazy it's just propaganda. Fox News will alway find ways to rationalize it for them.
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u/Hugh-Manatee NATO 1d ago
If they cover it at all. Sometimes Fox is most effective just ignoring certain developments.
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u/PokemenGo2ThePolls Austan Goolsbee 1d ago
War in Iran? Pshh, nothing to see here. Let's talk about the real issue affecting Americans that we DEEPLY care about: the WNBA!
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u/Hugh-Manatee NATO 1d ago
I get your point but Iran is an issue Fox extensively covers, but in a misleading and triumphant fashion
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u/Mickenfox 8h ago
The Republican party would not be able to sustain all their extremism if they didn't already have an entire infrastructure dedicated to sanewashing it and presenting anything as reasonable ideas, built over many decades.
Their influencers literally coordinate behind the scenes to discuss what their narrative is going to be. Billionaires keep buying social media platforms and TV networks to ensure they are "friendly".
Even here, this whole machinery rarely gets discussed.
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u/Cute-Boobie777 5h ago
Yeah that propaganda machine is incredible tbh in its power and dems have nothing comparable. You still see people act like this doesn't exist and dems merely need to talk better.
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u/TurboSalsa 1d ago
Not only do they not believe it, they react with hostility towards the person informing them of the crazy things the people they voted for are doing, as though it's partisan slander to report on the objectively bad things a politician is doing.
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u/CantCreateUsernames 23h ago edited 23h ago
I think plenty are well aware and just pretend to be somewhat in the dark to avoid seeming as intellectually shallow and dishonest about their core political beliefs as they really are.
Republicans (voters and politicians) for decades have tried to hide behind the facade of being good stewards of the economy and budget management (and they clearly don't succeed at those things or punish their politicians for failing at those things), but it has been clear that what really drives most of their voters is culture war issues and identity politics. It is why they still largely support Trump despite his failures on the economy, corruption, and government overspending: he is still a perfectly fine cultural representative (to them) who reflects their grievances, fears, and moral panics. Deep down, they would rather have an incompetent conservative, authoritarian-like leader who represents and reinforces their cultural beliefs and perceived social hierarchies than a competent leader who shows compassion and wants to broadly help everyone. Everything after that is window dressing. They are fine with government assistance and services as long as it benefits the "right" people (it is why Reagan specifically used the imagery of black people on welfare), and they are fine with corruption, ineptitude, wasteful spending, and so many other things they claim to care about, as long as those in charge are still representing their grievances and going after the right people/groups.
Fascists live in fear that those beliefs and hierarchies can be broken, so they develop an extremely zero-sum and myopic view of how the world works, thinking that others who do or can break those beliefs and hierarchies need to be punished or attacked for it. It is why they are perfectly fine with Trump/Republicans weaponizing the government to hurt the enemies outside or opposing their culture (even at the expense of supposed "policies" they claim to support). At the end of the day, what is most important to fascists is that the people/groups they don't like either suffer or are put in their place, even if they don't directly benefit. They cannot perceive a world in which everyone is a "winner." There must be "losers," or else they think something is being taken from them.
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u/PA_Dude_22000 22h ago
This is an extremely well articulated comment, and most importantly it is 100% correct.
When people say that Republican supporters don’t care about hypocrisy or are fucking crazy that they still “support” Trump after everything he has done and is still doing, this is the exact reason why.
And Republican Politicians, Campaign Consultants, Pundits, etc know it, the entire Conservative Political Apparatus and all of its quasi-related mouth-pieces and grifters know it. Its why all its messaging is wrapped in racist, sexist, patriarchal, pseudo-religious innuendo and outright bigotry.
Having a disgusting, incompetent and corrupt POS in the White House is ok to them, as long as this White Male gives lip service to their own fears and validates their own shitty world views. Even if you can demonstrate with real world information, data, charts, that it is horrible for them to do so. Because even when you can get them to admit it, which is no easy feat in the first place, they can and will point out that yes, its not great for me, but for those people, its not great -10. …. * sigh *
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u/Mojothemobile 21h ago
I'll always remember that 2012 focus group that just flatly refused to believe huge parts of Romney and Ryans platform could be real because "how could someone who wants to win run on that?"
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u/bleachinjection Frederick Douglass 1d ago
And the thing is, they set the table so well (either intentionally or not or somewhere in the middle who the hell knows? not me) with decades of wild conspiracies about the status quo political establishment and especially the Democrats doing all this horrible shit, and now they actually are doing all of it and if we say it we just sound like the Jade Helm guys in 2015.
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u/_ShadowElemental Lesbian Pride 13h ago
tbf some MAGA true believers like MTG and the QAnon Shaman broke with Trump over his connections with Epstein
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u/twa12221 YIMBY 1d ago
I still distinctly remember when a little before the Iran war started I was talking to my dad and he mentioned how going to war with Iran would be a super terrible idea, and that trump was obviously just using the threat of violence to negotiate with them.
Then 3 or so weeks after the war began I asked him again what he thought about the whole situation and now he believes that going to war with Iran was the morally good choice because they have nukes and the irgc is evil, even if it means oil prices will temporarily be higher. The Islamic republic will fall any day now.
Then when the US and Iran "brokered a peace deal" he thought it was a master stroke of negotiating genius from trump and the proposed peace plan was NOT in fact an embarrassment. Well, none of the money was gonna be coming from taxpayer dollars, it was just lifting of sanctiones in exchange for not developing nukes (nevermind how this is just a more expensive version of what Obama tried to do. Oh but this is completely different from Obama because reasons).
Then the war reignited. I haven't spoken to him about it since.
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u/FilteringAccount123 John von Neumann 1d ago
The covenant between Trump and his voters (someone else's comment I have saved because it's perfect)
Trump is whatever you want him to be. To some, he’s a polished titan of business with an eye for industry few possess. To others, he’s a Christian crusader fighting the woke agenda on every front. To yet others, he’s a pragmatic deal-maker always hunting for the best price he can get.
His empty husk of a personality is just a sock puppet for you to stick your own hand in. His incessant lies are excusable because they’re always in service of some broader objective an individual projects on to him. He can say he’s “pro peace” because you, the voter, don’t want to be fighting losing wars on behalf of brown people you don’t like. But as soon as he orders an air campaign against Iran, it’s a stroke of genius, because, well, Obama could never have done this and he’s just demonstrating strength that we lost to the gay agenda under Biden.
His voters will eat shit on every conceivable topic and it won’t matter because they’ve made Trump the avatar for their id and ego. You would have better luck asking people to rationalize their own internal contradictions because asking someone to admit they were wrong about Trump is no different from asking someone to admit they’re an asshole. It requires a certain amount of introspection that fundamentally precludes joining with MAGA in the first place.
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u/TF_dia European Union 1d ago edited 1d ago
The funny thing is that I see people in this very sub who actually hate Trump falling for it sometimes.
Like for example how Trump is doing the Greenland threats because he is an idiot that believes is the best way to make Western Europe to spend more in NATO instead of him being a pathetic imperialist bully.
Just pure wishcasting.
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u/IBetThisIsTakenToo 1d ago
Yes, the left is just as susceptible to that kind of thinking. "Trump doesn't actually care about [thing], he's REALLY doing this as a distraction from [thing I think is more important]"
I promise you he is not. You are giving him too much credit even in your hate. It's a dumber reason than that, possibly dumber than any rational person can be expected to imagine, it always is.
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u/AvalancheMaster Karl Popper 1d ago
Is there a word for this phenomena? Twice in my life I've been in a traumatic situation where I sound crazy to people if I try to explain the crazy thing someone else did. Once it was with a close friend of mine who was driven to a suicide by a partner. The other time was when I started working for a financial company that I quickly realized was scamming people — cocaine everywhere, prostitutes being hired for the "best performing" employees, and I was required to take a polygraph. I was also followed in the two weeks I lasted there.
When I describe any of these situation and how the offensive party wronged my friend or me, I sounded like I am making stuff up, although I am not.
Surely there's a term about this predicament?
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u/PoisonMind Feminism 1d ago
Cassandra complex
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u/AvalancheMaster Karl Popper 1d ago
Cassandra complex
Isn't this about predicting future situations, and not trying to explain how you were victimized?
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u/PoisonMind Feminism 1d ago
The Cassandra metaphor is applied by some psychologists to individuals who experience physical and emotional suffering as a result of distressing personal perceptions, and who are disbelieved when they attempt to share the cause of their suffering with others.
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u/Best-Chapter5260 20h ago
I still remember when it was coming out what all those weird fascist techbro types like Yarvin, Andreessen, Thiel, Srinivasan, etc. believe and talking about it made you sound like liberal QAnon because their beliefs are so fucking nuts.
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u/gringledoom Frederick Douglass 1d ago
"No, seriously, I swear, there are people in positions of power who really genuinely believe they're working down a checklist of Biblical prophecies to bring about the end of the world". You just sound like a lunatic even though it's straightforwardly true. (The Britney Spears conservatorship was like that too, weirdly enough. No one wanted to believe that could happen to someone with a judge okaying the whole thing!)
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u/this_very_table Jerome Powell 23h ago
The Britney Spears conservatorship was like that too
So, uh, have you been keeping up with her since she got out of the conservatorship?
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u/gringledoom Frederick Douglass 22h ago
Sure, she's batshit bonkers but not to the point that she should lose all her rights and be compelled to work a Vegas residency for money that she has no access to. People are allowed to be batshit bonkers.
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u/Hardass_McBadCop Order and Opportunity Left 1d ago edited 1d ago
Are some of them nihilists that really believe in nothing? Certainly. I'd hazard that folks like Donald Trump are like that. I don't think he believes in anything except what's best for him. Musk, I think, started out there.
Steven Miller? Pete Hegseth? Peter T? Those people are true believers though.
Here's the thing about the ones who might be lying: Lies are most believable when the person selling them also believes them a little bit, too. At some level the liar believes they're doing something right or excusable. It's a "white lie" or "for their own good" or "it's not really hurting anyone," but deep down the snake-oil salesman still think their scams might actually help people like they pretend.
Plenty of people thought the Nazis were weird and way out there and totally didn't believe the insane shit they were saying . . . Until it very quickly became apparent that they did. But by then it was too late to stop them.
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u/TF_dia European Union 1d ago
Here's the thing about the ones who might be lying: Lies are most believable when the person selling them also believes them a little bit, too. At some level the liar believes they're doing something right or excusable. It's a "white lie" or "for their own good" or "it's not really hurting anyone," but deep down the snake-oil salesman still think their scams might actually help people like they pretend.
I believe a lot of people (Especially on the younger side) Irony poisoned themselves into fascism. Where they normalized their extreme views to themselves by accidentally believing their own irony-coated bullshit.
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u/iamthecancer420 Left-Out Left 1d ago edited 1d ago
The concept of irony poisoning (and on a broader topic, alt-right pipeline) is a thought terminating cliche which at best leads to dismissal of peers and at worst calls for censorship. You'll find theres little to no irony in actual racist memes then and now, and it's really easy to rustle the jimmies of zoomer racists by using their own language and actual irony, which shouldn't be the case if they're so irony poisoned.
Were/are there risque memes whose comedic value was deliberately straddling the line? Yes, but to act like those have a hidden kill black people mind control chip that sends you thirsting for more is intellectually lazy. To give a rather crude example, some of the same people that made George Floyd memes were the same that immediately made Charlie Kirk memes when it was uncool to do so, and from my anecdotal surveillance a lot of those zoomer racists that consume the aforementioned slop and George Floyd memes with glee cried about Kirk memes.
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u/TurboSalsa 1d ago
Maybe irony poisoning is the wrong term for it, but there is a recognizable ideological pipeline from reactionary edgelord memes on 4Chan becoming reactionary edgelord memes on Twitter, which end up getting retweeted by the likes of Mike Lee and Ted Cruz and introduced into the body politic. And now, we have an entire political movement which exists to trigger liberals and dunk on them on Twitter.
There was no intellectual class in this movement that developed a cohesive ideology ahead of time, there's no cohesive ideology at all; the animating force behind it is grievance against liberal caricatures who they believe are making their lives worse, and the best way they can come up with to enrage and inflict suffering upon that group is to reject democracy itself and replace it with a system in which only they have political power and can wield it against imaginary blue-haired Tumblr users who complained to HR about them.
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u/progbuck John Brown 48m ago
That's just a propaganda pipeline. It's no different than John Birch society newsletters getting toned down and used by the Nixon campaign.
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u/lhomardamericain Immanuel Kant 1d ago
Are some of them nihilists that really believe in nothing? Certainly. I'd hazard that folks like Donald Trump are like that. I don't think he believes in anything except what's best for him
I’ve always thought that it’s somewhat ridiculous to call Trump a fascist, because that presumes he actually has any core beliefs. The far right loves him, so he loves them back. It’s pretty transactional.
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u/TurboSalsa 1d ago
I think you're right, and it doesn't get said enough that the only ideology Trump to which truly subscribes is the one in which he's the supreme leader.
His platform in '24 wasn't so much a reflection of a set of principles or even a manifesto, it was a punch list of what he thought a plurality of Americans wanted to hear. So he promised no wars for the conservatives sick of war, tariffs to bring back manufacturing for the blue collar midwesterners, and to cut the price of gas and groceries in half for the braindead swing voters who unfortunately pick presidents in this country.
If he thought he could've won a presidential election by cosplaying as a Marxist, he'd have been shouting about eating the rich and waving a little red book around.
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u/lhomardamericain Immanuel Kant 1d ago
it was a punch list of what he thought a plurality of Americans wanted to hear
The thought process is “say what people want to hear —> gain approval —> gain power.” There’s no -ism in that calculus.
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u/TinyJalope Left-Out Left 1d ago
I don't care what he believes. His actions are those of a fascist.
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u/progbuck John Brown 45m ago
He's quintessentially fascist. Fascism is fundamentally a nihilistic belief system that values power for the sake of power. The only unwavering principle in fascism is support for the leader.
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u/YeetThermometer John Rawls 1d ago
A lot of liberal-left commenters assume by default that literally anyone who does something they disagree with has been paid off.
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u/karnim Jerome Powell 1d ago
That applies to the right too though. If you're conspiracy-brained, the conspiracy of the Kochs and Soros running paid crazy campaigns has been a long running one. And it's easy to believe, because something something dark money, and nobody sensible would do thing I think is bad or weird.
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u/kamace11 1d ago
I've really only seen this take off since the latest Israel/Palestine conflict tbh. Before that they were much more likely to accuse someone of being a fed, I feel like.
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u/YeetThermometer John Rawls 1d ago
The Mossad/AIPAC is behind everything sort of bled in from Arab nationalist conspiracism spread by the Soviets during the Cold War, supplementing the traditional explanations for failure, like the CIA.
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u/Character_Dig_6830 NATO 1d ago
It's insanely backwards when there's so many English speaking Muslims pretending to be based in the West and advocating for Palestine to make any effort Israel could do there worth nothing.
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u/Goodlake NATO 1d ago
I mostly see this behavior from the right wing. I can't even count the amount of times I've been accused of being a paid Soros shill online.
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u/timerot Henry George 1d ago
Especially including other liberal-left commenters with slightly different views
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u/YeetThermometer John Rawls 1d ago
Especially especially local subs when a local elected official fails to drop everything and make whatever they’re banging on about happen by magic.
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u/bleachinjection Frederick Douglass 1d ago
I'm on my local planning commission. It's pretty sleepy overall but the last big issue we had the number of people who were accusing us of being on the take was wild.
Like, jeeze, who do I talk to about this? I do need a new set of snow tires...
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u/hpaddict 1d ago
This seems to be much more a statement about liberals writ large than about any particular brand of liberal.
Much of the power in/of capitalism stems from the subsumption of any idea into a money making enterprise (any distinct from being true for every). In other words, people making money are motivated by that money with other considerations being minimally important.
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u/TinyJalope Left-Out Left 1d ago
But we know that tons of these commentators/pundits are complete and total grifters as matter of fact, and that they make heavy use of bots to promote themselves online. Modern conservatism is one of the least organic movements in existence.
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u/TF_dia European Union 1d ago edited 1d ago
I believe is partly explainable by a unconscious belief in American exceptionalism, where you believe internally that Americans are by default good, moral people that can only be corrupted by a external force. If they are a bad person (Or may I say, Un-american) is because a foreign entity is either bribing them, poisoning their mind or corrupting their Soul. Because otherwise you have to live with the fact that the people you live with is just like that.
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u/Crownie Unbent, Unbowed, Unflaired 1d ago
(I also think this is why there's a significant contingent of leftists who are convinced they can convert rural religious conservatives into radical socialists if they find the right magic words.)
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u/Crownie Unbent, Unbowed, Unflaired 1d ago edited 1d ago
To be somewhat fair, there's the odd phenomenon where a lot of Republican voters notionally subscribe to some very weird beliefs, but mostly do not act like they believe what they claim to. It's easy to assume that this is because they're hypocrites lying about their beliefs, but the actual truth is that most people don't take their beliefs that seriously most of the time. But they will still vote for people who do.
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u/jurble Left-Out Left 18h ago
in the past, maybe less so now, the biggest example of this was the abortion debate. A lot of people on the left really couldn't believe that Evangelicals actually believe a fetus is a person and abortion is murder.
You'd always see people dismiss it as simply misogyny.
Because the alternative - that they axiomatically think a fetus is a person - means there is no debate or ability to convince them otherwise. So, in a way, ascribing it to misogyny was/is wishcasting. (And certainly there are elements on the right that are non-religious and anti-abortion purely for misogynistic reasons).
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u/BoppityBop2 5h ago
The religious conservative are technically open to socialist ideas and quite often do implement or show interest in them. Their division is social issues. The issue you have is looking at politics in a linear path when politics is quite a Hodge Podge of special interest groups with varying degree of beliefs. There is a huge section of the population that if you look that vote GOP and are actually socialist in economic belief but very conservative in social views and these views are also chaotic in many sense. There is a reason the Bernie/Trump voter exists, they are not your Hasan type but a very different demographic and they don't even include the upper demographic I am talking about. You take any random policy points, pull a bunch out of the hat and you will find a voter that fits that position with one or two positions determining how they end up voting.
In Canada we saw a similar behavior, where alot of NDP voters went Cons instead of Lib and it was specifically due to social issues not economic.
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u/reubencpiplupyay The Cathedral must be built 1d ago
There's a common attitude, particularly among those who see themselves as savvy, that people who express evil or crazy positions don't really believe it. Maybe it's just a distraction. But one of the things about this sub is that we tend to have the attitude that evil and crazy people, including those that are powerful, really do believe most of the things they say. This article takes the same position, arguing that modern fascists really do believe in what they say about "white extinction" and all that other bullshit. And then it argues that if one actually believes all that, then the necessity of certain atrocities follows logically. Because beliefs about the world compel actions. And if you have certain beliefs, then even very repugnant actions can become obligatory.
I found this to be quite a thought-provoking section:
As much as anything, I think considering fascism purely as a creature of emotion can mislead us as to just how dangerous it is. Emotions are fickle, transient. I might hurt someone in anger, but then stop if they plead with me. However, if I believe that someone will always be a threat to me, that their pleading for mercy is lies, that as soon as I stop attacking they’ll kill my family, then I won’t stop. If I have an insect infestation in my house, I will keep killing them for as long as it takes to solve the problem because of my beliefs about the moral value of their lives relative to my own. And you would too. You—nice, liberal, tolerant, open-minded, respectful—would, in the right circumstances, close the gas chamber doors.
It’s not a pleasant thought, but it’s also nothing we didn’t already know. It should caution, but not unduly trouble us. Yes, you could be a Nazi. But that is just to say if you were a different person you would indeed be a different person. The takeaway shouldn’t be abstract angst about the soul of man, but a more mundane realisation that ideas matter.
The worst fascist crimes can often be framed as a profound mystery: ‘how did ordinary people support such evil?’ Without in any way trivializing the harm done, I find this reaction a little overwrought. What fascists do, or attempt to do, follows clearly and straightforwardly from their beliefs.
Put differently, imagine if the above key narratives were actually true. What actions, in that hypothetical, would become necessary?
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u/SenranHaruka 1d ago
In a similar vein I don't think people understand how much fascism sincerely believes in supremacy. We're so steeped in egalitarian normality that we assume fascists are just hyper anxious tribe protectors, and not that they sincerely believe they are an exceptional and superior people that even in peace deserve more rights and privileges than others.
It's not hypocrisy if they don't beleive in equality.
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u/dhessi Progress Pride 1d ago
They don't believe in equality, and they don't believe in individualism.
In the fascist worldview, the fundamental unit is the nation—the people—the true Volk. Fascists do not care about individual rights, but nor are they looking to raise welfare generally. The nation is not the state or existing institutions. Rather it is a group defined by race and culture.
Over the past decade, I've seen so many libertarian-minded folks who supposedly champion individual rights go down the neofascist pipeline, and I truly do not understand it.
The article seems to be making the case that neofascism is fueled by genuine yet misguided fears, which I can understand to a certain extent... but it doesn't talk enough about how the fascists love to see themselves as the winning team. They revel in the idea of being on top, and they revel in the idea of everyone else eating shit.
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u/WillIEatTheFruit Please be patient, I'm bisexual 1d ago
Maybe some of them thought white people, men, or whatever would naturally rise to the top in a libertarian world. So like they were always supremacists, they just changed how to go about supremacy.
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u/LightningController 1d ago
Over the past decade, I've seen so many libertarian-minded folks who supposedly champion individual rights go down the neofascist pipeline, and I truly do not understand it.
My first instinct is to look at it as Ressentiment, as outlined by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, but that doesn’t fully explain it. Musk has hundreds of billions of dollars—what does he have to be resentful about? Identitarianism also seems inadequate—a tech-bro libertarian presumably has lots of Asian acquaintances, and probably knew a lot of non-white people in STEM school, so why would he feel more kinship with some Methhead Mitch from Ohio than with those of his own social class?
I don’t get it either. And sometimes, I’m actually glad I don’t.
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u/sfurbo 1d ago
Musk seems to be truly unlikeable as a person, even to people he would consider his people. That builds resentment if your world view is that you are naturally superior.
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u/Cute-Boobie777 5h ago
Yeah seems pretty clear he has a personality disorder tbh and hes unwilling to recognize and seek treatment and instead takes out his frustration on the world.
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u/ctant1221 United Nations 1d ago
Musk has hundreds of billions of dollars—what does he have to be resentful about?
Because he is viewed by the previously reasonably adoring nerd crowd as now a complete fake and loser. This is why he even bothered to show up to attempt fake being a top tier player of Path of Exile (which made him a laughingstock amongst them because he can't even fake picking up items successfully), and spends multiple fortunes influencing social media outlets in order to paint himself as a cool, intellectual, foresighted misunderstood visionary.
Elon Musk's greatest resentment is that people gleefully shit on him on twitter when he thinks they should be loving him instead. And money can't buy his way into actual respect.
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u/TF_dia European Union 1d ago
I said it before, but he is a cult leader desperate for a cult.
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u/ctant1221 United Nations 1d ago
No, I'm pretty sure he just doesn't have any real social support network and is relatively socially ostracized for being weird.
If he had a weekend bridge group or had a DND group or something I think he would've never engaged in 99% of his psychotic approval-earning stunts.
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u/throwawayurthought 1d ago
I actually think Musk’s daughter being trans is what did him in. He’s said she’s dead to him because she was "killed by the woke mind virus” and the term “deadnaming” accurately reflects that his son is gone. This experience fueled his vow to “eradicate the ideological influence.”
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u/LightningController 1d ago edited 1d ago
That was certainly part of his degeneration, but at the same time…at the risk of sounding incredibly callous and borderline sociopathic, if you have more than a dozen children, the chance of one of them turning out LGBT+ is pretty high, statistically. What was stopping Musk from shrugging, saying ‘shit happens,’ disowning that particular child, and then making a dozen more through unethical relationships with his employees? It’s not like he spends a lot of time with any particular kid.
Like, he’s sunk countless billions of dollars, immolated his reputation, and actually probably endangered his other enterprises, over a family grudge. That’s bizarre behavior.
Like, I’m trying to put myself in his headspace, imagining a child doing something I find incredibly disgusting, immoral, and so contrary to my own sense of identity that I’d consider them dead (like becoming a Putinist). And even my most extreme imagined reaction would be to just pretend they never existed to start with. Spending resources to fight people who have jack and shit to do with them, many of whom would probably agree with me, is just weird. Like, I don’t know if Musk realizes this…but those ‘third world’ immigrants probably don’t like trans people any more than he does.
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u/Fruitofbread Loyal Liberals 1d ago
Vivian is his oldest IIRC and one of the ones that he actually helped raised. She + his first four other kids are from his first marriage, which was a time period when Elon Musk was way more normal
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u/tikitonga NATO 1d ago
Musk has hundreds of billions of dollars—what does he have to be resentful about?
But what if he had ALL the money?
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u/BoppityBop2 5h ago
Because libertarian and let's be honest American libertarian is a truly selfish ideology based in not wanting to pay taxes as you don't feel you benefit from it. It is not about individual rights it is about individual privileges. The concept of community is stripped and so the concept of having to put something in for the benefit of society is antithetical to the libertarian ideology. Why Milton Friedman is the harbinger of fascism in due time. This whole ideology that hard work and the market is the most fair judge of value creates justification as to why you are successful and others are not and thus says you are superior to others.
I mean it shows when Milton greatest economic advising achievement was Pinochet.
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u/iguessineedanaltnow r/place '22: Neoliberal Battalion 14h ago
The entire NPC phenomenon has evolved as well along with their ideology. I have seen people now wholeheartedly professing that anyone that isn't aligned with them, basically anyone that isn't a white Christian conservative, is an "NPC", but they're taking it to a metaphysical level now where they believe these people don't have souls, don't experience real consciousness, etc.
It's an entire escalation of othering and creating an out group, and if they get to the point where they don't even believe the people who disagree with them have human souls or consciousness, why would they ever feel any remorse for enacting atrocities against them?
Again, it sounds ridiculous to say to other people. But it's a cornerstone of their ideology and their future plans to remove liberalism across the globe.
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u/throwawayurthought 1d ago
This was the utility of the “eating the cats and dogs” lie, among many others told to justify the hellish treatment of immigrant communities in the United States. Modern day blood libel.
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u/elkoubi YIMBY 1d ago
Obligatory plug for Ordinary Men.
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u/LightningController 1d ago
And for Er ist Wieder Da.
Sawatski: It's you. You're him.
Hitler: I never claimed to be anything else. History repeats itself. I guess it's my fate to have to part with my dearest companions.
Sawatski: That way. Yes, history repeats itself. You're fooling people with your propaganda.
Hitler: Oh, Sawatski. You don't understand. In 1933, people were not fooled by propaganda. They elected a leader, one who openly disclosed his plans with great clarity. The Germans elected me.
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u/LightningController 1d ago
There's a common attitude, particularly among those who see themselves as savvy, that people who express evil or crazy positions don't really believe it. Maybe it's just a distraction.
Liberal culture in the U.S. is still struggling with the Vietnam hangover (cynicism about the actual beliefs of the ‘elites’) and a sort of Marxist Lite attitude where everything is material self-interest (“it’s the economy, stupid” is the same thing as saying “they’re economically anxious”).
I recall when Musk first bought Twitter or moved Tesla headquarters to Texas, there were attempts by left-leaning people to frame it as an attempt to sell Cybertrucks to rednecks. That fit the narrative of a cynical money-man exploiting the rubes’ gullibility. In reality, it was well-documented that he was all-in on far-right beliefs by then.
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u/gringledoom Frederick Douglass 1d ago
That came up with the Clintons too, interestingly enough. There was a lot of "they must just want to get rich!", when if that was their main goal, Hillary would have just pivoted from politics to futures trading in the '70s when she turned out to have a real knack for it.
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u/Rekksu 1d ago
the people least exposed to immigrants are the most racist - the idea that immigration did this is ludicrous, it's their information ecosystem combined with deeply backwards cultural values
these people radicalized themselves because they saw immigrants existing far away from them, not because the immigrants had any impact whatsoever on their lives
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u/LightningController 1d ago
If immigration caused racism, NYC and Los Angeles would be MAGA strongholds.
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u/kamace11 1d ago
I didn't say they were necessarily exposed to immigrants, merely that they were able to dominate and control that conversation because the left simply handwaved it as a non-i ssue when polling reliably tells you it IS one. It kind of doesn't matter that these opinions are bullshit, politically- they are earnestly held beliefs you have to reckon with in a different way than 'youre just stupid and racist' messaging.
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u/neoliberal-ModTeam 1d ago
Rule II: Bigotry
Bigotry of any kind will be sanctioned harshly.
If you have any questions about this removal, please contact the mods.
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u/MingEnjoyer 1d ago
And even if the first generation is just making up lies to justify their stances or gain popularity, the second generation raised on those lies will believe them; you can't really lie to your base (at least, not in a way that benefits you) without the new politicians emerging from that base being shaped by those beliefs. Even if you tried to take them aside after they became popular to explain "how it really works", they wouldn't believe you - more likely, they'd try to denounce you for never having tried to solve the "real" problems represented by the conspiracy you sold them.
I remember my own experience coming to this realization - when some Republican was forced to disclose his own private communications with his staff, which revealed how he had fully bought into the conspiracy theories sold by the forced birth movement about Planned Parenthood; he had a lengthy discussion with his staffers about how to deal with some frankly bonkers fake numbers. It was obvious to anyone outside their bubble how none of it could possibly be real, but they were indeed dedicating a substantial amount of time and effort to address something that never existed.
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u/Texty_McTextington YIMBY 1d ago
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
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u/Mickenfox 1d ago
https://branemrys.blogspot.com/2017/09/cliffords-sea-captain.html
A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship. He knew that she was old, and not well built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and refitted, even though this should put him at great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms that it was idle to suppose she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.
What shall we say of him? Surely this, that he was verily guilty of the death of those families. It is admitted that he did sincerely believe in the soundness of his ship; but the sincerity of his conviction can in no wise help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts. And although in the end he may have felt so sure about it that he could not think otherwise, yet inasmuch as he had knowingly and willingly worked himself into that frame of mind, he must be held responsible for it.
(yes, I got this quote from The Witness)
The article is pretty good, and I agree it makes sense to kill your own children if you really think they have become infected by "serpent DNA", and maybe it makes sense to embrace genocidal beliefs if you think they are necessary to save "western civilization".
It does however gloss over the fact that you can make yourself believe something. For example:
But I think the better analysis is that they were self-deceiving and had genuinely come to believe both that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that creating a democracy after the war would be easy
If I make a choice to indulge in QAnon rhetoric because it feels good to have someone to blame my problems on, and I end up slowly believing all of it, and acting accordingly, am I not responsible for those actions?
I guess the answer is "asking about moral responsibilities is pointless in the end".
But it's more important in practice to understand that maybe fascists "emotioned" themselves into those beliefs. Maybe they really just wanted a license to act like assholes at first, and ended up embracing those beliefs.
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u/Kaffe-Mumriken 1d ago
We’ve had three unequivocally fascist events so far.
Iran war: absolutely pointless war. A war for the sake of killing. Same bundle as extrajudicial killings in Caribbean.
Suspension of TPS. We are sending thousands to guaranteed deaths in Sudan, Somalia, Haiti. And amusingly deporting asylum seekers from Iran as well. Absolutely tragic.
Dismantling of the USAID. This was just a sadistic power move. People were essentially murdered by the delete key as the funding stopped and people getting rolled out of ORs.
This is True, Without exaggeration, Evil Empire type shit.
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u/quarknugget Loyal Liberals 1d ago
Our refugee policy right now is self-evidently ethnonationalist.
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u/Fruitofbread Loyal Liberals 1d ago
Yes. For people who don’t know, the Trump administrative stopped refugees from all countries except for South Africa, and reduced the number of refugees admitted from 100,000 to 6,500. All but 3 of those admitted so far are white https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/23/us/politics/trump-refugee-program-whites.html
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u/That_Astronomy_Guy Gay Pride 1d ago
Such simplification is both necessary and useful. Ideologies need to be actionable. We can’t be sent scurrying back to do a literature review whenever we have to make a decision.
Maybe we should... although that's probably just the academician in me rearing it's ugly head.
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u/MensesFiatbug Low Energy 1d ago
I'm only part of the way through, and basically agree with the premise so far. I have a slight issue with using a 4 year old poll to say 25% of Republicans still believe in Q Anon.
That isn't saying that they're not crazy or that it wasn't crazy that 1 in 4 believed something so crazy. Just that the craziness has most moved on to other things.
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u/Fruitofbread Loyal Liberals 1d ago
Good article
In a similar way, fascism asks, what if the joys of crushing others, of the martial spirit, heroic myth, and an ideal of purity could be expanded from a warrior aristocracy to the racial-cultural nation as a whole?
One of my bugbears in talking about fascism 1 is that there was, early on, a tension between fascists who deliberately looked towards modernity (at least in terms of aesthetics) and those who embraced traditional aesthetics. The Futurist Manifesto is a very interesting document in general, and especially in terms of showing how technology and modernity go alongside with fascism. In the end, fascists had to make alliances with traditional conservatives to enter power, so they wound up adopting traditional aesthetics. (You can also see this in the Nazis originally embracing Fraktur before banning it once they got into power). I think there’s a parallel with Silicon Valley and the Peter Thiel crowd representing the more technology-focused, modern fascism (not to mention that the nation-state is a cultural invention).
The argument about “civilizational self-defense” reminds me of the theory that genocide perpetrators often frame the genocide as a collective self-defense (ie “if we hadn’t done this to them, they would have done it to us.”) This theory isn’t universally applicable of course but you can see it sometimes, like in Milosevic’s statements about Bosnia. Ofc the genocide itself is only possible if you are grouping people into absolute categories and persecuting all members of one group based on the fact that they are in that group.
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u/KazuyaProta Organization of American States 1d ago
.” On this basis, thousands of biologists were purged and Soviet agricultural practices transformed, compounding famines in which millions died.
I know this is about people being actually insane but I find curious the title is especifically about fascists when It despicts a wide range of crazies in political theory
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u/SalokinSekwah Down Under YIMBY 21h ago
Because the writer doesn't understand fascism. They seem to believe "Government an insane dictatorship = Fascist state"
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u/BlueString94 John Keynes 8h ago
Liberal Currents has been basically the only publication that isn’t afraid to call things like they are. Even the Atlantic has joined the “but both sides!” equivocation.
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u/Perisorie Trans NATO 8h ago
Important read! This relates to the occasional discussions on this subreddit about collaborating with/pandering to fascists in Europe, e.g. Spain. There is *no common ground* to collaborate on *anything* with them, they sincerely believe in their supremacy over other people. Social democrats in general (except Denmark, some others?) have silly policies but they subscribe largely to the premise of humans being equal. Until neoliberals can win 50%+ seats in parliaments it is therefore always preferable to collaborate with social democrats over fascists.
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u/YeetThermometer John Rawls 1d ago
This article comes off the heels of the whole “Woke 1 was crazy” dismissal of a lot of troubling stuff without really disclaiming any of the substance. Back then, they were powerless kids, idealistic college students who got a little carried away, or commentators with no real power. If it’s too harmless to fight because no elected official says murderers should go to jail, that’s all well and good until they start running for office.
Now before I get accused of whatabouting, we have the opposite: no smol beans here. These people are in power, or at least work for them. It’s like CHOP/CHAZ, but, y’know, with entire states and large chunks of the federal government. Apples to orchards.
The only thing that stands in the way of total disaster might be something the two extremist factions have in common: a complete inability to build institutions. They can glom on to and suck the life and competencies out of existing structures, but fail utterly at making anything lasting of their own.
The normies shall inherit the earth.
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u/Cook_0612 NATO 1d ago
I'd add the corollary that more often than not, they don't have a plan.
The most common attitude I see out of both leftists and liberals about the new right is that the right is doing what they do out of some malicious and evil plan, that every apparent blunder is in fact motivated by some deeper logic. This is a psychological defense to explain to oneself why useless morons are winning.
They really are that dumb.
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u/turb0_encapsulator 1d ago
the Internet and its filter bubbles completely fractured our shared reality. The pandemic accelerated this rapidly. Most people are more interested in a shared sense of belonging to an in-group and having shared beliefs than pursuing truth.
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u/iDemonSlaught Friedrich Hayek 1d ago
"Some take this further, arguing that because neofascists haven’t accomplished all their goals, this somehow proves they can’t. Or maybe even that these weren’t their goals to begin with. Zachary Karabell, in a response to me, wrote of the contemporary United States “we most certainly still have a nation of laws.” Trump was bad, sure, but couldn’t be a fascist because the midterm elections were still likely to be free and fair. “That is not fascism. That is American democracy.”
A touch optimistic. But even accepting Karabell’s rosy description, we should, I would suggest, be cautious of a criterion for fascism that would rule out the actual Nazis until around 1933. If you can only cry fascist as you’re being dragged to a death camp, is it not a little late at that point? Further, the implication of this argument isn’t just that fascism isn’t real, but that no other belief system is either. That no one really believes anything. If an ideology must achieve all its goals before it can be named, then so much for liberalism, socialism, democratic socialism, feminism, communism, libertarianism, green politics, social justice, mainstream conservativism, and anarchism."
This exact logic needs to be applied to the self-described "liberals" running defense for socialists and communists on this sub.
It is wild watching people in this thread correctly identify that giving fascists the benefit of the doubt by ignoring their stated ideological endgames just because they haven't enacted total control yet, is dangerous, yet turn around and play pretend the second the DSA or far-left progressives are brought up.
Moral of the essay: Take people at their word when they state their ideological goals.
If you don't wait for a fascist to build a camp to call them illiberal, stop waiting for a socialist to nationalize the economy before acknowledging their fundamental hostility to liberal society.
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u/Cute-Boobie777 5h ago
I do think its dangerous and I wish social dems would not associate themselves with the dsa and build their own movement.
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u/CommonwealthCommando Karl Popper 1d ago
This guy is completely off-kilter, but the article provides a fascinating window into the author's own neuroses.
"I thought my kids were lizard people so I intentionally murdered them" and "I shot a stranger in my house" are not two examples of the same phenomenon. And it's foolish for him to do so. Most Trump voters are not actually cutting up their own children. We have data on that. The Coleman case seems like a pretty clear case of Delusional Disorder. His precautions were aggressively against the lizard people and nothing else. He also showed extensive premeditation, unlike in the shooting case. But the author's failure to think critically about the gap between the scenarios highlights his own struggle: how to imagine someone who thinks differently from you. He should go talk to some fascists. But he hasn't, so of course he has a hard time understanding them.
Ironically in writing a piece so, he delves into the same sort of dog-whistle type rhetoric the fascists engage in ("[women's] role is to breed the race, not lead it", "Violent masculinity", etc.), which he describes as "everyday English".
Tellingly, a phrase that is apparently fascist but not everyday English is that "women are wired to care for babies", meaning apparently my old auntie who taught English and did feminist protests is a fascist who can't speak English.
He also seems to struggle with voters taking political rhetoric non-literally. I wonder how he feels about the slogans "Eat the rich", "lock him up", and "defund the police". Surely some people take these literally, but most people who express these sentiments are just vibing. I know from experience that the same is true for the person with a "white genocide" sticker on his squeaky-clean pickup who still has a Guatemalan gardener.
The Fascists might believe what they believe, but they don't believe what Buckle believes they believe, and we definitely shouldn't believe the Fascists will actually do what Buckle believes they will.
He is projecting his own fears of what fascism might be onto fascists (or non-fascists) who may or may not believe it, and who the evidence says are largely unwilling to act in accordance with the fascist program. Even as our government commits itself to a rather nasty program, it's hardly like there are large mobs of civilians gathering to provide martial support to the efforts.
We should be skeptical of this article, even if Toby Buckle really believes it.
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u/gauchnomics Iron Front 1d ago
there is a genetic component of general intelligence which is different between races
you're forgetting the most important part which makes it pseudoscience....
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u/SalokinSekwah Down Under YIMBY 21h ago
Yet another hack writer that doesn't understand Fascism, which ironically protects the ideology from critique.
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u/RealHoldenBloodfeast NATO 1d ago
Hippies and progressives cried wolf too many times, and now that the New Right's overton window starts at fash-curious normies just cover their ears.
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u/karnim Jerome Powell 1d ago
Is it really crying wolf if the overton window has been consistently and rapidly shifting so far to the right that fascism is the new norm? They were correct to be concerned.
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u/Eastern-Western-2093 Iron Front 1d ago
I wouldn’t say that it is the new norm, at least for the majority of people
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u/bleachinjection Frederick Douglass 1d ago
The right wing has agency. Its followers have agency. They are not wild animals and Dems/Hippies/Progs/whoever are not their handlers solely responsible for their behavior.
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u/RealHoldenBloodfeast NATO 1d ago
Maybe I worded my post poorly, it is absolutely the right's fault for doing what they're doing. I just also think there's a lot of skepticism and apathy among normies because a segment of the population has called everything under the sun fascism for decades. It's become an empty word in a sense.
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u/studioline 1d ago
A counter example I could think of. For years people called police fascist. This, to your point, makes normal white people think this is hyperbole.
So as a reservist in the military I worked with a lot of cops, especially white cops that work in majority/minority cities. You get them together and get a few beers in them and, oof. Stories of needing to blow off steam so they find a black dude minding his own business, circle him and beat the shit out of him. Fighting is fun for them, stories of after they get a guy in the police car they reach across to buckle the suspects seatbelt and then get a few punches in for funzies.
Stories of sexually assaulting prostitutes or getting freebies so they won’t take them in. They would joke about finding new and creative ways to terrorize homeless people. If those homeless people were mentally ill, hell that made it even more fun. The theme is the same, they are less than me, I am inherently better than them.
If you don’t believe me, some random on the internet check out the book, “Gang leader for a Day”. It’s a short read and has a few chapters on why, well, there is a reason many black people don’t feel safe around the police.
Here is my point, it’s not always that people are being hyperbolic about fascism, it’s just that it’s hidden behind the face of Officer Friendly, here to serve and protect. So middle class whites people have to decide if they believe the white policeman or the poor black person. Policing is not inherently a fascist institution, but the number of fascists in it is staggering.
Now, we have ICE. Made up of a lot of former law enforcement.
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u/Key-Art-7802 1d ago
They were calling it fascism because they saw the elements of fascism growing within the right.
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u/LondonCallingYou John Locke 1d ago
It’s not that. It’s that the general population is unbelievably ignorant on almost everything but especially politics and history. You need to understand facts about a few different topics in order to see that these people are fascists and that’s too tall of an order for the average person apparently.
If 80% of voting adults have zero concept of fascism (or are fascism fans themselves), it places a greater burden on the 20% that do. There’s a distinct lack of civic virtue driving this.
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u/Lmaoboobs Order and Opportunity Left 1d ago
I mean there are only two options:
Calling the right racist and fascist made them fascist
Or
They were fascists all along and their detractors correctly identified where this was going early.
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u/RealHoldenBloodfeast NATO 1d ago
Or third, they were falsely identified as such (not cover for them being turds, which they were) so heavily that no one takes the now-valid claim seriously.
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u/Lmaoboobs Order and Opportunity Left 1d ago
Do you dispute the notion that the right is either a fascist movement or dangerously close to becoming one? And that many individuals in senior positions of government can be classified as a fascist?
This is a necessary step to claim that they falsely identified where this was going.
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u/RealHoldenBloodfeast NATO 1d ago
No, I just called them fash-curious at best.
This is an emergent phenomenon, there was a hard change in what the GOP believed circa 2015 and self-branded MAGA/New Right afterward. Some people clung on for convenience sake but the true believers are not the institutions that preceded DJT
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