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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29210 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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a country with a fundamentalist religious tradition experiences a mass movement around a figure

fear of immigrants and immigration

contempt for journalists and journalism

violence

but when the people said: this is fascism

there were always those who said, no it isn't!

if it were fascism, he would be glorifying war!

he's the anti-war candidate!

now

he's been elected to deploy the military domestically

and he indicates he will expand the borders using the military

this is fascism

... duh.

  • -76

There are broader arguments here, but I want to pick at a couple of the smaller bits:

a country with a fundamentalist religious tradition

This condition is neither necessary nor sufficient for something to be referred to as "fascism" in any meaningful sense. Nazism was more occult than religious, Pinochetism doesn't have much relation to religion, Oswald Mosley wasn't interested in Anglican authoritarianism.

To be more direct, the United States doesn't really have much of a fundamentalist religious tradition - it's a religiously pluralist country where the largest single religion is Catholicism, and it's a squishy strain at that.

violence

The American right broadly and Trumpists more narrowly are just not very violent at all. The central example of right-wing violence during the Trump era is a single riot where the only deaths were one of the rioters and a couple geezers that got too excited and had heart attacks. This wasn't nothing, I didn't like it because I don't like riots, but the political violence in the United States has been primarily racialized (BLM riots and associated violence) or Islamist (various acts of terrorism) for decades.

The central example of right-wing violence during the Trump era is a single riot where the only deaths were one of the rioters and a couple geezers that got too excited and had heart attacks.

Are you referring to the Diet-Coke Hall Putsch?

There was also the Charlottesville Massacre. (Kind of book-ends it....)

Is "Charlottesville Massacre" meant sincerely?

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