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If no one else is going to link to Scott's latest CW-related post, I guess I'll try to meet the mods' wishes for a top level comment... (Though I didn't re-read it, so...)
Fascism Can't Mean Both A Specific Ideology And A Legitimate Target
I agree, inasmuch we stipulate "Political violence in America is morally unacceptable" means "literally, categorically unacceptable, due to our assessment of the threat of fascism" and "(at the current time)" ignores the possibility of near-future change in the threat-assessment. Though I emphatically oppose political violence, I don't think it would be logically incongruent to leave open the possibility that fascism is bad enough that we're near the point of political violence being acceptable. But I don't think Scott's doing a motte-and-bailey, by using a narrow denotation; just stating a motte, with the expectation his readers take it at face value.
Characteristic of Scott, the post is a neat exercise in logical tidiness. However, it only gestures at the bigger, scarier question: How do societies classify danger and determine when violence becomes permissible? The classification of threats is important, because names carry significant policy weight (e.g., Trump labeling Antifa a domestic terrorist organization...). Label something "fascism" as a distinct ideology, and you direct attention towards connotations and lineage. However, use the same term as a moral epithet (i.e., a catch-all for political enemies) and you alter the rhetorical perception.
He really didn't want to put out any concrete examples of what he considered 'fascist' even though he spent a lot of time talking about Stephen Miller. Things like this where he talks very carefully around certain subjects just reinforces my sense of the San Fransisco bubble that he lives in.
There seems to be this weird equivocation between right wing nationalist and fascist. Why doesn't this equivocation happen between member of the communist club at college and hardcore tankie pol pot enjoyer; used as justification for brown shirted McCarthy squads to give them a beating? This is of course rhetorical. Their rules applied unfairly.
Antifa and black block really do seem to be the modern equivalent of brown shirt thuggery. It never made sense how this was tolerated by the government except by sympathetic people giving them cover and support from inside the institutions.
Edit: A few words.
Edit edit: What makes me the most frustrated about this labeling is that Trump's policies are roughly aligned with Bill Clinton style 1990's Democrats.
He linked to his review of Mussolini's book, though the review, itself, is paywalled.
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Frankly, MAGA has a lot more in common with fascism than being right-wing nationalist.
Taking Eco's definition, I would argue that MAGA checks about half the boxes.
The points which apply IMHO from WP:
I do not see the classic militarism (universal heroism, permanent warfare), Trump does not want his followers to die in Stalingrad for him, for the most part. The full rejection of the Enlightenment is probably limited to the retvrn crowd, and there is little embrace of (fake) tradition. Machismo is also rather absent, Trump has women in positions of power. Newspeak also does not seem a prominent feature, covfefe aside.
And of course, MAGA is also characterized by a denial of objective truth and widespread kleptocracy, and is ideologically too light-weight for classic fascism.
•Its important to go out there and DO SOMETHING
•Rich people are just different from you and me. They're all evil. So are white people, apart from the ones who are Allies
•[middle class people are struggling and need help so long as they're the right color]
•[poor people are good so long as they're the right color]
•Chuh, learn to code, boomer. Sucks to suck, women and queer PoCs are the future, your time has passed, something something mediocre white man
•We live in a fascist white supremacy where klansmen lurk around every corner plotting to lynch [TV actors], but also we are on the right side of history and our time is now and a people's revolution is right around the corner once we all unite behind revolutionary leaders like Hasan Piker, comrade.
• [disagreement is treason] I'm not going to bother with this one.
•White supremacist Nazi racist misogynist gatekeeping chuds are dog-whistling about their conspiracy to keep trans women of color from playing video games.
My point is, a lot of those things are just universal tactics to rile people up and bully your way into relevance.
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Obligatory warning against arguing from fictional evidence (though I can't remember where I first saw this warning), but this definition from an alternate-history author who presumably has done some research into the topic may be relevant.
In this work of fiction, there later is a schism between Nazism and fascism proper.
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This thing was invented by Eco because he was seething at Silvio Berlusconi's electoral victory and came up with the broadest possible definition of Fascism that would include his party. That's all it is, not a deep reflection of an intellectual on the nature of fascism but a knee-jerk reaction to an italian political party from the 90s.
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Eco is the worst possible source on this topic and deserves to be anathemized from polsci altogether for having originated it.
This is like if people just kept insisting that a human is a featherless biped to this day despite the definition being so prima facie terrible it was ridiculous and ridiculed in its own time.
Nothing less precise than "Palingenetic ultranationalism" is worth even entertaining.
TBH (without having read Griffin's book) I've always wondered if "palingenetic" is superfluous here. I mean, the fascist movements we do know have had the palingenetic element (and it doesn't really affect the question of whether Trump's a fascist or not since the palingenetic element is obvious down to the MAGA slogan), as one could imagine a fascist movement built on the basis of "our nation has never been particularly great or important, but we are going to be great in the future".
Without that specific spiritual foundation it just decays into regular old authoritarian nationalism. Most right wing African governments have this sort of setup and they are recognizably not fascist. And South America has its fair share of Caudillisms too.
When you start to bring out some mythic past to rewrite the history and meaning of all institutions through fanatical and totalitarian mass politics, then you're in fascist territory.
In a weird way the Woke movement is as close to Fascism as MAGA, just from the other side. But neither are fascist.
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This is also very obviously true of the Democrat party (see, eg, Burisma, 50 years of NGO graft, and various officials claiming to have seen Joe Biden doing cartwheels). As such, it doesn't tell us anything in particular about MAGA, except that you don't like it.
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I'll never forgive Eco for managing to establish his "definition" as the one every midwit on Reddit reflexively reaches for, simply by the virtue of being a fancy writer of the worst mental masturbatory kind.
It's not completely bad, but something like "a progressivist ideology aimed at a complete rebuilding of society that tries to capture the discontent of the dispossessed masses and wears a reactionary façade to appease the elites and the middle class" is a much better one, in my opinion. However, this means that Fascism 1.0, as created by the Mussolini, is only possible in an industrialized state undergoing a demographic transition, where you have a massive restless working class.
The US is nothing like that. It's a post-industrial country that does have some restless working class, but it wasn't going to be captivated by communist agitators any time soon.
While I agree with you that the US is not actually in danger of imminent capture by communist agitators, a key part of the MAGA worldview is that the Democratic Party, Ivy League, mainstream media, FAANG middle management etc. already have been captured by communist agitators, and that the threat of said communist agitators consolidating power and imposing the Glorious Bugpod Future is an emergency that justifies tearing up the rulebook.
If "Drives support from small-c conservatives by exaggerating the threat of Communism" is a warning sign of fascism (and I think it is, though it is a long way from being pathognomic), then it is one of the warning signs that MAGA triggers.
Which of these communist agitators have been talking about violently seizing the means of production?
They haven't - I think MAGA are wrong about the American establishment being full of communists - even with a small "c". But the whole point of the "cultural Marxist" meme as used by the right is to allow you to call people communists even if they are talking about racial equality and not violently seizing the means of production. Similarly "Bio-Leninism", which is a favourite of MAGA-friendly Motteposters.
But the question "Are left-wing authoritarian wokists communist?" is fundamentally irrelevant - it is an argument about the definition of a defeated ideology. It is no more useful than the question "Are right-wing authoritarian MAGA supporters fascist?" If you abstract out the meaning of controversial words and try to answer questions about the real world, the key questions are "Was there ever a real threat of a left-wing authoritarian woke takeover that would justify a right-wing authoritarian response?" (MAGA think the answer to this one is "Yes", and appear to do so sincerely) and "Is there a real threat of a right-wing authoritarian takeover under the Trump-Miller administration?" (The fact that Trump, Miller, and their supporters in the country all think that the answer to the first question is "Yes" is a large part of why the answer to the second question is "Yes")
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You shouldn't take Eco's definitions for anything at face value. Half his point apply to commies as well.
Yeschad.jpg
If you look at the nature of the thing and not the political rhetoric, fascism and communism are more similar than different. If they were materially different, it would be obvious which Orwell's Oceania is. The whole point of Nineteen eighty-four is that it isn't.
Fascism is what a dictatorship of the working class looks like when it forgets to invite any women.
Communism is what a dictatorship of the working class looks like when it forgets to invite any men.
I don't think the USSR was a particularly feminised society. Blue-haired feminists may consider themselves communist, they may even be communists, but they definitely haven't established Socialism in One Country.
Why? I think it was very feminized- layers of bureaucracy simply to make work (especially important for women), a total lack of emphasis on family formation and children (China is an even better example of that), and total equality of outcome (which favors the gender with the evolutionary disadvantage when it comes to producing physical things at scale).
Were the same things true of the fascists? No; where communists increase bureaucracy fascists do away with it, where communists fail to provide suitable accommodations fascists say 'living space', and equality of outcome is as far as I can tell not a thing for a Nazi (unless it's a group for which a claim that they owe reparations can be made).
I was just a baby at the time, but that seems a bit off. My parents told me the message at the time was "the family is the basic cell of a society", and other such slogans that you could easily mistake for coming from the Tradcath sphere.
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As feminists (and even superficially non-feminist women) will tell you, even today's society isn't. The USSR definitely did have a short stint of the sort of progressive craziness we are facing right now, which Stalin had to cut short, when he realized it's ruining the country, and he might have a war or two to fight.
Translation: Stalin perceived that the valuation of men in society increased (or would increase), resulting in it being necessary to pander more to their interests lest his forces simply permit the Germans to walk right into Moscow and overthrow the government through inaction.
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Liberalism is what a dictatorship of the working class looks like when it goes through gender affirming care.
That's just communism calling itself liberalism. It's the equivalent of a nation calling itself a "Democratic Republic" when it is in fact neither of those things.
Liberalism is not a dictatorship of the working class; liberalism is a codified cease-fire between groups that naturally seek to become dictatorships to let them exploit their resource surplus (this is distinct from monarchy and oligarchy, where in those cases the benefits of that resource surplus can be easily captured by a limited number of actors- liberalism self-establishes when that is not possible).
Once that surplus runs out, including for hedonic treadmill reasons, people turn their attention back to reforming those dictatorships.
That's the Superbowl ad of liberalism that it purchases to try to sell itself. What liberalism actually is, is a silent conspiracy of lizardmen to sell you for a slave, while pretending this is what you wanted all along.
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Joke's on you, most of this applies to modern liberals as well.
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There's a bunch of nonsense right here.
Of course, our guys only topple statues, set fire to district courts, attack the police, smash windows of the stores, burn down gas stations and loot supermarkets only after deep intellectual reflection. While their fascist goons are taking actions just out of base animalistic instincts, because they are uncapable of deep thought - otherwise they'd already be agreeing with us, as any reasonable person who is not a fascist does.
How can one take something like this seriously as a "definition" of anything? Of course exposing the vacuous nature of such intellectual pretense can be called "anti-intellectualism", but this is bullshit - these people have no right to usurp the mantle of "intellect" and use it to cover their vapid nonsense.
So you're saying, taking into consideration the interests of a group of voters who are about 3/4 of the voters, is something that "fascists" do? Congratulations, every single politician is a fascist now. This can't be serious, of course every political movement in a democratic country would consider interests of the middle class, and in every welfare state a lot of middle class is frustrated because they bear the bulk of the burden of maintaining the welfare state, while not deriving a lot of benefit from it. The only movements that would not are the ones like communists which would rather see the democratic regime overthrown and the dictatorship of the proletariat installed - there would be no stinking "middle class" there!
This is literally THE leftist slogan. "People united" and so on. When I was in Soviet school (long time ago), I had to memorize a ton of poems about how an individual is nothing and the collective is everything. And it's the opponents of MAGA that had been consistently trying to suppress individualism and unapproved viewpoints for decades now.
This can be applied to any anti-establishment movement. People say the elites oppress them? "too strong!" People say the elites are morally corrupt and decadent? "too weak!" Here, every movement attacking the establishment - even obviously oppressive, corrupt and decadent one - is now "fascist". That's not a definition, that's a smear.
This is especially poignant now, when the Left actually just murdered a person whose only life's business was publicly disagreeing with them, and massively agreed this is a good thing to do and needs to be done more. I mean, without that I could spend some time on explaining how the left had been repressing dissent for the last decade, but I no longer need to. They are literally, as a movement, enthusiastic about murdering people for disagreement.
That's another nonsense - who defines what's "hyping up"? You take your enemies actions seriously? You are "obsessed" and therefore a fascist. You are passionate about human rights and injustice? "Obsessed" again. This is literally how late Soviets suppressed the dissidents - they just declared them mentally ill, because obviously only a mentally ill person can be obsessed with proving USSR is an oppressive dictatorship with no freedoms or human rights.
This of course is especially great when we know now that there are organized networks and institutions working to achieve exactly the goals the "conspiracy theorists" said they want to achieve - a fundamental transformation of Western society and imbuing it with values radically different from the ones it used to have. If you notice any of that, you are obviously a fascist.
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I think of these
"too strong and too weak" is a stretch (I haven't actually seen much Trumpist rhetoric arguing that the Left is weak - degenerate and doomed in the long run, perhaps,but not weak right now)
"contempt for the weak" feels more like outgroup slander as everyone in the US frame has some groups that they value and think the others don't value enough which to them amounts to contempt; probably Trumpists could equally paint "deplorables"/"learn to code"/"flyover states" rhetoric from the Left as contempt for the weak, and it would ring as inappropriate as whatever you are arguing (because I think Eco really intended it to mean contempt for the weak qua weakness: "if you are weak, you suck", not "you suck and you are weak")
"selective populism" - are there instances of Trump suggesting that he represents the will of an abstract People, as opposed to just claiming that he represents the will of his followers and his followers are the better people? (This would cover a lot more political movements)
seem like a stretch. I would even argue that the points are about the same level of applicable to the Russian influence/Ukraine narrative - in particular there there is a lot of "too strong and too weak at once", healthy servings of disagreement-as-treason, obsession with plots and cult of action, and a gradual growth on the militarism axis now too.
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Just as a sanity check let’s run the same test cases against wokeness. By my count these apply.
Rejection of modernism. Obviously wokeness favors alternative “ways of knowing” and rejects objectivity, rationality and the scientific method as white supremacy.
Cult of action. The motto “Punch a nazi” is certainly proudly anti-intellectual, elevating the propaganda of the deed/direct action above any intellectual debate.
Disagreement is treason. This is too easy, wokeness considers silence as violence and obviously disagreement is violence.
Obsession with a plot. White supremacy is behind everything. Bad test scores? White supremacy. Crime statistics? White supremacy. Every institution is full to the brim with hidden, covert racists.
Enemies simultaneously too strong and too weak. Trump is simultaneously a fascist dictator but also a bumbling, senile buffoon.
Newspeak. Control and redefinition of language is one of wokeness’ defining traits.
The selective populism and appeal to the middle class are basically free squares that can be applied to any ideology
I think they're basically all free squares; the list is just a toolkit for anytime you want to coordinate the masses into some kind of political action.
If you tried to form a political project that was the exact inverse of what the list describes, you get a kind of bloodless, nebbish classical liberalism. Which is nice, but it's not something a movement has ever been made from.
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I thought action was an example of white supremacy?
I haven't heard that specific one. While it wouldn't surprise me if someone did say something like that, it's not exactly hard to come up with examples that would contradict, unless the revolution is supposed to happen all by itself.
The Smithsonian has an evergreen cheat sheet for understanding white supremacy:
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Most left wingers have a lot more in common with fascism, if you take Eco's definition.
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That's nothing special, so does Social Justice:
Either those summaries are too broad to be useful, or some traits of Fascism have become broadly entrenched in our society, regardless of what we call the groups that embody them.
Nothing special indeed; FDR's New Deal checks about half the boxes too:
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Eco was opposed to fascism, taking his definition of fascism as definitive is like taking an atheist's definition of Christianity (instead of Nicean creed), or Rand's definition of socialism. Luckily an endodefinition1 exists:
I suspect the reason that this defition is not used, is that describes better2 the relationship democrats have with the state, than republicans do. And also, the preference for anti-fascist sources, even if secondary.
1: That completely accurately, but if forced at gunpoint to chose, democrats are slightly closer: Operation Chokepoint, lockdowns, censorship during lockdowns.
2: It is queer that in the age of transsexualism, not only is self-identification not applied, a group is defined by outsiders. If one were to transpose discourse surrounding the definition of fascist, onto the debates surrounding gender, it would be like the canonical definition of a woman being something some misogynist thought up.
I think that almost all societies which are commonly labeled fascist did not use that as an endonym. Comes with the territory -- "we just adopted an ideology of the Italians" is a hard sell for ultra-nationalists.
I think there is a cluster in thing-space for the states of Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and it is useful to have a word to reference that cluster, and the word their opponents have adopted for better or worse is fascism. One can debate how well it applies even to Franco and if it ever applied to any other states, of course.
Just because the SJ lets people pick some common identifiers it does not mean that individuals get to pick all identifiers. The SJ certainly does not like "I identify as native-American", and "I identify as assigned-female-at-birth" is absurd. Nor do we respect people deciding that they are not schizophrenic, but merely willing servants of the man in the moon.
Fascism as used by Eco is mostly an exonym, and it makes sense to have an exodefinition for that.
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