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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27954 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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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:

  • "The cult of action for action's sake," which dictates that action is of value in itself and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science.
  • "Fear of difference," which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants.
  • "Appeal to a frustrated middle class," fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups.
  • "Selective populism" – the people, conceived monolithically, have a common will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual. As no mass of people can ever be truly unanimous, the leader holds himself out as the interpreter of the popular will (though truly he alone dictates it). Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions they accuse of "no longer represent[ing] the voice of the people".
  • "Contempt for the weak," which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism, in which every member of society is superior to outsiders by virtue of belonging to the in-group. Eco sees in these attitudes the root of a deep tension in the fundamentally hierarchical structure of fascist polities, as they encourage leaders to despise their underlings, up to the ultimate leader, who holds the whole country in contempt for having allowed him to overtake it by force.
  • Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak." On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.
  • "Disagreement is treason" – fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action, as well as out of fear that such analysis will expose the contradictions embodied in a syncretistic faith.
  • "Obsession with a plot" and the hyping-up of an enemy threat. This often combines an appeal to xenophobia with a fear of disloyalty and sabotage from marginalized groups living within the society. Eco also cites Pat Robertson's book The New World Order as a prominent example of a plot obsession.

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.

  • -15

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).

a total lack of emphasis on family formation and children

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.

Talk is cheap, of course. What did they actually do to support the average working-class non-party-member family? Granted, they did do the Nazi thing of rounding up co-ethnics and shipping them off to concentration camps in Siberia, but far as I know that wasn't an explicit policy goal and was more about paying off supporters than anything that would have benefited the average Russian.

By contrast, there's a country in the Near East- the ethnicity of its founders even had 'nazi' as part of their name- that despite its small size actively sends armed 'settlers' into a combat zone to displace the natives there, spends a great deal of treasure doing this, and the people that do those things have a TFR above 2. That just ain't a thing the average communist does.

Granted, they did do the Nazi thing of rounding up co-ethnics and shipping them off to concentration camps in Siberia

By contrast, there's a country in the Near East- the ethnicity of its founders even had 'nazi' as part of their name- that despite its small size actively sends armed 'settlers' into a combat zone to displace the natives there, spends a great deal of treasure doing this, and the people that do those things have a TFR above 2. That just ain't a thing the average communist does.

Because they don't have to. Russia / the USSR is a different creature, but the Soviet satellite states were so ethnically homogeneous, they'd give the average Californian a stroke. And come to think of it this might even apply to the USSR, give or take minor Soviet Republics being flooded with ethnic Russians to maintain control, it's not like you were free to travel around that country. As for TFR, I think my generation is the last above-replacement one.

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