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I recently came across this video from the NYT. It is titled: "We're experts in Fascism. We're Leaving the U.S."
Not to boo my outgroup too much here (and that's not the point of this), but holy shit this video is bonkers. The logical jumps these people are making, their inability to understand or recognize that they are explicitly not living in a fascist dictatorship when they work for the largest newspaper in the country publishing content about how the leader of the country is a giant fascist. This video is frightening to me for the following reason:
What does the deprogramming effort for all of this eventually look like? Or does it happen?
These people (not necessarily the ones in the video, but the ones who might watch this type of video earnestly) seem convinced that we are living in a society which is comparable in some way to Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy.
I guess I have to stop myself here to check my biases: are we? Just to look at the most obvious thing here, the press, the answer is unequivocally: no, or perhaps even "fuck no, lol".
Or the military? It seems like we have the most powerful military on earth, and are essentially not using it at all.
As far as ICE: ice killed two people in situations which were arguably (though not definitely) self defense, and the response was that the Federal Government largely pulled out of the area (Minnesota) where they were deployed. This is while local residents are doing things like stalking federal law enforcement, setting up various checkpoints, and delaying "rapid response forces" to track their movements.
Would Hitler have tolerated this? Was there an equivalent in Nazi Germany of non-Nazis setting up checkpoints for the Nazis and driving them out of town?
Okay I'm talking to myself here: no we are not even remotely close to anything even remotely like a fascist dictatorship. By almost every definition we are likely the farthest we have ever been from living in a fascist dictatorship.
So deprogramming: has there been any serious discussion about what this will look like? It's been on my mind for a little over a year now. Here was the positive realization I had about it: it's not necessary. The people being dispatched by this sort of propaganda don't hold coherent beliefs. This is not part of a larger system of beliefs that all build on top of one another. These ideas are mostly just sitting on their own. They are a collection, not a system.
So this means that deprogramming isn't so much a process of unwinding everything, it's just a matter of installing a new set of ideas. Deprogramming could happen in a few days, for some people it could probably happen in a single episode of John Oliver or Rachel Maddow.
Realistically this was a happy realization to me. Am I wrong to think this?
The irony calling Trump and his supporters "Fascist" is that MAGA does not buy into the idea of the state as ultimate sovereign/final arbiter of authority. MAGA does not want a rational materialist technocracy society run by "Elite Human Capital" (or a racial spoils system for that matter) nor does MAGA see itself as socialist (though they are certainly nationalist).
To the extent that mid 20th century fascism is an active and vital force in US politics today, it is embodied by the sort of affluent white liberal who writes for the New York Times and voted for Zohran Mamdani on the high-end, and would-be brownshirts like Alex Pretti on the low end.
I would argue that MAGA is (amongst many things) a popular reaction against the fascistic and anti-western tendencies that have been allowed to fester amongst our so-called "best and brightest" for far too long. But acknowledging that would force the NYT to grapple with their own checkered history regarding Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, the German Bund, Et Al, whereas doubling down on calling anyone to the right of Karl Marx a secret Nazi costs them nothing but readership.
Much of MAGA buys into the idea that Trump ought to be the ultimate sovereign/final arbiter of authority. There's a short distance from the type of cultism the rank-and-file MAGA voter shows, and the idea that Trump should be some sort of dictator, if only to stop those evil leftists!
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