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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13487 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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Yes, Its Fascism

I decided to come in with an open mind and read this, and i have to say, im only somewhat impressed.

There are 7 primary points that I have a big axe to grind with, lets jump into it.

Blood & Soil/White & Christian nationalism

A fascist trademark is its insistence that the country is not just a collection of individuals but a people, a Volk: a mystically defined and ethnically pure group bound together by shared blood, culture, and destiny. In keeping with that idea, Trump has repudiated birthright citizenship, and Vance has called to “redefine the meaning of American citizenship in the 21st century” so that priority goes to Americans with longer historical ties: “the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War,” as he put it, or people whom others on the MAGA right call “heritage Americans.” In other words, some Americans are more volkish than others.

While Vance, Trump, and MAGA do not propound an explicit ideology of racial hierarchy, they make no secret of pining for a whiter, more Christian America. Trump has found many ways to communicate this: for example, by making clear his disdain for “shithole” countries and his preference for white Christian immigrants; by pointedly accepting white South Africans as political refugees (while closing the door to most other asylum seekers); by renaming military bases to share the names of Confederate generals (after Congress ordered their names removed); by saying that civil-rights laws led to whites’ being “very badly treated.” In his National Security Strategy, he castigates Europe for allowing immigration to undermine “civilizational self-confidence” and proclaims, “We want Europe to remain European,” a rallying cry of white Christian nationalists across the continent. Taking his cue, the Department of Homeland Security has propagated unashamedly white-nationalist themes, and national parks and museums have scrubbed their exhibits of references to slavery.

Here is my push back for some of this: 1st, trump has passed laws that are in the interests of minority communities here & here There are some others as well. And has gone out of his way to condemn racists on multiple occassions 2

From the whitehouse website, the immigration that is largely approved is mostly from europe, asia, latin america, and oceania. A good chunk of people from these regions are not white, are free to come in the country. This is a heavily skewed exaggeration. White Christians are not being favored in the way the author wants us to believe.

I will concede here that attempts to white wash history (and the confederates) are bad, im not convinced that by itself is white nationalism. Even if it was, the fact that trump has been willing to go out of his way to help non-white groups proves that he probably isnt explicitly hateful in any real sense. To be honest, i dont think he cares for race that much.

As for europe. They have had enormous trouble with immigration, that warrants the type of nationalist response. The continent has been dealing with repeat violence and mass rape. This behavior is simply unacceptable. Your not a nazi for not wanting Islamist buffoons in your society, or for not wanting your societies demographics to shift towards those kinds of populations.

What’s private is public.

Classical fascism rejects the fundamental liberal distinction between the government and the private sector, per Mussolini’s dictum: “No individuals or groups outside the State.” Among Trump’s most audacious (if only intermittently successful) initiatives are his efforts to commandeer private entities, including law firms, universities, and corporations. One of his first acts as president last year was to brazenly defy a newly enacted law by taking the ownership of TikTok into his own hands. Bolton understood this mentality when he said, “He can’t tell the difference between his own personal interest and the national interest, if he even understands what the national interest is.”

So only one of the links given here is barely comparable to Mussilini.

Lets have a quick rundown of what Mussilini did to really get accross what is meant here: Mussolini sought to ensure that no independent centers of power could exist:

  • Labor unions were replaced with state-run “corporations.”
  • Youth groups, sports clubs, and cultural organizations were absorbed into fascist structures.
  • Education was redesigned to indoctrinate children into fascist ideology.
  • Religious institutions (especially the Catholic Church) were pressured, negotiated with, and partially subordinated through the Lateran Accords.
  • Banned all political parties except the National Fascist Party.
  • Suppressed opposition newspapers, labor unions, and civic organizations.
  • Employers, workers, and the state were merged into state-supervised “corporations.” The goal was to ensure that every social identity — worker, student, parent, believer — was mediated through the state.

Targeting law firms, while certainly poor, cant really be equivalent too this.

The other link is him appointing someone to look over steel companies. This isnt him making the steel company a corporation of the feds. Whats likely happening here is that he is trying to appease the blue collar part of his base, and keeping steel jobs within the country. The intention here is seems different, at least to my eyes.

Then there is the part about the education cuts. Yeah, again, i agree its bad, but not fascism. The point of those policies is to reduce the federal governments influence and hand power to indvidual states and parents. This is the opposite of consolidation

Might is right

Also characteristic of fascism is what George Orwell called “bully-worship”: the principle that, as Thucydides famously put it, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” This view came across in Trump’s notorious Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which Trump showed open contempt for what he regarded as Ukraine’s weakness; it came across explicitly, and chillingly, when Stephen Miller, the president’s most powerful aide, told CNN’s Jack Tapper: “We live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” Those words, though alien to the traditions of American and Christian morality, could have come from the lips of any fascist dictator.

While I agree trump acted poorly in response to Zelensky here, the quote "We live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time." Clearly strikes me as descriptive, rather than normative. It would of course be ideal if being strong wasnt the relevant factor, but thats not the reality of the situation. Those who have power makes the rules, doesnt make it ok, but it is what it is.

Territorial and military aggression

One reason I held out against identifying Trumpism with fascism in his first term was Trump’s apparent lack of interest in aggression against other states; if anything, he had seemed shy about using force abroad. Well, that was then. In his second term, he has used military force promiscuously. Of course, many presidents have deployed force, but Trump’s explicitly predatory use of it to grab Venezuela’s oil and his gangster-style threat to take Greenland from Denmark “the easy way” or “the hard way” were 1930s-style authoritarian moves. The same goes for his contempt for international law, binding alliances, and transnational organizations such as the European Union—all of which impede the state’s unconstrained exercise of its will, a central fascist tenet. (Mussolini: “Equally foreign to the spirit of Fascism … are all internationalistic or League superstructures which, as history shows, crumble to the ground whenever the heart of nations is deeply stirred by sentimental, idealistic or practical considerations.”)

Ok, so greenland comments here, fair enough. Bad. But on the bright side, he rolled it back. His foreign policy isnt the same as desiring to invade and conquer every country a la Mussolini. CFR notes that “many of [trumps] actions mirror those of previous administrations,” even as the strategic framing differs.

This is the last one im gonna touch on, because i find it so fucking gross.

Politics as war

A distinctive mark of fascism is its conception of politics, best captured by Carl Schmitt, an early-20th-century German political theorist whose doctrines legitimized Nazism. Schmitt rejected the Madisonian view of politics as a social negotiation in which different factions, interests, and ideology come to agreement, the core idea of our Constitution. Rather, he saw politics as a state of war between enemies, neither of which can understand the other and both of which feel existentially threatened—and only one of which can win. The aim of Schmittian politics is not to share the country but to dominate or destroy the other side. This conception has been evident in MAGA politics since Michael Anton (now a Trump-administration official) published his famous article arguing that the 2016 election was a life-and-death battle to save the country from the left (a “Flight 93” election: “charge the cockpit or you die”). In the speech given by Stephen Miller at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, MAGA’s embrace of Schmittian totalism found its apotheosis: “We are the storm. And our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion … You are nothing. You are wickedness.”

Dude, for fucks sakes, the dude went and fucking murdered a man!. He almost certainly is not coming in good faith or wanting to be buddy buddy with conservatives or the people he perceive as fascists. Leftist extremist who are referring to others as fascists and desiring to bash the fash, and actually carrying out the violence are clearly asking for a fight. People have the right to denounce those kinds of people as the assholes they are. Last i checked, if you fired the first shot, you are the one starting the war.

This post is getting long, but i just wanted to rant about the parts that really bothered me

Fascist ideology isn't particularly well-defined and is mostly notable for its role among the Axis countries during WW2. This provides a good sanity-check when comparing something to fascism: is it more or less similar to fascism than the Allies were? If something wasn't distinctive to the fascist countries, but in fact was widespread among other countries as well, then one begins to suspect that the purpose of associating it with fascism (rather than with the countries that defeated fascism) is because the former has a worse reputation. You can define fascism so broadly that all of WW2 was just fascist infighting, but that makes it a much less useful label and means people have less reason to care about it.

I'd argue that the most common and consistent definition of fascism is "people who are willing to oppose communist revolutionaries with force".

Outside of the WW2 context it's usually what people on the left mean when they say it.

I've recently come up with an even more biting definition that's guaranteed to please no one, yet I think fits most actual "use cases": fascism is using communist means to achieve non-communist ends.

(Paramilitary youth groups, mass surveillance, centralization of power, expropriation of private enterprises, media censorship, etc.)

Orwell once described fascism as "socialism shorn of all its virtues".

My immediate reaction was "what virtues?"

Orwell was a socialist, albeit a cynical and disillusioned one, and he had trouble publishing Animal Farm because the only publishers willing to publish anti-communist parables were anti-communist. Might be worth bearing in mind.

Oh, I'm aware.

For many people, "meaning well" and being nice is very important, sometimes even more than actually accomplishing anything. There is in particular a stark divide between left and right (and also men vs women) on this issue. Plenty of my friends and acquaintances, when confronted with the dysfunction of some left-wing regulations, will nevertheless defend them and not want them abolished, mostly on account that they were originally meant well and should at most be reformed (which nobody ever kicks off and thus never actually happens). Aristocrats who never actually accomplished anything and certainly don't deserve their wealth will often be more popular on account of modest charitable spending and a public image carefully designed to be maximally inoffensive (which is much easier if you're not constrained by trying to accomplish something) than a revolutionary entrepreneur.

Their view, as I understand it, is that communism at least sounds nice in theory and means well originally, and the same goes for communist activist, whereas fascist activist are just irredeemable monsters. Which I even partially agree with, the problem is just that the people they call fascists pretty much never identify as such and have only little commonalities with the historic concept. It's always Adorno-style sophistry where you use a definition of fascism that is 50% totalitarism and 50% being right-wing and then, upon showing that the right-wingers are indeed right-wing, claim that there are large parallels between fascism and whatever right-winger you choose. Not to mention that irrespective of the good intention of the communist, I don't want to end up in the gulag anyway.

For many people, "meaning well" and being nice is very important, sometimes even more than actually accomplishing anything. There is in particular a stark divide between left and right (and also men vs women) on this issue. Plenty of my friends and acquaintances, when confronted with the dysfunction of some left-wing regulations, will nevertheless defend them and not want them abolished, mostly on account that they were originally meant well and should at most be reformed (which nobody ever kicks off and thus never actually happens).

I can't help but notice how well this parallels the discourse around generative AI and whether or not it has a "soul" in the sense of the author's intentions. To some people, this intent of the author exists in an image (or video or song or a block of text or etc.) only insofar as the actual final pixels represent such an intent; the actual thoughts that went through the author's head in the moment don't matter. To others, it's the actual thoughts that matter, and how well the pixels convey those thoughts are merely a curiosity.

Right now, the culture war lines drawn in the world of generative AI doesn't seem to neatly match other lines of older culture wars, but I wonder if this aspect will mean we'll see support/opposition to treating media generated by AI as having exactly as much meaning as those generated by humans without AI getting split up in right/left or male/female. It's possible we're seeing it happen already (it's hard to get a sense of the latter, especially, since new tech is almost always heavily male-dominated by default).

That issue is somewhat confused by postmodernism and death-of-the-author being associated with left-wing intellectual discourse, even though it's also left-wing to hate on AI for lacking soul. It's not quite irreconcilable - you can say, for example, that the fun thing about experiencing art is trying to guess what the author meant, so that the game is equally spoiled by rigid adherence to factually documented authorial intent or by the knowledge that the content was spat out by a machine and there is no 'there' there to guess at. But it's an interesting paradox.

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