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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   28101 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

When people say Trump is fascist, you should take them seriously, not literally :V

Clearly strikes me as descriptive, rather than normative.

It's not. Have you seen the context that quote is from? It's Miller justifying the US trying to strongarm Denmark into surrendering Greenland. It's not simply a bare description*, much as its proponents try to present it as such. It's a belief that power entitles you to do what you want, and that acting with scruples or restraint is weakness and stupidity. It is also why they become so petulant and angry when threats fail to secure submission - it's a violation of their understanding of order of the world and why the Trump administration is soft on Russia and China. It's why they seem to have miscalculated so badly with Iran. The IRI was supposed to be reminded of our overwhelmingly power and be awed into submission. Now they're fumbling because it turns out that "might makes right" is actually an extremely naive way of looking at the world.

"Bully worship" is an extremely apposite label. One of the reasons "bootlicker" has such resonance an insult is that it captures this attitude very effectively.

Last i checked, if you fired the first shot, you are the one starting the war.

I am once again reminded that right-wing political violence is completely invisible to many. Either it's excused because it's carried out under a veneer or law enforcement or the perpetrator is written off as a crazy person who in no way reflects on the right more generally. Or the perp gets a pardon. The history of political violence in America did not begin on 9/10/25.

*even as a bare description it is wrong, but it has the appeal of sounding superficially correct and looking like edgy truth-telling.

I am once again reminded that right-wing political violence is completely invisible to many. Either it's excused because it's carried out under a veneer or law enforcement or the perpetrator is written off as a crazy person who in no way reflects on the right more generally. Or the perp gets a pardon. The history of political violence in America did not begin on 9/10/25.

I think more generally it's that you remember and internalize what offended and outraged you, and not what didn't. I'm sure there's a certain kind of trans skeptical person that can cite chapter and verse of every bad thing a trans person has done in the United States over the last 10 years, while your average trans-friendly progressive either didn't hear about such incidents or even if they did hear about them, they weren't horribly offended by them or were happy to say something like, "Yeah, trans people are human, they do bad things just like everyone else," and moved on with their lives.

In a way, it is a form of political myopia that basically everyone who sees themselves as part of a larger political coalition ends up experiencing. The only way to avoid it is to feel in your bones that neither the Right nor the Left are "us", and to instead center your "us" in some completely orthogonal grouping. Otherwise, it will take constant effort to correct for this "myopia" due to then nature of human psychology. And most people don't want to correct the myopia because righteous fury feels good.

There's certainly truth to that, in that most people tend to downplay the infractions of their friends and play up the infractions of their enemies. However, I consistently observe a meaningful difference in how left-wingers and right-wingers have talked about political violence over the past decade, which I think reflects their differing attitudes towards politics more broadly.

Left-wingers (or, more properly, the forerunners of the social justice movement) brought us the phrase "everything is political". While obnoxious to argue against because it involves dealing with people playing word games, it at least clarifies how many of them view the world. You don't have to struggle to get them to acknowledge the political nature of an act. Right-wingers (or at least the current populist-right), by contrast, have a habit of dividing things into 'not political' (meaning: reflects their beliefs/assumptions) and 'political' (meaning: challenges their beliefs/assumptions). Thus you get RWers complain about something being made political because, e.g. it has a gay character or something.

This difference in mindset impacts the way they process acts of political violence. For left wingers, they might condemn it, they might support it, they might try to disown it depending on their mood, particular beliefs, and the act in question, but they're generally not going to insist it wasn't political or didn't happen or doesn't count because the perp was crazy. This is not the case for right-wingers. Right-wing political violence is almost always either outright denied or shifted to another category in the eyes of the broader right (often in a way that is incoherent).

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