Alt-right, far left -- basically everything but Liberals and respectable Republicans like Mark Rubio is a Russian psy-op! You can't get more left wing than me, a neo-con!
Seriously, though, the Russian government does not care what any of us think. General sentiment has no baring on US policy, why would you waste resources influencing it? The "alt-right" ascended to the "mainstream right" in America because young alt-right posters got jobs working for Republican campaigns. That happened on its own, nobody forced the RNC to give them jobs. Stop blaming our stupid stupid politics on some scary computer boogeyman an ocean away.
It does more than undermine it. It forces the question of what is to be done when a large chunk of your country (30%? 40%?) is braying for open fascism, another large chunk is at least fash-curious, and your precious laws and norms are utterly useless to stop them?
It's probably closer to 20/25%. Half of US citizens don't participate, and more than half of the people that do participate are pretty repulsed by our right-wing.
eh, even then, I think I'm overestimating a bit. And a chunk of that would be fair-weather fascist, they'd only support it if it looked like it was going to be successful and there weren't enough consequences for doing so.
The picture of an "Openly Fascist United States" just seems a little too... camp theater, if that makes sense. Like, in terms of our imperial policy, we're already basically there. "Open Fascism" would just be bringing our international policy back home and implementing it here. And... I think there'd be a crisis of legitimacy before that happened, the country would break apart into regional factions. Those would be where capital-F Fascism, the sort that feeds people into an industrial slaughterhouse, would be at it's most likely.
Alt-right, far left -- basically everything but Liberals and respectable Republicans like Mark Rubio is a Russian psy-op! You can't get more left wing than me, a neo-con!
Seriously, though, the Russian government does not care what any of us think. General sentiment has no baring on US policy, why would you waste resources influencing it? The "alt-right" ascended to the "mainstream right" in America because young alt-right posters got jobs working for Republican campaigns. That happened on its own, nobody forced the RNC to give them jobs. Stop blaming our stupid stupid politics on some scary computer boogeyman an ocean away.
Because accepting that general sentiment has no baring on policy undermines their “we just need to
harder!” worldview.
It does more than undermine it. It forces the question of what is to be done when a large chunk of your country (30%? 40%?) is braying for open fascism, another large chunk is at least fash-curious, and your precious laws and norms are utterly useless to stop them?
It's probably closer to 20/25%. Half of US citizens don't participate, and more than half of the people that do participate are pretty repulsed by our right-wing.
Yeah that's probably a better estimate of how many people would openly support naked fascism.
eh, even then, I think I'm overestimating a bit. And a chunk of that would be fair-weather fascist, they'd only support it if it looked like it was going to be successful and there weren't enough consequences for doing so.
The picture of an "Openly Fascist United States" just seems a little too... camp theater, if that makes sense. Like, in terms of our imperial policy, we're already basically there. "Open Fascism" would just be bringing our international policy back home and implementing it here. And... I think there'd be a crisis of legitimacy before that happened, the country would break apart into regional factions. Those would be where capital-F Fascism, the sort that feeds people into an industrial slaughterhouse, would be at it's most likely.