Don't wanna write a wall of text, but historically fascist movements have come to power under the banner of a charismatic leader with majority support from the population. As fascistic as America is today, I'm not sure there is enough support to sustain a serious fascist movement. Nearly every major city is at least a 50/50 split among liberal democrats and republicans. Many of those republicans are politically uneducated and don't have a real desire for authoritarian dictate. The Republican candidate has won the popular vote in the presidential election once in the last 30 years and the only places where fascists outnumber every day liberals is in rural America.

So can fascism exist without popular majority support in dense urban areas? What does the fall of capitalism look like with no strong left or right movement? Am I naïve and should we expect reactionary attitudes to grow in response to a collapsing economy? My materialist brain is usually pretty good at seeing the direction we're headed but I'm not sure on this one.

I suppose the doomer take is that we haven't actually collapsed yet, and when the jenga tower really starts to fall, libs will be forced to choose between going right and going left. At that point if we don't have a popular workers movement with enough power, actual fascism will become a threat.

  • InevitableSwing [none/use name]
    ·
    2 years ago

    the freedom of the internet is what is causing social alienation... they countinue to mix up cause and effect.

    There's a guy I follow on Twitter named Will Stancil who rabid believer of that. He's nothing special. He's yet another generic liberal who probably self-identifies as a progressive because he hopes the democrats will finally listen to people like him.

    But his takes are so delusional and he is so obsessed by the idea that tv and the internet warps people's minds - he makes me laugh. Tiktok corrupting the mind of the young is - by far - is favorite bugbear. He has ridiculous thread after ridiculous thread...

    People are making fun of this, but they shouldn't. TikTok has 50 million daily US users - undoubtedly vastly skewed towards the young. That's 33 times as many daily viewers as Fox News. If you don't think that's politically relevant, I don't know what to tell you.

    Tweet

    I dunno. Maybe people - especially young people - don't need Tiktok or any other site on the net to dislike Biden or even hate him. Maybe they have those feelings because Bidin is worse than fucking useless and the future looks bleak as can be.

    If you're young and you have no hope - why would you have positive feelings for the old codger in the White House who won't do anything?