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.

  • ANTI_MAGE [none/use name]
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    edit-2
    2 years ago

    I don't know how I feel on that subject either way. I agree with what you're saying, but there was a lot of support from capital even from the US (see: IBM) and I would argue that the US wouldn't have entered the war without the demand from the working class that was given power during the labor surge of that era

    but also there is the argument that yeah, they still privatized everything, the caloric intake of germans actually went down during hitler's reign, and that it was still reliant on capital to the extent that it cost them the war. I genuinely don't know either way. I would err on the side of "the working class will win the 2020's" but that's pretty pollyana