I think there's kind of a misunderstanding of fascism baked into this analysis. America is already a fascist country. It is genocidal, racist, imperialist, martial, anti-communist, patriarchal, has a hyper religious section of the population, a semi-theocratic government, it puts millions of people into prisons, etc. The slim veneer of democracy we have doesn't meaningfully separate us from fascism.
We all go along with the fascism unless you cook up a definition of anti-fascism that you fit into. The funny thing is that there are a lot of people opposed to this fascism, probably even a majority. The problem is that they'll never actually do anything to combat it. Most of the fascists will never actually do anything either. Americans have been so neutered of any political power we simply exist like specks if dust floating around at the whim of the currents. Whether we agree with them or not is largely meaningless.
I don't think there's necessarily been a growth in fascist activity either. I live in the north but the Klan was active up here for most of the twentieth century. Birchers were all over the place. The Tea Party rose up after them. Those right wing nuts out in the Northwest are the descendants of ten generations of right wing nuts, and the same for their comrades all over the country. Polite society was forced to acknowledge the fascism baked into our reality because of the progress that has been made on social issues, not because it has grown. It's like the 2020 protests didn't happen because of some uptick in police killings, they were because those killings were always happening.
When you make this assertion you end up needing to talk about different levels of fascism. Modi, Erdogan, Bolsonaro, Marcos, Suharto, Pinochet, Salazar, Franco, and then the Big Three: they're not all exactly in the same category, and not the same as what we have in the US now.
It behooves us to have a rigorous definition of what fascism looks like, connected to a rigorous definition of who fascists are.
The Big Three: Hitler, Mussolini, and a dang cheeto in the White House.
I've opted for defining fascism as the petty bourgeois policies that the big bourgeois are comfortable with. Fascism manifests itself differently depending on the material conditions of the time and country so this is definition is general enough while also being clear to anyone with a basic grasp of Marxism. It also covers left-fascism (reactionary social democracy).
Congratulations, you have a definition of fascism that includes the majority of present governments on earth. Do you have any subcategories to separate them from the Third Reich, or are you just fueling the "everything far enough from my position is fascism" allegation?
Like I said, how fascism manifests depends on the material conditions of the place and time. There are some versions that are more violent no doubt, but all of them can and will be as deadly as Nazi Germany if it serves capital. As a Marxist I say that the bourgeoisie are the enemy and fascism is the poison they inflict on us all.
It is worth noting that the US and Western Europe, both the inspirations for fascism and the crevices it was forced back into by the Soviet Union, are now the center of the world system. Their rehabilitation and reintegration of fascists into society is well documented. Their meddling in foreign governments to establish puppet states is well documented. The complete disregard that they and their puppet states have for human life is abundantly clear. Is it that absurd to call the majority of states fascist when they are so clearly controlled by countries that were so intimate with fascism? What could be more fascist than being told that millions of people will die if we don't stop greenhouse gas emissions, having the power to do so, and then choosing to exacerbate the problem by increasing greenhouse gas production? This is exactly what most of these countries are doing at the behest of their financiers in Europe and the US.
I would say that it's more useful to have an umbrella term of "reactionary" that encompasses pro-bourgeois policies, and includes fascism as a specific subset.
Hirohito, although that government doesn't quite fit the mold of the others.
unless you cook up a definition of anti-fascism that you fit into.
Anti-fascism is when you're me and the more me you are, the more conventionally attractive you are.
It is genocidal, racist, imperialist, martial, anti-communist, patriarchal, has a hyper religious section of the population, a semi-theocratic government,
you could say all this about Spain in the years before the civil war--many things about the imperial nations are fascistic, unjust, and awful, but that doesn't mean they can't get more fascist or transition to an acknowledged and outwardly anti-democratic dictatorship.
growth in fascist activity is expected by the acceleration of climate crisis & deepening crises of capitalism and US hegemony. the right now evidence is less charlottesville rallies but immigration policy & ICE concentration camps. the purpose of this exercize is shooting into the dark on how the next decades are going to look as things will get worse and the left & far-right necessarily rise to compete with one another
i’m not going to hazard a guess at percentages but i want to add some perspective.
as gets said time and time again by crusty old leftists in discussions such as this one, fascism refers to a very specific ideology and moment in time, in the first half of the 20th century. its descendant ideological strains can’t really be called fascism as much more than as a derogatory remark toward them, evoking the now well known consequences of the 20th century fascist movement, namely a global war and the deaths of untold millions of innocents. nowadays, many of these descendant ideologies don’t really see themselves as being aligned with 20th century fascism, and in fact will proudly defend their own beliefs by pointing out that they stand in opposition to the capital f Fascists of yesteryear. and they earnestly believe they are on the opposite side of some sort of spectrum, choosing to define themselves by their obsession with personal liberty in contrast to the authoritarianism of the National Socialists. in their mind, the parallels are coincidental.
there are some clowns like Patriot Front who deliberately invoke the aesthetics of the fascists, being more honest about the roots of their belief and not deluding themselves into thinking they stand in opposition to fascism. they are a minority of modern reactionaries. the evangelical homeschooling parents who are convinced public schools are communist indoctrination camps, the small business owner Qanon cultists, the MAGA-hat Floridian retirees— these are the base of the modern reactionary threat in America. their ideological has become more North American centric, built on an obsessive and misguided preoccupation with ‘liberty’ and skin color than on the fleshed-out history of absolutist monarchist rule and virulent antisemitism that European Fascism was centered around a century prior. when they call Joe Brandon a dictator for forgiving student loans or saying that some pitiful tax increase to fund cops is going turn impressionable children into hiphop-loving transsexual antifas, they may be exaggerating but they aren’t arguing in bad faith. they actually believe this shit, just as most of the high ranking Nazis earnestly believed communism was a disease caused by christendom’s inaction on cleansing the festering wound that was the existence of jews.
in that sense, i’d say less than 1% of americans are ‘fascists’. but the majority of republican voters believe nowadays in a loosely defined ideology that is not direct continuation of European fascism, but a twisted rats nest of Nazi anticommunism and the same hysterical white bourgeois land owner brainworms that led to the southern ruling class saying shit like “slavery is a necessary element of freedom, and trying to stomp it out constitutes tyranny” and seceding in a suicidal fit of Jeffersonian yeoman-independence-idolosing rage. that same delusional worship of capital with local brainworms and peculiarities baked in that led to the Final Solutional and the American Civil War are rearing their bead again in the Republican party during the Trump era. it was always there, especially among southern Democrats before the ideological realignment of the US parties made these kinds of people coalesce around the GOP.
the way that this modern post-fascist movement will affect America is very different than the way the rise of the Nazis affected Germany and Italy, because our two party political system is so vastly different than Weimar Germany or the Italian constitutional monarchy. its hard to what will happen going forward as a result of this, but the gist of what i’m getting at here is that a distinctly north american reactionary ideology that sometimes gains enough self awareness to deliberately emulate the aesthetics and policies of 20th century european fascism is already here to stay and growing stronger. your Qanon uncle might not be a fascist because that historical moment has already come and pass, but he and millions of others have become something roughly analogous to fascism. if we go by that metric, the majority of republican voters could be seen as “fascists” already.
For fascism, I tend to use the criteria of whether there’s a descent from fascist movements, or whether there’s an outright claiming to be fascist. That works for most European and international groups.
Now, for American movements in particular, they often fail those tests. One approach is to give it a special carve out, on the basis that Manifest Destiny was a proto-fascist movement. It and other American policies inspired the fascists of Europe. In a sense, America was the modern ur-fascist state.
As you’ve touched on, a key feature of fascism is borderline incoherency. It is not a coherent ideology, and the further you get from Mussolini, the less coherent it becomes. It thrives on the occult and conspiracy. That makes it difficult to draw a line between category 1 and category 2. I guess the best way is to put 2 in the ‘respectable fascists’ camp.
A- 0.5%. Could be a little less, but probably on the rise and could reach as high as 1% within a decade. I have met 3 or 4 certain fascists in person (out of a total of thousands of acquaintances), none of whom had any in-person connections to other fascists. But I suspect their numbers are concentrated in reactionary hotbeds.
B- 16%. Here I'm going with a midpoint between the number that believe the 2020 general election was stolen and the number that say violence against this regime is justified right now, cross-checked against the percent of people with wealth above the nationwide mean (as a proxy for the class of lifetime net creditors).
C- 80%, plus or minus 2%.
D- 4%, and that's pushing it. 5-8% took part in the 2020 wave of BLM protests in any form in person, which is a very low bar for personal risk. Marxists and anarchists and democratic socialists add up to maybe just over 1%, the vast majority being demsocs. The remainder of this is left-liberals who'd be willing to put something on the line for their beliefs.
For my response, cf. responses from @KiaKaha and @ghosts.
The reactionary minority isn't enough to win democratic elections; their game plan this whole time has been to minimize voter turnout, and introduce as many abstractions as possible into the republican institutions such that the one-sixth minority can have a majority in government. They have been making steady progress on this front, and are now in a position where presidents who won only by the distortion of the Electoral College have appointed a majority of the current Supreme Court, which will have a huge reactionary impact for a long time.
That all still falls short of seizing power as a regimented, palingenetic, ultranationalist government. That may happen, and it may be funded by Group 2, but it will mostly just be Group 1 doing it. And Group 1 is way more prepared to do act along these lines than Group 4 is.
Your analysis is more thorough than mine—using responses to polled questions is a better proxy than just plain votes.
I don’t think there’s much likelihood of an outright ‘seizing power’ by the fash minority. Rather, it’ll be a slow squeeze, like what’s already happening as you identify.
Next time the Republicans get in, it’ll have a few more nutters pushing a stolen election narrative. We’ll get a few more ‘safety checks’. Maybe one day there will be an election effectively decided by the Supreme Court (but that itself boggles belief a little—it’s hard to imagine the Supreme Court interfering with the electoral process to award the election).
I don’t think there’s much likelihood of an outright ‘seizing power’ by the fash minority.
That would be more likely to happen if their grip started to slip.
Even then, they can usually get away with just making loud noises and having policy bend their way.
The Dems would really rather not have that fight if they can avoid it.
Do you think they'd allow the Democrats to win the White House plus the House and Senate again, without attemping another 1/6, and do you think the Dems would just roll over and let them have it?
Doing napkin math without looking at others’ answers:
62% of people vote. Of the 38% who don’t, I’ll put 33% in the apathetic ‘go along’ basket of 3. I’ll give an overestimation for ardent anarchists who refuse to vote, or people in prison, or kids, for a charitable 5% in basket 4.
Approx half of the 62%, being 30%, vote GOP. Let’s say, charitably, that only a fifth of them are actually fash, putting a total 6% in basket 1. The remaining 24% are in basket 2.
The 32% who vote Dem are where it gets hard. I’ll say a sixth of them, 5%, will actually fight in basket 4. The remaining 27% go in basket 3.
That gives us a total of:
Basket 1: 6%
Basket 2: 24%
Basket 3: 60%
Basket 4: 10%
Meaning we have 6% who want to do it, 24% who will help them, 60% who will look on, and 10% who will push back.
Edit; pretty close to OP’s. Slightly less optimistic, even.
I ended up getting really close to your results too just going by general vibes
And when does that regime collapse? The end of America isn’t the end of the world.
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2% - Neo Nazis
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32% - Republicans
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65% - Liberals and Independents
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1% - Leftists
There are really not that many real leftists in America. I would consider even your most principled rad-lib to capitulate to fascism because they are at their core, still going to be capitalists. The idea that some liberals are not going to go along with fascism isn't one that I buy. They will roll over, and the reason they are so fired up and scared about fascism winning at the voting booth is because they know they will obey and won't fight it.
That looks pretty accurate to me. Agree with your position on libs too
So, 99% that will go along with it and 1% that gets disappeared.
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I operate on the assumption its a solid 20%, with an additional 15% being sympathetic
5% open fash, 25% fash-adjacent petit bourgeoisie, 50% centrist go-alongs, 20% cool people
Based on people I run into anyway
Edit: wow, guess I've got a bias towards optimism because no one else pegged cool people at such a high %, lol
I'm not American so I can't answer the question. I can however answer the question for my homeland Denmark, the Nordic socialist workers' paradise that American progressives dream of.
Open fascists: Less than once percent. There are some fucked up shitheads who try to reenact the 1930's but people here know that nazis are bad as they paid us a visit during WWII.
Cryptofascists: Around 40% is totally on board with racism, police violence, the carceral state and the military. They love seeing poors and non-whites being stomped into the ground and they have nothing but scorn for any kind of social progress.
Centrists, enablers: Around 35%. They might not be keen on fascism themselves but they have no qualms treating fascists as legitimate political actors or of enabling them if it serves their own purposes.
Cool people: Around ten percent are principled anti-fascists. Most of them will be too scared or demotivated to do anything when shit hits the fan
Openly 10
Adjacent 45
Go along 40
Anti 5
My estimate for fash-adjacent seems to be higher than some others here, but I think it's because the prompt in OP frames them as "small business NRx types, HOA suburbanites too well-off to march with the openly fash they consider lowly losers", though personally I know several people are working class yet somehow fit into this category.
i don't know that this exercise will produce much useful discussion, but i'd guess 3%, 20%, 67%, and 10%, respectively. I think the problem with your categories is the wide variance in and gradations of belief. like, i don't think it's controversial to say that a very small proportion of americans are self-identified neonazis or white nationalists. but how many support the state enacting violence on the undesirables of society, especially the homeless, addicts, and criminals? how many support the US military without even really understanding what it does or why? and for antifascists, sure maybe we'd break the law to fight fascism, but how many would take up arms? and maybe if we live in a blue state we would help someone from a red state get an abortion, but how many would physically fight ICE agents trying to kidnap people?
but how many support the state enacting violence on the undesirables of society, especially the homeless, addicts, and criminals?
I wish this was an actual survey question. I fantasize that even asking this question would immediately cause most people to get a "deer in headlights" look on their face and struggle to answer because the implications are so horrific. Maybe just asking the question would be enough to convince people that there is, here and now, a non-zero number of our population who would actually respond in the affirmative to that question...or maybe that's just wishful thinking.
Openly fascist and in the streets: less than 1%, but maybe as high as 3% if we count the most active Q-anoners
Above + pro-fascist but won't risk their own necks: 20% (It's just usually about 20% in western countries + this is the number of Q-anon believers)
Above + will go along with anything as long as the fascists don't come for them personally: 80%
Antifa, or at least antifa if shit kicks off: 7%. (Higher number than I was expecting to put here honestly, but I don't expect it to be substantially different than the number of people who showed up for the George Floyd protests)
We just saw a speech by Biden that was drenched in fascist imagery. It looked like something straight out of V for Vendetta.
It was met with wild cheers.
Fascist imagery aka the color red? Come on dude, he just looked like Brandon. He's actually funding American fascism through his police program, I don't think we need to fall back on shit like this
He positioned uniformed soldiers behind him. The meaning was quite clear. It could have come out of "Triumph of the Will".
Goddamn , you are a cartoon character. We know he's a fascist, we know he's the figurehead of a genocidal empire, grabhing a photo where he looks scawy is not supporting either
It wasn't some kind of screw-up. They deliberately constructed this visual entity because they knew the terror it would create. Typically the American power structure conceals itself behind a mask of "democracy" and all that stuff. Going full on Leni Riefenstahl is something new.
You can't actually believe the words you are saying, right?
lmao he was a fuckin dork & you only got the scary pics by cropping and staging appropriately, something notably done by right-wingers and not the official releases. and they only did that because he was mean to the republicans without actually promising or taking any actions against them :biden-troll:
nevermind the democrats couldn't summon enough commoners to a speech to actually simulate a fascist populist moment :che-laugh:
Curious, are you able to post a link? Would like to see.
