I think some apologists try to characterise the Germans as an aberation and instead express a preference for Italys regime.
But we can definitely see in the US that the corporate elite - some of whom are old enough to have fathers who were Nazi sympathizers like Charles Koch - are the ones motivating the hysteria about trans students, bathrooms, abortion, etc to organize a voting bloc that will support their chosen candidates.
But how many fascists are aware that they associate their enemy with communism?
I wonder how we push back against this right wing strategy. We know they’ll do it every time.
Even the ethnic genocide of Jews in Nazi Germany - the extermination of the Jewish race - was deeply rooted in the ideology that Jews were a core component of Bolshevism
not so much as far as anyone can tell they hated Jews first and most of the reasons they gave for hating Jews they gave worked backwards from hating Jews to blaming them for a thing they don't like. They also baselessly and contradictorily accused the Jews of all being capitalist despite Nazi Germany also being capitalist
basically the Nazis were extremely incoherent but very clear that they hate Jews albeit for confusing and nonsensical reasons
they were also extremely anti-communist which was where their material base came from and Mussolini was more clearly anti-communist being slightly less of a rambling lunatic than Hitler
I once met a man who claimed that the Jews had kicked him off the bus simply because he was drunk, yelling about Jews, and trying to fight the driver. That man was about as precise in his reasoning for why he hated Jews as Nazi Germany
If the rejoinder to that is “well yeah that’s because a lot of mainstream conservatives are fascists” — okay, I guess
I read Ur-Fascism and the takeaway really is that the two are the same thing. The Leninist analysis that capital-f "Fascism" is what happens when capitalists drop their liberal idealism and do whatever it takes to defend the system is a nice dividing line though.
Fascism is also a direct and violent reaction to internationalism
"Hello smart people, can you help me camouflage my fascism so people stop calling me fascist, thanks"
To be fair liberals have muddied the waters so much that the populace has no idea what fascism is except for Hitler and maybe Mussolini.
Also even lefties can have pretty incoherent takes on it, waffling between Eco rule-setting and Stalin takes (which I'm partial to) and doing a kind of shit job at recognizing the fascism that's already present and has been for a long time, just as something that's so normative it doesn't even get categorized. Neoliberalism is basically a form of the same thing, for example, just in a more developed imperialist world.
I just finished reading it (thanks @ssjmarx ) Got hand it to the republicans for getting a perfect 14/14.
It's good but liberals use it as the sole indicator of fascism. It's an essay about the social causes and effects of fascism, and the underlying philosophy and stuff. But it's not a materialistic analysis of anything economic or institutional.
Ur-fascism just describes some surface level symptoms of fascism but misses the structure and causes almost entirely.
It aims to describe the semiotics of fascism, it exclusively deals with which believes fascists like to virtue signal about and how they do that. It does that really well, and it doesn't need to go into the material causes of fascism, because bolsheviks already got that covered decades before Eco. I'd stick with Dimitroff personally, i think he is pretty spot-on in that regard. He describes why fascism is, Eco describes how it is. These theories are complementary, like base and superstructure. Both should be used where they apply.
ofc both the semiotics and the material causes 100% apply to Amerikan "conservatism". That does not mean that everything Eco and Dimitroff and me don't like is fascism, it means that the GOP is genuinely fascist, decidedly moreso than any other conservative party in the west, to the point where i expect them to try and pull off the next openly conducted domestic Amerikan genocide within this decade.
I keep looking for a definition of fascism that doesn't indicate that I am in fact a fascist. Please help.
Academically, I think its worth noting the real difference between Mitt Romney Liberalism and Ron DeSantis / Greg Abbott style white nationalism. The Bush/Cheney regime was regularly compared to Nazism, but it was not meaningfully distinct from the Clinton/Obama periods that surrounded it.
At some point, I guess you can just throw up your hands and proclaim everything Americans have done has been a shambling beast of white nationalist consumption and degradation. But that almost feels like fed-jacketing the plurality of the general public. You're just kinda ceding that there's something inherently anti-social about the entire West, rather than identifying the material drivers for these philosophies and patterns of behavior.
I don't think it's throwing your hand up so much as it is pointing and shrieking like Donald Sutherland.
Nearly all Americans have either hooted and cheered as our nation slaughtered millions or were forced to live with it complacent or under duress.
This isn't about him not knowing this shit.
What he's doing here is grasping for a left and right of fascism. To shift the mainstream further right without going one-party you need a left and a right of fascism to maintain the release valves.
