Is the US fascist? Are all bourgeois states fascistic? If not then why are some fascist and others not? Is post-Stalin USSR fascist? Was FDR fascist? Is Putin fascist?
Is the US fascist? Are all bourgeois states fascistic? If not then why are some fascist and others not? Is post-Stalin USSR fascist? Was FDR fascist? Is Putin fascist?
Any definition of Fascism that doesn't fit the US is absolutely worthless. Nazi Germany was explicitly modeled on the US in nearly every way imaginable.
I think people get hung up on the US not having the exact same race madness and violent dispossession as the Third Reich, but that's a very shallow view. You can absolutely see the exact same race madness as Germany but directed at the US' undercastes if you talk to literally 99% of white people in rural areas or probably 75% of white people in suburban areas. Moreover, violent dispossession still occurs in the US, but in a more subtle and lassez-faire way. But the Nazi-style Primitive Accumulation that people seem to think is missing was the entirety of American history until basically the 1970s.
As Aimé Césaire says, Fascism is colonialism turned inward. The US is ~400 years into settler colonialism, and every single city is occupied territory.
Ok let me make one last comparison. You know the Years of Lead that everyone who's just starting to move past their RadLib stage loves to talk about? <500 deaths in three decades. Adjusted for population, that's about three weeks of gun deaths in the US. Obviously that's not a direct comparison, but the conditions for this violence weren't handed down by God. I haven't done in depth study on gun violence in the US, but the only materialist hypothesis that makes any sense to me is that the US needed white vigilantes to wipe out the natives, keep the undercastes in line, and discipline labor where state power was lacking (and you can see these vigilantes being integrated into the state at a moment's notice in thousands and thousands of instances), and our current conditions are a direct result of the way those needs were met. And do we really all think that the invisible ruling class that is the intersection of finance and intelligence have nothing to do with fostering these conditions? Allen Dulles was literally named by Allen Dulles Jr as a spy for the Third Reich!
Ok I guess I can't stop with one last comparison since this is the topic I think about probably more than everything else combined. JFK was killed by elements of what we now call the National Security State and since then literally every single President has had nearly identical foreign policy, only varying in its intensity and targets. The US has the world's most extensive and powerful network of secret police (but they're not called that due to the need to keep a facade of liberal democracy).
Ok this next claim is not 100% accurate and is an attempt to make people think: the Mode of Production in the US is, like Nazi Germany and the Roman Empire before it, conquest. The US doesn't make its money through production, it makes it by dominating other nations, taking their resources and enslaving their people. This is all just carried out much more subtly (though when the rubber really meets the road, you can see the Roman Empire in all its crucifying brutality shine through).
From its very inception, it was consciously and explicitly modeled on the Roman Republic (which was not much less guilty of conquest than the Empire, and obviously needed to set the stage for the Empire) and every stage of development has been a modern version of Rome. The word colony comes from Latin and British colonies were, once again, explicitly made to emulate the Roman model. The continental US was unambiguously conquered (they make a desert and call it peace, anyone?). Slavery--the defining feature of the Roman economy--was the bedrock of the US, and even when the Feudal model was disposed of, things neatly transitioned into a more lassez-faire version of slavery. The Dollop's episode on convict leasing is a good little peak into one of the many many ways that slavery evolved. When Reconstruction was sabotaged, you could see the reemergence from the plantation class of an explicit aristocracy in the South, and a slightly less explicit industrial aristocracy in the North. Angola Prison is operated by the family that owned it as a plantation pre-war, by the way. There are hundreds of families that have maintained their wealth and influence through methods very similar to the Roman nobility (Michael Parenti would namedrop the Morgans, the Mellons, and the Rockefellers at the drop of a hat, and I fear that Communists today shy away from critiques and analysis of these people for fear of appearing to be "conspiracy theorists."). There are open agents of the state (sorry, I mean "former spies") populating literally every national news agency, and every major broadcaster has explicitly entrenched interests with the state and the military-industrial complex. The undercastes of the US are made up of the descendants of explicit chattel slaves and of modern peoples from conquered nations, though largely moved by the market instead of men in armor with spears. As with Rome, "American interests" can be conjured up at a moment's notice, and nearly every casus belli is an explicit lie made to manipulate the non-noble population. Both the US and Rome have the mythology of ending monarchy as ideological bedrock, yet both went on to create regimes just as--if not more--brutal, because the real objection was not to unjust rule but the domination of a foreigner over the nobility.
What are the three states that most explicitly evoked Rome? Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the United States of America. The Fasces is the symbol of the authority of the Roman state!
I apologize for being so discursive and rambly, I'm just kind of throwing out every comparison I can think of.