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?
fascism is a post-hoc category for the state ideologies of Italy and Germany in the 1940s and similar, specifically constructed to explain how liberal democracy can autocannibalize so spectacularly. From this perspective, it seems like liberalism always contains fascist elements, which only become identifiable as such when they come to threaten the democratic elements. This fits with another common definition, that fascism is the violence of the capitalist frontier turned inward.
that said, all states are fascism in repose :3c
It's not post hoc. It was the self-description in the 1930s.
if discussions of fascism only used the definitions of self-identified fascists, they'd be very short discussions indeed.
Mussolini was pretty straightforward about what fascism is.
very true, but Mussolini-coined, Mussolini-identified, and Mussolini-defined fascism isn't sufficient to correctly materially identify and make predictions of all the fascism that proceeded it
Read this as "Mussolini-coded," which is how I'm gonna refer to Italians from now on.