considering the number of credentialed historians who still refuse to call settler colonialism "genocide" I'm not inclined to just defer to the experts' definitions here
― Left, Sunday, 24 January 2021 14:15 (three years ago) link
Yeah, it's a bit of a "let me tell you what real fascism is" and then waving away what fascism actually is... would Evans consider the US-backed Suharto regime fascistic, for example, because it didn't live up to his standards of organization and rigidity?
― The return of our beloved potatoes (the table is the table), Sunday, 24 January 2021 15:00 (three years ago) link
I don't get too hung up about the word fascist. Words have loose meanings, fuzzy edges. It's OK if you use it on Trump, it's OK if you don't think Trump qualifies.
― wasdnuos (abanana), Sunday, 24 January 2021 15:23 (three years ago) link
saw this just now:
https://jewishcurrents.org/neofascism-after-trump/
― xyzzzz__, Sunday, 24 January 2021 19:17 (three years ago) link
brilliant, sic
― assert (MatthewK), Sunday, 24 January 2021 19:25 (three years ago) link
Trump is piecing together a set of narratives and mythologies that would be very adaptable to establishing an extra-constitutional regime based on the presumed need to secure the nation from the dire threats posed by a set of easily-scapegoated outsiders, Mexicans and Muslims in this instance. He also casts himself as so far superior to his rivals as to be, in effect, a 'supreme leader'. These are primary foundations upon which to build a cult of personality and a police state.
So, yeah, Trump is following the fascist road, which is also the road to a totalitarian, extra-legal government focused on one leader.
― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Wednesday, December 23, 2015
Five years on, I'd say he followed that road as far as his limited competence could take it. Lucky for us, he failed. But he still blazed a path that will be easier for someone else to follow, even if he dies, is imprisoned, or simply drifts into irrelevance.
― Respectfully Yours, (Aimless), Sunday, 24 January 2021 19:32 (three years ago) link
"Again, it’s instructive to look at the case of modern India. The BJP came to power in India before Modi. Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the first BJP prime minister, in the 1990s. He had little political support, and could not deliver on much of the cultural program so important to the BJP. But this period saw the infamous Gujarat Riots, in which Hindus engaged in a pogrom against Muslims for nearly two months, killing a thousand people. Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat, was accused not only of neglecting the situation but actively inciting it. Meanwhile, Vajpayee proved the economic utility of a BJP government by accelerating market reforms and leading to stunning profits for Indian capital. The BJP did not win the following election; it was not repudiated, but it underperformed, and neoliberal “normality” was reinstated with Manmohan Singh. Modi came to power a decade later.
No analogy is perfect, but Trump is more Vajpayee than Modi. This is not the end of something; it’s the beginning. We have yet to see what Trumpism 2.0 will bring. There will be a fallow period as these forces regroup post-Trump, but neofascism is likely to continue to develop in the US. Meanwhile, we are likely to see an uptick in sporadic neofascist violence outside of electoral politics."
― xyzzzz__, Sunday, 24 January 2021 19:36 (three years ago) link
― Next Time Might Be Hammer Time (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, 24 January 2021 19:39 (three years ago) link
Did he want to bar Muslims from entering the country? Yes. Did he call Mexicans rapists and "bad hombres"? Also yes. But did he have an operating plan to build the country's economy through strategic investment and tax reform on big business? Not on your nelly, baby. We were rounding the fourteenth hole - Don was working on his slice, while I was fishing one out of the old-fashioned my caddy, Cherice, had handed me - when I asked him "Donald, if you could have it all over again, is there one woman you'd stick with?" He might have answered, but I was already thinking about Ali, and how I could now afford to have some Venice Beach muscle men send that rat bastard McQueen to FedEx to sign for a new set of teeth.
You've made me want to rewatch The Kid Stays In The Picture all over again.
― Ray Cooney as "Crotch" (stevie), Sunday, 24 January 2021 20:06 (three years ago) link
just want to chime in that i am also extremely here for that post
― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Sunday, 24 January 2021 21:32 (three years ago) link
reading through the fauci interview, one of the most frightening things to me about the modern paranoid republican movement is how instantly, devastatingly effective it is at designating enemies.
anyone can be called out as a baddie at any time, and the mob will swing unhesitatingly into line. death threats, social media campaigns, texts to daughters' mobile phones, the apparatus works extremely well and it works almost instantly.
so, i don't know if that's fascism. but it will make any public figure think very hard about taking certain stands, contradicting certain people. it's not about 'guts' really it's about personal capacity to endure these threats and harassment not just to yourself but to your whole family, and not everybody will be willing to do that. i honestly don't see a way out of this situation. social media and the amount of information available on the internet makes this sort of intimidation trivial.
― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, 27 January 2021 15:05 (three years ago) link
Yes, we live in the age of social media-enhanced, weaponized mass paranoia.
― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Wednesday, 27 January 2021 15:07 (three years ago) link
This is exactly what they say about "the left," btw
― CumuloNIMBY (Ye Mad Puffin), Wednesday, 27 January 2021 15:19 (three years ago) link
also, K-Pop stans
― Hello Nice FBI Lady (DJP), Wednesday, 27 January 2021 15:23 (three years ago) link
Trump was 100% intending to continue along that path toward fascism/dictatorship. His first term he was just testing his limits. If he had won a second term, that term would have been focused on putting pieces in place to cement his power for a third term and beyond. Whether or not he would have succeeded is questionable, but surely if he was able to put enough enablers in the right positions (say, another hand picked SC justice?) and continue driving militant furor among his base for intimidation and leverage, it could have happened.
― epistantophus, Wednesday, 27 January 2021 15:25 (three years ago) link
yeah when the right talks about "cancel culture" I'm pretty sure they're just talking about fascism, they have zero problem getting people fired for taking a stance on racism
― frogbs, Wednesday, 27 January 2021 15:28 (three years ago) link
I think these judges he appointed were loyal to the conservative project, not Trump himself. (Look how they dropped his spurious lawsuits!) I don’t think they’d have been reliable allies in cementing his power. Even his AG had a line and it was this coup stuff.
― treeship., Wednesday, 27 January 2021 15:30 (three years ago) link
I mean, who knows, but I think he was always going to fail in this final endeavor to become the first American dictator.
― treeship., Wednesday, 27 January 2021 15:31 (three years ago) link
if he'd had the institutional support to hold onto his position regardless of election results he would and could have done. someone who is just as racist and authoritarian but with more establishment support and/or a better-organised mass movement behind them could easily do or have done so. I could even see more powerful interests proping up (a) trump if someone from further left had won the presidency
― Left, Wednesday, 27 January 2021 15:39 (three years ago) link
True. I think Trump’s greatest contribution toward future dictatorship was his incessant testing of limits and boundaries which ultimately showed just how soft and malleable they are.
― epistantophus, Wednesday, 27 January 2021 16:22 (three years ago) link
yeah I think the brazenness in which Republicans have shown their willingness to defend literally anything, up to and including a violent insurrection, bodes very very poorly for our future, especially now that it's been telegraphed that nothing's gonna happen to Trump and guys like Hawley & Cruz are gonna keep their seats
― frogbs, Wednesday, 27 January 2021 16:45 (three years ago) link
Then you have these kinds of fascists:
Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys extremist group, has a past as an informer for federal and local law enforcement, repeatedly working undercover for investigators after he was arrested in 2012, @Reuters finds https://t.co/bsudhNVHEF by @AramRoston 1/5 pic.twitter.com/igVSVCKOzK— Reuters (@Reuters) January 27, 2021
― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, 27 January 2021 17:37 (three years ago) link
“I don’t know any of this,” he said, when asked about the transcript. “I don’t recall any of this.”
― peace, man, Wednesday, 27 January 2021 17:42 (three years ago) link
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/trump-justice-dept-seized-post-reporters-phone-records/2021/05/07/933cdfc6-af5b-11eb-b476-c3b287e52a01_story.html
― burnt hombre (stevie), Monday, 10 May 2021 10:03 (three years ago) link
this is so fucking funny, they've built him a little fake Twitter that does nothing to keep him busy pic.twitter.com/NozGe89UVa— 📻 thomas website (@nailheadparty) May 10, 2021
― xyzzzz__, Monday, 10 May 2021 17:23 (three years ago) link
As this is-he-or-isn't-he war enters its 9th year, this a good (if long!) 1-2 by Georgetown historian Thomas Zimmer. He's very much on the "yes obv he is fascist" side, but mostly what he's concerned with her is the resistance/skepticism from other leftist scholars who think that worrying too much about Trump and fascism is a distraction from the defeating the real enemy — libs and neolibs.
Not shockingly, I'm on Zimmer's side here.
From Part II: The problem is that we have reached a point where their devotion to this anti-liberal struggle has led them to propagating positions that are increasingly untethered from what is happening on the Right. Their incessant warning that the real danger lies in liberal hysteria has turned into sophistry in defense of a premise that is more and more at odds with empirical evidence.
Part I: https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/fascism-in-americaPart II: https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/the-anti-liberal-left-has-a-fascism
― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Monday, 27 May 2024 20:10 (two weeks ago) link
"mostly what he's concerned with HERE"
I mean, can’t these fascist goons be fascists and neoliberal goons also be fascists? Why not both? That’s the way I see it.
― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Monday, 27 May 2024 20:49 (two weeks ago) link
Probably not — if we can't get to scholarly agreement on Trump being a fascist, you're gonna have a much harder sell on the Clintons. But they can all be terrible, sure.
Zimmer's point, which I feel deeply, is that some quadrants of the left seem rooted if not mired in a neoliberal triumphalist moment that compels them to insist that liberals are the actual Real Enemy and everything else is a distraction, which wasn't even actually true in say 2016 but was at least an easier case to make. (Albeit, primarily for those who live in liberal cultural centers removed from the realities of modern conservative American rule.)
― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Monday, 27 May 2024 20:57 (two weeks ago) link
But if you live in Texas or Florida or Tennessee, the idea that what you really need to be focused on is fighting the libs just seems bizarre.
― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Monday, 27 May 2024 20:58 (two weeks ago) link
neoliberal goons also be fascists?
They can be, but I haven't met any. They're terrible in non-fascist ways.
― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 27 May 2024 21:01 (two weeks ago) link
One of the phenomena I have to explain to friends who live outside Florida is that for thousands of South Florida Democrats the idea of socialism is a total non-starter, especially the ones who actually lived in Cuba and experienced a warped personality-cult totalitarian version of it. Even with my students their paradoxes fascinate me. Growing in privation in Cuba and Venezuela and the DR, they want their phones, leased cars, streaming subscriptions, and indulge in heteronormative fantasies about the home but also want some government overseeing of basic services....so long as you don't call it socialism.
― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 27 May 2024 21:07 (two weeks ago) link
I find the entire framing questionable? I've never heard anyone on the left call Trump or the rise of far right nationalism a "distraction"; rather the argument is that neoliberal orthodoxy lead to these developments and as such is incapable of defeating them.
― Daniel_Rf, Monday, 27 May 2024 21:09 (two weeks ago) link
The cruel joke is the actual fascists are also neoliberal.
― Are you addicted to struggling with your horse? (Boring, Maryland), Monday, 27 May 2024 21:21 (two weeks ago) link
No, there is a very small contingent of leftists who still are like: “Trump’s not so bad you’re being hysterical mom and dad”.
― Are you addicted to struggling with your horse? (Boring, Maryland), Monday, 27 May 2024 21:22 (two weeks ago) link
Yeah if you read those two blog posts you'll find plenty of citations saying it is more or less a distraction, a liberal deflection, etc. Not universally on "the left," which is no kind of monolith, but there is definitely a strain of thought (to which, say, Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi succumbed) that sees no greater evil on the planet than the neoliberal consensus of the '90s/'00s.
xp: I don't think the modern American right — whether you call it fascist or not — can be called neoliberal. They're anti-"globalist," anti-internationalist, anti-NATO, pro-government-intervention in the economy etc.
― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Monday, 27 May 2024 21:23 (two weeks ago) link
First we defeat Trump, then we defeat neoliberalism.
― Are you addicted to struggling with your horse? (Boring, Maryland), Monday, 27 May 2024 21:26 (two weeks ago) link
Trumps administration was still very neoliberal, he made some minor tweaks to NAFTA and that’s it.
― Are you addicted to struggling with your horse? (Boring, Maryland), Monday, 27 May 2024 21:27 (two weeks ago) link
I mean for gods sake the actual existing fascist governments of history worked very well with international capital.
― Are you addicted to struggling with your horse? (Boring, Maryland), Monday, 27 May 2024 21:29 (two weeks ago) link
Ok, didn't know this was about "a very small contingent" and Greenwald/Taibbi. Don't personally think anyone needs an academic article to know what's up with those guys but ok.
― Daniel_Rf, Monday, 27 May 2024 21:30 (two weeks ago) link
The article barely mentions Greenwald, it's mostly about much more respectably people like Corey Robin and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins.
As for Trump's neoliberalism, I don't know, he threatened to leave NATO — that's not very neoliberal! He didn't do it, but one of Zimmer's points is that using Trump's failures to enact a fascist state in his four years in office as evidence that he isn't actually fascist is kind of a weak argument. It's wanting to see him as more a part of a postwar American continuum than not. And he is part of a postwar American continuum, but one that runs through the John Birch Society and the Southern strategy and paleoconservatism, not through the IMF and the DLC.
He's not anti-capital, of course not! But he is at best skeptical of any kind of international order and the multinational institutions that neoliberalism built.
― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Monday, 27 May 2024 21:34 (two weeks ago) link
Bessner's last Jacobin op-ed (not radically different from the four year old stuff he links to but a bit more timely) - https://jacobin.com/2024/04/liberals-fascism-rhetoric-democrats-election
This does not read like "fight the REAL ENEMY ie liberals" to me. Seems more like "liberals, do better."
The real objection I see from Zimmer is that the leftists are not sufficiently onside with seeing Trump and the contemporary GOP as a radical break with history rather than a continuation of the reactionary political project supercharged by the failures of (neo)liberalism over the last decades.
― papal hotwife (milo z), Monday, 27 May 2024 21:49 (two weeks ago) link
^ ^ ^
― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Monday, 27 May 2024 22:05 (two weeks ago) link
I don't think he thinks they're a radical break from history — quite the opposite, they're a continuation of multiple strong strands of history, which largely predate neoliberalism and have never gone away. (I mean, unless we're going to retcon history and say that slavery, e.g., was a neoliberal project.)
I think he thinks the lib-obsessed leftists underestimate the actual threats of the Trumpist/authoritarian front, because they find it politically and philosophically inconvenient to contend with.
― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Monday, 27 May 2024 22:14 (two weeks ago) link
_neoliberal goons also be fascists?_They _can_ be, but I haven't met any. They're terrible in non-fascist ways.
― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Monday, 27 May 2024 22:17 (two weeks ago) link
But in either case, Trump probably qualifies, yes?
― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Monday, 27 May 2024 22:22 (two weeks ago) link
Like, I am thoroughly of the belief that many of the qualities of our current state and society are fascist. Things can get much worse, of course, but part of why I don’t like this kind of shit is that it puts all the blame on obvious right-wing ideologies and their promulgators rather than acknowledge liberal and neoliberal complicity with these ideologies as demonstrative of how we got here.
― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Monday, 27 May 2024 22:22 (two weeks ago) link
― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Monday, 27 May 2024 22:23 (two weeks ago) link
neoliberalism being seamlessly compatible with fascism is most exemplified by Modi imo
it's maybe worth mentioning that there isn't consensus on what "neoliberalism" is either. For example, there are interpretations of neoliberalism that emphasize "government-intervention in the economy" as being key to the neoliberal project rather than antithetical, in that the function of the government is to serve the market which often requires quite a lot of govt intervention in the economy.
I associate that view with Quinn Slobodian, and I skimmed this interview w/Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, might be worth a look? https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/quinn-slobodian-crack-capitalism-interview/. He addresses the question of whether neoliberalism has ended in the last question.
I am sympathetic to the idea that some critics of neoliberalism don't reckon enough with the kinds of overt social control and enforcement of caste hierarchies (race/gender/sexuality etc.) that animate the conservative movement in the US and beyond and aren't so easily reduced to capitalist ideology (imo)
― rob, Monday, 27 May 2024 22:38 (two weeks ago) link
I mean, both fascism and neoliberalism have the problem that it can tempting to start applying them to everything — is Putin a neoliberal?
But in practical political terms, what Zimmer’s talking about is a concern (which I share) that some perspectives on the left lend themselves to “there’s no difference” or even “the Dems are WORSE” rhetoric, which he thinks seriously misunderstands what’s going on.
― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Monday, 27 May 2024 22:44 (two weeks ago) link