Fascism is a big word with a lot of weight to it.
The more you get into politics and the more you debate with people across the aisle, the more you realize you have to be careful what words you use, so as not to lose credibility.
That being said…this is fascism. Period.
It’s happening. It’s happening now. It’s happening here. It’s not debatable anymore.
Well, the US has arguably always been fascist. Essentially fascism is copratist control of the economy and a merger of corporations and state. Of course corporations as entities have evolved after the US’s conception, but we’ve never been a democracy of the people, with only wealthy white business owners calling the shots.
We stole the land with genocide and apartheid, then built it on the backs of slaves. The house the president lives in was even built by slaves. When we “abolished” slavery, we had to make sure that we had a way out through incarceration. Guess which nation incarcerates more citizens than any other nation?
Not only that, but the US was a major inspiration for both Hitler and Mousolini.
And not to mention how we are constantly starting wars and instability around the world for our oligarch’s own benefit. And that out biggest enterprise is weaponry and war technology.
The US is and has always been a fascist nation.
Fascism brought to you by full blown dementia and criminal behavior. Wheeee!
You guys are so screwed, I left Reddit cause of all the censorship and siding with the government.
I’ve had comment removed from this community for being incendiary, for saying Trump and ICE agents need to feel the force of the second amendment.
You guys are not even allowed to discuss anything further than a useless peaceful protest, or you get banned or shut down and silenced.
Even regular folk who mod on Lemmy are tripping over themselves to stop us from actually doing anything
.world communities are particularly squeamish about not toeing the corpo line.
Some things are best discussed privately.
No sub, on Lemmy or Reddit, is safe from power tripping mods. I’m currently dealing with a Lemmy mod on a few other Lemmy subs that’s abusing his mod powers.
The bottom line is the other mods either need to step in and reign the bad mods in or remove them, or their sub dies. Seen it on Reddit plenty of times. But I’ve also seen Reddit mods that successfully removed their bad actors and then everything was fine. So it could go either way.
You guys are not even allowed to discuss anything further than a useless peaceful protest, or you get banned or shut down and silenced.
Everyone who isn’t actively complicit is terrified of standing up and therefore standing out. It’s a rational response and one we’ve been struggling with since the era of modern policing.
Even regular folk who mod on Lemmy are tripping over themselves to stop us from actually doing anything
I see a lot of empty gestures towards “someone should do something”. I see books like “How to Blow Up A Pipeline” and movies like “One Battle After Another” exemplify and valorize domestic insurrection. It isn’t as though there’s some total censorship. And we have plenty of nominal organs of resistance - from charity groups to gun clubs to local political caucuses - that could “do something” if they knew what exactly it was they were trying to do.
But relatively few people want to risk their lives and livelihoods to take a turn at being Revolutionaries. We don’t have a revolutionary movement. We have a random collection of martyrs piling up in the street - people who did not wake up that morning and declare they were going to die for their cause, but were just swept up in the violence for the most token forms of resistance.
Lemmy mods don’t have to try particularly hard to squelch something that isn’t emergent.
Oh well now that YOU say it, king of the obvious, now we are allowed.
You know, Start by saying you’re fucking sorry for being an idiot. Because that’s what you’re actually reporting.
I am so upset by articles like this, but the saddest part is that they’re needed. Months ago a professor who studies fascism fled the country due to rising fascism. There were articles about it. I sent them to family and friends in an attempt to warn them about what was coming. Some did listen, but there are so many people we will have to pick up along the way and “meet where they’re at”. I wish all articles like this were “I’m a huge idiot and was horribly wrong and will devote myself to fixing this now”, but in reality that helps no one. I can keep sending out articles like this and since it’s not “wow! I and by extension you were a dumb idiot” people may feel like maybe realizing it now is smart and can have their minds changed. I would appreciate a better note at the end, once the reader may be swayed, that was about what to do going forward and how to learn to listen, but it is what it is.
Yay, The Atlantic gave us permission!
I’ve lived my entire life in fear of being called uncivil.
Free at last, free at last.
How can I upvote this comment more than once?
Now it’s fascism even for idiots to see
Donald Trump is a complete scumbag.
The Atlantic is trash. Lib bullshit late to the party and faking it. These are the same people who enable fascism. Not to mention the zios…
Thinking it a term best avoided for reasons of decorum is part of what got us here.
Yes, we know.
See, everyone knows that fascism is a bad thing. That has been taught in every school since the end of WW2.
It’s just a shame that most people never bothered to look up what fascism actually is, and it can be something your guys do as well.
Our general discourse has been so deeply and deliberately poisoned that people don’t pay attention to words broadly anymore. So many different foreign and domestic forces have worked so tirelessly to amplify the chaos and boost the worst takes on both sides of every social issue, that the general population of the US stopped paying attention. (The horrific 2024 exit-polling confirms this too.)
This is why people are latching onto character over policy, it’s why Trump retains power despite not having any clue what he’s doing and is just obviously being led around by his cabinet. It’s why we all seem to care a lot more about what our favorite internet streamer has to say about a candidate than AP our Routers or the evening news, because the words have been said so much that people stopped paying attention.
This is not a new, modern ploy either. The KGB and CIA both have written how to destabilize nations using these tactics as far back as the 50’s or earlier.
Who’s that kgb guy that runs Russia loves trump and had been accused of interfering with international elections. Has a bigger army of Internet bots than the army he fields?
I would wager that the army Elon employs is bigger. He deliberately monetized blue-check twitter accounts for high views and shares. Not much, just a few dollars a month, maybe a couple hundred dollars if you break some thousands of shares and views.
For the average American this is not worth the time and effort to stay on Twitter all day and night farming engagement, but for the average citizen of a place like India, this is a living. So now in addition to the Russian bot-farms, Chinese espionage orgs, domestic groups of angry incels employing bot armies, we also now have millions of people in countries like India, Philippines, Pakistan and other countries who have been holistically outsourced to push rage-bait and propaganda through US culture and conversation.
This has had a devastating effect on our domestic conversations. These people are probably fine, normal, decent people, but they have no stake in the USA’s future and are wrecking our present day so they get a meal tomorrow.
We have to start treating the information feeds in new ways. Namely, by turning them all off and spending more time in local communities and socializing to form protective groups and power blocs in our neighborhoods and cities. The most sensational bullshit someone reads online will not withstand peer-pressure to think critically and not act stupid.
The sad and dangerous thing is that many are actually starting to come around to the idea that fascism is good. They have spent years denying that Trump is a fascist and are now fully embracing it.
Fascism is bad, communism is bad, socialism is bad. Leftists have successfully been labeled socialists and communists, why would the other side care about being labeled fascists anymore? They’re just words, meaningless abstractions now.
Right, but if you say to a Leftist “You are a socialist!” they’ll say “Yes, that’s correct”.
The MAGA hats aren’t owning the word fascism. They don’t know what it is. They know it’s bad. It’s something that happened in WW2. It’s something others do.
I’d link Michael Rosen’s “I Sometimes Fear” poem, but this administration did walk in saying exactly that, and half the people still didn’t connect the dots.
So you literally ignored hitlers plot playing out until it was to late, and now it’s okay to call them hurtful name. Another banger from the Atlantic.
We need more community defense classes now more than ever. Seriously!
I feel like this debate over whether it’s fascism or not misses a big point:
It’s an oppressive nationalist state with practically unchecked presidential power. It is responsible for numerous war crimes. It instates hardline policies targeting everyday Americans. It puts people in detention camps. It is fueled by exceptionalism on all levels, from foreign policy to religion. And at the same time, it doesn’t provide for its people, cutting all forms of social support.
It also erodes democratic institutions in an attempt to cement itself, so that other powers couldn’t change course.
You can call it fascism. You can call it authoritarianism. What matters is that America is turned into an angry shithole hostile to both others and it’s own people. Isn’t that a reason good enough to stand strongly against it? Why do people wait for a “fascist” label, like it’s some sort of red cloth, and would it change much if tomorrow Trump would plead allegiance to Hitler?
America needs a New Deal for both wealth inequality and authoritarianism.
America just needs to stop being America imo. Countries in general should be smaller and not so powerful.
For another, the term has been overused to the point of meaninglessness, especially by left-leaning types
Jonathan Rauch is holding out on the one thing we want to see: the websites of these left-leaning types, because they’re the ones whose voices we should be hearing and promoting.
LMAO they’re calling people fascists for acting like a fascist 🤷 not sure how that makes it meaningless.
“Oh gee wiz, turns out he’s doing the dictator thing like he said he would”
“President Trump was clearly making a joke.” - Enablers like the media, “centrist Democrats”, and others
“I resisted calling it fascism until it was too late and people were dying at the hands of monsters.”
Get fucked. It was fascism when it was George Floyd and it’s fascism now. It’s been a fascism white people were willing to ignore because it didn’t impact them directly for fucking decades, if not a hundred years or more.
Great job joining us in reality.
[Fascism] has been overused to the point of meaninglessness, especially by left-leaning types who call you a fascist if you oppose abortion or affirmative action.
Yeah, this guy can fuck right off.
This is infuriating.
We’ve been calling it fascism for at least 10 years because that’s what it’s been.
We were trying to get you fucks to wake up and stop it before it was too late, and now that you’re finally willing to acknowledge it, it’s too fucking late.
Thanks for ignoring us and enabling it. You can fuck all the way off.
Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds.
Maybe he’s been in opposition of using the term because he’s fucking fascist-lite himself. Fascist with half the calories.
Calling liberals fascists is literally overusing the term to the point of meaninglessness.
Fascists are real and they’re here, and they hate liberals and liberals hate them too. Calling liberals fascists is not going to help the situation.
And if you’re going around making liberals bleed because you disagree with them, then you might wanna look in a mirror because you might be a fascist.
The phase comes from the original Black Panther Party.
Doesn’t change anything I said
Just giving some historical context.
Do they hate fascists? They seem to be quite accommodating what with the slow rolling of justice for any infractions and the weakest of resistance to funding any ‘security’ concerns.
But no, calling them fascist wont help.
You seem to be confusing the democratic party leadership and a handful of traitors with every liberal.
Hard to tell the fucking difference. Nice words don’t matter only action matters.
Okay dude, go out there and take some concrete actions and when I see you in the headlines I’ll know you made a difference.
But until then, stop blaming the people who literally voted against this to try to stop it from happening in the first place.
You were probably one of the idiots going around telling people not to vote, and if so you’re as much to blame for this as anyone who voted for trump.
“Don’t overuse the term fascist you’ll make it meaningless and that makes you a fascist!”
Like you people can’t help but be hypocritical in the same damn sentence.
I didn’t say “don’t use the term fascism.” If someone’s a fascist, call them a fascist. And there absolutely are fascists.
But don’t call people who aren’t fascists, fascists, because that makes the the term meaningless. And liberals by definition are not fascists.
Focus on the actual fascists, the far-right and everyone enabling them. Don’t call the opposition fascists just because they’re ineffective, with minorities in both chambers of congress and the supreme court.
What makes you a fascist is advocating for making people bleed just for being liberals.
And you had to willfully butcher everything I said in order to pull such a distorted interpretation out of it so you could make your strawman. And guess what? That’s what fascists do!
I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard of Rauch before but this is Bari Weiss level of bullshit. Fuck opinion writers.
I would say certain white people but they don’t consider me white so maybe that’s why I’ve been freaking out too.
When was the US not fascism? Serious question.
Serious answer:
From wiki: “Fascism is characterized by support for a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.”
I’m not a historian or anything, but I would say that until trump we haven’t really had anyone you could call a dictator. And saying we had a strong regimentation of society and the economy seems like a stretch with the exception of wartime. You could make a good argument for ww2 era USA under FDR though that also came on the back of the new deal and a relatively progressive thrust in US politics (of course many groups of people were still oppressed and marginalized though), and possibly some parts of US involvement in Vietnam. But I think realistically there are better descriptions of the US government during those times.
This comment is intended not to discount the historic atrocities and abject failings of the US government, but rather to maintain the power of the word fascism and to assert that things are in fact different at this moment, even if they’ve been bad for a lot if people for a long time.
How long until we stop complaining about fascism and actively talk about doing something about it—publicly?
Talk about it in the back of coffee shops, not publicly. That’s how you get the Feds on you.
the feds already have you if you post on lemmy, blusky, or mastodon
And if you talk about what should actually happen then the Secret Service knocks on your door. Still best to do it in private.
I have neither the charisma nor the aim to be a priority for them. I’m interested in long-term direct action that can build something better, not just fighting and protesting. The internet should be decentralized immediately.
Lmfao. Worry about yourself.
Only worrying about oneself is part of the reason we are in this mess. I am actually worried for a lot of people currently.
I’m worried about the entire country. You seem to want to let fascism happen. Which is why you try to crush anyone talking out against the government lmfao.
You’re a fucking idiot. If everyone willing to take direct action talks about it publicly, then before long there won’t be anyone left to take action.
The French Resistance didn’t exactly stand in the middle of a public square telling everyone “We’re the french resistance.”
You aren’t doing that tho?
You support Trump.
