a discussion of the causes of the divergence of American politics and culture

[Traitorfish]

Well, yeah, i would basically agree with this. The differences are of degree, not of kind - not to say that differences of degree are unimportant.
Strictly speaking trump and his trumpets aren't "literal" fascists. But they represent a political dynamic that leads straight to literal fascism. I'm posting from my phone atm so don't want to go into detail but will elaborate on this when i can post from a computer.

I'm just not sure that "fascism" is a useful word, when used like that. It's barely a useful word when used to describe an openly pro-fascist regime like Horthy's, let alone something like the Agrarian dictatorship in Estonia and Latvia (I know, right?)- but they were all much closer to fascism proper in their ideology, structure and their social base than any American administration.

I do think that the English is missing a useful shorthand for, well, Tim has endorse "jingoistic authoritarian dickheads". But there's too much history tied up in fascism for it to the job, and even saying that Trump isn't a "literal fascist" draws implicit lines in the direction of Auschwitz are really not very useful or enlightening. This might just reflect the relative shallow public understanding of fascism, the failure to appreciate that nothing that the Nazis did was really exceptional until maybe 1941, except that they managed to do it in a country which had been presume to be as modern and liberal as Germany- but that is the landscape we're dealing with.

I understand what it is from being a student of the behavioral studies and anthropology. It is creating a pecking order where old members think every new person is automatically a troll and so grill them to see if they have similar political ethos so they can stay without minute by minute challenges.

Mate, you don't get to pick fights in half the threads on the board, with half the posters on the board, and then claim that you're being unfairly hazed. That's just not how it works.

 

[Birdjaguar]

A good debater can debate any side. So never presume I am saying what I actually think. I enjoy debating for its own sake as dialogue. You might see me say anything if I think no one is speaking for one side or another. I think any educator would do this as well.

Well that explains a lot and you will have to up your game considerably to make that work here.

 

[Cassius Critzer]

I don't believe in debate that determines veracity by who gets the most likes.

The second part is even stranger. How does "making that work" even enter into the equation? Say a communist poses her model of reality in a crowd of Reaganites. If they vehemently disagree and get angry by what she said and dislike her post, does that have any bearing on veracity or insight?

 

[Cassius Critzer]

I'm just not sure that "fascism" is a useful word, when used like that. It's barely a useful word when used to describe an openly pro-fascist regime like Horthy's, let alone something like the Agrarian dictatorship in Estonia and Latvia (I know, right?)- but they were all much closer to fascism proper in their ideology, structure and their social base than any American administration.

I do think that the English is missing a useful shorthand for, well, Tim has endorse "jingoistic authoritarian dickheads". But there's too much history tied up in fascism for it to the job, and even saying that Trump isn't a "literal fascist" draws implicit lines in the direction of Auschwitz are really not very useful or enlightening. This might just reflect the relative shallow public understanding of fascism, the failure to appreciate that nothing that the Nazis did was really exceptional until maybe 1941, except that they managed to do it in a country which had been presume to be as modern and liberal as Germany- but that is the landscape we're dealing with.


Mate, you don't get to pick fights in half the threads on the board, with half the posters on the board, and then claim that you're being unfairly hazed. That's just not how it works.

I am amused that disagreeing with your post is spun to picking fights. You must not get challenged very much. All through my university life, there were challenges to ideas as a normal aspect of inquiry and criticism. That is quite different than being accused of a medical condition. Challenge of ideas is just disagreeing and is common in the current political climate in real life. Insults by false diagnosis is not normal.

And this is echoed in real life by ideologues accusing Trump of a medical condition by virtue of disgust and disagreement and due to our lack of tolerance due to polarization.

 

[Lexicus]

It's barely a useful word when used to describe an openly pro-fascist regime like Horthy's

Well, if you're really that restrictive about how you use fascism that more or less explains our disagreement. Really, Trump is too inept and unfocused to be any kind of autocrat - but his administration is paving the way toward a nakedly authoritarian and racist defense of the privilege of elites. The Republican Party, or at least the majority of its voters, are moving toward support for various far-right positions that simply aren't compatible even with bourgeois democracy. Most of them are stuck in epistemic loops that push them further and further right no matter what information they're exposed to. That isn't going to end anywhere good.

But there's too much history tied up in fascism for it to the job, and even saying that Trump isn't a "literal fascist" draws implicit lines in the direction of Auschwitz are really not very useful or enlightening.

It's not all just buffoonery, you know. Human rights violations on a fairly large scale are taking place under the Trump administration. Trump is drawing lines toward Auschwitz himself (inevitably that sounds hyperbolic - by it I certainly don't mean that I think there is a serious prospect of the Trump Administration committing genocide). The manifest racist cruelty of this administration really speaks for itself.

 

[Cassius Critzer]

Trump and Auchwitz...hoo boy. Is that worth a Super Godwin award?

Meanwhile Obama writes an exec order that actually calls for internment camps in times of national crisis. But you are worried about Trump who made no such call because tweets are a bigger threats to the republic.

 

[Mouthwash]

It's not all just buffoonery, you know. Human rights violations on a fairly large scale are taking place under the Trump administration. Trump is drawing lines toward Auschwitz himself (inevitably that sounds hyperbolic - by it I certainly don't mean that I think there is a serious prospect of the Trump Administration committing genocide). The manifest racist cruelty of this administration really speaks for itself.

Nothing like the Clintons/Bushes.

 

[Katie88]

The Republican Party, or at least the majority of its voters, are moving toward support for various far-right positions that simply aren't compatible even with bourgeois democracy.

Could you give some examples?

 

[Traitorfish]

Well, if you're really that restrictive about how you use fascism that more or less explains our disagreement. Really, Trump is too inept and unfocused to be any kind of autocrat - but his administration is paving the way toward a nakedly authoritarian and racist defense of the privilege of elites. The Republican Party, or at least the majority of its voters, are moving toward support for various far-right positions that simply aren't compatible even with bourgeois democracy. Most of them are stuck in epistemic loops that push them further and further right no matter what information they're exposed to. That isn't going to end anywhere good.

If you want to characterise Trump, and the Republican party, as anti-democratic, that I would agree with. My only caveat is that the Democrats, or at least their leadership, are basically anti-democratic. What sets the Republican Party apart is, noting the irony, their anti-republicanism: their hostility towards constitutional, orderly and regular government. The Democrats, for all their enormous failings, seem to tend to a sort of constitutional technocracy, while the Republicans will just do whatever they can get away with, and some things that they really can't.

The question for me is whether this is a deliberate political project, even a less than entirely conscious one, or the result of every single Republican politician being focused on their own careers to the point of complete disregard for the republic.

It's not all just buffoonery, you know. Human rights violations on a fairly large scale are taking place under the Trump administration. Trump is drawing lines toward Auschwitz himself (inevitably that sounds hyperbolic - by it I certainly don't mean that I think there is a serious prospect of the Trump Administration committing genocide). The manifest racist cruelty of this administration really speaks for itself.

As they did under Obama, and Clinton, and Bush, all the way bag to Washington. Roosevelt, the great working's man president, set up concentration camps. Trump's authoritarianism may be flagrant, but there's no real indication that there's been any real break in practice, only in how the practice is packaged for the public. Trump is the first present to revel in his contempt for civil rights, to wear it as a badge of bride, but mostly his administration seems to be guilty of turning a blind eye to the widespread abuse of civil rights that has been a regular feature of American life since, say, 1607.

 

[Lexicus]

The question for me is whether this is a deliberate political project

It certainly is a deliberate political project at some level. Not at the level of Republican politicians themselves, but certainly at the level of the right-wing infrastructure that funds them and furnishes them with what passes for their ideology.

As they did under Obama, and Clinton, and Bush, all the way bag to Washington. Roosevelt, the great working's man president, set up concentration camps. Trump's authoritarianism may be flagrant, but there's no real indication that there's been any real break in practice, only in how the practice is packaged for the public. Trump is the first present to revel in his contempt for civil rights, to wear it as a badge of bride, but mostly his administration seems to be guilty of turning a blind eye to the widespread abuse of civil rights that has been a regular feature of American life since, say, 1607.

Yes, and in my view this continuity actually strengthens my argument. Fascism is a current running just under the surface, so to speak. It doesn't take much to bring it into the open.

 

[Traitorfish]

Yes, and in my view this continuity actually strengthens my argument. Fascism is a current running just under the surface, so to speak. It doesn't take much to bring it into the open.

Is "fascism" a useful term, then, if it's just the normal operation of things? Trotsky apocryphally described fascism as "capitalism with the gloves off", but the intention of that characterisation was to undercut the idea that there was anything genuinely revolutionary, genuinely different about fascism, that it was just how capitalism responds to crisis. It was a comment made in the context of a politics that already intended towards the overthrow of the existing order of things (and ol' Lev Bronstein, at least, can be said to have put his money where his mouth is on that one), and so for which the rise of fascism was not some sudden call to arms, but a confirmation of what was already known.

The root problem, I think, is the way we uphold the idea that there's some form of capitalism that isn't authoritarian and exploitative and repressive, that all the hopes and dreams of well-meaning bourgeois liberals could be fulfilled while leaving the economic structures of wage-labour and private property intact, like some sort of social justice neutron bomb. In principle, if not in practice. Fascism, in this view, isn't clearly distinct from reaction, except that the extinction of the aristocracy, or its assimilation into the liberal bourgeoisie, means that modern reactionaries tend to have more of Mussolini than of Metternich about them.

 

[Lexicus]

Is "fascism" a useful term, then, if it's just the normal operation of things?

It's not just the normal operation of things. Rather, the possibility, or potential, for fascism exists in the normal operation of things.

the intention of that characterisation was to undercut the idea that there was anything genuinely revolutionary, genuinely different about fascism, that it was just how capitalism responds to crisis.

Fascism certainly isn't "revolutionary" the way Marxists use the term, but it is genuinely different from bourgeois democracy and to say otherwise is foolish.

and so for which the rise of fascism was not some sudden call to arms, but a confirmation of what was already known.

No, Trotsky didn't see it as a reason for a sudden call to arms, but he recognized that it was more dangerous than the "normal" state of bourgeois rule.

In any case while my views on fascism have been influenced by Trotsky I see no reason to feel bound to agree with him on every point. Fascism is certainly "capitalism with the gloves off" but it is also different in important ways from bourgeois democracy.

The root problem, I think, is the way we uphold the idea that there's some form of capitalism that isn't authoritarian and exploitative and repressive, that all the hopes and dreams of well-meaning bourgeois liberals could be fulfilled while leaving the economic structures of wage-labour and private property intact

What does "intact" mean in this context? The structures of wage labor and private property demonstrably can work in many different ways. Indeed, private property and wage labor existed before capitalism (though, naturally, in different forms than they take under capitalism). Wage labor and private property work differently under fascism than under bourgeois democracy. The problem in the US is that there has been a long-term change in the political-economic structure that has made it look more and more like a fascist state, than like a bourgeois democratic state, and Trump is one of many consequences of that process.

 

[Traitorfish]

It's not just the normal operation of things. Rather, the possibility, or potential, for fascism exists in the normal operation of things.

What I'm asking, though, is this a difference of quantity or kind? If everything that happens under fascism can happen under "normal" circumstances, if what distinguishes fascism is just a lot of it happening at once- at what point do we actually transition into fascism? At what point do you reach a critical mass of Bad Stuff and the mundane shifts into a dystopia?

Fascism certainly isn't "revolutionary" the way Marxists use the term, but it is genuinely different from bourgeois democracy and to say otherwise is foolish.

Bourgeois democracy produced the Irish and Bengal Famines, the Atlantic slave trade and the Trail of Tears. Liberal democracy deployed the Friekorps, the Black and Tans and the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. I don't disagree that fascism is in many important respects a departure from bourgeois liberalism- what I ask is, when liberal democracy is capable of so atrocities that so clearly anticipate the worst depravities of National Socialism, how fundamental can that difference really be? Should we really look at "democracy" and "fascism" as two great, opposed titans, or is different ways of administering a capitalist society.

No, Trotsky didn't see it as a reason for a sudden call to arms, but he recognized that it was more dangerous than the "normal" state of bourgeois rule.

In any case while my views on fascism have been influenced by Trotsky I see no reason to feel bound to agree with him on every point. Fascism is certainly "capitalism with the gloves off" but it is also different in important ways from bourgeois democracy.

For sure- but the question is, in what ways? Trotsky defined fascism specifically as a counter-revolutionary movement, and one given particular power by its ability to mobilise large numbers of people in the counter-revolutionary cause. For Trotsky, for any of the communist anti-fascists of the era, fascism wasn't simply reaction, its reaction specifically to the emergence of a socialist working class. Bismarck was a reactionary and an authoritarian, but he wasn't a dictator; Porfirio Diaz was a dictator but not a counter-revolutionary; Miklós Horthy was a counter-revolutionary but not a fascist. I will readily grant, it's not a clear line; there were figures like Metaxas in Greece played with fascist rhetoric and aesthetics, and some, like Dollfuss in Austria, went so far as to identify themselves as "fascist". But on this scale, Trump sits firmly to the bourgeois democratic side of Bismarck. If all it takes for a leader to be a fascist, or even a proto-fascist, is a degraded respect for political norms and constitutional structures, then any corrupt right-wing government is "fascist", and most of Europe was evidently lost to fascism by the mid-nineties.

What does "intact" mean in this context? The structures of wage labor and private property demonstrably can work in many different ways. Indeed, private property and wage labor existed before capitalism (though, naturally, in a different form). Wage labor and private property work differently under fascism than under bourgeois democracy. The problem in the US is that there has been a long-term change in the political-economic structure that has made it look more and more like a fascist state, than like a bourgeois democratic state, and Trump is one of many consequences of that process.

My point is, Trump's "fascism" has no clear economic or class content. It's a bit more protectionist in theory, a bit more kleptocracic in practice, but it fundamentally represents the same distribution of property and economic power as that proposed by anyone in American politics from the centre of the Democratic Party rightwards- and the left of the Democratic Party only really offer a version f the same system capitalist tempered by welfarism and trade union rights, which, invaluable as they may be, are not exactly the Communist Party of Italy c.1919. To the extent that wage-labour and property function different under fascism- and I'm not sure that they do, except that they are given greater permission to function without obstruction- there's no clear evidence of that change in Trumpism.

 

[Lexicus]

What I'm asking, though, is this a difference of quantity or kind? If everything that happens under fascism can happen under "normal" circumstances, if what distinguishes fascism is just a lot of it happening at once- at what point do we actually transition into fascism? At what point do you reach a critical mass of Bad Stuff and the mundane shifts into a dystopia?

Bourgeois democracy produced the Irish and Bengal Famines, the Atlantic slave trade and the Trail of Tears. Liberal democracy deployed the Friekorps, the Black and Tans and the Pinkertons. I don't disagree that fascism is in many important respects a departure from bourgeois liberalism- what I ask is, when liberal democracy is capable of so atrocities that so clearly anticipate the worst depravities of National Socialism, how fundamental can that difference really be? Should we really look at "democracy" and "fascism" as two great, opposed titans, or is different ways of administering a capitalist society.

Democracy is the opposite of fascism. Bourgeois democracy is not "real" democracy, at least not in my opinion. So we're more or less in agreement on the substance here.

But on this scale, Trump sits firmly to the bourgeois democratic side of Bismarck.

I'm not at all certain I agree with this. Bismarck at least had a concept of the public good; Trump has none, or at least none that is separable from his own ego.

My point is, Trump's "fascism" has no clear economic or class content.

I don't agree with this at all. The economic and class content of Trump's...uh...whatever you want to call it, is quite clear: the "merger of state and corporate power." He is accelerating all the trends I mentioned above where the US is moving from a bourgeois-democratic political economy to a fascist political economy.

 

[Traitorfish]

Democracy is the opposite of fascism. Bourgeois democracy is not "real" democracy, at least not in my opinion. So we're more or less in agreement on the substance here.

But what are the actual characteristics of fascism, except that it is absolutely not-democratic? What distinguishes it from any other kind of authoritarianism or autocracy? Again, if fascism is simply being used as a synonym for "reaction", or for "reaction in a post-aristocratic age", then does "fascism" really describe a specific threat to liberal democracy and not just the general specter of illiberalism that has persisted throughout human history?

I'm not at all certain I agree with this. Bismarck at least had a concept of the public good; Trump has none, or at least none that is separable from his own ego.

He an aristocrat's sense of the public good. He would tell the public what was good for them, and deliver it; they would be consulted only so far as necessary to confirm that they had understood. Trump is a crook, but he's a crook working within a constitutional democratic system, however much he would personally prefer to be a sultan. The mechanism for a dictatorship don't really exist in the United States, at least not yet; as other posters have pointed out previously, the greatest damage that Trump is doing to the United States is through inaction, through the failure of his administer to actually administer, rather than an any great authoritarianism. His more controversial, anti-civil libertarian policies mask the fact that the primary distinguishing characteristics of his premiership have been sluggishness and inactivity- and knowing how he courts his base, deliberately so.

Calling him a "fascist" attributes to him a dynamism and energy that the tangerine parody of a human corpse simply cannot contain.

I don't agree with this at all. The economic and class content of Trump's...uh...whatever you want to call it, is quite clear: the "merger of state and corporate power." He is accelerating all the trends I mentioned above where the US is moving from a bourgeois-democratic political economy to a fascist political economy.

But, we already have a word for that. It's called "capitalism".

 

[Broken_Erika]

But, we already have a word for that. It's called "capitalism".

Yeah but he's going for a more "Crony-ish" flavor of capitalism. And when i say more, i mean total.

 

[Hygro]

I don't believe in debate that determines veracity by who gets the most likes.

Overall off topic is stingy with likes and no one considers a debate winner by the like tally. Nice to get them ofc.

As for playing devils advocate, bad odds of making a good argument. You’re free to do whatever.

Most opinions are formed without response. You’ve said plenty of things I like or agree with, but you’d never know because I was quiet.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Overall off topic is stingy with likes and no one considers a debate winner by the like tally. Nice to get them ofc.

As for playing devils advocate, bad odds of making a good argument. You’re free to do whatever.

Most opinions are formed without response. You’ve said plenty of things I like or agree with, but you’d never know because I was quiet.

I'm super generous with likes. But yeah, the love is not usually reciprocated but I don't take that personally.

 

[Lexicus]

I try to be generous with them but not too generous.

 

[Borachio]

I use them when a post makes me smile, or think "That's good. I like it." Or when a well-written post tells me something that I didn't already know.