Suggestion for Paul street: the use of “proto-fascist” gives some room for discussion, developmentally speaking, where “fascist” seems to end the discussion.
Would you please provide your definition of Facism. I read the 'this and this' but didn't see anything about the underlying way facism works. My understanding of the word, historically, is that facism is when gov'ts and business colude to stomp out the individual.
Fascism="Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power” ― Benito Mussolini.
It's the boot on the face for eternity. But to me, these posts focus on one single word, dictatorial leader (Trump 2024 ->) and nothing of the rest of it.
From my perspective, being unvaxxed unmasked and having been fully censored for showing a different perspective (one which I read in the polls that show alot of new converts too). I've been living in facism the past two years. Our government has been in collusion with an FDA that has been hijacked by big Pharma to demonize, ostracize and take away individual rights. That is fascism.
From the past two posts here, it seems to have morped into being a trope.
M&W. Facism: a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.
I am not a Trumpie. I am one of those who has been through the polarized bs, and see right through it now; most of our politicians are Uniparty, despite the charade. The reason why the polls show close races is because of the undecided. You can look to NJ in 2021, the Gov race, to see how it breaks. People don't want Republicans, but Democrats are not giving them a choice.
80% of Democrats and 80% of Republicans believe that the other political party poses a threat that, if not stopped, "will destroy America as we know it," per the NBC News poll. I don't believe there will be any sort of civil war. What will happen is that Republicans are going to starve the Dem controlled cities, and it will feel like civil war to those living there.
This is from an endnote attached to an earlier Substack I publish: 'What follows is an approximation of the definition I work with. It is taken from a recent CounterPunch essay I published under the title “Only Fools Count on Capital to Stop Late Fascism.” Some basic elements of the disease are touched upon by the prolific human ecology professor Andreas Malm and his colleagues in the Swedish anti-fascist Zetkin Collective (ZC).On page 405 of their important 2020 volume White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism, Malm and ZC refer to “the basic strands” of “a sort of DNA code of fascism” as “ anti-Marxism, anti-feminism, racism, imperialism, the preoccupation with fertility, the promotion of inequality, accolades to violence, and a giddy myth of palingenesis” – that is, the myth of lost but soon to be reborn national greatness, stolen by liberal and Left elites accused of “stabbing the nation/fatherland in the back” by promoting and “replacing” (purportedly) virtuous and hard-working native whites with (supposedly) dangerous and inferior non-white others. More than six years ago, in an essay on then candidate Trump, the liberal New Yorker essayist Adam Gopnik suggested another useful description of the ideological sickness that the future president with orange-tinted skin shared with Mussolini, Hitler, and a slew of contemporary far-right politicians including Viktor Orban, the Hungarian strongman who has emerged as a hero of the Republican right:
“There is a simple formula for descriptions of Donald Trump: add together a qualification, a hyphen, and the word ‘fascist.’ …his personality and his program belong exclusively to the same dark strain of modern politics: an incoherent program of national revenge led by a strongman; a contempt for parliamentary government and procedures; an insistence that the existing, democratically elected government…is in league with evil outsiders and has been secretly trying to undermine the nation; a hysterical militarism designed to no particular end than the sheer spectacle of strength; an equally hysterical sense of beleaguerment and victimization; and a supposed suspicion of big capitalism entirely reconciled to the worship of wealth and ‘success.’… The idea that it can be bounded in by honest conservatives in a Cabinet or restrained by normal constitutional limits is, to put it mildly, unsupported by history.” These are useful descriptions to which we should add some other key definitional ingredients: the “Orwellian” campaign against truth and intellectuals, conspiratorialism, cults of personality centered on powerful and always male “charismatic Leaders,” and – of critical significance – the deployment of the military and paramilitaries and mobs to crush dissent and overthrow previously normative electoral bourgeois democracy and constitutional rule of law. “Lawlessness in the name of law and order” is a particularly relevant “calling card” of the sickness, as the Yale philosophy professor and leading fascism scholar Jason Stanley has noted.
Anyone who doubts that the Trump presidency matched these descriptions of fascism should read the second and third chapters of my most recent book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals and the Trumping of America : “The Fascist Wolf Defined and Foretold” (Chapter 2) and “A Fascist in the White House, 2017-21” (Chapter 3). You can work backwards from this volume’s index, searching phrases like “Charlottesville,” “Portland,” “Proud Boys,” “Hitler,” “Jason Stanley,” “How Fascism Works,” “Rittenhouse, Kyle,” “Bannon, Steve,” “George Floyd Rebellion, response to,” “Capitol Riot,” “January 6th,” and “pandemicide.” You can also read the first chapter, titled “Is it the Fascist Apocalypse Yet?” in my October 2020 book (written while Trump was trying to use the George Floyd Rebellion as his attempted Reichstag Fire) Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and the Politics of Appeasement. “Fascism,” as a Refuse Fascism activist told me in Washington DC as Trump’s Christian fascist Supreme Court was preparing to strip women of their constitutional right to an abortion, “lives on in America and Europe today. It doesn’t require a mustache.”
By the literal Mussolini definition the US was a fascist state by the Progressive era, which saw the consolidation of corporate state capitalism in the USA. See Marty Sklar's magisterial book The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916. I don't know any serious thinker who considers Woodrow Wilson's USA a fascist state. Anyway my latest book (referenced in my comment above) runs thtough a vast amount of writing on fascism, including of course the Jason Stanley stuff you quote below. The first three chapters show precisely how and why the Trump presidency and phenomenon was/is fascist. I particularly recommend Chapter Four, "The Anatomy of Fascism Denial." It is an (among other things) hilarious takedown of all the frankly ridiculous and cowardly ways academics and intellectuals (not the same) came up with to deny the neofascism/fascism staring the nation in the face. This fourth chapter indludes a really fun concluding section on what I at first thought was a joke designation (or mine) and later found out was no joke: "the Trumpenleft" deniers.
As for thinking covid vaccines and masking and all that in defense of the common good and trying to stem a deadly pandemic...as for thinking that all that is fascism, I don't know any words that can began to capture even a small slice of a hint of a dash of a scent of an inkling of an iota of how INSANE -- and I do mean insane -- I think that is. Sorry for that but I have to be honest. We do not inhabit the same cognitive universe in that regard. Which happens a lot these days.
It does. I do recognize that you think my viewpoints are INSANE. And I think yours are clouded from misinformation and propaganda, on this issue. But at least we can talk. imo, and you prob don't agree, but this is just one of the issues that progressives are going to have to work out --how to get back to 'my body my choice' across the board and not at the whim of big pharmas capture of the regulatory system-- while in the political wilderness.
Of course the term wasn't even around, but, call it whatever you want, there's no doubt I would have been in jail living at that time in America, you too I'd bet...
Just to follow that last paragraph, here's the Republican perspective on the same word, which serves to show how no one even agrees on words anymore.
"The 10 pillars of fascism are: ..number one, a mythic past, a great mythic past which the leader harkens back…Number two, propaganda. There’s a certain kind of fascist propaganda where everything is inverted. The news is the fake news. Anti-corruption is corruption….So, three, anti-intellectualism. As Steve Bannon said, it’s emotion—rage gets people to the polls. We got elected on “Lock her up!” and “Build the wall!” Hitler, in Mein Kampf, says you want your propaganda to appeal to the most—to the least educated people…Number four, unreality. You have to smash truth. So, reason gets replaced by conspiracy theories...Hierarchy. In fascist politics, the dominant group is better than everyone else...Victimhood. In fascism, the dominant group are the greatest victims. The men are the greatest victims of encroaching feminism. Whites are the greatest victims of blacks. Germans are the greatest victims of Jews….Law and order. What are they victims of? They’re victims of the out group, who are criminals. What kind of criminals are they? They’re rapists. Sexual anxiety….Pillar nine is Sodom and Gomorrah. The real values come from the heartland. The people in the city are decadent…pillar 10 is ”Arbeit macht frei“—work shall make you free. The out group is lazy. They’re not just criminals; they’re lazy… It’s all about winning.”
So you think Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works (from which all this comes) is a Republican? Really? Good grief, he's a liberal lefty who describes himself as influenced by Marxism. I mean this all comes from JS, who is about as Not a Republican as anyone can be.
Sorry, I got it from the Chicago library site and other than being in quotes it was not said who was the author. The page is also where the quote on Mussulini, and how fascism is corporatism by another name, with the government allying with corporations, comes.
Suggestion for Paul street: the use of “proto-fascist” gives some room for discussion, developmentally speaking, where “fascist” seems to end the discussion.
Would you please provide your definition of Facism. I read the 'this and this' but didn't see anything about the underlying way facism works. My understanding of the word, historically, is that facism is when gov'ts and business colude to stomp out the individual.
Fascism="Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power” ― Benito Mussolini.
It's the boot on the face for eternity. But to me, these posts focus on one single word, dictatorial leader (Trump 2024 ->) and nothing of the rest of it.
From my perspective, being unvaxxed unmasked and having been fully censored for showing a different perspective (one which I read in the polls that show alot of new converts too). I've been living in facism the past two years. Our government has been in collusion with an FDA that has been hijacked by big Pharma to demonize, ostracize and take away individual rights. That is fascism.
From the past two posts here, it seems to have morped into being a trope.
M&W. Facism: a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.
I am not a Trumpie. I am one of those who has been through the polarized bs, and see right through it now; most of our politicians are Uniparty, despite the charade. The reason why the polls show close races is because of the undecided. You can look to NJ in 2021, the Gov race, to see how it breaks. People don't want Republicans, but Democrats are not giving them a choice.
80% of Democrats and 80% of Republicans believe that the other political party poses a threat that, if not stopped, "will destroy America as we know it," per the NBC News poll. I don't believe there will be any sort of civil war. What will happen is that Republicans are going to starve the Dem controlled cities, and it will feel like civil war to those living there.
This is from an endnote attached to an earlier Substack I publish: 'What follows is an approximation of the definition I work with. It is taken from a recent CounterPunch essay I published under the title “Only Fools Count on Capital to Stop Late Fascism.” Some basic elements of the disease are touched upon by the prolific human ecology professor Andreas Malm and his colleagues in the Swedish anti-fascist Zetkin Collective (ZC).On page 405 of their important 2020 volume White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism, Malm and ZC refer to “the basic strands” of “a sort of DNA code of fascism” as “ anti-Marxism, anti-feminism, racism, imperialism, the preoccupation with fertility, the promotion of inequality, accolades to violence, and a giddy myth of palingenesis” – that is, the myth of lost but soon to be reborn national greatness, stolen by liberal and Left elites accused of “stabbing the nation/fatherland in the back” by promoting and “replacing” (purportedly) virtuous and hard-working native whites with (supposedly) dangerous and inferior non-white others. More than six years ago, in an essay on then candidate Trump, the liberal New Yorker essayist Adam Gopnik suggested another useful description of the ideological sickness that the future president with orange-tinted skin shared with Mussolini, Hitler, and a slew of contemporary far-right politicians including Viktor Orban, the Hungarian strongman who has emerged as a hero of the Republican right:
“There is a simple formula for descriptions of Donald Trump: add together a qualification, a hyphen, and the word ‘fascist.’ …his personality and his program belong exclusively to the same dark strain of modern politics: an incoherent program of national revenge led by a strongman; a contempt for parliamentary government and procedures; an insistence that the existing, democratically elected government…is in league with evil outsiders and has been secretly trying to undermine the nation; a hysterical militarism designed to no particular end than the sheer spectacle of strength; an equally hysterical sense of beleaguerment and victimization; and a supposed suspicion of big capitalism entirely reconciled to the worship of wealth and ‘success.’… The idea that it can be bounded in by honest conservatives in a Cabinet or restrained by normal constitutional limits is, to put it mildly, unsupported by history.” These are useful descriptions to which we should add some other key definitional ingredients: the “Orwellian” campaign against truth and intellectuals, conspiratorialism, cults of personality centered on powerful and always male “charismatic Leaders,” and – of critical significance – the deployment of the military and paramilitaries and mobs to crush dissent and overthrow previously normative electoral bourgeois democracy and constitutional rule of law. “Lawlessness in the name of law and order” is a particularly relevant “calling card” of the sickness, as the Yale philosophy professor and leading fascism scholar Jason Stanley has noted.
Anyone who doubts that the Trump presidency matched these descriptions of fascism should read the second and third chapters of my most recent book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals and the Trumping of America : “The Fascist Wolf Defined and Foretold” (Chapter 2) and “A Fascist in the White House, 2017-21” (Chapter 3). You can work backwards from this volume’s index, searching phrases like “Charlottesville,” “Portland,” “Proud Boys,” “Hitler,” “Jason Stanley,” “How Fascism Works,” “Rittenhouse, Kyle,” “Bannon, Steve,” “George Floyd Rebellion, response to,” “Capitol Riot,” “January 6th,” and “pandemicide.” You can also read the first chapter, titled “Is it the Fascist Apocalypse Yet?” in my October 2020 book (written while Trump was trying to use the George Floyd Rebellion as his attempted Reichstag Fire) Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and the Politics of Appeasement. “Fascism,” as a Refuse Fascism activist told me in Washington DC as Trump’s Christian fascist Supreme Court was preparing to strip women of their constitutional right to an abortion, “lives on in America and Europe today. It doesn’t require a mustache.”
By the literal Mussolini definition the US was a fascist state by the Progressive era, which saw the consolidation of corporate state capitalism in the USA. See Marty Sklar's magisterial book The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916. I don't know any serious thinker who considers Woodrow Wilson's USA a fascist state. Anyway my latest book (referenced in my comment above) runs thtough a vast amount of writing on fascism, including of course the Jason Stanley stuff you quote below. The first three chapters show precisely how and why the Trump presidency and phenomenon was/is fascist. I particularly recommend Chapter Four, "The Anatomy of Fascism Denial." It is an (among other things) hilarious takedown of all the frankly ridiculous and cowardly ways academics and intellectuals (not the same) came up with to deny the neofascism/fascism staring the nation in the face. This fourth chapter indludes a really fun concluding section on what I at first thought was a joke designation (or mine) and later found out was no joke: "the Trumpenleft" deniers.
As for thinking covid vaccines and masking and all that in defense of the common good and trying to stem a deadly pandemic...as for thinking that all that is fascism, I don't know any words that can began to capture even a small slice of a hint of a dash of a scent of an inkling of an iota of how INSANE -- and I do mean insane -- I think that is. Sorry for that but I have to be honest. We do not inhabit the same cognitive universe in that regard. Which happens a lot these days.
It does. I do recognize that you think my viewpoints are INSANE. And I think yours are clouded from misinformation and propaganda, on this issue. But at least we can talk. imo, and you prob don't agree, but this is just one of the issues that progressives are going to have to work out --how to get back to 'my body my choice' across the board and not at the whim of big pharmas capture of the regulatory system-- while in the political wilderness.
Ah, should have edited... As for Wilson, I would point this thread, which deals with why elitists think of him different than his actual record. https://www.quora.com/Is-it-wrong-to-say-that-Woodrow-Wilson-was-almost-a-fascist
Of course the term wasn't even around, but, call it whatever you want, there's no doubt I would have been in jail living at that time in America, you too I'd bet...
This may be useful: https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/08/26/only-fools-count-on-capital-to-stop-late-fascism/
Just to follow that last paragraph, here's the Republican perspective on the same word, which serves to show how no one even agrees on words anymore.
"The 10 pillars of fascism are: ..number one, a mythic past, a great mythic past which the leader harkens back…Number two, propaganda. There’s a certain kind of fascist propaganda where everything is inverted. The news is the fake news. Anti-corruption is corruption….So, three, anti-intellectualism. As Steve Bannon said, it’s emotion—rage gets people to the polls. We got elected on “Lock her up!” and “Build the wall!” Hitler, in Mein Kampf, says you want your propaganda to appeal to the most—to the least educated people…Number four, unreality. You have to smash truth. So, reason gets replaced by conspiracy theories...Hierarchy. In fascist politics, the dominant group is better than everyone else...Victimhood. In fascism, the dominant group are the greatest victims. The men are the greatest victims of encroaching feminism. Whites are the greatest victims of blacks. Germans are the greatest victims of Jews….Law and order. What are they victims of? They’re victims of the out group, who are criminals. What kind of criminals are they? They’re rapists. Sexual anxiety….Pillar nine is Sodom and Gomorrah. The real values come from the heartland. The people in the city are decadent…pillar 10 is ”Arbeit macht frei“—work shall make you free. The out group is lazy. They’re not just criminals; they’re lazy… It’s all about winning.”
So you think Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works (from which all this comes) is a Republican? Really? Good grief, he's a liberal lefty who describes himself as influenced by Marxism. I mean this all comes from JS, who is about as Not a Republican as anyone can be.
Sorry, I got it from the Chicago library site and other than being in quotes it was not said who was the author. The page is also where the quote on Mussulini, and how fascism is corporatism by another name, with the government allying with corporations, comes.