I know we've had this conversation on a number of occasions here. An argument for letting go of the term. Does American Fascism Exist? For nearly a century, Americans have been throwing the term around—without agreeing what that means. https://newrepublic.com/article/170890/does-american-fascism-exist too long to quote in its entirety. Here are some excerpts: . . . Into this fray enters the intellectual historian Bruce Kuklick, whose Fascism Comes to America provides an entirely new perspective on a debate that’s become a bit exhausting. Unlike other pundits and thinkers, Kuklick is not interested in whether “fascism” as such has arrived in the United States. Rather, he’s concerned with how the term itself has been used in the last century of American discourse. “Fascism,” Kuklick’s exhaustive survey of U.S. politics and culture shows, has generally functioned as a so-called floating signifier. In the words of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who originated the phrase, a floating signifier is a term “void of meaning and thus apt to receive any meaning.” At one point or another, every political perspective in the United States has been identified as fascist. In the last two decades alone, Jonah Goldberg railed against “liberal fascism” as Chris Hedges dubbedthe “Christian Right” “American fascists.” Dinesh D’Souza claimed that Hillary Clinton was fascist; Paul Krugman said the same about Trump. And even fringe ideologies weren’t safe: Sebastian Gorka linked socialism with fascism, while Nouriel Roubini made similar claims about libertarianism. The one consistent quality the term “fascism” has retained since the 1930s is its negative valence. Almost no one uses it positively; instead, to borrow Kuklick’s acid description, the term is the verbal equivalent of “throwing a tomato at a speaker at a public event.” “Fascism,” Kuklick shows, “does not so much isolate a thing as it does some stigmatizing.” Indeed, fascism’s power in American discourse comes from the fact that it has no stable meaning—it’s mostly an all-purpose curse word, a highfalutin “**** this”—which means that the fascism debate, as currently constructed, can never end. *** Fascism, in other words, has not generally functioned as a term of analysis—as Kuklick demonstrates, it doesn’t have “much empirical content.” It is instead “a part of language that is more evaluative than factual.” For most of its American history, fascism has been an insult, a performative reflection of the user’s desire to make the object of their derision disreputable. Kuklick is therefore “skeptical” of the mounds of scholarly research that have utilized “fascist” to describe governments, movements, and people not linked to Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany. Like much research into political topics, this work, he claims, “continues politics by other methods” and “displays standard sentiments as much as … disinterested information.” *** Beyond its versatility, there are several additional reasons why fascism has become such a powerful term in American discourse. First, as Angela Davis’s use of the word suggests, sometimes left-wing thinkers have determined that to impel Americans to confront difficult truths, only the word “fascist” will do. Using the term further enables individuals to indicate that they’re “one of the good guys.” When anti-war activists identified George W. Bush with Hitler in the 2000s, they were not so much making a careful historical analogy as signaling their hatred of Republican warmongers and, in most cases, their allegiance to the Democratic Party. Moreover, in eras like our own, in which rampant polarization co-exists with a political structure in which most citizens have no influence, it’s only natural for people to construct struggles that give their lives political meaning. Identifying “fascists” allows Americans living today to imagine themselves as part of a consequential world-historical fight between good and evil. It’s an ahistorical framing that gives meaning through romantic nostalgia and provides psychic succor to all of us who have no influence in the corridors of power. The contemporary fascism debate is thus about much more than fascism—it’s about people’s sense of self in a moment of anti-popular politics. And it is for this reason that the debate, which on its surface is as academic as a discussion could possibly be, has engendered so much rancor: When you attack someone’s identification of fascism, you’re attacking more than a political diagnosis; you’re attacking their very identity. *** But this still doesn’t answer the normative question: Should we on the left use the term “fascism”? To many, it might not matter that “fascism” has no coherent analytical meaning—what matters is that it’s a politically useful way, first, to force people to appreciate that U.S.-style liberal democratic capitalism doesn’t prevent oppression of the kind that occurred in Nazi Germany, and, second, to mobilize people against right-wing extremism. I’m not persuaded by the first argument. I have yet to see compelling evidence that indicates invoking fascism leads Americans to confront racialized state violence. Leftists have been using fascism as a term of abuse for decades, and it doesn’t appear to have had much effect on how the population understands society. I am also skeptical of the claim that using the term “fascism” is an important means to mobilize people against the far right. It seems to me that there are likely more meaningful ways to rally one’s side against reaction that are centered less on abstract concepts and more on promising, and giving, people money and benefits, as the recent success of John Fetterman’s populist campaign suggests. Unfortunately, there’s no extant data that can definitively settle the question: According to pollsconducted by the firm Citizen Data, in the 2022 midterm elections voters who split their ticket “in five battleground states … were strongly motivated to respond to threats to democracy.” Was the fascism framework an important part of the effort to make voters anxious about democracy’s survival? We just don’t know, though the message “we need to defend democracy” by no means depends on identifying fascism, and we could discard the latter without losing much. As we move further into the twenty-first century, it’s worth asking whether using a twentieth-century term that inevitably invokes images of brown-shirted thugs beating down doors and black-shirted psychopaths running death camps will help us solve the problems we face. Neither climate change, nor inequality, nor structural racism, nor the general hopelessness that has permeated American society will be defeated in ways that resemble the Allies’ defeat of fascism. It may therefore be time to retire the term. Not only is its political utility doubtful, but Kuklick has demonstrated that there is no fascist object “out there” to discover. There is thus no way to end the fascist debate. Agreement or consensus is unlikely to be reached. It’s time to let go. more at the link
****ing Christ, the grandiosity of the prose makes my eyes bleed. I had to look up the author. Story checks out, guy in love with academia and himself. https://jsis.washington.edu/people/daniel-bessner/ Education Duke University, Ph.D. History, 2013 Duke University, M.A. History, 2010 Columbia University, B.A. History, 2006 Jewish Theological Seminary, B.A. Jewish History, 2006 I'm not commenting on the actual content of the article, which you need to wade through a gallon of bullshit to get to, just the writing style itself. TLDR, give me some bullet points, Dr. Dan.
People like to give a label to things they dislike because it allows them to focus their resistance and anger against it. There must be some psychology term for this? We do this all the time. The "fascist" label is but one example. The way we've redefined what racism means is another. And I would argue that the way many people have taken the word "woke" and redefined it as a way to rally against anything progressive that they dislike is yet another instance of this.
Fascism isn't used just as a curse word. I've expressed my views on fascism through pattern recognition of previous fascist regimes and no one who cries "the left calls everyone fascist" engages. Yes. There are strong elements of fascism in America. The notion of the hegemonic cultural ethnicity and religious group being the victims of oppression by outsider groups is a core tenant of fascism. "It's okay to be white" is a central premise of fascism derived from white majority western nations.
I've defined fascism through pattern recognition of previous fascist regimes specially Nazis during Weimar Germany. No one who has this line of thought that the term "fascism" is overly used has engaged with my take though. They just repeat "people don't define fascism and just spam the term". Okay I'm trying to define it and explain what I think it is.
Dictionary definition of fascism link I’m not very old, and neither a historian, but regarding recent politics, I was disappointed the article didn’t touch more on Trumps presidency when trying to make this case. This is where we have seen the word used the most as of recent times I feel. I think there is a case to say Trumps presidency may have consisted of nationalism, autocracy, regimentation and suppression of opposition. Going by the dictionary's terms.
I think most everyone can agree that there are similarities between the fascist movements of the past and what we're seeing today with various populist, right-wing nationalist movements. The existence of similarities doesn't, in itself, mean you can use "fascism" as an umbrella term to describe both. I think fascism had a particular historical meaning, and people who want to emphasize the striking similarities with historical fascism (which is worthwhile!) are kind of playing rhetorical games by redefining fascism to just refer to those similarities.
I think what many don't understand is that fascism at its core is an ideology about hierarchies. The end state of fascism is a authoritarian regime but that isn't what defines fascism. Any extreme ideology such as communism for example usually has an end state of authoritarianism. Hence why when I define these extremist ideologies I try to avoid using the term "authoritarian" because even though it's an end state of fascism, it's to broad of a scope to just think of it as a mere authoritarian ideology as many extreme ideologies have an end state of authoritarianism
Singular individual usually aren't "fascist". It's the mass cultural movement that turns into fascism. So if the percentage of white people thinking that white people are victims increases to a majority of white people, the odds of a fascist regime becoming a real thing also increases.
wish you'd consider the source, which had remain silent when the Tea Party was forced-fitting / spinning this convenient lie during the Obama presidency.
https://jsis.washington.edu/people/daniel-bessner/ https://live-sas-www-history.pantheon.sas.upenn.edu/people/emeritus/bruce-kuklick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Republic#Political_views
I disagree. Let's discuss. What do you think are patterns of fascist ideology rising in a nation? Try to avoid defining generic authoritarianism. If you are that's how you know your definition is too broad in scope which ironically is what you are b****ing about.
Was Trump a fascist? You can debate that. But what is for sure certain is that he had fascist tendencies.
Fascism just like communism needs a base of rabid support for said ideology. I would say Trump is one of the heads of an entire fascist movement
