I'm not saying that American SJers *aren't* going to disproportionately die en-masse, but if you do, it's either going to be because you violently revolted against Trump and got killed in combat, or because WWIII happened (probably over Taiwan) and a bunch of US cities got nuked (in the latter case, many other Western nations will also have their SJers disproportionately die en-masse).
You can choose, personally, not to be subject to either of those. If you want to call New York City, the Bay Area and Washington DC "extermination camps" because they might get burnt to a crisp at some point, I guess I can't stop you, but they're not isomorphic to Auschwitz; you're allowed to leave. Hell, I left Melbourne (or technically, didn't return) due to this hazard. And, obviously, you can choose not to revolt against Trump.
Much as I disagree with SJ (though I also disagree with Trump), I don't want you guys dead. You can save yourselves, and I hope that as many of you do as possible.
It seems to me you interpreted cl’s comment in a way that did not seem the intended meaning, probably deliberately, then gave a bunch of advice based on this alternate interpretation. Which seems a bit trolling, or at least neither necessary nor kind. I remember an old commenter somewhere who would take the stance that the real “Trump Derangement Syndrome”consisted of supporting Trump, and then would reply to comments acting like this was the obvious consensus definition. Your comment reminded me of that. Cl’s post seemed kind of over the top to me but was at least a response to what it was responding to.
I interpreted the post as saying "we [American SJWs] are all going to be murdered by Trump". I wanted to argue against the claim that Trump is Hitler 2.0 and is going to Endlosung them, but I *couldn't* say "you're not going to be killed", "you're not going to be *disproportionately* killed", or even "you're not going to be disproportionately killed *by Trump*" because, as noted, I believe all of those are plausible.
So I focused on the points where these scenarios differ from his/her hysterical fantasies in terms of action recommendations.
I'll admit that part of why I went so hard on "I don't want you dead" is because on several occasions when I've brought the "it's pretty plausible that we have a nuclear war in the near future, and if we do then the deaths will disproportionately be SJWs due to the urban-rural divide" issue up (even in the Ratsphere!), I've been accused of *wanting* that result for culture-war purposes (e.g. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ssc-survey-results-on-schooling-types/comment/12030337https://www.themotte.org/post/1169/smallscale-question-sunday-for-september-15/251226?context=8). As you might imagine, I really do not appreciate that accusation - yes, I oppose SJ, but I am not so morally bankrupt as to want to turn all SJWs into charcoal! - and so I tried to head that little absurdity off in advance. Apparently I can't do that without getting accused of trolling instead, which I also hate; lonely dissent is suffering.
100%, 99% of political activity is about getting the feeling of righteous anger. Creating change is hard, hating is easy and pleasurable. It’s a strong drug.
You understand that if you start shooting Republicans, America will not cheer you as "anti-fascist". We will regard you as an evil terrorist who must be stopped by any means necessary. Nothing could be more beneficial to Trump's standing than an actual violent insurrection. You would be proving him right and making yourself a scary threat all at once. His popularity would make Bush after 9/11 look like Hoover after 1929.
I'm not going to argue with you ideologically since that's an obvious lost cause, but I hope it is still possible to appeal to your pragmatism. Do not start an insurrection when you can't even win an election.
I'm reminded of that one story in the Sequences that explains what truth is, and why it's important to have an accurate assessment of reality. My condolences.
It feels like the obvious answer is that "Fascists are an acceptable target for political violence" is wrong, and the broader claim that "political violence is unacceptable" is true, and should also include "calls for political violence are unacceptable."
I'm not sure I agree that calls for political violence are unacceptable.
I tried to be careful to say that political violence is unacceptable *now*, but that there are certain situations (eg Hitler) where it becomes acceptable.
But in order to recognize when it becomes acceptable, you need to be able to have the debate about whether it's acceptable now, and some people in that debate will necessarily take the yes position, or else it's not a real debate.
"Article 4. Whether human law binds a man in conscience?
...Objection 3. Further, human laws often bring loss of character and injury on man, according to Isaiah 10:1 et seqq.: "Woe to them that make wicked laws, and when they write, write injustice; to oppress the poor in judgment, and do violence to the cause of the humble of My people." But it is lawful for anyone to avoid oppression and violence. Therefore human laws do not bind man in conscience.
...I answer that, Laws framed by man are either just or unjust. If they be just, they have the power of binding in conscience, from the eternal law whence they are derived, according to Proverbs 8:15: "By Me kings reign, and lawgivers decree just things." Now laws are said to be just, both from the end, when, to wit, they are ordained to the common good—and from their author, that is to say, when the law that is made does not exceed the power of the lawgiver—and from their form, when, to wit, burdens are laid on the subjects, according to an equality of proportion and with a view to the common good. For, since one man is a part of the community, each man in all that he is and has, belongs to the community; just as a part, in all that it is, belongs to the whole; wherefore nature inflicts a loss on the part, in order to save the whole: so that on this account, such laws as these, which impose proportionate burdens, are just and binding in conscience, and are legal laws.
On the other hand laws may be unjust in two ways: first, by being contrary to human good, through being opposed to the things mentioned above—either in respect of the end, as when an authority imposes on his subjects burdensome laws, conducive, not to the common good, but rather to his own cupidity or vainglory—or in respect of the author, as when a man makes a law that goes beyond the power committed to him—or in respect of the form, as when burdens are imposed unequally on the community, although with a view to the common good. The like are acts of violence rather than laws; because, as Augustine says (De Lib. Arb. i, 5), "a law that is not just, seems to be no law at all." Wherefore such laws do not bind in conscience, except perhaps in order to avoid scandal or disturbance, for which cause a man should even yield his right, according to Matthew 5:40-41: "If a man . . . take away thy coat, let go thy cloak also unto him; and whosoever will force thee one mile, go with him other two."
Secondly, laws may be unjust through being opposed to the Divine good: such are the laws of tyrants inducing to idolatry, or to anything else contrary to the Divine law: and laws of this kind must nowise be observed, because, as stated in Acts 5:29, "we ought to obey God rather than man."
...Reply to Objection 3. This argument is true of a law that inflicts unjust hurt on its subjects. The power that man holds from God does not extend to this: wherefore neither in such matters is man bound to obey the law, provided he avoid giving scandal or inflicting a more grievous hurt."
"Article 6. Whether he who is under a law may act beside the letter of the law?
Objection 1. It seems that he who is subject to a law may not act beside the letter of the law. For Augustine says (De Vera Relig. 31): "Although men judge about temporal laws when they make them, yet when once they are made they must pass judgment not on them, but according to them." But if anyone disregard the letter of the law, saying that he observes the intention of the lawgiver, he seems to pass judgment on the law. Therefore it is not right for one who is under the law to disregard the letter of the law, in order to observe the intention of the lawgiver.
...On the contrary, Hilary says (De Trin. iv): "The meaning of what is said is according to the motive for saying it: because things are not subject to speech, but speech to things." Therefore we should take account of the motive of the lawgiver, rather than of his very words.
I answer that, As stated above (Article 4), every law is directed to the common weal of men, and derives the force and nature of law accordingly. Hence the jurist says [Pandect. Justin. lib. i, ff., tit. 3, De Leg. et Senat.]: "By no reason of law, or favor of equity, is it allowable for us to interpret harshly, and render burdensome, those useful measures which have been enacted for the welfare of man." Now it happens often that the observance of some point of law conduces to the common weal in the majority of instances, and yet, in some cases, is very hurtful. Since then the lawgiver cannot have in view every single case, he shapes the law according to what happens most frequently, by directing his attention to the common good. Wherefore if a case arise wherein the observance of that law would be hurtful to the general welfare, it should not be observed. For instance, suppose that in a besieged city it be an established law that the gates of the city are to be kept closed, this is good for public welfare as a general rule: but, it were to happen that the enemy are in pursuit of certain citizens, who are defenders of the city, it would be a great loss to the city, if the gates were not opened to them: and so in that case the gates ought to be opened, contrary to the letter of the law, in order to maintain the common weal, which the lawgiver had in view.
Nevertheless it must be noted, that if the observance of the law according to the letter does not involve any sudden risk needing instant remedy, it is not competent for everyone to expound what is useful and what is not useful to the state: those alone can do this who are in authority, and who, on account of such like cases, have the power to dispense from the laws. If, however, the peril be so sudden as not to allow of the delay involved by referring the matter to authority, the mere necessity brings with it a dispensation, since necessity knows no law."
I agree with this as a philosophical anarchist. However, we must note that taking this as a universal standard is anti-democratic as everyone judges the morality of laws independently and acts violently on that principle. The underlying assumption of liberal democracy is not ideal, but a least bas option- that we settle this by some agreed upon process then through the war of all against all.
It's not a hard question for me: as long as you have a political process in the US to constrain or throw out your government, political violence is unjustified. If the problem you have is that "not enough Americans care about this horrible thing to change the government over it" then that's too bad.
And from a pragmatic standpoint, violence generally isn't going to solve the problem in the first place; rather, it is likely to make the populace far less sympathetic to the plight of those victims of torture.
That's a fair question. I mean, it's not, because there would be no government left after WWIII, or if there was, law and order itself would be moot, and thus, violence would likely rule the day.
But let's take your hypothetical: we blow up 3 gorges dam, killing millions, and for whatever reason didn't suffer the effects of, say, a massive nuclear exchange or other event that upended law and order, and for whatever reason most Americans just didn't care, so there wasn't a massive political outcry (that seems completely unrealistic, but for the sake of argument...), I'd leave. This is no longer my country, since my fellow citizens appear to be completely amoral at best, and I would leave and probably join a country which was opposing these things while still embracing basic freedom, should such a place exist. That would probably take time, and in the mean time, I would attempt to persuade anyone I could that what we had done was wrong and cannot be allowed to continue or to ever happen again.
In the much more likely case that there was a very robust public political argument over it, I'd stay and try to persuade as many as I could to my side so we win the political argument, and if those objecting to such lost that fight decisively, I'd have to spend a lot of time thinking about what the appropriate further action is. But violence would not be on the table as long as persuasion and self-government still is.
But this is all thought experiment. The country that would destroy the 3 gorges damn without a very compelling reason would be a different country than the US where I reside today.
I think Scott’s point is that “have a process to constrain” is very broad. How capable of rigging elections does a government have to appear before violence is acceptable? I admit we’re probably not there yet, but the administration has signalled a willingness to shadily circumvent the courts, so what else is there?
This is something that many MAGA supporters felt after the 2020 election. Election procedures were changed in many states within months of the election in the direction of making them harder to audit, using COVID as an excuse, often seeming to violate state constitutions. There were many irregularities on election night that the state didn't seem too interested in investigating. And it was a very close election.
But there was probably no viable route to contesting the election with violence. The American state is perfectly willing to use its substantial capacity for violence and subterfuge against right wing groups. So in the long run, it was still better to bide their time and just re-elect Trump four years later, with a vengeance.
The "harder to audit" was largely done by republican controlled counties who assumed the ability to "check" ballots would favor the dems. That may have been true, but the problem was that the counties that did this were majority republican so it likely actually hurt republicans more.
And there really weren't these iregularites that you claim. This was also a MAGA talking point that got repeated ad nauseam.
Now as someone who volunteered for Ron Paul, I saw all sorts of voiting shenanigans in the primaries by both republicans and democrats.
I looked into these claims when they came out considering it a possibility. And what I found was... nothing.
The election was one of the most secure ever.
I found ONE significant oddity. There was a county in florida where there was inclement weather. A recount was being done and they told people they could go home if they wanted to.
One woman stayed, but she was supposed to be supervised. She wasn't. This was a clear mistake. However, there are multiple couints. She did one recount of a batch of votes. Even if she somehow managed to switch every Trump Vote to Clinton which would have been a very difficult feet given the levels of security, it wouldnt have affected the outcome.
The other "irregularites" cited were just people observing things they misunderstand with the prior bias that dems were going to cheat.
For example places where late large dem vote totals came in after inital republican leads. Thse are very easy and logical to explain. Republican counties tend to be more rural and GOP voters on average are older and vote earlier. So those counties were able to count and certify their votes faster.
Large urban areas which lean heavily democrat take much longer to count and certify the votes. So those big swings late are the urban results coming in.
Nothing unsual about this and its a consistent pattern across elections though the specifics vary.
Others were things like
"I saw a truck picking up votes at the place I was voting that drew away."
Yes, because the votes weren't counted at your small polling station, they are shipped to a larger center.
I saw some guy who had this ridiculous series of hour videos where he starts backwards and comes up with a supposed vote changing algorithm he claims was emplored and spends hours on it, showing his work, to explain how this very convoluted algorithm that had hours of steps of complexity could have been ujsed to change the vote totals without anyone noticing anything but would account for so and so statistical oddites. If you watch these videos its clear hes doing this backwards as he reaches his conclusion then spends hours messing worund with some algorithm modeling program to fit it to the election data versus supposedly showing that it proved statistical oddities compared to previous election vote patterns over a century. Garfabge in, garabge out.
There were many claims by Trump and many lawsuits which failed over and over again. This notion that were consistent irregularite that no one investigated appears to just be a popular claim, not one that has evidence.
Violence is, unfortunately, really effective, especially when deployed against those who have isolated themselves from being held accountable for their actions. The single most effective action of the entire BLM period of protest came in August of 2016 when Michah Xavier Johnson shot 14 police officers, murdering 5, before becoming the first US citizen in the US killed by a robot.
Johnson was, by all accounts, a madman. Additionally, as large metropolitan police departments go, the DPD was actually kinda known for seeking accord with the populations they policed. There were problems, but DPD was not the NYPD, the Chicago PD, or even in the same chapter of the book as LAPD or the LASO.
After these heinous murders, the fact that DPD wasn't reasonably hated contributed to the chilling effect they had on police resistance to holding itself accountable in my opinion. Facts were that the following 6-8 months represented something of a watershed in policy and enforcement changes. The powers that be were much more interested in holding themselves to account when mistakes or malfeasance hurt the public. Since being "one of the good ones" didn't protect the DPD, it could happen to them too at any time.
You may see this event differently, but it really did presage some of the more effective months for police reform in the US. I don't think this means that violence should always be the first tool reformers reach for, but I believe that it does show that a more-or-less functioning society can have parts that are beyond the tyranny threshold that can be improved by political violence.
> Abe's killing has been described as one of the most effective and successful political assassinations in recent history due to the backlash against the UC that it provoked. The Economist remarked that "... Yamagami's political violence has proved stunningly effective ... Political violence seldom fulfills so many of its perpetrator's aims." Writing for The Atlantic, Robert F. Worth described Yamagami as "among the most successful assassins in history".
Which implies that "violence" is a word that needs to be carefully defined. It is one thing to assasinate one man and another thing to massacre everybody wearing a red hat.. The system itself survives the first kind of thing easier, even gets strengthened by a martyr. For example, assassinating MLK did not turn back the Civil Rights movement.
I guess it's really effective when it's effectively used. Which means you need tons of luck/skill to actually execute them. Something people don't really associate with angry mobs. And don't forget, violence is always a double sided sword, expect to be punched back. Somehow it reminds me of this old post https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/02/be-nice-at-least-until-you-can-coordinate-meanness/.
An individual act of violence could be quite effective. The problem is that the great majority of them aren't. So far as I can tell, there is no reliable way to tell beforehand which way it will go. So you are sacrificing a life on the off chance it will do some good...
Obviosuly this assumes some kind of constraint on the extent of the law. If there was a political process to restrain that was no longer effective and the law calls for you to e imprisoned or killed based on your race gender or some factor where you lack an option to obey the law, no one will submit to such on the principle of just authority
Well, wouldn't political violence have been justified against School of the Americas operatives in South America by South Americans, at least? (I know "South America" isn't a nationality but maybe Salvadorans in the early 80s, say?)
This brings up the point I made, that most speech is about the appropriate way for the state to use violence. Without understanding a lot of the assumptions and confusions that go into these divisions the topic will be hopelessly confused.
Take for example ICE. From my philosophical anarchist perspective, ICE is the aggressor (immigrants werent coming after them with violence) and actions against them fall ethically into the category of self defense. Now I don't think violent resistance is practical, but that isn't the same as ethically justified.
When you get to areas like where you are going, the entire pretext of state violence, i.e, the social contract, has to be tortorously stretch to applied.
This type of condemnation of "violence" only treats resistance to the more powerful force as "violence" The violence by the more powerful force is "just" government or maybe the claim would be here "defense against communist aggression" or some such.
World War 2 wasn't "political violence", it was a war. And we didn't go to war because we disliked Hitler's political opinions, we went to war because he started invading neighbouring countries.
I'm almost certain Scott is saying the citizens of Germany were justified in committing acts of political violence against the Nazi government (e.g. attempting to assassinate Hitler), not that the US was justified in going to war with Germany (which of course they also were, but that's a different question).
It is worth bearing in mind that (writing from the USA) we now have nuclear weapons. Internal political violence that has a decent chance of escalating to a nuclear civil war is _much_ worse than anything that could have happened before 1945. _Maybe_ having Pol Pot in control of the nation (perhaps 40% fatalities) is of the same order as a nuclear civil war. Very little else is.
>we already have nuclear-contaminated parts of America, and adding a few more won't do much harm.
If it got to that point, I'd be surprised if it ended with "a few" (unless one side had all the nukes, as in WWII). I do agree that if it ended with e.g. losing three cities, that wouldn't be a nation-ending event. Three hundred, though...
Nukes have little chance of being used in a civil war. The same deterrence factors exist as in regular wars and also on top of that there's the aversion to nuking what you see as part of your own country.
Many Thanks! No one knows. In most conflicts, the natural course is escalation. De-escalation is very difficult, as is evident even in political discourse within the US. If the US fought another civil war with some nuclear weapons on each side, no one knows what would happen.
I’m English. We went to war in 1939. The US didn’t. I’m using we here to mean Britain (and empire). I think any other use of we would be suspect and hand waving about neither of us being alive then is an attempt at deflection.
Of course you might be British and I’m wrong to assume otherwise.
I'm Australian, we went to war the same time you did. You're welcome.
And I guess we should both apologise for assuming the other was American (just because we're both here arguing about American politics for some ungodly reason...)
Thats why "political violence" needs to be carefull defined. On a certain level, it as very obviously political violence. There are all sorts of assumptions here that are treating all types of violence as "not really violence" because they are done by groups with claim to authority. From a libertarian/anti-authoritarian perspective, this is a huge blindspot for most people they can seem to get around.
Calling someone a fascist could mean you should keep an extra close eye on them for purposes of when political violence might become acceptable, as they're opposed to democracy and likely to try to dismantle it, at which point the threshold gets crossed.
Do you think your are better at violence than the Fascists? Do you think killing them would be an effective way of reducing their numbers?
Or getting them to stop their violent political project?
Or weaken their resolve? Make them doubt the justice of their cause?
Do you think it would swing, others to your side?
I think it's a resounding no to all of these questions. Asking if it's ok to kill Fascists is a Fascist question. You need to ask how to effectively fight Fascists, and I don't think it's violence.
Resounding no to *most* of those questions, which is cause enough to refrain, but "better at violence than the Fascists" has historically been a surprisingly low bar. Obsession isn't the same as competence - they don't know when or how to stop, so they under-prepare and overextend.
The question is, "do you as a private individual think you are better at violence than the Fascists who are currently in charge of the government or are trying to take over the government."
And looks like Fascists won all civil wars they had, at least the famous ones (tautologically). German certainly isn't defeated from inside, despite what Nazi propagandize themselves of WW1.
Yes, in foreign wars. In internal conflicts, their track record is generally good. They can simply intimidate people. They don't even need to shoot much - just people with scary guns, scary uniforms and scary faces parading down the main street typically makes their opponents fold.
For example the Marcia su Roma was a myth. They did not march to Rome, because the government got so scared, it collapsed and handed over the reins to Mussolini. Then they held a victory parade IN Rome, took some heroic posing pics, and sold this as the myth of march TO Rome.
And it was a bipartisan myth, the liberals were so ashamed that their leaders spinelessly folded, and they supported the myth it was a big armed attack on the city, so they lost to overwhelming force. In reality they did dare to shoot a bullet.
In the current context which is what we are concerned with. the state and MAGA are far better armed and organized then the opposition and it isnt even remotely closed.
6. Mixed results ending in a wash. Some people would stop sympathizing with you, but some people would also join what they perceived to be the winning side.
Indeed. In response to the "when is it time to kill them?" question, I would go towards the practical of "not untill there is some chance of victory."
I would say it is not the time for violence but rather the time to prepare for violence in the hopes of avoiding it.
That means things contrary to the way many on the left think- arming, training and organizing for defensive purposes.
Protests are not effective and are only being used by the administration to justify more authoritarianism.
Part of the greater enthusiasm for war on the right (as evidenced by the different reactions of leading politicians and figurs) to the Charlie Kirk assasination was the reality that one side has all the weapons, training, organization etc.
It is an ugly reality, but well established that (generally) people are more reluctant to support war/an aggressive takeover the harder it will be to win and the better resistance the opposition can offer.
I think at this point, the left needs to take the threat seriously and understand just how terrible acceleration would be. preparation as deterrance and some possibility of survival if the worst comes to pass.
I've always loved that article, and I am just a consequentialist, not a utilitarian.
But rather than a rule, this could be a case for a cost benefit analysis, almost in the opposite direction of "Be Nice Until You Can Coordinate Meanness":
Political violence has no value when there is sufficient consensus. Why harm a political opponent when you can simply all agree not to give them space in The Atlantic?
Political violence only gains value as consensus breaks down, and since it dramatically accelerates the breakdown of consensus, you pick a moment where consensus is already so weak that the benefits (simple, us vs them jungle survival benefits) outweigh whatever remaining consensus value you're burning.
"then they came for me, and, uh, actually there were a lot of my friends left, and that's when we fought back"
I applaud you for thinking that there is a line that can (or must?) be crossed when the stakes reach that threshold. At a certain point I think the task is just identifying that threshold - at what point does a person constitute an existential risk to ... what exactly?
I think in America the answer to that has to be "Democratic Republicanism" with an emphasis on the Constitution. I am by no means political, but I think - for America to continue to function at any real level - the forms of democracy must stay central, if not the substance.
As someone who spent many of my college years studying Fascism (specifically the Japanese instance, but contextualized of course via the European Axis powers) and *consistently arguing against the use of the label outside of extremely specific contexts,* this may be the first time in a while where I am seeing political actors tick off multiple boxes on the checklist at once.
One thing to remember about Fascism, in its historical context - it's not quite as top-down as it is often imagined. Often, the middle is pressuring the top and the bottom. By which I mean, there can be big political actors, and the average person - but intermediating them is a large mass of powerful organizations. Prior to the rise of a Fascist regime, one of the most insidious ways it can take root is by finding footholds in these organizations. Once organizational power and money can be subordinated to their political agenda, so, too, can those above and below them.
To be clear - I think nobody in remotely mainstream politics has CHECKED ALL THE BOXES for Fascism as it is classically understood to date. Trumpian policies are increasingly moving in that direction, but not enough to warrant serious consideration of the label.
But I am shocked to find myself in a position where I actually think recognizing the rise of Fascism may be of importance.
I read this recently, and while I am not certain I agree with all their perspectives, it is a very sober look at the issue - and I agree, the mechanisms that help Fascism get in power are very, very hard to stop once put in motion. The breaking point would appear to be *Democratic acceptance* of *undemocratic values.* Once we explicitly elect someone who defies the Democratic expectation of governance, it's pretty much game over and there is nothing we can do (save pray or rebel).
When I was younger and bolder and Trump was running for his first term, I often asked incensed Liberals, quite seriously, what level of a threat they believe he represented to the institutions of democracy. My central litmus test was whether there was a moral imperative to assassinate him - for indeed, I hate to say it but if there were ever a case for using force in politics, it would be to prevent a tyrant from seizing power.
I got one affirmative answer to this hypothetical, and I asked perhaps 5 or 6 well-meaning liberal Americans.
Again, I do not think this is the question we ask to justify violence. This is the question we ask to start the discussion on where the line sits - the very conversation we are having now, and which is warranted. I only hope that the answer to the question is not needed, at the end of the day.
If I recall correctly, wasn't the confiscation of guns in Nazi Germany actually quite targeted? It was not so much a blanket ban/confiscation on guns across the country, rather a ban/confiscation of guns targeting specific groups of "undesirables" (I.E., Jews and Gypsies). Interestingly, some sources also claim this was just a formalization of existing law - police could already target these groups for confiscation on flimsy grounds, the 1938 law just gave them a mandate to confiscate *all* guns from those groups.
I do not say this to detract from your point -- on the contrary, I feel like it actually aligns *even more closely* with the current climate in the US.
That was a fun article. Because it is obvious that any kind of radical change, mean or not mean, is going to be really hard to coordinate. Most people most of the time just want to coast. So it mostly cashes out to the centrist position that things should largely stay the same - unless some crisis does require coordinated radical change. For example a housing crisis can lead to a "housing revolution", rewriting all the rules. But otherwise things mostly stay the same. In previous historic periods when words had different meanings, that would have gotten you called a conservative.
I assume you are distinguishing calls for the government to do violence. Where those lines are drawn very much matter in terms of definitons, arguments and ethics
What's the difference between political violence and violence?
Fascist policies and forces are already killing people and taking away rights here in the US.
What has to happen before fighting back stops being 'political violence' and becomes 'self-defense'?
Is the answer that you're only allowed to fight back against the foot soldiers, not the ringleaders? That seems backwards and cruel.
Is the answer '10,000 deaths justifies fighting back, before that it's terrorism'? But in that case, the whole reason for pointing out fascist tendencies is to show what happened the last 10 times fascists took power, arguing tat the future deaths are inevitable if nothing is done, and trying to solve the problem with much *less* violence earlier in the process. Is that type of foresight and learning from history flatly never allowed?
Well Scott pretty much answered that in the piece. He said there is a time for violence. Not now.
Both MAGA and American leftists seem to over estimate the power of their legal pea shooters against the most well armed paramilitary police force in the world ( before the army and national guard are factored in). That leaves you to shoot at political leaders or bloggers, which will lead to the crackdowns you presumably don’t want.
If the “fascists” are to overextend the power of the federal state and its armed militaries or paramilitaries, opposition will come within other elements of the state police forces, national guard or within the army (if you are pining for civil war) not the ragtag of antifa or (for the other fantasists) armed fat MAGA types. The latter could be defeated without a shot by defending a hill and watch them die of breathlessness as they try attack.
What actually did happen the last 10 times fascists took power? Who even are those 10? Just taking the 3 most uncontroversial examples, Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, only one of them was exceptionally horrific. The other 2 were garden variety authoritarians.
The whole violence is justified against fascists argument seems to rest on the premise that fascist = the next Hitler, but that becomes less and less true the more people you include in the definition of "fascist."
Franco is definitely controversial, and it's highly questionable whether he was a "real" fascist. A more unequivocal example would be the Romanian Iron Guard during World War 2.
While I don't know the truth of the matter, a book I had studying the political systems of non-democracies said no to Franco being a fascist. Rather, as they portrayed it, he made a bunch of promises to the fascist faction when he needed their support in the civil war - and then when he won the civil war, he never got around to fulfilling those promises. To be clear, he did remain a dictator; that much doesn't seem to be in dispute.
Note that that's just me pretty much echoing the book's summary. If they ever gave details, they were located further into the book than I ended up reading.
Killed by who, and when? We can judge him in retrospect, but how do you do it in the moment? Being at war is different than a political difference within a country. So I assume you mean for his fellow Germans to kill him. Which they tried and failed.
A thing to remember is that most free speech is in fact a call for political violence, ie., an argument about how the state should operate, which uses violence as its ultimate means of compliance. There is the distinction of calls for political violence outside this framewor, and this is where it gets muddied with people being confused about these things and why they exiost.
I’ve been thinking about Decker’s article, especially in the light of the Charlie Kirk assassination. I didn’t care about his article when he wrote it but I do know.
When must we kill fascists?
When must we kill Decker?
EDIT: There are a lot of people in my replies who would reach Decker’s threshold for death in my opinion. Not who he would’ve chose but still. Where does the rhetoric end and actions begin?
I didn’t even vote for him. All I need to know is that from what you have said, the cursory comment I said about Kirk is enough for you to label me as one side, a side you said deserves violence.
We don't tariff goods from Vietnam at 50% either, do we? It looks as if this was threatened, and then an agreement was reached such that we tariff Vietnam at 20% and they tariff us at 0%, down from a prior average of ~10%.
Regardless of the details, though, I meant to suggest that it sort of seems as if the rest of the world does not actually oppose tariffs, 𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘳. Or do you mean that the rest of the world just opposes the U.S. levying tariffs upon their own goods? Undoubtedly so; I don't think Republicans would deny that, though.
That's not to say that I think the tariffs are a good idea—my default assumption is that the freer the trade, the better—but if they turn out to be effective at persuading other nations to lower their own tariffs upon U.S. products, as Vietnam did, then maybe they were a good idea after all.¹
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¹(Except that now the shoe is on the other foot—20% vs. 0%—and that seems counter-productive; I think the rationale is that this will help reduce the trade deficit? ...though I'm not clear on why the balance-of-trade with a particular nation matters, exactly.)
>Sure, and the rest of the world does not actually oppose wars because they sometimes partake in them.<
I accept this framing: nations oppose wars declared against them, but they must—at least implicitly—support wars that they declare. Similarly with tariffs, and most other things also: self-interest tends to predict position.
>Nobody runs their trade or tax policy by imposing a global 10% tariff baseline and using trade deficits divided by exports to target every sector and every country that way<
True, as far as I know, and I admit to being somewhat mystified by this program of Trump's (e.g., why the 10% baseline? the main—putative—benefit of "reciprocal tariffs" is, so far as I can see, the possibility that other nations will respond by lowering their own barriers to trade; but doesn't the blanket 10% contribute nothing to this, and in fact even weaken it...?).
Could you point me toward where it does so? I'm not doubting that it does—my impression is, indeed, that economists in general disagree with the tariff program—but skimming the introduction & appendices didn't lead me to anything very enlightening (but I do mean "skimming", heh—it's somewhat dry reading, by my standards–).
You do realize that your links don't substantiate what you claimed?
Also note that opposing something doesn't mean, even, that you know it's false. You may oppose it because you know it's true but you benefit from the opposite situation.
I think a minimum bar is "don't do things that absolutely will not help at all in any way", and neither the Kirk assassination nor killing Decker would clear that bar.
The problem about opening this sort of debate is that more than any other form of debate, it’s very easy to turn emotional and bitter. We can try and bind it within the boundaries of reason but even if we ban anyone who goes too far in direct rhetoric, you can’t prevent people from reading it and taking their own emotional responses from it.
What's the claim you're making here? Should we start preemptively restricting speech that could, maybe, make someone violent even if it doesn't call for such? Shut debates down as soon as they get too heated?
So far as I know, the murderer's motive was something like this: Charlie Kirk is hateful towards trans people; this is unacceptable; so I'm going to kill Charlie Kirk. Which is horrible and, yes, itself absolutely unacceptable, but isn't "over free speech" in any sense I can make sense of. Charlie Kirk didn't get killed _for advocating free speech_.
(You could argue that Kirk got killed because of things he said, and therefore his murder was "over free speech". I think the first part is right but the second part is wrong. If I insult someone's mother and they shoot me dead, I haven't died "for free speech". If I tell an armed policeman that I have a bomb and am about to set it off, I haven't died "for free speech". If I live somewhere that has slavery and advocate fiercely for its abolition and a slaveholder kills me because they'll be much poorer if slavery is abolished, I haven't died "for free speech".)
A better way to put it is that he get killed over his speech in a widely publicized event, which reinforces chilling effects on speech of others, making this a free speech issue.
I think you're stuck in a semantic point here. "Getting killed for free speech" is a colloquial way of saying "getting killed for saying things that one has a constitutionally protected right to say". I'll point out that the examples you gave are not constitutionally protected categories of speech: insults are considered fighting words, which are not protected; threatening violence is also not protected. Advocating for an unpopular political opinion, as in your abolitionist example, IS constitutionally protected, so it would be correct in a colloquial sense to say that that person died for free speech.
Part of the problem is that the very smart kids who like to debate the parameters of this and calculate exactly how many utils you get out of killing fascists tend to not be the people who actually commit violence (one struggles to imagine Nicholas Decker in a fistfight), and thus the debate is mostly hypothetical to them and their fun is in the intellectual stimulation of the debate.
Whereas the people who do commit violence tend to be much dumber* and less likely to run the regressions correctly to produce the correct results; the fun for them is in the actual violence!
Jason Manning noted in his review of the book Fragging that a very typical pattern in a fragging was smarter white soldiers bitching about killing their officers with no intent to do it; it was their much dumber black colleagues who tended to actually throw the grenades.
*the Charlie Kirk shooter is noteworthily an exception here)
The interesting complication arises when you consider just how much connection there is between those two classes. The white soldier advocating for fragging becomes a lot less innocent if he does it within earshot of soldiers whom he knows can be easily manipulated into violence. There's obviously a spectrum of influence and plausible deniability there, but the distinction isn't as clear cut as your comment suggests.
I'm reminded of the fuss liberals made when Gabby Giffords was shot because of the "implicitly violent" language that Republicans had been using on the campaign trail (e.g. using hunting metaphors like "we're targeting our Dem opponent" or "we need to take the liberals out"). I think the current liberal rhetoric would fail very badly if judged by that standard.
I made a similar point a while back in response to the murder of the CEO of United Healthcare: those who endorse the killing seem to think that are promoting a principle that people should feel empowered to assassinate people you consider sufficiently villainous. But the principle actually being promoted is that potential shooters should feel empowered to murder people *they* think are suddenly villainous. And a marginal potential shooter is, by virtue of being a potential shooter, the sort of person who is likely to be unusually bad at making that sort of judgement.
I read through one of the lists of American political violence in recent decades and ... what a bunch of screw-ups. Zero Colonel von Stauffenbergs on the list. Lee Harvey Oswald might rank above the average for general functionality and good decision-making ability among Americans who decide to kill over politics.
Are you sure it didn't help them? I mean, they've permanently removed the most important conservative activist from the game board, and all it cost was a bunch of conservative influencers raging on X for two weeks and the failed cancellation of Kimmel.
From an amoral, Machiavellian perspective, violence worked for the left (as it has historically).
It’s hard to evaluate the net impact. It helped get antifa listed as a terrorist organization, massively energized the right, and made the left in general appear violent and dangerous. Kirk can’t be easily replaced but eventually someone will come along to fill his shoes, and that person could be farther right than Kirk.
If the administration actually targeted antifa groups and only antifa groups, that would probably be a good thing for the left in the long run. If they use "antifa" as an excuse to arrest left-leaning people whenever they want, that's definitely bad for the left.
It's not that they are too principled; it's that they are incompetent and weak, which makes it even more pathetic.
The Left put busloads of people in solitary confinement for 6 January, even those who weren't there. They debanked or cancelled their enemies with impunity (even Melania Trump couldnt open bank account for years), they blocked the entire media ecosystem from spreading the true story about Biden's laptop, removed Parler from both app stores and AWS, and eventually removed Trump from social media. They even came close to putting him in prison.
Right cant do even a 2% of that in response of this unprecedented event. The fact there is such asymmetry of power actually makes me worried that we might see large scale civil conflict after the MAGA base realizes that they are not able to count on their political representatives to protect the from the Regime.
Come to think of it, you're probably right about that... unfortunately. Where are—say—the 𝘙𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵'𝘴 activist judges? The Right's entryists, academics, True Believers, censors, propaganda, riots...? There seems to be a disparity there.¹
Same for things such as the "Community Relations Service", the FAA's sudden "biographical exam" / university admissions / countless similar efforts, the social-media–co. pressure (see, e.g., ol' Zuck's testimony), "Sanctuary Cities", selective enforcement of the law & selective flouting of the same, the proliferation of "Grievance Studies" departments...
I'd 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 to say that it's because "well, we are opposed to such things on principle"; but—the asymmetry begins to make me uneasy. Symptomatic of the issue, maybe, is how even the messaging from the "grass-roots" right-wing online community tends to be "just unplug & homestead bro disengage from it all"—which is perhaps good advice (& I've basically taken it, myself: my Substack, such as it is, has no political position or content)... but is 𝗻𝗼𝘁 very conducive to any sort of social or political victory.
Truth be told, I am not really all that fond of the Right, either: Trump has done some good, but also a lot of bad—and the Right has, largely & for many years, seemed to me to be something like... an alliance between greedy Affluenza cases & anti-intellectual social Luddites,² so to speak—but I have been driven into its figurative arms by the way that the alternative 𝘬𝘦𝘦𝘱𝘴 𝘨𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙣 𝙬𝙤𝙧𝙨𝙚.
(I still remember when, over ten years ago now, I found Reddit leftists mocking the ideals of "free speech" & "meritocracy" & "even-handedness" & "objectivity"; not, you understand, saying that we 𝘧𝘦𝘭𝘭 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘵 of these ideals, but disparaging the 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘷𝘦𝘴... to hundreds of upvotes—sc., these were 𝗽𝗼𝗽𝘂𝗹𝗮𝗿 sentiments! Before then, I felt—my perception was—that both sides could agree upon ideas such as "we should strive to ensure that speech is as free as possible" or "we shouldn't support stripping freedoms away from enemies, or other policies that can be turned against us later... even if we think it's in a good cause now" or—the lowest of bars, one would have thought—"some things are objectively true".
(The first time I saw "mathematics is just white oppression" was, I think, the last time I considered myself to be on the left... heh.)
² my general policy is "let people do what they want"—I'm fine with gays, got no problem with someone being trans, have always loved drugs³... ahem; etc.—but the progress of society since ~2010(?) has recently made me wonder if perhaps the ol' "slippery slope" arguments didn't, in fact, have more validity than I had credited them with... heh.
Can we get a source on people not involved in Jan 6 being put in solitary confinement for Jan 6? And on Melania Trump not being able to open a bank account for "years"? I'm aware she claimed one bank account of hers was cancelled in her memoir (without providing evidence that this was in fact for political reasons), but that seems very different from what you're claiming.
> They debanked or cancelled their enemies with impunity (even Melania Trump couldnt open bank account for years),
Can you provide some kind of citation for that? She claimed in her memoir that one of her bank accounts got closed down. She never said which bank. I don't think she ever claimed she had trouble opening a bank account for any extended length of time. I don't think she ever followed up on the claim in her memoir in any way at all.
You seem to be right. I misremembered the story: it was the bank she used at the time that denied her service, but I presume she was able to find another bank.
However, while going through the sources, I found it quite disturbing to realise how widespread de-banking was at the time. They even de-banked Barron Trump, which I find especially gruesome, given that not targeting children for their parents' actions is supposedly a cornerstone of civilised society.
It energised right wing cancel culture. Which is another thing that’s comes around and goes around. So everybody stop cancelling everybody would be the wise, but that’s not recoverable either.
I actually disagree with this. I don't think Kirk was uniquely influential. Whatever his value to the right was, I think it's vastly outweighed by the moral backlash that his murder caused. Ideologues generally have more symbolic value as martyrs than as advocates. More than anything else I think that fact is what keeps a lid on political assassinations.
If Tyler Robinson wanted to maximally advance liberalism he probably would have been better served by pretending to be MAGA and assassinating a popular liberal.
I mean, sometimes. In this case it seems to have got the whole left into the mood of justifying it rather than condemning it, and opened up the previously taboo discussion of "well maybe we really should start killing our political enemies" rather than the opposite.
Yes but that’s limited to a small number of already-committed progressives. I think there are many more centrists who see that reaction and say “wow, progressives are terrible.” I think that, on net, Kirk’s murder will hurt democrats in the next election.
> If Tyler Robinson wanted to maximally advance liberalism he probably would have been better served by pretending to be MAGA and assassinating a popular liberal.
That wouldn't have worked because they'd have just ignored it like they did with the assassination of Melissa Hortman.
That didn't get any traction because Hortman was too obscure. That's why I said popular. It has to be a national figure.
Also the assassin more closely fits the deranged wingnut mold than the political assassin mold, similar to the would-be Trump assassin. Neither of them were really used to tar their respective parties. They're much more reminiscent of Jared Lee Loughner than Tyler Robinson, e.g. motivated more by mental instability than politics.
How very odd that a young man raised in a very conservative religious family, apparently in a committed gay relationship (probably experiencing much internal conflict over this), took extreme, irrational, unprovoked violent action to protect his loved one, and you call this amoral violence by the LEFT. What part of the murderer is a left-wing radical? His gonads? His heart? How does one frightened lover represent the half of all Americans that you call "they"?
Violence almost never helps. By the time it does, it's because there has been a lot of other violence already. Hitler got away with a lot of violence before the only solution was more violence. Violence against Stalin would've been acceptable long before WW2.
Hitler came about in a time when there was open street violence between at least 3 major political contingents. People we're often killed in these battles, buildings were burned etc etc. It's not like he took power *and then all the violence started*.
"After Hitler rose to Nazi Party leadership in 1921, he formalized the party's militant supporters into the SA as a group that was to protect party gatherings."
"Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, members of the SA were often involved in street fights, called Zusammenstöße (collisions), with members of the Communist Party (KPD). In 1929, the SA added a Motor Corps for better mobility and a faster mustering of units."
When he took power, the violence actually did start though. Research the "Night of the Long Knives". Hitler consolidated his power by getting rid of anyone in the party who could challenge him and wasn't aligned with him.
Ernst Röhm, Gregor Strasser and many others were murdered. Gregor Strasser btw. was the leader of the wing that warranted the term "socialist" in the NSDAP. That's the first aspect of his movement Hitler got rid of. An aspect all people who claim that Hitler was actually a leftist ignore. Hitler had distain for leftist ideology and only used them to get to power, then got rid of anyone who actually had this ideology.
The Night of the Long Knives was specifically triggered by it being the Army's requirement to support Hitler - get rid of his paramilitaries so that the Army could (think they could) feel secure.
(This was before the Waffen-SS became a military factor - the Army would have been opposed to that as well, but by then it was too late.)
You are giving more context to the reasons this event took place; but it doesn't change the fact that "he took power *and then all the violence started*."
The Night of the Long Knives was just one example. Another was the „Köpenicker Blutwoche“ in June 1933. I can go on with examples of escalating violence after the election of Adolf Hitler. The boycott of Jews started the 1st of April 1933. Dachau was opened in March 1933. The concentration camp Oranianburg followed quickly after. In April 1933 alone tens of thousands of people were arrested.
The street fighting before the election of the NSDAP was just a warm-up phase for the Nazis ...
This reminds me of an old student project that made a fake advertisement for Mercedes, mocking their new brake assistent. The original claim was that the car would avoid collisions with pedestrians by performing an emergency stop.
In the fake add the car actually accelerated and drove over a young boy in the Austrian countryside, with his mother crying his name, "Adolf", in hysterics while the car leaves "Braunau am Inn", the birth place of a(n) (in)famous Adolf ...
I'm not claiming that Kirk or Decker would have ever reached this level of infamousy. Nor do I claim that it's possible to predict such a thing for any other human being. But the fake advertisment really drives home the moral issues with political violence to prevent worse outcomes, since those outcomes are always by definition unknown. It's a clever take on the prevention paradox IMO.
The core issue is that it's much easier to determine after the fact that a certain individual would have deserved death to prevent worse outcomes than it is to predict it. In another timeline Adolf Hitler might have simply been a bad, poor and unsuccessful painter.
Back to the topic: To me as a German todays America feels a lot like Germany in 1933. That's not a call for political violence. But it definetly is a call to action to anyone who doesn't agree with the fascist tendencies US politics exhibit at the moment. Rallies, strikes, civil disobedience and other forms of non-violent protests are most definetly warranted at this time. Especially against all attempts to threaten future elections, but also against the behavior of your ICE agents ...
Germans telling you that we recognize the signs. We are kind of experts in recognizing them nowadays ;-)
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I actually support banning the AfD. It's a party full of actual Nazis (not fascists, Nazis as in "Would have been early member of the NSDAP in 1933"). This party is anti-constitutional in its nature.
The american equivalent would be a party openly compaigning in the US to reintroduce slavery and to turn half the population into slaves.
Maybe I get the US wrong. But I'd certainly hope that this would be grounds to not let this party campaign on the grounds of their political goals being unconstitutional.
In America we have freedom of speech and freedom of association, so we are allowed to campaign for any policy we want. Yet you would be hard pressed to find anyone advocating to bring back slavery. I believe Germany's suppression of a swiftly growing political party is a far greater authoritarian threat than ICE's enforcement of immigration law.
Your freedom of speech eroding under your very eyes is one of the reasons it's feeling very 1933ish to us Germans. The Jimmy Kimmel issue was kind of the most recent warning to you guys that play time is over.
I disagree with you assessment regarding the "suppression of a swiftly gowing political party" vs "ICE". The German constitution even allows and calls for violent resistance against anyone trying to abolish the constitution. Our constitution starts with "Human dignity is inviolable. It is the duty of all state authority to respect and protect it.". Notice how it says "Human", not "citizen". The AfD doesn't even want to honor that paragraph.
But considering your cultural background I'm not surprised that this isn't important to you. The US constitution only cares about citizens after all. There is no freedom of speech in the US for tourists, VISA holders and any other people with a foreign passport. And while Jimmy Kimmel got his job back for now, the VISAs of people with the wrong oppinions have still not been restored. Yet, you still pride yourself for something you've already lost to a great degree ...
There's a constant tension between people who think the lesson of fascism was "don't negotiate on high-level abstract liberal principles" and those who think "don't negotiate on suppressing specifically awful and retrograde worldviews"
The latter are proponents of paradoxical "militant democracy," where the former would be accused of a paradoxical suicide pact liberalism.
That just makes your constitution even worse. I knew that it only cared about citizens. But that it doesn't even guarantee basic human rights to its own citizens is quite something. You should probably amend that once you get the chance ;-)
> we recognize the signs. We are kind of experts in recognizing them nowadays
No, you aren't. You just think you are because you hallucinate these supposed "signs" in a lot of places while ignoring (or cheering) ACTUAL authoritarianism.
This operationalises pretty well as a general rule on political violence.
Take as a starting point that there is a set of scenarios where it's acceptable to try and forcibly overthrow the government. Where you're in one of those scenarios, violence is justified if, and only if, it's a necessary (or very helpful) part of a coherent plan to overthrow the (presumably tyrannical) government. Killing random people because of their opinions will basically never reach this level, even in a dictatorship.
This punts part of the question back to, "When is it ok to forcibly overthrow the government?" I think that's straightforward as well in one scenario: where there's no prospect of removing the government through democratic or peaceful means.
I think there's also an argument for a second scenario where overthrowing the government meets some reasonable metric of self-defence; in a hypothetical Nazi Germany with elections, saying Jews would just have to shrug and get killed seems absurd. That's much fiddlier to draw a line on though, and it's also not clear where overthrowing the government is meant to go (elections don't solve the problem). This problem, although it seems farfetched, is basically Paul Kagame's origin story.
Seems straightforward enough to me. If there are two groups of people, A and B, and group A is a government which is actively trying to kill everyone in B, that's called a war, meaning B and B's allies are broadly allowed to shoot back - at least in any manner consistent with the Geneva conventions and suchlike.
What if Group B is “people who have committed capital murder” or members of a terrorist group? What if the government’s not trying to kill Group B, only intern them or expel them from the country?
In my thinking, a minor crime syndicate picking a fight with the cops and immediately losing is still, in some sense, a war - just a very small one, with a particularly uncontroversial outcome.
That's... wow, I'm baffled how you'd be confused about this. Yes, obviously a terrorist group is de facto at war with the government they're doing guerilla attacks against, with corresponding implications for tactical necessity of violence. Joining or deliberately perpetuating such a group might still be immoral for strategic reasons, and all that reasonably-foreseeable violence would be a major factor in such a determination.
> “people who have committed capital murder”
Not usually a cohesive group, any more than, say, "people with a prime number of active hair follicles." As for individuals... heroic loners falsely accused of serious crimes, evading and inconveniencing law enforcement until they collect enough evidence to exonerate themselves, is common enough in fiction to be a cliche, so 'trying not to get caught' clearly isn't widely regarded as inherently wrong all by itself.
> only intern them or expel them from the country?
Kidnapping or home invasion aren't usually considered any less serious than direct violence in terms of how much force is acceptably proportionate in response - not least because success at such would make potential follow-up violence much easier. The more important factor is, was there some less destructive option which could also have accomplished the defensive goal? https://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=935
But the question isn’t whether a terrorist group is trying to overthrow the government, it’s whether they’re morally justified in doing so (and killing people in the process) purely because the government’s hunting them down, which seems like the answer is no.
If you’re including expulsion, should illegal immigrants be able to use force to stop themselves being deported/overthrow the government that’s trying to deport them?
My point is that you probably have to wade into an object-level question of who the government is justified in killing/detaining/expelling to determine who is morally justified in trying to overthrow an elected government in response.
From a philosophical anarchist perspective, the ethical if not practical answer is self defense. If one si threatening you or someone else who is not aggressing against them, self defense is acceptable. People who are committed to such (like police mean out on patrol) also count as ethical targets.
Not a practical answer, just an ethical one. Its pretty clear who is the aggressor when it comes to violence.
At minimum you should consider killing them when you have run out of options for preventing them from doing physical harm to others. AFAIK decker has never physically harmed anyone, but plenty of fascists are illegally kidnapping innocent people and throwing them into gulags, for example.
Still though, Decker himself has said that you should wait until the fascists "shoot first" so to speak, ie: they do some obviously immoral, illegal, and brutal thing to a large group of innocent American citizens, because that gives total casus belli to start a civil war.
The Gulags were run by the most anti-fascist people around. 100,000s of fascists were sent to the Gulag. It is evidence that being anti-fascist doesn't make someone good.
Oliver, the use of the word Gulag is just a stand-in for "political prison", not actually a reference to Soviet gulags. I hope you are smarter than this.
You're using fascist in the connotative sense that's being critiqued here: bad people. Do you think these federal agents are trying to enact a technically-correct Fascist state? Or are they part of a generally authoritarian regime? Personally Trump et. al. seem more like Chavista/Castro populist socialists than fascists if we go line by line on their agenda and attitudes. I don't care for it either way but a proper description is key to a proper prescription.
There's actually open debate about whether the immigration raids and deportations are illegal, especially in the specific cases. I would say that 75 percent of the actions this year are SOP for immigration agencies from Bush to Biden.
"seem more like Chavista/Castro populist socialists than fascists"
Right. But machismo *over there* is not treated the same as machismo here. Socialism with a certain aggressive male pathos really isn't socialism to American progressives. It once could be, but no longer can.
Would you like to explain what those theoretical non-fascist means are? Because the liberal establishment would certainly use their entrenched position to fight back against any attempt to change the status quo.
Decker's writing encourage other people to conduct violence against garden variety American conservatives. Why should that one degree of separation protect him? It's pretty easy to add parameters to a hypothetical mathematical model where Nick Decker's premature death is net positive utility for mankind.
It's frighteningly easy to use utilitarian logic to justify any sort of action one wants to do.
Decker has precise thresholds where violence becomes acceptable (as we all do) that as far as I know current fascists have never had. They seem to just want to kill people for pleasure. Of course you can rationalise any behaviour, but not all rationalisations are equally correct.
I think with this sort of a thing there is a huge difference between people who have opinions/supporters vs those actually doing the violence themselves. Of course in a civil war/total populist takeover, there are no civilians which is a horror of civil war I think a lot of people don't grok.
And the term was fairly new then. The worst characteristics are indistinguishable from any other authoritarian mindset. Altogether not a very useful term anymore I don't think.
"Fascism" is meaningless, if it means anything it refers to the sort of "strength in unity" idea promulgated by all political movements of all stripes everywhere.
The Italian Fascists' German counterparts had a much more meaningful name for their movement: National Socialism. This is a much better and more accurate label for the entire sort of thing, and if we'd only stuck with that label then we could be having meaningful discussions about it.
But the left-socialists (like Orwell and his less cluey brethren) of the time didn't want to acknowledge their common ground with right-socialism so they used "Nazism" as the name for a particular party and "Fascism" as the name of the general sort of movement, when it should have been the other way around.
So now we spend all our time arguing over whether all sorts of modern people are members of a long-defunct Italian political party, which is as ridiculous as arguing over whether they're Bull Moose or not.
Yes, those _are_ fasces, and yes that _is_ consistent with his putting the U.S. back together by force of arms, over the violent objections of portions of it. Compelled unity is bloody. C'est la mort.
>But the left-socialists (like Orwell and his less cluey brethren) of the time didn't want to acknowledge their common ground with right-socialism
Orwell himself acknowledges there are similarities in the essay you are responding to:
>But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor *Socialists of any colour, are willing to make*.
Lots of people doing bad things in American politics would actually be doing virtuous things if what they believed about the world were true.
Just as one example, if Joe Biden really had stolen the 2020 election, only the people who stormed Congress would have been taking the preservation of the American system of government seriously, and their many many fans would be a bunch of poseurs who had the opportunity to put their money where their mouths are, and did not.
A fascist who is right on the cusp of wiping away American liberties and rights for a generation or longer might be a valid target for political violence IFF that person’s program had been correctly diagnosed and the violence had a reasonable chance of averting the outcome.
But given how sloppily such terms and labels are deployed, to draw a line high enough that the 95% confidence interval is still on the fascist part of the scale, one must essentially wait until a politician puts on a full black bodysuit and marches down to Congress with a rifle shouting “I am a fascist, it is time to do a fascism, here is how I will do so,” followed by a seven-point-plan to institute all the greatest evils.
I don’t have a great solution for this, I will just observe that any actual fascists out there surely benefit from these consequences of injudicious language.
Realistically the win case for Jan 6 would to be delay the confirmation for long enough for further investigation to be performed to find evidence of sufficiently widespread fraud to justify holding some kind of fresh election.
That's the sanewashed version anyway. In reality you've just got a bunch of bored angry people who gave spent a year in quarantine watching the left burn and loot over some equally bullshit cause and deciding it's their turn.
The body tasked with identifying fraud in a Presidential election is actually Congress, during the counting of Electoral Votes. So a protest outside of the Capitol building that calls attention to fraud is actually the right thing for 'regular people' to do during a stolen election. What storming the building is supposed to do I'm not sure.
I don't think the Courts could remedy a fraudulent election where the Electors have already voted. They certainly have no power to order a new election. The only real influence they have is saying which votes do and don't count.
No, Trump had a specific coherent plan, put together by Eastman: make Mike Pence throw out the electoral votes of seven US states, thereby causing Trump to win, either the majority of remaining EVs, or by vote in the House by state delegation. This theoretical action would take place on January 6, as that's when Pence, as President of the Senate, opens the certificates, in accordance with the 12th Amendment to the US Constitution. Pence refused to do this, as he believes in the most basic elements of American democracy, so Trump sent a mob to intimidate him into submission. The mob may not have understood every detail of the plot, but they did understand it came down to Pence - that's why they were chanting "Hang Mike Pence."
I don't think I necessarily have to take people's claims about what they believe as being in good faith. I.e. I think a lot of "Biden stole the election" claims are motivated reasoning from people who would use violence to overturn elections commonly if they could.
Trump started planting the seeds for the stolen election narrative in April 2020, then really ramped it up at the end of July. Or you can go back to 2016 when he suggested it would be rigged.
Ironically one of the most quoted sources on the rigging in the 1960 presidential election in Illinois is from a 12 year old Hilary Rodham who was so shocked she became a committed Republican activist.
Do you really think that YouTube shows the same thing as a sitting president alleging it will be stolen well in advance of the election, continuing to it say it for 60 days after, calling the Georgia Secretary of State and pressuring him to change the vote tally while hinting that he could be prosecuted, then holding a rally outside Congress during certification, calling your own VP a coward for not overturning the results? That’s just normal politics?
Dunno about jail for officials, but there have been prosecutions of voters. A woman in Texas got five years for double voting in 2016. In 2020 A murderer in Colorado voted on behalf of his dead wife. In 2018 an election in North Carolina was thrown out and done again in 2019 because of election fraud.
Trump's claim is that if all the votes were accurately counted as they were cast, he would have won 2020.
Democrats saying: "Trump won because foreign disinformation got people to make misinformed votes" or "Trump does not really represent the people because although he won the election, he didn't win the popular vote" is not even in the same solar system as claiming that the voting machines secretly switched the votes. Do you realize how "Foreign interference got people to vote in ways they wouldn't have otherwise" is a substantially different claim than "Foreign interference switched the votes that were cast by Americans"?
The only thing that is remotely comparable is Gore 2000, an election where there demonstrably was legitimate question the degree to which votes in a few specific counties were accurately counted, and that asking for a recount in those counties is a completely reasonable avenue of seeking redress.
This is a personality piece on three nobodies with no influence in the modern political climate who are also 9/11 truthers about the 2004 election.
You are trying to compare this to a mainstream belief in the modern Republican party espoused by the President of the USA and Fox News and still held by 40% of the party.
Do you think that being able to find someone with fringe beliefs means that the parties are at all comparable? Do you think these are equally representative of the broader beliefs in their respective parties?
Fair enough, but I also think that a lot of "January 6 was an insurrection" claims are also motivated reasoning from people who would also use violence to overturn elections of they could.
I think there's a scary number of people on both sides who want to do that.
No, it's a pretty straightforward reading of what happened. Donald Trump attempted to use force or threat of force to intimidate Mike Pence to throw out the EVs of seven US states, in order to win when he actually lost. I don't understand what is supposed to not be an insurrection about this. Not enough guns? So if Mike Pence had been surrounded by a mob of 300 unarmed people, pushed, shoved, kicked, and finally, after being beaten black and blue, decided to throw out the EVs to make the pain stop, it still wouldn't have been an insurrection because he didn't have a gun pointed at him?
the commander in chief is just a name. the president is not a god king who can simply command the military to do whatever it wants at his leisure. theres a story about richard nixon directing a nuclear strike against north korea while in a drunken stupor; henry kissinger told the top brass of the military to stand down and wait until the morning when nixon sobers up and he forgets all about it. the commander in chief isnt that powerful.
if trump directed a military-led insurrection against the government as opposed to the moron-led insurrection, the military most likely would have refused the order.
Bob says "Y is evil and X is obviously false, therefore you must only be claiming to believe it as an excuse because really you're evil and want to do evil things."
I have seen many many cases of this, from either side, and always, the answer has been that Alice really does believe X.
(For examples: X = "Abortion is murder", X = "Biden/Russia stole the election", X = "Vaccines don't work/have major side effects", X = "Homosexuality is sinful", X = "Women are an oppressed minority", etc. Those specific examples are all things I can guarantee you someone out there actually really believes, although I personally think all of them are both false and harmful. But let's not get into the weeds on that.)
I agree, and think that's one good argument for restraint and humility - if I think we are in an illiberal democracy (I do) and that the normal operation of the Constitution has been suspended (I do) then arguably we should be forming a violent resistance. But I disagree because I could be super wrong. And I would not want to be subject to violence if someone else thought the same with as much confidence as I have.
I have lots of reasonable hope - people have a visceral negative reaction to cancelling elections, so even if the GOP attempts it I think it's likely to fail and backfire. Many of the things this administration is doing are just the natural result of one party controlling the full federal government, and so nobody being empowered to check the executive, a problem we've bounced back from in the past. So despite the conditions for violence arguably being there, I have low confidence that violence would be effective, or that less disruptive means wouldn't be more effective. And I think anyone considering whether legitimate violence is needed here or in any case should do a similar calculation and ask about their own level of certainty. Of course, a major problem is that extremists tend not to do that calculation and reasonable people tend to do it, so we end up with only extremists being able to wield this tool. So to sum up I have no point and I'm just talking.
If MAGA people were factually correct about things like the 2020 election, immigrant violence, Trump's mental fitness, etc., I think it would have to be only by coincidence. They would still be doing something very wrong, which is exercising power on the basis of a very flawed epistemology.
We have a moral obligation to try and understand what is true and what isn't, especially before engaging in violence, or voting for leaders who will act with the backing of state violence. If we refuse to put in that effort out of laziness, or because we emotionally or socially prefer some narrative, we deserve moral rebuke, even if the beliefs we land on turn out to be accurate. The reason we deserve that rebuke is that by exercising power without understanding reality, we endanger people.
This isn't the only reason the MAGA movement deserves rebuke- the bad epistemology is sometimes, though not always, motivated by other moral failures like a desire to dominate, or a very narrow circle of moral concern. But I think it deserves to be condemned even in the absence of those other motivations.
I also don't think they benefit from being labelled "fascists". When used descriptively, the word is notoriously vague, but when used normatively, I actually don't think the word is vague at all- I think it has a very clear, widely agreed-upon definition, which is "someone who is sufficiently similar to the Nazis and their allies to morally deserve the shame of being associated with them." The word, in practice today, is a moral condemnation, like the word "cruel". Who, objectively, are the cruel people? Well, that's vague. But if someone condemns you for being cruel, you know what they mean.
Moral shaming of that sort has been common throughout human history because it's effective. I do think Trump and his people have earned the shame of the "fascist" label; I think using it is accurate according to the word's modern normative definition. I also think it probably is effective at reducing the social status of his movement- mostly because, on reflection, a very large number of people seem agree that the label is normatively accurate.
> If MAGA people were factually correct about things like the 2020 election, immigrant violence, Trump's mental fitness, etc., I think it would have to be only by coincidence. They would still be doing something very wrong, which is exercising power on the basis of a very flawed epistemology
This is true of both sides of politics and has been since forever.
I've long thought we should appreciate people for doing the right things, even if they didn't do it for the right reasons. Even if they didn't know why they did it.
We already kind of have an answer for this. Let's take the case of murderers and rapists. In our legal system you do kind of have to wait around for them to actually murder and rape people before you can lock them in a cage, or at the very least until they march around screaming "I'm going to do a rape/murder" as in your comment.
“This machine kills fascists” is undoubtedly relevant, but it seems in bad faith to take it at face value - seems like a burger company claiming their products “kill” vegetarians by converting them to eating meat. I think most people interpret Guthrie’s slogan to mean “This machine kills fascism”.
If a burger company's ads were "This restaurant kills vegetarians", I think many people (including me) would have further questions!
I think the actual story is that during WWII, people who built guns and bombers would sometimes put "This machine kills fascists" on the actual fascist-killing military hardware, and Guthrie (in the context of WWII) thought it was funny to put it on his guitar. I'm not sure what further conclusion we can draw from that (it was during WWII, when killing fascists was much less civil-war-ish), but I'm a little nervous about how the phrase is used today.
Even then, we weren't killing fascists, we were killing people from countries with whom we were at war. We didn't do a lot of bombing runs over Spain, despite Franco's regime being fascist, because we weren't at war with them.
I suppose the idea was in the irony - use something normally employed for actual weaponry doing actual killing to instead label a tool of art that merely "kills" the ideology. So in that sense it was quite a positive use, the twist being exactly that it doesn't really kill, it spreads ideas.
I don't get it, is this a bit? He was obviously talking about how the Allied armies were using his songs as recruitment material.
EDIT: Wait, is this just people confusing Guthrie with Bob Dylan? Because these misinterpretations make a lot more sense if people are imagining the slogan being done by a folk singer writing hippie anthems in the '60s, rather than by a WWII-era Marine writing propaganda for the military he was serving.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to interpret it as anything other than “this music causes people to abandon fascist ideology” unless you’re going to claim that the singer of “This Land Is Your Land” was, what, threatening to go around bludgeoning people with a guitar?
As I said elsewhere, I'm not sure if this confusion is a joke or not, but he was clearly boasting about how his music was being used to recruit for the army.
"This land is your land" seems like a kinda fascist blood-and-soil anthem when you think about it.
I'm not saying that Woody Guthrie was a fascist, just that it wouldn't surprise me if it turned out the same lyrics had been generated by a different process in another universe.
Yup. I always loved this song, of course, like most of Americans. I had mixed feelings learning about the two original verses that he left out, both of which have made a comeback. I loved the verse about him watching poor people stand in line for bread. I was totally appalled by his attack on private property. 10 years later and I'm not appalled anymore. Our property customs are the result of a compromise and negotiation that have lasted for 1000+ years. Our property laws (and the overarching customs that guide them) are pragmatic stop gaps. They aren't sacred principles handed down from God at the dawn of time.
Exactly. Using "kill" in a way that actually has nothing to do with killing is an incredibly common figure of speech. It's also a very common figure of political speech to take all the other side's statements as literal fact, while excusing the same from your own side as just jokes, exaggeration, or figure of speech.
To be fair, some kind of guerrilla mariachi going around in WW2 Europe smashing Nazi skulls in with his armoured guitar sounds like a pretty rad movie idea.
It should be remembered that between September 1939 and Operation Barbarossa Guthrie thought fighting fascism was a terrible idea only supported by people controlled by Wall Street bankers and campaigned against the draft and military preparation. It is impossible to tell but it is quite likely that some of the "fascists" he wanted to fight were supporters of Trotsky.
The entire problem is that WWII era American society would itself be considered "fascist" by the standards of today. Because racism and nationalism became the ultimate evils, rather than racial extermination and imperialism (or rather, the former is viewed as a greased slope to the latter), most Western societies prior to WWII are retroactively bunched closer together with the Nazis on the evil scale than would be evident to those societies themselves at that time.
Don't forget this is the pre Civil Rights era (and read some of the opinions of soldiers at the time), so someone could say "I'm a segregationist American patriot, not a fascist" and even those who opposed them and had positions on integration that preconfigured the Civil Rights era, would actually believe them. Today, the moral difference between pre-WW2 non-fascist American and European societies has been squashed together in a way where if someone says "we should kill fascists" people who basically DO just want 1950s America (also viewed as evil because pre Civil Rights era) are viewed as rounding off to the same thing. Obviously fascism was thrown around here and there back then too, but nowhere near to the same degree, because the moral squashing of the past hadn't happened yet.
Yeah, I find it weird when opposition to immigration is implied to be incompatible with "liberal democracy." The immigration policies of the countries that actually fought the Axis powers were extremely restrictive.
Vegetarianism as a philosophical position is different from the biological trait of having an herbivorous digestive system. Plenty of cows would gladly eat meat if it were available to them - calcium-deficient deer have been known to suck the bones out of baby birds.
I don’t necessarily see a contradiction between (2) and (3). You can think that fascists are a legitimate target for violence in that you wouldn’t morally scorn an individual for attacking a fascist, and at the same time think that political violence will generate a number of negative externalities without actually solving the problems brought about by having a large portion of the US population being fascists. Basically something can be morally justifiable without being a good idea to actually carry out.
Thanks, that's useful pushback. I do think violence is currently morally unacceptable and not just impractical, but I agree it's not as logically airtight as it originally claimed.
Hot take: violence is bad whether it's political or not. Political motivation alone neither makes it more excusable nor makes it worse.
(Similarly, incitement to violence should be treated with equal gravity regardless of political motive / affiliation. Arrest the leftist calling for the Nazi to be punched if and only if you also arrest the Nazi calling for the leftist to be gassed.)
Sure; and as it happens western justice systems do in fact make a distinction between premeditated crimes vs crimes of passion, so no new exception is needed to capture premeditated acts of terror.
Arguably there's room for a useful distinction between "murder of someone known personally, premeditated to look like an accident or otherwise avoid raising a fuss" vs. "murder of a stranger who happened to support a rival political faction, premeditated to maximize disruption and spectacle."
Both involve deliberate killing, which the law certainly needs to firmly discourage if it's good for anything at all, but the latter is also effectively a public threat against every surviving member of the victim's faction - 'let that be a lesson to the rest of you' - which constitutes further, separate damage to the fabric of civil society.
I've always been against hate speech laws, considering them to be thought crime laws. but now that I think of it, laws against terrorism and political violence are kind of thought crime laws, too. I don't know what to make of this. I'm not even sure if premeditated murderers are more likely to reoffend then impulsive murderers.
I am responding to someone saying political violence is never acceptable with examples that I think are hard to disapprove of. I also would not say that John Brown failed at all.
Everyone who is violent has something that drives them to violence. The mere fact they were political alone is not what we use to decide what we think about it. With that alone and no other context, they'd get filed in the same bin as, oh, any of the random nutters that write their ravings in a "manifesto" before they do a shooting as seems to be a regular occurence in the US. We actually look at the whole situation, as for any other violent incident. The details matter and you have to judge case by case, whether it is political or not.
Hence, as I said: "Political motivation alone neither makes it more excusable nor makes it worse."
"Political motivation alone neither makes it more excusable nor makes it worse."
I'm not saying it's never necessary. I'm saying the "political" label alone is not what we use to judge, and after you've looked at the situation in detail adding the extra label is redundant. "Political violence" is a thought-stopping phrase. It gets trotted out when someone wants you to make a snap decision and/or overgeneralise.
After the fact we can punish assault & battery less than we punish murder, just as we punish attempted murder less than actual murder. But beforehand we don't know what the actual result of violence will be, and some people actually do die as a result of getting punched in the head.
Civil disobedience is widely regarded as at least potentially okay. The *absolutely fundamental* part is that you're public about what you're doing and that you're willing to take the punishment if found guilty in court.
This is also what makes it (sometimes) effective in the first place - without that part, it's mere hooliganism.
Or the opposite: A deontological general rule against political violence is good and important, but there may be specific extreme situations at the tails where utilitarian concerns outweigh the general principle, and fascism may be one of those.
This isn't that weird; the value of having utilitarian calculations is often to catch unusual exceptions to a broad deontological rule.
Let me see if I can come up with an example that is maybe less loaded than "fascist" currently is.
Murderers (and perhaps other categories of serious criminals) are a legitimate target for violence. (I'd guess that most, but not all, people who are anti-death penalty are generally against it on quasi-procedural grounds not because they don't actually think murderers can a legitimate target for violence).
But vigilanteeism in American is morally unacceptable (at the current time).
Both of these seem reasonably broadly acceptable? But we can also understand there are times & contexts where vigilanteeism might be morally acceptable.
The limiting factor is the "not acceptable at this time", not the categorisation of some people as being valid targets should "at this time" change.
Even leaving aside far-fetched hypotheticals about the collapse of effective state authority or widespread corruption/malfeasance we can look at cases like the murder of Ken McElroy.
From wikipedia, for those aren't familiar with him:
"Over the course of his life, McElroy was accused of dozens of felonies, including assault, child molestation, statutory rape, arson, animal cruelty, hog and cattle rustling, and burglary.
In all, he was indicted 21 times but escaped conviction each time
[...]
McElroy was shot and killed in broad daylight as he sat with his wife Trena in his pickup truck on Skidmore's main street. He was struck by bullets from at least two different firearms, in front of a crowd of people estimated as numbering between 30 and 46. Despite the many witnesses, nobody came forward to say who shot him. As of 2025, no one has been charged in connection with McElroy's death."
Per social contract theory, someone who commits murder has unilaterally defected from a broader agreement we all have to refrain from killing each other, and as such is no longer protected by it - but the rest of us, not having defected, are still obligated to deal with that threat using as little additional violence as reasonably possible. In Ken McElroy's case, apparently the formal mechanisms for doing so had been tried and found wanting, so empirical "minimum necessary" kept incrementing upward.
Any given witness, after the mob dispersed, might have thought to themselves, "Could the shooter(s) be coming for me next? Eh, probably not. Even if it somehow gets to a point where I've had, say, nineteen blatantly unjust felony acquittals, all I gotta do is remember to plead guilty and throw myself on the mercy of the court for the next one."
I push back against your assumption that most people are against the death penalty on procedural reasons. I would say that many, perhaps most opponents of the death penalty do not believe that retributive violence is appropriate against murderers. They truly believe that violence is only justified in the context of stopping and/or incarcerating the murder. Although naturally incarceration involves continual implicit threats of violence.
I have an admittedly strange compromise position where the death penalty is wrong, but I think murderers should be blinded or otherwise permanently disfigured. I figure it meets the demands of justice, safety and financial responsibility. You should see my fellow bleeding heart liberals freak out when I share this view. I posted this view on a Reddit group where you are supposed to post the most outrageous thing you believe, and it was removed by a moderator because "this must be bait, there's no way you really believe that."
Regarding your view on vigilantism, I think you're understanding of vigilantism is naive and overly influenced by Hollywood films. I regret that vigilantism has a large fan base in this readership and there is not much pushback.
Nor does your interesting anecdote about Mr McElroy clarify the situation. Even if vigilantes only killed innocent people say, 1 out of 6 times, that would represent an incredible travesty. It's a fundamental rule of anglo-american jurisprudence that it's better for 10 guilty people to go free than for one innocent to suffer. I do not know how much traction this princie has internationally, but it's a principle I hope we never forget
"Almost nobody uses fascism in a purely innocent denotative way; if they did, it would serve their purposes equally well to replace it with a synonym (like “far-right nationalist authoritarian corporatist”) or even a more specific subvariety (like “Francoist”). But it wouldn’t serve Gavin Newsom’s purpose to call Stephen Miller a far-right nationalist authoritarian corporatist, because Gavin Newsom specifically cares about the negative connotation of “fascist”, rather than its meaning"
I think "far right" would actually have served a similar purpose. I find that most people just understand "fascist" to mean something like "very far right", and many would still grant the same connotations and implications (e.g. it's OK to use violence against the "far right").
This might just be a difference of intuitions - I think if Gavin Newsom had called Stephen Miller "far right", everyone including Miller himself would have just shrugged and said "yeah, I guess".
And, of course, left and right are just labels for temporary political coalitions in one place at one point in time.
They don't have much to do with policy preferences.
Remember how free trade used to be a centre right idea, and now the right (in the US) loves tariffs?
In British politics anti-semitism is now firmly a left thing, in the peat the literal Nazis were also big fans.
Traditionally in post war Germany Catholicism was associated with the centre right. I've you've listened to a Pope recently, they are pretty much commies. (Though I have to admit that's probably closer to what you should expect if you read their book.)
Probably. But I do think that there's some fundamental "core" behind what is right and left from when these terms were first used before the French Revolution to now (see e.g. Scott's "Thrive vs Survive" theory, which I agree with mostly), but obviously the specific policies and even some values of "Right and Left" can shift depending on time and geography.
I also feel that the argument can be made (as has been made by others) that currently the Right is mostly "tribal" while the left is mostly ideological. This explains a lot of modern politics, for example why less educated voters in most Western countries tend to favour the Right (especially the populist right), while more educated voters tend to favour the left. Also, it's a reason for why "cancel culture" was developed (mostly) by leftists, as the left cares more about "ideological purity" than the right, who cares more about a strong leader" who can lead the "tribe" (the "tribe" usually being an ethnic or at least national/citizen group, though sometimes it can be broader or narrower, depending on the context). And while the right these days is probably ideologically a lot more diverse than the left, the left has more problems unifying and especially appealing to a large group of voters because they tend to be much more ideological and thus less accommodating of people with different views, which on the left seems to be seen more as a moral failure than on the right were more people are accepted as part of the "in-group", at least as long as it's seen as electorally valuable. Of course, different voting systems create different incentives, thus in the US with its two-party system its more difficult for the Democrats to be seen as "moderate" as long as they are seen as being the party of the far-left than in most EU countries with proportional systems where the far-left voters usually don't vote for more centre-left parties. And yeah, some policies have shifted from being "left-coded" to being right-coded", such as being against vaccines or promoting more domestic manufacturing, simply because the right's "leaders" have changed the minds of their followers (as I explained above, this isn't relay the case for the left, except that in the US opposition to Trump now means "lefty" for most people, especially on the right).
IMHO, here in the UK, "far right" is understood to be loosely synomyous with "fascist" and both terms mean someone who it is right and proper to hate and verbally abuse (but not physically - we haven't sunk that low yet). This equivalence is clear from the fact that nobody is ever called "centre right".
People say "centre right" in the UK all the time, normally Tories describing themselves. I agree that "far right" is taken to be literally a synonym for neo-Nazis (I generally hear "fascist" use almost apolitically to describe officiousness). I'm not sure "extreme right" would be though; describing Farage as "far right" sounds like calling him a Nazi, describing him as "extreme right" sounds more descriptive.
Whilst you are correct that Tories describe themselves as "centre right" that is not how they are described in normal conversation. People rarely say "the centre right", they just say "the Tories" or "the Conservatives" which is precisely why even "the right" is more usually taken to mean "the far right" rather than the centre right plus the far right (Of course there is no "near right" ever :-)).
That’s a good point. I’d say “the far left” as well. It could be the lack of cohesive organisation maybe - “far right” is quicker than listing a bunch of splinter groups.
Perhaps Farage is better described as center-right? Reform currently is running at 34% in UK polls ( https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/uk-opinion-polls ), well ahead of all other parties. He is _not_ a fringe candidate.
He's certainly not a fringe candidate! Farage has a traditionally far right goal (Reform are talking about repatriation existing immigrants) combined with a reassuring orthodox conservative image and some left-wing policy goals like scrapping the 2 child cap on benefits. Hard to categorise. I feel populism generally is more of a hot mess than fascism was.
The problem with "far right" is that it entirely misses the point about what is wrong with fascism and naziism. If you draw a line with Clement Attlee somewhere on the left and Sir Winston Churchill somewhere on the right, putting Hitler and Mussolini on the right around twice as far from Attlee as you put Churchill, or for that matter you put Stalin on the left twice as far from Churchill as Attlee, it does nothing to explain what was actually wrong with those people. The problem with Hitler was that he was a murderous dictator and not that he was particularly right wing.
I mean, that's what you think. There's a lot of people (on the left) who genuinely think that the right-wingess, rather than the war and mass murder, *is* what's wrong with Hitler.
Idk about Miller, but others haven't shrugged. Iirc Musk got the FBI to stop working with the Southern Poverty Law Center because SPLC called TPUSA "hard right."
The far right wants to legitimize itself by calling itself centrist
> it would serve their purposes equally well to replace it with a synonym (like “far-right nationalist authoritarian corporatist”) or even a more specific subvariety (like “Francoist”).
One of those is like 50 syllables, the other nobody actually knows or understands.
The purpose of language is to communicate' we often sacrifice specificity for ease of communication and for being easily understood by a wide audience. That's why we have words like 'fish'.
'Far-right' doesn't work because it is commonly understood to be relative to the Overton Window; 'Far-right' wouldn't necessarily imply an intent to subvert the constitution or end elections, for instance.
But I think it might be a more accurate charge to call him a centre-right authoritarian. His policy preferences are well within the mainstream (minus a few personal idiosyncrasies on things like tariffs) as demonstrated by the fact he repeatedly wins elections.
Centre-right (or centre-left) authoritarians typically haven't been much of a thing, we usually associate authoritarianism with extremism. But my theory would be that authoritarianism is a pattern you resort to when you can't get your way through normal means; centrists don't usually have much trouble getting their way, but the machinery and institutions of the US are so entirely captured by the Democrats at the moment that a centre-right leader simply _cannot_ execute ordinary centre-right policies without running into a morass of resistance at every level (as in Trump's first term). Therefore if he wants to get anything done then he needs to resort to measures which it might be somewhat fair to call authoritarian.
For example: it's normal mainstream policy for ICE to go out and catch and deport illegal aliens. However, in some cases you have state and city governments actively working against the ordinary legal actions of the Federal Government. This forces Trump to play the "national guard" card. It would be better if the National Guard card were left unplayed, but it would be better if local authorities could simply cooperate with federal authorities in ensuring the rule of law.
>Outright obstruction is criminal, but that's not what's happening.
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has been damned close to outright obstruction.
>Pritzker has repeatedly affirmed his commitment to protecting undocumented immigrants, particularly those without violent criminal convictions. In January 2025, he stated Illinois would "_stand in the way_" of certain federal deportation policies, citing the state's Trust Act, which limits local law enforcement's cooperation with federal immigration agents.
To put it another way: He may be able to construe the law in such a way that he is within the letter of it (that's for the legal system to decide) but he is damned surely violating the _spirit_ of the immigration laws.
I agree with Melvin:
>It would be better if the National Guard card were left unplayed, but it would be better if local authorities could simply cooperate with federal authorities in ensuring the rule of law.
Surely illegal aliens in a Democrat state is a problem for the Democrats in that state and a boon to the Republicans so that cannot be an explanation for Trumps actions with ICE and the National Guard. Also, if Democrats wield such influence, how did they let Trump get elected twice. Try to be consistent.
I'm not sure if I'm reading you correctly, but are you saying that Democrats see illegal aliens as a problem? That would be something I've never heard from a Democrat's mouth. I live in the US and Melvin's take seems right on to me.
No. I mean that illegal aliens, to the extent that they are a problem, are primarily a problem for the state that they are in. In a Democrat state they are not doing any harm to any Republicans in other, Republican, states so why is Trump so keen to "help" the Democrats? Logically he should be appealing to his base by squeezing every last alien out of Republican states. The only reasonable explanation is that he's just trying to provoke a fight.
I think Trump's constituents appreciate ICE activity anywhere it is needed, and cities like LA and Chicago seem like high-visibility, high-ROI areas for laws to be enforced that haven't been. Provoking a fight with Democratic governors might be a bonus, if it's a fight Trump thinks he can win.
I basically agree that denying (2) makes sense: I think MAGA (especially last few months) is looking like a 21st century version of Fascism: corporatist economics with big companies working in close cooperation with the executive, crush and go after dissent using blunt force not sublety, control the most important media organs. There is continuity with previous bad things done by past admins (Obama, Trump 1, Bush, Biden etc) in the sense that there was 'advice' to tech companies or random activist DAs starting dodgy prosecutions of trump, but its now looking more like a 'unified theory of power' in Ezra Klein's words than any of these previous approaches, like its being done FOR a unified purpose of having civil society, big tech the courts etc bend to a small groups will https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-authoritarian-menace-has-arrived
And I know there's a wing of people here who will say, but the dems wanted that too, they was just more subtle about it, look at the twitter files, look at the broader so-called 'independent civil society' and how it all lined up behind one agenda... and look, I think these are 'on a spectrum' in some very technical sense that a supernova and a house fire are on a spectrum. Like they're different in kind, and also one is WAY LESS BAD to the extent that you can compare them as similar at all. I also think Scott thinks this even though he does his best to avoid making direct comparisons between left and right anti-liberal tendencies.
But this is also not 1930s Italy, the biggest disanalogy is that there isn't the same focus from Trump on the state embodying the will of the people, but is is authoritarian, personality driven, very nationalist and at least a bit corporatist.
I think the correct thing to do is say it looks fascist, or bears the same relation to fascism as modern far left groups like antifa do to 1920s revolutionary leninists, but no that doesn't mean we're at the violence is good level. Though I do think that we are into Orban territory now.
I basically agree with all of this except that I'm not sure how to think about the issue brought up in your second paragraph. I think if you extend the left's trajectory over 2010 - 2020 another X years in the same direction, you get a regime that controls large swathes of private activity, bans large categories of dissent and criticism, and is very hard to dislodge. I think it's slightly exculpatory that no specific individual had the entire plan in their head in the same way that Trump/Miller are consciously aiming at authoritarianism now, but I don't know how much difference that would have made in practice, and I wouldn't want to have to make that case to conservatives in order to make them feel like they're the ones unilaterally violating a norm.
I don't think it's reasonable to extend the lefts trajectory the way you are hypothesizing. By 2020 woke was already on the down turn and "cringe" among the youth. I simply don't see a way that it would've continued the way it had
The woke left peaked around 2022. With the death of George Floyd in mid-2020, it was firmly in the ascendancy. For the following two years, anything and everything became about racial equity, even to the point of eclipsing the pandemic's presence in the public consciousness.
You mean the year it went into overdrive and encouraged mass riots, racist vaccine distribution policy, and people ran the risk of losing their jobs for *not* posting a sympathetic black box?
Yes. Trajectories track derivatives, not moments in time. Parabolas have peaks.
> racist vaccine distribution policy
If what you mean by this is "federal/state/local governments were exclusively giving early access to vaccines on the basis of race", this didn't happen. If you mean something else, you should clarify
> people ran the risk of losing their jobs for *not* posting a sympathetic black box
this definitely didn't happen for any definition of these terms
> If what you mean by this is "federal/state/local governments were exclusively giving early access to vaccines on the basis of race",
I like the "exclusively" you threw in there to give yourself an out. Sure, it wasn't *exclusive*, they just used a nice technocratic weighting system in which race counted more than most other factors. A lot of attempts at ethnic cleansing are like this now; they feel the need to be have a touch of subtlety in the age of democratized media.
Citation needed. I'm fine with dropping the exclusively. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I lived in two very progressive places and did not hear a single time anything remotely approximating "racial minorities are weighted higher to get access". The doctors, the old, and the immuno compromised got early access, in that order.
> I simply don't see a way that it would've continued the way it had
...Because they would be overthrown by force. Which is what's happening now.
They would have never given up power willingly. The system was designed to entrench their rule. So the system being destroyed is a prerequisite for change.
Leftists, obviously. They have a mass media apparatus and an academia in thrall to their morality. Even if they lost, they would spin up the propaganda machine again, and centrists would vote for them next election, because the average American is a moron. So yes, the system for disseminating their ideology will be destroyed (alongside the entrenched bureaucracy protecting it), because that's the only way to ensure a long-term national shift in morality.
I'm sorry, do you hear yourself? Who are 'the leftists'? Do you just mean 'the Democratic party and anyone who votes liberal'? Do you mean 'anyone who isn't maximally far right on every subject'? Or are you referring to a specific group of people? Is, like, Oprah a leftist? What about Kendrick Lamar? Dick Cheney recently supported Kamala, is _he_ a leftist?
Doesn't every authoritarian movement claim they are taking extraordinary measures and violating the law to prevent the destruction of the nation? Why should we take your claims anymore seriously this time?
Okay thanks for the reply and it's good to know we're on the same page about a lot of this and what you actually believe about the left vs right wing threat here. So let me organize my thoughts:
First: is the claim that really authoritarian things like Democrats packing courts and making fake interpretations of the constitution to let them criminalize dissent would have happened eventually, or just that you can draw a trendline in that direction and it's possible in principle, but wouldn't have a really occured? Because there's a massive difference between "here's a concerning trend" and "this would realistically have occurred." The hypothetical is inherently hard to argue about so it's basically unknowable, but I'd at least like to know which version you mean. If the point is just "there is a trendline we could extrapolate but it's unlikely to hold" then we don't disagree.
Second: there's a vocal, explicit appetite on the Trumpian right for bulldozing institutions. Miller calls judges who rule against Trump "terrorists." Musk and others openly praise Bukele for destroying judicial independence. They say out loud that independent institutions checking executive power are bad and should be removed. Where's the equivalent on the left? The concerning left-wing stuff: payment processors, campus speech codes, bureaucratic overreach, stays diffuse and uncoordinated precisely because there's no one actually advocating for centralized authoritarian power. That doesn't mean you can't do some authoritarian things but it is a really significant brake. Progressivism is fundamentally unsuitable for this. It's this weird hybrid of far-left cultural analysis (structural oppression, systemic critique) combined with stated commitment to liberal principles (free speech, institutional checks, democratic process). That combination makes it really hard to actually govern in an authoritarian way. You'd need to jettison the liberal principles entirely, at which point you're not talking about progressivism anymore - you're talking about actual revolutionary socialism. The ideology itself has internal blockers.
Third: has this ever actually happened? The charismatic strongman who says only I can fix things and I embody the will of the true people of the nation is a cliche for a reason, but the slow-drift-from-diffuse-progressive-consensus path... where? Maybe Indira Gandhi's Emergency is an example of a center left or at least not a revolutionary socialist government getting to proper authoritarian overreach, but that's still one leader making explicit decisions in a country with weak democratic institutions, and it got reversed. If this were a real comparable threat, we should see historical precedent. We don't.
I think the fact that as you say there is no plan on any leaders head for authoritarian rule is THE crucial thing, not just "mildly exculpatory". I don't think you can sleepwalk into severe authoritarianism. Somebody needs an actual plan at some point for it to get really bad! And I can't imagine who on the left could develop and execute such a plan while remaining popular enough to implement it.
Which brings me to the fourth epistemic point: the whole thesis requires seeing invisible coordination. "Cathedral," "conspiracy without conspirators," diffuse consensus somehow acting like unified intent. And yeah, class interests and structural forces are real, but this framework makes it so easy to engage in conspiracy-adjacent reasoning. You can attribute agency to anything, connect unrelated events, posit hidden coordination precisely because you've defined the threat as having no visible center. I think this invites exaggeration even if there is a real problem, and (especially if you want to be fair minded to both sides AND one is definitely authoritarian right now and using all this as an excuse for its own power grab) I think it can become a mental trap.
So even setting aside whether we agree on the specific facts about Twitter Files or campus speech or payment processors, which I suspect we don't, I don't think the "trendline extrapolation" to an extreme authoritarian regime actually holds up except as a very unlikely edge case.
Look, maybe I'm wrong and changing technology/culture means this could happen differently in the future to how it's ever happened before.
But right now, all the really bad examples in recent history are populist strongmen, mostly on the nationalist right and some on the revolutionary socialist left.
TLDR: One path as far as I can tell just ends in modern day Germany, with its Constitution protection office making dubious rulings about which parties are "anti -democratic" and its police investigating rude tweets about politicians. But the other path ends in the other Germany.
Germany is slowly working its way to banning the AfD, though. It's not guaranteed but at this point the only real blocker is that the CDU is part of the current coalition government and its current leader is opposed (but many of the people who could replace him are in favor). The latest appointees to the constitutional court are in favor too, so that obstacle has eroded substantially.
The idea that you need a strong central singular authority fails to predict what happened in the run-up to the 2024 election in the US. Colorado's Supreme Court, which does not answer to Biden in any way, decided to block Trump from running in that state (only to be reversed by the US Supreme Court). These kinds of measures are slow and telegraphed in advance, because without a central source of orders you need consensus-building for each new abuse, but it can keep building over time.
To be clear, that was my entire point. As repulsive as the AFD is, it's no worse than the 2016 Republicans. https://www.richardhanania.com/p/is-the-afd-crypto-fascist-no-more I don't think modern Germany has a great track record on free speech, in terms of free speech suppression due to "academic progressive cathedral consensus" it's the worst offender maybe ever. The worst offender on the right wing side is the other Germany.
Okay, but "academic progressive cathedral consensus" is incredibly narrow and reasonably modern. If you try to give Trumpism a similarly narrow label, "protectionist anti-immigration populist personality cult with poor respect for separation of powers" you get what, Orban? Andrew Jackson? That shrinks the gap in terribleness substantially.
Going straight to Nazi Germany seems like not just a stretch, but the biggest stretch possible, mostly for rhetorical purposes. Especially since we have an entire "win, govern, lose" cycle for Trump's first term to look at. It's not impossible that *this* time, Trump has a plan to become dictator. But it's hard to justify this position.
I think it should be ""protectionist anti-immigration populist personality cult with active contempt for separation of powers and individual civil liberty plus a belief that the entire state apparatus should be an extension of the executive." Which is a mouthful, but I think that's kind of the point, there's no way to distill it down that isn't dishonest unless you mention the deliberate coordination against democratic norms.
The gap in terribleness between present-day Germany and present-day Hungary might not seem so large if you insist on a scale that can include Hitler, but why would you? As you say, Nazi Germany is not very relevant to current politics; meanwhile, the Republicans aren't at all coy about wanting to turn the US into something like Hungary. They invite Orbán as a keynote speaker, they are holding CPACs in Hungary etc.
And on a normal person's scale, it's still the case the Germany is about on par with the US in quality of life (the US is richer and more dynamic, and arguably its constitutional system has better philosophical foundations; Germany has better work-life balance, more livable cities and less polarization) while Hungary is a shithole and getting worse by the day.
Yeah I agree with your and Hanania's take on the AFD. But since I am from Germany I do understand where the fear of the AFD comes from, even If I disagree with it and consider it somewhat ridiculous. But the trauma of the Nazis and WW2 still is something that's an important part of modern German culture and political discourse, and thus the analogy between the NSDAP and AFD makes some sense if viewed through that lens, though I disagree with it mostly (yeah, there are ethnic nationalists in the AFD, but they don't advocate for anything on the scale what the NSDAP did, and thus the question is if ethnic nationalism is considered to be something that is so beyond human decency should be made illegal, and a lot of Germans seem to think it should be even if most people in other countries will find them ridiculous for this and banning the AFD would actually make Germany more "Weird" in the Western World than allowing the AFD to be part of government).
BTW I believe that modern European history relating to Fascism and Communism and how either of those are seen vis-à-vis being "the ultimate evil" can also explain why the former Eastern Bloc countries tend to have more negative views on communism than fascism, and why the AFD is so popular in Eastern Germany especially...IMO if the AFD were to be banned, a lot of their voters would leave for Eastern Bloc countries such as Hungary, Slovakia and Czechia, and possibly Austria.
>They say out loud that independent institutions checking executive power are bad and should be removed. Where's the equivalent on the left? The concerning left-wing stuff: payment processors, campus speech codes, bureaucratic overreach, stays diffuse and uncoordinated precisely because there's no one actually advocating for centralized authoritarian power.
Yeah, when you control all the relevant institutions and use them tyrannically constantly (including criminal prosecution for jokes on twitter!) you don't clamor to tear down the institutions - they're working just fine for you.
Yep, it's the biggest structural advantage leftists have that they never admit - that they have managed to subvert liberalism (and to even claim its name), which leaves the hapless rightists to both play on the field tilted against them, and to always take PR hits for being against Most Holy Democracy Itself. Of course, the right only has itself to blame for letting this happen, but the outcome isn't good for anyone not insane.
The other thing here is that this heavily weights actively using the state to do things. If the state actively refrains from properly doing basic fundamental state activities for long enough that can lead to its own destructive manifestations. Laxity on border control, of course, directly led to the right wing populist surge democratically, though the consequences of being lax on border control have been much more destructive in, say, Sweden, than they have in the United States.
This also was planned, which is why left wing (and also Catholic, let's not leave them out) NGOs planned this, and why Biden said it was a source of "our strength" and why it was the positive subject of magazines until the right complained too much and then it became the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory. It seemed they did have a state plan, but it didn't necessarily involve the state passing onerous laws, though if you want to see that, it's worth looking at Europe. While in the US you could say that Trumpism is more authoritarian than the more institutionalist Democrats who preferred to have power through information and education organs, a number of European governments actually do have the power to arrest you for insufficiently leftist statements.
The funny thing about comparisons to the Nazis is that Hitler flipped out over Jewish influence over a still incredibly German society, demographically speaking. In modern day Europe, by comparison, there are countries where the capital city is now majority foreign extraction. You can either care about that or not, but it is interesting that Hitler engaged in the extermination of the Jews on the basis of demographically marginal but theorized large impact, whereas when the entirety of the Western world is facing demographic turn over the likes of which has never been seen before, inarguable massive change, the worst you've got so far is that in America there's a buffoonish narcissist TV host whose worst crimes are having bad schizophrenic economic policy, bullying network edutainers, and not holding millions of high due process trials in order to execute mass deportation.
I don't think this post will be taken well, but that feels like getting lucky in some way.
>The other thing here is that this heavily weights actively using the state to do things. If the state actively refrains from properly doing basic fundamental state activities for long enough that can lead to its own destructive manifestations. Laxity on border control, of course, directly led to the right wing populist surge democratically, though the consequences of being lax on border control have been much more destructive in, say, Sweden, than they have in the United States.
It seems strange to me, if Trump and his supporters really are fascists, that the left doesn't just support stricter border control. That's the main issue behind his success, after all.
If you could stop WW2 by giving 1920s Germany a closed-border immigration policy, why wouldn't you?
This is what the moderate center-left in the UK sort of are doing (but failing). The Labour Prime Minister gave a speech that was castigated by the further left as being reminiscent of Enoch Powell's rivers of blood speech.
This move has likely been made for two reasons: 1: The Conservatives had power for 15 years and basically ossified and enshrined what was previously established by New Labour, leading to the "Boris Wave", an enormous inflow of post-covid migrants, and 2: Reform, an actual right wing nationalist party are now wildly popular, causing the ordinarily left wing Labour Party to have to drop trans stuff and outflank even the Conservatives on immigration.
Of course critics say that this can't be maintained (because the left of the party has pro-migrant principles), and trying to copy Reform won't actually keep them out of power. Given Starmer has done a load of other unpopular things like pass the Online Safety Bill (another bipartisan Tory-Labour wonder), and is planning Digital ID, and has the worst polling in 40 years, it's likely he wasn't the man for this job. Right wingers/nationalists also don't believe him about the "smash the smuggling gangs" rhetoric, since his government tried to obfuscate that the Southport killer had been reading Al Qaeda training manuals, and that he was just a typical "Welsh schoolboy".
So, it's possible that the establishment could've stopped this by merely doing border control plus progressive stuff, but woke and its insistence on white privilege and post-colonial repentence likely made that impossible. Also, establishment conservatives and centrists were cowards (as mentioned with the Tories basically continuing Labour social policy and keeping their institutions in place such as staffing the ministerial position for Women and Equalities instead of abolishing it, and Merkel in Germany opening the borders during the height of the migrant crisis would also count, if the CDC is considered establishment conservative). Conservatives being cowards (cuckservatives in the 2016 MAGA parlance) is why Trump's "So what?" attitude to normal institutionalism and formality seemed refreshing to the Republican base.
The right time to have made the proper corrections in this area was around 30 years ago.
>(including criminal prosecution for jokes on twitter!)
Also
>“When you start to criminalize dissent, when the head of the federal government, through the president, through the Department of Justice, is saying you might be a domestic terrorist if you raise your voice, I think that’s appalling and is chilling and is very, very dangerous,” said Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.
These are reasonable points. A comprehensive response would take *way* too long to write, but here are a few counterpoints to consider:
- Groups that are closely related in ideology don't need to coordinate. From c. 2015 to 2024, the American left was overwhelmingly motivated by equity. (equality of outcome) Kamala Harris explicitly endorsed this ideology.*
- The urge to bulldoze institutions was shared by the left. During the 2020s in particular, a popular slogan on the left was "disrupt and dismantle", which was applied to anything that was deemed to impede equity.
- Bulldozing institutions can be counter-authoritarian, so it's important to evaluate the effects individually. For example, Trump dismantling the Department of Education prevents the federal government from commandeering the education system its own agenda, supporting a check on federal executive power. In contrast, "dismantling" racial or gender inequity in the Supreme Court would require packing it, undermining a check on federal executive power.
"Groups that are closely related in ideology don't need to coordinate." This is the most false thing I have read in the comment section for this post. This is absolutely untenable, based on even a cursory survey of political and military history. Closely related groups absolutely do need coordination, because otherwise they tear each other apart squabbling over tactics, leadership, resources, messaging and "the narcissism of small differences."
If you want more specific historical references to follow up on this, I suggest looking into the Russian Civil War, the Angolan Civil War and the Spanish Civil War. It was reading about the Spanish Civil War that caused me to have an epiphany about the left. I realized "socialists are just Communists in sheep's clothing. They are more or less the same" didn't make any sense. Not when socialists and communists have fought shooting Wars against each other, and seemingly have little motivation to cooperate.
While it may look to you like the left has been transcendently successful over the course of the past 17 years, that's all in the eye of the beholder. You have no way of knowing if the left has crippled itself, COMPARATIVELY SPEAKING, due to disunity. For all we know, we might be living in a Scandinavian style system with a cradle-to-the-grave welfare system, if not for left disunity.
>stays diffuse and uncoordinated precisely because there's no one actually advocating for centralized authoritarian power
Diffuse and uncoordinated but, up until this year and there's continuing massive resistance, it affected basically every university and HR department in the country.
Just imagine how effective they'd be if there was a centralized power!
Tinfoil hat time: we just *don't know* if there's a centralized power behind that.
Also in January 2021, Apple and Google removed Parler from their app stores, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) suspended its hosting services.
Now, I don't know whether this triple attack was coordinated, or if just the three corporations were sufficiently Woke, or sufficiently looking to curry favor with the incoming Biden administration to not require coordination. I'm not convinced that it matters, one way or the other. The _effect_ was of a coordinated attack on MAGA speech.
> If this were a real comparable threat, we should see historical precedent. We don't.
This is arguable. I think it works as long as you're satisfied with all the long term trends of modernity leading to the present established order.
If the only trend lines you disapprove of are ~5 years long, I agree. If you think there exist a few bad ~200 years long trend lines (ex: Kaczynski flavored stuff), I think you'd be justified in being worried about the emergence of new ones.
I think your argument relies on the assumption that the only sort of badness you should be concerned about is "regimes where the consensus among those polled in them is that they're horrible" and not "regimes I personally would call horrible".
The difference I'm thinking of is whether in 100 years you ask somebody in that society if it's a bad regime vs if I time travel to that point. Imagine asking an original American colonist whether the current American government is bad or not.
I think the argument "concerning leaderless trends don't continue indefinitely" really depends on what you consider concerning. A reasonable opinion is that future-people should have the last words about what is good for future-society, but that seems similar to me as foreign-people should have the last word on foreign-society (implying that you can't try to influence a cultural practice that you consider abhorrent like burning widows on pyres if the social consensus is that it's fine).
That last point is a great point, and it's the kind of comment that makes me wish Likes were enabled. (Also, it should be "widows" instead of "windows", right?)
Certainly Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Fidel Castro in Cuba come to mind. And probably also Lenin, who starts as you suggest but then is succeeded by Stalin.
Lenin had no way of knowing that Stalin was going to be such a ruthless and incompetent leader. No doubt if Lenin had known, he would have executed Stalin immediately.
RE: no historical precedent for diffuse movements leading toward authoritarianism
I think there is a category of counterexample that is actually quite prevalent, both historically and in the modern day: theocracies. This requires a large contingent of true believers, social punishment for anyone who expresses or sympathizes with disbelief, and honestly not much else -- ie supernatural beliefs are not a core part of the mechanism. Parallels between wokeness and religion have been made plenty of times before, and I don't think it is a stretch to say that it could allow for that same kind of diffuse coordination that exists in theocracies, but it is of course not overdetermined.
> If the point is just "there is a trendline we could extrapolate but it's unlikely to hold" then we don't disagree.
If the trendline was going in that exact direction, you need an actual reason it would be interrupted to be able to predict it won't get there. It looks to me like Trump's actions are what interrupted it. Had we elected Harris, as I voted for, we most likely would have made another four years of progress towards that dystopia.
> The concerning left-wing stuff: payment processors, campus speech codes, bureaucratic overreach, stays diffuse and uncoordinated precisely because there's no one actually advocating for centralized authoritarian power.
Indeed, the dystopia is made of decentralized authoritarianism, not centralized.
> combined with stated commitment to liberal principles (free speech, institutional checks, democratic process).
Anyone else remember "freeze peach" and dog-whistles for racism? The progressives gave up free speech, and now they want it back. (Or, more likely, the loudest voices are from different, more principled. people now.)
> has this ever actually happened?
That's actually a really good question. What would this look like from the outside? News headlines would portray it as progressivism gradually winning the fight against racists, since the fight is done by manipulating consensus social reality into agreeing that the regime's enemies are racist. Sounds not unlike the Red Scare. In more general terms, one could view it as a social-moral victory of one culture over another, such as Athens over Sparta.
> And yeah, class interests and structural forces are real, but this framework makes it so easy to engage in conspiracy-adjacent reasoning.
A good point and a warning worth heeding, thank you.
> Somebody needs an actual plan at some point for it to get really bad!
Nope, not at all. Tribal war is human nature.
> TLDR: One path as far as I can tell just ends in modern day Germany, with its Constitution protection office making dubious rulings about which parties are "anti -democratic" and its police investigating rude tweets about politicians. But the other path ends in the other Germany.
I hadn't thought of it quite that way before. I'd say this assumes we have already explored both paths all the way to the end, when in fact I think one of them (if not both) has a ways further it can yet go, which luckily no one has travelled along yet before. (Or perhaps they have, if Judges 17-21 is historically accurate.) I think the current location of the Overton window is a good ways from either end, so I want to keep it about where it is rather than keep sliding it along.
I think the extrapolation is nonsense the same way that it is in xkcd's "you're going to have 30 husbands next month" comic is. Exactly because it wasn't some intentional plan, but rather a drift due to cultural shifts, it would simply eventually change direction again as people get tired of it and push back (in fact, it's what has happened; except the push back is going way overboard now).
Unfortunately, it's not nonsense. Institutions like to increase their power. (Effectively, even though the institutions have no intelligence or self-awareness per se.) This combined with increasing speed of communication and data processing mean that centralization of control is going to increase, with or without any plan...in fact, even with plans to the contrary.
In a way this is something like Parkinson's law. It's something inherent in the design of the system. Yes, it's only a rule of thumb, but it's one that works. When it becomes easier to exert control, more control will be exerted.
> I think if you extend the left's trajectory over 2010 - 2020 another X years in the same direction, you get a regime that controls large swathes of private activity, bans large categories of dissent and criticism, and is very hard to dislodge.
Are you talking about 'the left' in terms of 'the 50% of the country more liberal than average', or 'the left' in terms of 'elected democratic officials'?
If the latter, this seems kind of insane to me... the top Democratic officials were neoliberals, increasing funding to police, very far from being progressive in any meaningful way. The idea that they might cancel elections or defy the courts feels like it has zero justification to me, and I'd want to hear what you're basing that intuition on.
If you mean the former... isn't that just society progressing? Like, everyone deciding gay marriage was ok and it was weird to be against it isn't *fascism*, it's just new ideas winning in the marketplace. However stifling a new social consensus may feel to the people outside it, it's entirely different from the *government* stripping rights, kidnapping people off the street and sending them to foreign prisons, defying the courts and undermining confidence in elections.
> The idea that they might cancel elections or defy the courts feels like it has zero justification to me, and I'd want to hear what you're basing that intuition on.
I mean I don't think they'd cancel elections as such. They'd just make it impossible for their opposition to meaningfully gather or get funded or form parties.
Imagine what a world would look like where the Left controls enough institutions that their rule is unquestioned, *but* they still want a fig leaf of democracy. You'd wind up with two parties, a "let's go further left" party and a "let's stop right here" party. When the left party was in power it would drag the country left, when the "right" party was in power it wouldn't actually go any further right, it would simply be a pause. The left-wing party would call themselves "progressive" and the fake right-wing party would call themselves "conservative".
This is of course what has already happened, everywhere across the Western World. There is no such thing as Right-Progressivism any more.
One reason to have pushed back on that stuff under Obama and Biden is so those tools weren't lying around and those techniques hadn't been normalized by the time we got to Trump 2: Electric Boogaloo.
It's hard to say because it's so loosely defined, but in general I am against the idea "X did a somewhat bad thing, then Y did a million-times-worse version, moral of the story is that X is bad". No, moral of the story is that Y is bad.
Especially since it's there's often a spectrum from acceptable actions with some drawbacks, and clearly unacceptable extreme versions of those actions, and it can be hard to draw the line but even so there is clearly one side that's OK and one side that's not OK.
I think we should go ahead and draw a line that puts government pressure on media/social media outlets to control what they say and politically-motivated prosecutions and using regulatory/tax agencies to punish political enemies on the "not acceptable" side.
Is the government requesting something from a media company applying pressure? I think there's some gray here that's hard to thread. I don't think the Biden or Obama administration would have done anything to social media companies that refused to stifle Covid misinformation, but I could see the mere request cause some unease. Nevertheless, I think it would be correct for the government to request such things. Hard problems in a world without gatekeepers.
To be clear, I said at the end I also factually disagree with a lot of these claims about progressive overreach, but I'm trying to just avoid getting stuck in the brambles of arguing about all of these gray area cases
> I don't think the Biden or Obama administration would have done anything to social media companies that refused to stifle Covid misinformation
why believe this?
every company at that scale is subject to discretionary government pressure in dozens of ways -- e.g. Twitter was (is?) under an FTC consent decree -- and Obama's government was notorious for using those avenues to pressure companies to play political enforcer (e.g. Operation Choke Point)
would they just suddenly have an attack of conscience, and start behaving way better, when it came to covid on social media specifically?
Would those administrations even have to do anything themselves for various independent agencies to investigate the perceived enemies of the administration? Didn't Elon Musk's companies suddenly get a lot of extra legal scrutiny after he bought twitter? I could be wrong.
Yes. The government knows that they can't give an order like that, so they "suggest" it, knowing that the company will get that the real message is "do it or we will use our regulatory power over you to punish you." Mob bosses don't tell their subordinates "I order you to kill Tony Soprano" either, but somehow the message gets through.
I don't think these things are actually bad in all cases.
E.g. "using regulatory/tax agencies to punish political enemies" - if you run on a pro-environmentalism agenda, win the election over the opposition from polluters, then have the EPA push the agenda you ran on, that is "using a regulatory agency to punish political enemies", should that not be allowed?
Now, slippery slope, hard to draw the line, etc - but it being hard to draw the line is not an argument to collapse all distinctions. Unless you're willing to go all the way and say something like nothing that could ever be compared to a bad thing is allowed.
Enforcing the rules as neutrally as possible is fine, but specifically targeting the companies whose lobbyists fought your side's election for retaliation is very bad. This does not seem like all that subtle a difference to me.
Seems like that would create perverse incentives. "My company paid lobbyists to oppose this regulation, which didn't work, but now if you send inspectors to see if we're actually complying with it, that means you're targeting us unfairly as political opponents!"
Do you mean targeting *as retaliation*? I.e. *because* they were against you?
Because otherwise what you said isn't different from what I said if the bad conduct is being done by only a handful of companies, e.g., in a sector of the economy with only a few key players.
If you do mean retaliation ... are you making a specific claim about Obama/Biden?
Yes, of course it shouldn't be allowed. The EPA has no legal authority other than to enforce environmental laws written by congress. So unless the new president also gets legislation passed through congress to give the EPA that authority, it is completely illegitimate to use the EPA to target your enemies.
The EPA writes regulations ... and re enforcing environmental laws, you can imagine a situation where the in-power administration lets their political allies violate those laws with impunity and the new guy runs on "we will actually enforce the environmental laws that are now being ignored".
I dunno: if you kill the Khan's envoys, and the Mongols retaliate by wiping your civilization off the face of the Earth, I think the moral IS "don't kill envoys."
It's funny because on this thread I'm arguing with someone saying that Trump is not doing anything out of the ordinary, and now with someone comparing him to the Mongols. But anyway, our entire system depends on the idea that we won't treat each other the way the Mongols treated their enemies.
As does either side's political support; the moment Trump says "fuck you guys we're the Mongols now", he - and all the people who respond with "fuck yeah time to rape and pillage" - will end up dead or in prison.
Heh, heh. Actually I'd agree with the other guy that Trump ISN'T doing anything particularly extraordinary, just applying the standard tools of state coercion that previous governments have used to different targets (and to the same targets, but to different ends).
>Actually I'd agree with the other guy that Trump ISN'T doing anything particularly extraordinary, just applying the standard tools of state coercion that previous governments have used to different targets
Agreed. I think Trump is pushing them slightly further, much as every president has pushed them slightly further, following a trend going back perhaps a century, maybe more. I'm not thrilled at it. There is something to be said for keeping power more distributed, but the Presidency (and the Federal government as a whole) grows more powerful, term by term. I suspect the biggest single jump was during FDR, not Trump.
>And I know there's a wing of people here who will say, but the dems wanted that too, they was just more subtle about it, look at the twitter files, look at the broader so-called 'independent civil society' and how it all lined up behind one agenda... and look, I think these are 'on a spectrum' in some very technical sense that a supernova and a house fire are on a spectrum. Like they're different in kind, and also one is WAY LESS BAD to the extent that you can compare them as similar at all.
Admittedly this is something I do not quite get. At least from my perspective (a Postdoc at a respectable mid-tier university), the left never was, in the slightest, subtle about it. They are openly and explicitly suppressing dissenting opinions in most scientific topics, and if I privately talk with colleagues, many of them will freely admit that this is the case (some in a regretful tone, but also many almost gleeful). They merely are in ideological alignment with the majority of the mainstream media apparatus, the majority of state employers, the majority of educators etc. so even talking about this publicly non-anonymously is silenced, let alone allowing coordinated efforts to subvert this state of affairs. They only have lost significant parts of online spaces so far, which has massively opened up discourse (but still mostly anonymously). And from my wife's side of our family, which is also mostly academics, but grew up in the DDR (communist eastern germany), they all agree that the last two decades have distinctly felt like society creeping into the same direction, the same culture of fear around expressing dissent, the same whisper networks of contrarians, the same institutionalized ideological agents(in some cases literally; there recently was a controversy around a former stasi employer now leading a left-wing meldestelle; naturally she still has that position).
I don't even like Trump and consider him a boorish fool, but no matter how I look at it, the right's efforts are just pitiful in comparison. A late-night host gets cancelled and immediately re-employed in just a few days? lol. Comey gets a taste of his own medicine? lol. Some programs with "DEI" in its name have to think about how to rebrand themselves, while still blatantly continuing the same policies? lol.
I'd even go as far as saying that, across the entire west, the left is STILL the supernova, while the US currently suffers from this house fire named Trump.
Well said! Trump has been far from harmless, but the silencing of dissent by the Woke was _pervasive_ . Harris even _personally_ explicitly said of online free speech "It has to stop." . The context actually makes this worse. She was talking of the speech of Trump, her political rival. My _suspicion_ is that Harris yearns for a one party State.
All the talk is about violence, but, although I expect to find few who agree with me, I think this type of tyranny that you describe is worse. At least violence is honest. No matter the collateral damage I support Trump in removing funding from universities and I don't think he is going nearly far enough.
They don't "control the most important media organs". Media criticizes them all the time. Even the Wall Street Journal is insisting on their coverage of that birthday letter to Epstein in the face of Trump's lawsuit.
Well said! I read the New York Times's daily summary, and it is _obviously_ biased against Trump and the GOP. Every time they can choose an emotive term, they choose one critical of the GOP. If Trump controlled the NYT, it wouldn't look _anything_ like what it looks like.
> looking like a 21st century version of Fascism: corporatist economics with big companies working in close cooperation with the executive, crush and go after dissent using blunt force not sublety, control the most important media organs.
This is the problem with the whole "fascist" label. I would call your definition a pretty reasonable one, and yet none of them are really reasons anyone would cite if you asked them what made Hitler so bad. Both Democrat and Republican regimes of the last 50 years all meet 2 out of those 3 points. The third "crush and go after dissent using blunt force" is the only one on that list that anyone would use to justify violence against the regime, and yet there are governments all around the world that do it, but still nobody is calling them "fascist" or suggesting that we go to war with them.
A common definition of fascism is "palingenetic ultranationalism", where the first part is about national rebirth, literally making the country great again.
The phrase "MAGA" basically says "yes, this is what we are!"
I think this article is missing the action v belief distinction.
Attacking a harmless retired grandma is psychopathic even if she covers her wall in posters of Pol Pot. If a vigilante is provocked by a belief that exists mainly in the mind of their victim, that suggests a search for heresy rather than a desire to protect society.
I mostly agree with this, but I think it's tough - is voting for Trump an action? Marching in a pro-Trump protest? Being Trump?
I think there's some sense in which politics has to screen off all of that - as long as you're operating legally within the system, you have an ironclad defense against your bad opinions *and actions* making you a legitimate target for violence. For me, the gray area comes in when you are sort of kind of operating within the system, but also subverting the system at the same time, to the point where we can never be sure whether you're really within the spirit of the system or have just hacked it so far that it can no longer register its own violations, eg https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/defining-defending-democracy-contra .
The number of people who believe something isn't a convincing argument for allowing it to override community norms of politeness. I can't speak for Scott, but if the post didn't start with "Fucking lol" and end with accusing those critical of Trump of having neurosyphilis, it might have made it through. As is, I'm happy to have those sorts of needlessly incendiary comments moderated out.
Scott, I'm agreed with the other commenters saying this doesn't feel ban-worthy, and I'm getting increasingly confused about how moderation / banning is even supposed to work. Are you just going with what you happen to see and be annoyed by while you're in the comments?
Because this banned user comment strikes me as *WAY* less malicious than...
It's hard to imagine #3 didn't make you curious enough to click through to read one of the single most gleefully sadistic comments ever posted to ACX, personally directed to a (supposed) employee of Charlie Kirk and survivor of the shooting (!).
So this is very weird indeed!
Let me be clear:
I never suggesting that you never moderate anything unless you can promptly moderate everything. I'm not even sure how you managed to draw that conclusion.
What I'm stating is that your procrastination batch banning is not effective for policing the behavior of users wearing sock puppet accounts, as Wuffles did here and as Charlie's dead I'm Happy did in one of the worst comments ever posted to this blog.
To repeat myself, I completely understand that it's impossible to police 1000+ comment threads, which is why I'm suggesting there needs to be a different - ideally collective - strategy for discouraging sock account shitposting.
I would happily say they are all actions. My point is that the rhetoric at least is about attacking or ostracizing people for their status as "fascists", they seem to think it describes a person in their soul. There does seem a fairly odd idea that there is a discrete fascist v non-fascist distinction.
My understanding is that of, cases heard by the Supreme Court that involve the Trump administration or its policies/actions, 95% of the rulings in lower courts were against the administration, and 90% of the Supreme Court rulings were in its favor.
When the court said the administration is not allowed to ship prisoners off to foreign torture prisons without due process, the administration said 'they're already in the air, you have no jurisdiction anymore' (even though that's completely made up and not a real legal doctrine) and sent them anyway. When the court said 'give us all the information about this shipment and how the timing was decided so we can see whether you intentionally sped it up to defy our ruling,' the administration said 'No, fuck you' and faced zero consequences.
The system is already subverted. If that's going to be your threshold for political violence, I think you have to say it's already justified - or at least admit that a large number of people have very good reason to end up believing we're at that point already.
>95% of the rulings in lower courts were against the administration, and 90% of the Supreme Court rulings were in its favor.
The disconnect between lower court rulings and SCOTUS rulings is actually the rule for SCOTUS sessions, typically 70%-80% reversals of the lower court over the last 25 years. Now, of course, SCOTUS gets to decide which cases they hear, but, still, reversals by SCOTUS, once they decide to hear a case, should not be a surprise, much less evidence that SCOTUS has been "subverted".
1. Understood, but, going from 20% upholdings to 5% upholdings is still 75% fewer upholdings. Ceilings effects are a problem, but big changes at the margin can still reveal a lot.
2. Yes, 90% overturning would not itself be hugely definitive, you do need more context.
For example, that 90% of the cases they take up WRT the administration are rulings against the administration; even if most courts also overturn most rulings, I'd expect that most courts take cases that initially ruled for or against the administration at more even rates, based on the merits of the case; taking and overturning 90% cases ruling *against* the administration feels like evidence that those cases are being targeted, in order to help the administration.
For example, how many cases are ruled on the shadow docket instead of getting a full hearing, and how many cases are being settled on procedural injunctions instead of reaching the merits of the case; this one I am less sure on the data about, but my impression is that both of these have seen a sharp increase under this administration, mostly because the things the administration is doing would be obviously unconstitutional if the court had to consider the merits in open court.
>how many cases are being settled on procedural injunctions instead of reaching the merits of the case; this one I am less sure on the data about, but my impression is that both of these have seen a sharp increase under this administration, mostly because the things the administration is doing would be obviously unconstitutional if the court had to consider the merits in open court.
That could be, but, unfortunately, without _seeing_ the merits in open court we can't really say.
>1. Understood, but, going from 20% upholdings to 5% upholdings is still 75% fewer upholdings.
Many thanks, but I'm confused. Where did the "5% upholdings" come from?
The 20% is from the historic record.
If we know that SCOTUS rules for Trump 90% of the time, while the lower courts rule against Trump 95% of the time, it seems that
one way this could happen is for 15% of the lower court rulings to be upheld: 5% from pro-Trump rulings from the lower courts to be upheld and 10% from anti-Trump rulings to be upheld.
I think the minimum is 5% upheld, with all the lower court 5% pro-Trump rulings reversed as part of the 10% SCOTUS anti-Trump rulings, 90% of the lower-court anti-Trump rulings reversed, and only the remaining 5% of the lower court anti-Trump rulings upheld as the other part of the SCOTUS 10% anti-Trump rulings.
I don't think that these numbers have enough information to tell us which of these alternatives is the case.
More to the point, aren't the total numbers of cases thus far pretty small? The statistics of drawing conclusions from small numbers of instances get pretty unfavorable. Roughly speaking, for N independently random samples (albeit with a closer to 50:50 distribution) the standard deviation is roughly sqrt(N). To get 3 sigma, we'd need 3*sqrt(N). Do we have it?
Leftist here. I will readily admit that we are not "within the spirit of the system" and that we are trying to "hack it." That's a fair cop. Maybe it's not politick to admit it but it's not like we can keep it a secret. You guys can read Marx and Zinn just like we can. We want to destroy the American system of government and replace it with something completely different. We have a different understanding history and we do not believe and most of the alleged virtues of the American system. We want to more or less destroy the Constitution and start from scratch.
That would be a risky move, but we feel it is a bigger risk to not do it. I guess leftism/socialism, in it's very core, is antithetical to traditional bourgeois notions of patriotism, reason and moderacy. I consider myself a patriot but my patriotism is so different that I will readily admit that it may not be taken seriously by traditionalists. My patriotism sees the nation as the body of living citizens, not as a geographical region or an ideology or a piece of paper. My loyalty is to that body of citizens, not to any piece of paper.
One thing here is, as you indicated, "fascism" is an incredibly popular accusation on *both* sides of the American popular debate, on the right only marginally less - or perhaps no less - than on the left. "You know who else supported evolution?" "Abortion is a modern holocaust." "Raise your right hand if you support gun control." "Fascists also supported socialized health care." And so on and so on, if you've debated American right-wingers online you've encountered all of these multiple time, along with many other fascism accusations (let's not even get to the debates on Israel/Palestine...) What's the accusation that the most famous right-wing domestic terrorist in the US made before committing his assault against the Oklahoma City Federal building in 1994, according to his sister? That the feds were "fascist tyrants", according to https://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/06/us/sister-says-mcveigh-s-anger-led-to-a-vow-for-vengeance.html.
Even recently, the time period of 2020-2022 saw many public officials, in US mainly Democrats, get termed fascist by the loudmouth brigade of the other side for enacting certain public health measures. (Many of these measures were unwise, but that doesn't make then fascist.). This would be combined with literal accusations of, well, *everyone* being genocided with vaccines or at least being put under permanent WEF fascist tyranny, and demands for a new Nuremburg Trial for all doctors, politicians and public health officials in charge of said measures.
Is there a special reason to assume this particular accusation is *particularly* poisonous when the direction of left-to-right rather than right-to-left? (This blog post did not indicate so, of course, but the recent discussions I've seen otherwhere still generally don't seem to cover this aspect.)
You have a good point. Frankly, I'd like both sides to drop the term. It seems to net out to: The other faction is exerting power, and the speaker doesn't like it.
I wish I didn’t have to say, “But they started it!” But I do. Democrats have been calling Republican Presidential candidates Hitler for as long as I’ve been alive, and I’m an old man.
If (I say “if”) we are ignoring them when we finally have a Hitler in power, it’s their own damn fault.
I daresay that both of these trends go back decades upon decades, probably right back to the Hitler became a thing. Ayn Rand was calling JFK and LBJ fascists in the 1960s (https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/the-fascist-new-frontier/), and I distinctly remember seeing that she already compared FDR to the fascists in the 1930s.
Ayn Rand is a different sort of fish than elected officials. And comparing FDR to the fascists had a much different valence before Hitler. I seem to remember reading that there was considerable sympathy on both sides for the Fascist Experiment (which "made the trains run on time", not that it did) before it became clear what went along with it.
"LBJ was also likened to Hitler because of his policy of merging big business with government and labor through his "Great Society" reforms. Representative William Miller claimed that this merger was comparable to Hitler's fascism, as the alliance between the government and business gave Hitler increased power (N.Y. Times, Finney, John, Miller Attacks Big Government, Oct 28, 1964). "
>I distinctly remember seeing that she already compared FDR to the fascists in the 1930s.
In the milder sense of public-private partnerships and greatly expanding the Federal role (likely unavoidable even if he had disliked it - he had WWII to deal with!), that isn't wholly wrong. (writing from the USA) Fortunately for us, a lot of the programs that he put in place (e.g. Social Security) have proved generally supported and generally positive.
I think that this article could have used a little more clarification/discussion of what exactly you mean by "acceptable". Is political violence of any kind going to lead to good outcomes? Clearly not. But *if we lived in a world where it did* I think we are well beyond the point where it would be immoral.
There's a trivial utilitarian sense in which anything that leads to good outcomes is good. But I think I bite the bullet that even if some sort of violent coup against the current regime succeeded and replaced it with some regime I first-level liked better, the damage created by violating the norm against violent coups would still be worse than the benefits of object-level success (and that this wouldn't be true in more serious cases like Hitler).
For one thing, the assumption that a coup or self-coup or whatever that overthrows the current order will get us to a better place is a very questionable assumption. I think it's way more likely that this sort of thing just gets us that high-tech police state we've always wanted a few decades early. Depending on who wins, the person attaching electrodes to your tender bits in some black site will have their pronouns on their nametag or will have an American flag pin on their lapel, but it won't make so much difference to you by then....
Somehow, the idea of a special service torturer having a pronouns tag is morbidly funny.
In the broader sense, however, "even if" in Scott's comment was important: it's not that he considers that premise likely, he just says that even that unlikely premise wouldn't be exculpatory because of third-order consequences.
>Depending on who wins, the person attaching electrodes to your tender bits in some black site will have their pronouns on their nametag or will have an American flag pin on their lapel, but it won't make so much difference to you by then....
Is the obsession with language policing a modern phenomenon? It seems like a large amount of effort is spent on trying to shame and alter the language of those we disagree with, both on the left and right.
I can somewhat understand the impulse when it comes to actual slurs. Like, ok, yeah, words used specifically to insult someone of a specific group probably aren’t acceptable in public life. But all the other words we use that are even moderately politically charged?
Why do people bother trying to shame those who use the word fascist? Why bother shaming how Black people are called in America from Negroes—>Colored —> African American—> Person of Color —> black —> Black —> POC, etc. (maybe a bad example but this is the one that’s changed the most that I can think of).
Maybe there’s some short term political clout to be gained when you successfully change the language we use to discuss something? I just don’t see the tangible benefit, and definitely not enough to account for the huge amount of time and effort the national consciousness spends on this stuff.
It's a modern phenomenon, almost certainly related to the amount of media we all consume.
In, like, 1770 or 1850 people might read a weekly/monthly paper but that was it. By, like, 1960, people started consuming 5+ hours of TV per day and we're up to, like...7-8 hours of internet use on average today. So people are swimming in media. And, while we don't fully understand how specific word choices affect people, there's still a wide variety of ways we can shape people's understanding of the world to our benefit.
So...the average American spends half their waking life staring at some form of shiny box. If the voices on the shiny box call my outgroup "bad word" then hundreds of millions of people will associate my outgroup with "bad word", which is good for me. My out group obviously does not want this. Therefore, we fight about what words we call my out group. If hundreds of millions of Americans did not spend a ton of time staring at shiny boxes, like, say, in 1850, then no one would care about word games. Since everyone does, we do.
Orwell complained a lot about lapse use of political terms eroding their meaning and twisting connotations. That was before mass TV adoption but after the radio I suppose.
In 1770, a colonial in a large town or city would have read several political broadsheets or libels during the week, probably a newspaper or two, gotten into hot arguments in a public house, and maybe listened to a political or religious speaker in a meeting house or in the public square. Everywhere you went, people would be talking and opining about the issues of the day. I don't think the media environment was anywhere near as sparse as you say. People have always been very politically engaged. Media can be gossip around town, printed or otherwise, it can be public speeches or rallies, it can be a play or satire. People consumed different forms but I think you need to back up an assertion that 1960 was materially different from 1760. The graph definitely goes up with smartphones, but I wouldn't be surprised if that is the first departure from a centuries-old trend that dates back to the printing press.
The Soviets did a ton of it. The French Revolution did some.
Contrast with the two British political party nicknames for liberals and conservatives derive from negative terms for thieves (they just decided to lean into them rather than shame people for using them). But of course, speaking ill of the monarch was a crime.
People trying to shame the use of actual slurs has definitely been an impulse for a very long time. Preferred terms is definitely iffier - there's definitely a tendency amongst even 19th century colonialists to go 'well what do the locals call themselves/this place' vs 'well let's just call them whatever we like.' But I haven't read as much 19th century political discussion as I would like in order to pronounce on this.
What else is there to yell about, if not the other side's yelling? Object-level policy decisions are mostly either solved, or complex and nuanced enough to be unsuitable for propaganda.
Yes, but every one is backed up by the threat of killing you if you do not comply with the lesser forms of coercion. That is what makes government a special organization: we allow them to initiate violence against people and ultimately kill them for not following the rules. The entire enterprise rests on "If you do not do what we say, we will kill you." We often try to put many milder punishments in the way, but at no point is there the option to put up with or avoid those punishments and have the government say "Oh well, we tried," and then leave you alone.
For example, Germany will forcible put you in prison, if you don't pay your taxes for long enough (and refuse to comply), but they won't kill you over it.
Similarly, if you don't get a license to carry a gun, in many countries the main consequence is that no one will sell you a gun. And the gun shop keeper will be very annoyed with you for wasting her time. But there's no further punishment.
Or to make it less politically loaded: think of a 17 year old in the US trying to buy a beer.
You're not thinking holistically. In a sense, every criminal law is backed up by an implicit threat of death. Because if you break the law, and then you don't comply peacefully with law enforcement, they have a mandate to use force to detain you, up to and including potentially lethal force. Of course, "potentially lethal force" and "lethal Force" are kissing cousins with similar valance. The libertarians are absolutely right that governance is inherently violent. Where they're wrong is thinking that there is a viable alternative.
Outside of America and certain parts of Eastern Europe, I believe it is almost universally recognized by educated people around the world that fascism is a far right ideology. Beyond that, everything is up for debate.
They are highly predictable collections of interest groups. Collections that recreate themselves time and time again, in different modern contexts and societies. So there is value in the terminology.
Life in a coalition isn't always easy. There are always big dogs and little dogs. But even the little dogs are going to be better off then say, landlords, who are almost always going to be outsiders to the coalition. It's structurally almost inevitable. The same thing applies to hereditary aristocrats.
Yeah that's probably true. IMO for Western Europe, and Germany even more so, "Fascism" and "Right-Wing" are almost synonymous and seen as being negative from a moral perspective - basically if you're a "right-winger" you are a "fascist" and thus an affront to common human decency. "Communism" and "leftist", on the other hand, aren't seen as being synonymous and thus not seen as being negative, in fact I'd say that being "leftist" is seen as rather positive by a lot of people in Western Europe since it is associated with Social Democracy and Social Democracy is widely hailed as being a major reason for making Western European countries becoming those with having the best quality of life after WW2. It's of course different in Eastern Bloc countries, where "Right-Wing" and "Fascism" aren't nearly as synonymous, and leftist is much more associated with communism, and thus seen much more negatively since communism is blamed for the economic underperformance of the Eastern Bloc relative to Western Europe. Also, ethnic nationalism was never seen as negatively in Eastern Europe compared to Western Europe, since the former never had colonized other countries themselves (with a few exceptions), and instead were often part of empires and thus "colonized", which means that the "woke left" is seen as being very ridiculous in the Eastern Bloc, and the EU is seen more negatively by many people because the EU is associated with the "woke left" now by many in the Eastern Bloc countries.
No, European leftists do not typically act as if "right wing" is synonymous with fascism. This is an exaggeration to the point of falsehood. As of now I see this as a habit of a loud but fringe minority on the left.
I think the left has become fascist as well. They employ all the same tactics, the only difference being that they espouse left wing beliefs. I believe the term fascist has evolved past its historical meaning and now means any political supporters that try to force others to obey, regardless of actual political views.
And as we face seen recently, the extremes of the left and right have circled around and are more similar to each other than to moderates.
Some of this just comes down to meaning "authoritarian regime that treats dissenters poorly" when you say fascist, right? It's like the folks who called Obama a socialist--what they really meant was "he has more left-wing economic policies than I would prefer," but "socialist" sounded worse, so they went for that.
What tactics do you refer to? "Any political supporters that try to force others to obey" - a government always tries to make its citizens obey its laws. I don't think this is a useful distinction as written.
Forced to obey their political views, not the law. Forced speech by university professors for DEI, censorship over political ideas they don't believe in (including media overreporting anything that confirms their beliefs and underreporting anything that goes against their beliefs like during COVID), deeming dissenting political views as worthy of assassination (the point of this post).
That adds some help. I guess I just believe that much of this is political views that get enshrined in law - like anti-racism, anti-sexism.....to something like bans on mis-gendering. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong in fighting for anti-discrimination legislation. The political process is used to create and remove those things. I wouldn't call any of that fascist.
Paternalist censorship over covid misinformation may be wrong, I'm not sure it is. We are in a new world without gatekeepers - perhaps an argument can be made that its within the interests of public health to censor such things - but as always - the person who decides what to censor is the issue.
I don't consider any of that fascist. Advocating murder of political opponents has been part and parcel of nearly every political movement at some time, so that's also not categorically fascist.
In my view - Fascism is unique is seeking to provide a veneer of democracy while folding-in the non-state power centers to prevent actual democracy. Those power centers are usually corporations, judges, labor unions, and perhaps the church. In some cases they seek to create their own non-gov power centers, like the German Labor front replacing existing unions, and the Hitler Jugend. The concern with the trump admin is the naked wielding of tariffs and other regulatory bodies to coerce private industry to support their political enterprise.
> Paternalist censorship over covid misinformation may be wrong, I'm not sure it is. We are in a new world without gatekeepers - perhaps an argument can be made that its within the interests of public health to censor such things - but as always - the person who decides what to censor is the issue.
The people who would've been calling the shots beclowned themselves severely. Heck, this community in particular is notable for predicting that the new virus was likely to be a plague while mainstream figures were saying things like "hug an Asian today to fight virus-related racism".
I note that this is a content-free sneer that attempts to paint my position as being beneath consideration. This is not an acceptable standard of discourse.
>Fascism is unique is seeking to provide a veneer of democracy while folding-in the non-state power centers to prevent actual democracy. Those power centers are usually _corporations_, _judges_, labor unions, and perhaps the church.
The Woke certainly did a lot of that with corporations (e.g. what Apple, Goggle, and AWS did to silence Parler - also a lot with social media corporations: pre-Musk Twitter, Facebook, etc., also a lot with legacy media, e.g. the New York Times, the Guardian, etc.). And a lot with Woke activist judges.
One other power center not on your list, but folded into Woke power is most of the educational system. Higher education basically became an ideological monoculture, and substantial (most?) of earlier education as well.
It is very frustrating that no one here is willing to actually use the proper definition of fascist or pretend like there isn't one. Fascism isn't simply employing some flavour of authoritarianism, it is specifically an ideology built on national mythology, hyperrealism, fetishisation of violence for its own sake and not for any specific goal, and eugenicist racial politics, on top of the generic authoritarian tactics. The left doesn't really do this.
Definitions change over time. I've been using the term "fascist left" for a while now and I believe it fits. I think the definition of fascist has changed, just like Nazi. Casually calling Stephen Miller (who is Jewish) or Trump (whose daughter and son-in-law are Jewish) Nazi is absurd. But here we are today, so I think you just have to accept the fact that definitions morph over time.
Uh, sure, I can agree that definitions change, but then what's the utility of the word? Using authoritarianism as a tactic is fairly standard everywhere, and that's what you really mean, so you may as well use that so as to not confuse people with your personal definitions which may differ from the norm.
Besides that, nazism is not the same as fascism and there's a reason people like Newsome are calling Miller a fascist and not specifically a nazi. Of course being jewish or being related to jews doesn't preclude one from being fascist, or even nazi quite frankly. Self-hate exists.
The left has a national myth of America: it's a blood-soaked imperial state which genocides and enslaves non-whites.
It has hyperrealism: did you know that the police kill a thousand unarmed Black men every year?
It has fetishization of violence for it's own sake: Punch a Nazi!
It has eugenicist racial politics: whiteness must be abolished!
And against all odds, it manages to be corporatist! DEI/Pride cooption of corporate entities to achieve socio-racial goals, jawboning of media to promote or suppress specific ideological messages.
All of this is just a failure to understand what the specific terms mean.
1. National myth meaning a desire to return to some fake point in history where things were supposedly good. It doesn't mean "believing fake stuff about your nation". Also leftists want to move forward not backward.
2. Hyperreality as a tool is used by the left, but obviously much more common on the right. Oftentimes leftists are wrong by mistake, whereas the right revels in being wrong as a political tool. We can see the obvious differences between Trump and any of his opponents.
3. No, "punch a nazi" is oriented towards some positive goal. You will disagree with that goal, but it is not a celebration of violence for its own sake. The right thinks it is virtuous to be bloody.
4. No matter how much you might try to contort it, leftists have never seriously or at scale advocated for actual eugenics programs against white people. Even your own wording does not imply eugenics.
5. I really hope you aren't stupid enough to think most corporate decisions, particular ones as mundane as putting flags on products, is A) unique to the left B) done by specifically motivated leftists rather than executives trying to make money
The modern right across the West is missing two if not three of those requirements (not entirely sure what hyperrealism means in this context). Ergo, also not fascist.
I think it's highly arguable that they have almost none of those traits.
Hyperrealism is a rejection of truth or even truth-seeking as a political tool to achieve political ends. The point is to make sure everything is up for questioning and no one knows what is real, so it becomes easier to push your agenda.
It's really not difficult to find fascists who think violence is in and of itself a virtue marking a strong ideal man, and something which must be used to maintain the hunger that drives fascism.
1) If you add the parenthetical "but not at the current time" to #2 as well, then all 3 statements can coexist.
2) It's always better, as I take Ibram X. Kendi's main point in his anti-racist book to be, to use fascist and racist as adjectives instead of nouns. It's the acts that can be fascist or racist, not the people.
3) The term political violence seems always to need more thought than in essays like this. It's usually narrowly defined as specific people assaulting, injuring or killing other people. But why do we exclude something like cutting medicaid eligibility which leads to some people's impoverishment or death? Isn't ICE attacking protesters in Chicago political violence, or sinking suspected drug boats (with little public evidence released) in the Caribbean the same? If they are acceptable, then I think you have to disagree with #3.
1. Why would killing fascists often be acceptable, but not at the current time? If we don't have a principled reason for the exception, don't we risk adding it in manually every time there are fascists?
2. Is this true? Is it true of communism as well? We shouldn't call Lenin a communist, we should just call his acts communist? Why? Isn't it pretty helpful to have a word for Lenin's consistent political and philosophical stance? If not, what is the categorical difference between fascism and communism here?
3. I think the difference between political policies (like extending or constricting health care eligibility) and extrajudicial violence is that one is operating within the system, the other outside of it. If you don't like the US Constitution, I guess your only option is violent revolution. If you do like the US Constitution, then part of abiding by it is agreeing not to meet legal policies done in accordance with constitutional norms with illegal violence. See eg http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Property/Property.html . Insofar as some of these actions (like the drug boat) are unconstitutional, I agree there's not a clear difference, and you have to decide how much leeway you're going to give for people to disagree on what's constitutional before you want to go full revolutionary.
1) Why isn't the same true of your formulation of #3 then? I thought that was actually what you were arguing when you suggested negating #2 to resolve the contradiction -- or were you really suggesting abandoning #3 as well, because there is never such a time?
2) Based on Merriam-Webster's definitions, there is an overlap between fascism and communism, but their aims are different. I would argue that fascism, racism and communism are legitimately nouns, and that their "ist" forms are adjectives, or ought to be. I'd make an exception when someone claims the label to apply to themselves (as Lenin did, or as Richard Spencer does when he calls himself a racist); surely communist is as much of an epithet as fascist or racist.
3) I recognize the "system" difference; I still think taking away someone's access to an essential need for political reasons (such as mollifying one's base of voters) is political violence, because it results in injury or death. I don't think that justifies killing the politicians who do it.
4) "If you don't like the US Constitution" except when it helps you, then you don't need to abide by it when committing state violence. That goes for all US Presidents to date, to varying degrees; all have stretched the constitution when they could and all have committed state violence at one point or another. Especially since Congress stopped declaring wars.
Edit: I'd just add that although I agree that the state should have a monopoly on the use of force (in non-revolutionary times), that doesn't mean that all use of force by the state is always legitimate.
The difference between those three is that the term "racism" was coined by a detractor of it, arguing that native Americans can be reformed of their culture on reservations, against the idea that the problem was in their ancestry.
It seems like you're advocating that people get to decide what they're labelled. Presumably they'll do that based on the connotations of the label, which isn't conducive to the rest of us understanding the situation. I think you should call someone a communist who consistently espouses communism, and call someone a fascist who consistently espouses fascism, rather than allowing them to spin themselves as something prettier.
I'm not advocating for that one way or the other, although the first amendment (IMO) implies that everyone does get to label themselves. I'm advocating for the use of -ist words as adjectives instead of nouns, and for focusing on the behavior of the person rather than labeling them. The reason this is important to me is what you bring up: calling someone a racist or fascist provokes an emotional reaction from them that interferes with dialogue. It's kind of like the recommended conversation style for parenting and in therapy -- avoid labels and you-talk, focus on behavior and how their behavior affects me.
It’s pretty silly to cite Merriam-Webster and then deny exactly what it says, that “communist” can be used as either a noun or an adjective. It actually expends far more text on the former than on the latter.
Which in this case is a proper use of the term "fascist" as an adjective modifying "party". I think calling someone or oneself a fascist is probably a useful shortcut in colloquial language, but it problematically shifts the emphasis to the person rather than the behavior or ideology, which is why it can turn into an epithet.
I agree that constitutionality is important context here. Political violence is never acceptable as long as there's a nonviolent political means to achieve your objectives - that's what our constitutional system seeks to preserve. We (usually) have peaceful transfers of power because we've created effective means for competing political wills to be assessed and implemented. The Constitution lays out the bounds of acceptable conduct by the government, and along with federal and state law lays out the bounds of acceptable conduct by the populace.
There exist balances of power within the system to hold each branch of government accountable to the Constitution, but when these balances break down, we have a problem. Fascists are not a threat under normal conditions, and violence against them is not acceptable under normal conditions, because the Constitution by its very nature precludes a fascistic (or communist, or etc) government in this country; fascists in that case are merely people expressing opinions and beliefs, and their right to do so is protected by that same Constitution. However, once fascists take political power and violate the Constitution, and the several branches of government fail in their consitutional duties to check those abuses, then the people are justified - and have a duty - to apply any means necessary to restore constitutional governance. There's a very deliberate reason we have millions of Americans who have been trained in the organized application of violence and are sworn to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
Sinking boats (with people on them) is definitely violence. I don't know what form of "attacking" you're referring to, but law enforcement engages in (legitimized) violence. Cutting eligibility is an entirely different story though, that's just not how normal people use the word "violence".
Well, normal or not ... I don't care much about the normalcy of the use. I'd agree that there is a hierarchy of degrees here. Cutting eligibility is not itself violent, but its effects can be violent against people who lose it. It is a cause of their death or injury -- we can argue about the directness of the cause. Then we can talk about what the reasons (stated or otherwise) for the cuts were. A genuine concern about budget priorities, or kowtowing to voters who believe (or perhaps have been taught to believe) that the people losing eligibility deserve to lose it? I'd say the end effect of the cuts is still violence, but blameworthiness depends on the reasons and the alternatives, as does the choice to resist fascism, as @J. B. Persons pointed out above.
Violence is a different thing from blameworthiness! I mentioned that law enforcement engages in legitimized violence, and quite often that is the opposite of blameworthy. In a different comment in this thread I asked whether it would be "evil" for law enforcement to shoot a mass shooter, deliberately causing harm/death to that shooter. It was something of a rhetorical question, because I expect the answer of normal people to be "no".
Yes, of course you're right. I would also answer "no" to the question of whether it's evil for law enforcement to shoot a mass shooter. But legitimized is not the opposite of blameworthy, and legitimized does not equate to legitimate either. I think we all understand that there are at least two meanings of the words "innocent person": someone who didn't do something, and someone who was not convicted due to lack of evidence, a technicality such as the statute of limitations running out, prosecutorial misconduct, etc. Legitimized violence by a state agent might look like something that is deemed subject to qualified immunity (even when not supported by facts on the ground), or use of force that's questionable but that isn't investigated. Legitimization is the act of trying (not necessarily succeeding) to make something legitimate.
By "attacking" I'm referring to (admittedly disputed) accounts of ICE agents using force against protesters where the protesters may not have been threatening the agents. Just because the agents claim legitimacy doesn't mean it shouldn't be taken as seriously as the charges that the protesters instigated or assaulted the agents -- you can't call one of them violence without calling the other one violence too.
Just be unfailingly good and love the better version of someone than they might be presenting. And respond as the highest possible version of themselves would ask you to respond.
In your personal life, this seems like a great way to be a sucker and an enabler.
At the societal level, I cannot help but note that bad people often win and good people often lose and the consequences of those victories and losses are really important. It is more important to win than lose nobly.
That's what bugged me about this: it's not consequentialist! Getting a good outcome is more important that doing things good. The morality of the outcome is more important than the morality of the act. If you act with goodness and love and end up in a (fascist/communist/lizardman) dictatorship, that's bad.
Other people are different than me. Many of them aspire to live in ways I would find morally abhorrent...and vice versa.
If I extend charity to my ideal of who they should be, rather than who they aspire to be, this ends badly. If they do this me, it's either confusing or offensive.
To remove CW from this, some people don't want to do big baller stuff. A lot of people want to do the minimal work possible, then get high and play video games all day. I think this is literally spiritual and intellectual death. They do not appreciate it when I try to interact with their highest possible version of themselves.
I agree it can be patronizing. But we all have to make these kinds of moral guesses on each other’s behalf. There are worse things than for a stranger to think, “This is beneath you.”
Violent revolution is impermissible as long as democracy is still functioning. If you can throw the bastards out at the next election, then there's no reason to resort to force.
If elections prove meaningless, either because of fraud or widespread suppression, or just outright ignoring elections, then the next step is widespread protests and civil disobedience. If that fails, then luckily we live in a federal republic where certain states can take action in a way that is still subject to oversight and checks and balances. I'd rather not contemplate what that actually looks like, but I don't want violent revolutionary factions and vigilantes taking matters into their own hands.
I don't think we're going to get to that point, though. At least I pray we won't
I'm referring to internal political enemies, not foreign. Torture of foreign political enemies(as despicable as that is) is not a clear and present danger to the internal democracy of a country.
I think we as Americans have a long history of killing and torturing foreign folks we don't like (should I list all the wars and conflicts?). I don't see this as evidence that Constitution is failing or that this administration is 'super' despicable.
Regarding torture, that's a fair critique. There's a parameter space where the justice system stops functioning that I hadn't considered. But, off the top of my head, my reaction is that it depends. I'm glad we didn't have a violent revolution in America during the Bush administration. But in a hypothetical scenario where a President abducts his political opponents and tortures them to extract false confessions, I'd say one can't wait until the next election to take action. But are there any examples of someone doing something like that but still leaving power if they lose the next election? I suspect not. I think that by that point democracy is probably already dead.
Regarding removing democracy in other countries, my initial reaction is to say no, I don't want to have a violent revolution in my country if I can still vote current officials out of office.
I think one of the bright red lines that must be drawn is the president trying to extend his stay in the White House for a third term without a constitutional amendment. The president has "joked" about this topic many times, seemingly to test the waters. If he doesn't agree to the peaceful transfer of power then political violence for his immediate removal would be warranted and justified. I'd be interested to hear what others think.
I’ve heard at least some of the jokes but I haven’t heard any with enough specifics to know whether we are talking about with or without an amendment. (And of course being that specific would pretty much kill the joke.)
But in this audience I’m a little afraid that floating an amendment would just be proof of his evil: Oh, how sinister, using Article Five against us!
I think we can defer arguing about Trump trying for a third term till he registers as a candidate for 2028 (for the case where he intends to run (unconstitutionally) but still intends to hold the election (and, perhaps, abide by the results)).
_Cancelling_ the election would be a more severe, immediate problem.
FRAN, as in Far-Right Authoritarian Nationalist, looks like a useful acronym to me. It's specific about what it's calling out, doesn't add any 20th century baggage like 'fascist' has, and as a bonus, you can call someone a (EDIT: scratching this out because I've already fumbled it in my head). I'd leave out the Corporatist part, because I'm not sure how many FRANs are currently Corporatist, and I don't want to sideswipe the French by calling it FRANC.
If you managed to invent a new word that perfectly described your target while excluding non-targets, it would take about 3 seconds before people start calling Mitt Romney a FRAN.
Orban is a democratically elected leader of a EU country. He is as much fascist as Merz Or Meloni.
I know of course it is perfectly acceptable to slander Orban in many circles to prove oneself a liberal or even a mainstream conservative in good standing.
Back when you posted this and people were always debating Orban, the point that almost all the media was controlled by Orban allies came up, and the common response was that the US is similar because the "mainstream media" and heads of social media all agree with some loosely defined liberal consensus around key issues.
IMO if you accept that idea, you have to look around now and see that most media outlets and heads of social media are either Trump supporters, or have made payouts to Trump. Meta, Twitter, Youtube, Tiktok, ABC, CBS, Washington Post, WSJ, probably others I'm forgetting...
Many have made payouts because he sued them. But the media continues to criticize Trump. I mentioned that Trump is suing the WSJ over that Epstein letter, but Rupert Murdoch is refusing to budge.
Agree re WSJ, but the WSJ's editorial line is more on Trump's side than the Dems, even before any lawsuit or anything.
Also true they continue to criticize Trump (though we'll see about CBS's new management), but that doesn't mean there's no pressure. Can also mean they are dialing back the criticisms while trying to maintain some credibility, if ABC turned into Fox News overnight it may well be less helpful to conservatives than if they moved meaningfullly-but-not-decisively in that direction.
Also just to say it, the payouts IMO are extortion and impeachable even if they don't result in any change in coverage, same as if Trump went around extorting laundromats and car mechanics.
Fascist doesn't mean that you can't be elected democratically. Historically many fascist dictators actually were democratically elected.
If anything one could claim that Orban, due to having to work in the framework of the EU, wasn't and couldn't be very successful in making sure that no future election would remove him from power. Though the authoritarian aspect of fascism is just one aspect of many. The chrony capitalism is something Orban has perfected much more, and something Merz can't really be accused of (I know to little about Meloni to comment about her). That's also the reason Orban has never tried to leave the EU to get rid of their comments. He likes milking the EU way too much. Another aspect of fascism is the nationalism. On that scale Orban is definetly much more far gone than Merz.
Merz is a right-wing politician. But he isn't a far-right nor a rightwing-extremist. And he definetly isn't a fascist. He hasn't made the slightest attempt to subvert democratic institutions in Germany. He hasn't even tried to damage them to the benefit of his own party. Orban has done all of that in his country.
> A dictator may be elected once but to keep having to fight elections isn't quite the thing a dictator does.
Most dictators of our day and age have learned from the past and know that keeping sham elections around is actually benefitial to them. Which is why most current dictators hold them and simply make sure that the result doesn't surprise them.
> Crony capitalism is neither here or there.
So, I take it that you haven't read the article linked by Scott about Orban?
> Only thing that makes Orban a fascist is that he isn't keen on third world immigration.
No, that's the only thing that he does that has little to do with fascism. It's the way he organizes the Hungarian state, how he's taken control of the media and his general policies that make him quite a bit fascist.
Orban faces and wins real elections. Like Modi of India, also in the list of authoritarian strongmen.
A degree of cronyism is inevitable in any setup in this age. That's why I don't see cronyism as anything to do with fascism.
Insufficient enthusiasm about third world immigration is what marks out Orban along with also being not-so keen on gay agenda. This is precisely why he is said to be fascist strongman.
> If anything one could claim that Orban, due to having to work in the framework of the EU, wasn't and couldn't be very successful in making sure that no future election would remove him from power.
He changed the Hungarian voting system to almost ensure that. Votes of people living in big cities are worth almost nothing under the new system, only the rural votes matter. Then he banned all media that criticized him.
So, in theory (and maybe also in practice, let's see the outcome of this election) he can be democratically removed from power, but only if people outside the cities can synchronize on that in absence of any coordination by media.
I asked ChatGPT: "Define fascism in three concise bullet points"
* **Authoritarian ultranationalism:** A political ideology centered on dictatorial power, intense nationalism, and the suppression of dissent.
* **State control and unity:** Prioritizes the interests of the nation or race over individual rights, often merging state and corporate power.
* **Militarism and propaganda:** Glorifies violence, obedience, and loyalty to the leader, using mass propaganda to maintain control and mobilize society.
I then asked: "Is fascism compatible with democracy?"
No — **fascism is fundamentally incompatible with democracy.**
Here’s why:
* **Authoritarian rule:** Fascism rejects pluralism and democratic decision-making, concentrating power in a single leader or party.
* **Suppression of opposition:** It eliminates free elections, independent media, and political dissent — all core elements of democracy.
* **Rejection of individual rights:** Fascism prioritizes the state or nation above personal freedoms and minority protections, which democracy seeks to safeguard.
In essence, fascism replaces democratic governance with totalitarian control.
I fully agree with the definition provided by ChatGPT.
I also made basically the same query, albeit to both ChatGPT and Claude, and asking for 10 points rather than 3. They mostly agreed with the 3 you got, and mostly with each other. Some of the 10 points sort of fall within one of the 3 you have, e.g.
- one-party state under Il Duce: the state above the individual; pluralism abolished; power concentrated in the leader and party organs (Leggi fascistissime; Grand Council of Fascism).
is sort-of implied by "the suppression of dissent"
One point that looks additional to the 3 you have:
- Traditionalism and social hierarchy - Emphasis on traditional gender roles, family, and Church (after the Lateran Treaty), combined with belief in natural social hierarchies.
I think this all comes down to a problem of type inference. If there is genuine ambiguity as to who is fascist, then you cannot do legitimate violence against fascism. Even if you are not, and do not want to be, a fascist, someone might infer that you are a fascist and beat you up. This fear will repulse all normal people from anti-fascism. Normal people do not and should not want to sacrifice their personal safety for "the cause", especially when "the cause" involves quasi-randomly beating people up.
If there is a clear consensus on fascism--that is, you have a group of people who proudly proclaim, "we are fascists and we believe evil things, and here is our fascist army and here are our fifth-columns working towards your demise"--then great, go violence against fascists. But this very rarely happens, for obvious game-theoretic reasons. WWII was historically pretty weird. A lot of leftist discourse in the last decade has been about trying to wishcast WWII back into reality.
I'm pretty bummed about all this. I think Miller really is unambiguously a fascist. But the argument can't be "therefore violence". It has to be about persuasion. We need to try to get back to a consensus on what is morally good and bad and what should be done about it.
> I'm pretty bummed about all this. I think Miller really is unambiguously a fascist. But the argument can't be "therefore violence". It has to be about persuasion. We need to try to get back to a consensus on what is morally good and bad and what should be done about it.
You're going to have to kill a lot of people if you want moral consensus. Is compromise based on the leverage different parties have not good enough?
I personally reject #2 not because it's morally or logically incorrect but because it's counterproductive. Violence ALWAYS benefits the fascist. It's why the Charlie Kirk assassination was the best possible thing that could have happened for people who support his politics and the worst possible thing that could have happened for the rest of us. It's why Trump is trying so hard to instigate violence against the NG in the cities he's occupying. The point of fascism is to trigger violence because then it justifies retaliation. Creating a world where political violence is acceptable moves the struggle to an arena where fascists hold the upper hand.
As far as "Make Fascists Afraid Again"...afraid of what? They're already afraid of everything. Immigrants, queer people, muslims, cities, history textbooks, comedians, tylenol. Their entire ideology is based on being afraid of everything. It's the only rhetorical move they have. And their path to power is making sure everyone is afraid of everything. The way you oppose fascists is to demonstrate an alternative. How about "make civil society compelling again"?
> "I personally reject #2 not because it's morally or logically incorrect but because it's counterproductive. Violence ALWAYS benefits the fascist."
I think this is false - if von Stauffenberg had succeeded in killing Hitler, I think this would have been bad for fascism, and not somehow made everything even more fascist than before.
Ok, maybe ALWAYS is hyperbole. But I think even the most alarmist among us (and to be fair I am probably in that camp) are claiming it's 1936, not 1944. And in 1936, the N@zi route to power absolutely relied on inciting antifascist violence, using it to justify reprisals, and making sure each round was bloodier and higher stakes than the one before. The only tactically sound antifascist response to that strategy is to not play the game.
Matt Yglesias argues, fairly convincingly in my view, that Hitler is a very-nearly-unique special case and that assassinating any high-ranking Nazi other than Hitler would have been a bad idea. https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/against-assassinating-nazis
(Granted, he is mostly talking about during the period when Hitler was consolidating power but had not yet become absolute dictator. But even under the most pessimistic view, that's the stage we're in now, so the argument remains applicable.)
In Stauffenberg's case, it actually would probably have been good for fascism in the long run. The Allies were already in a position where they would have had to prosecute the war to an unconditional surrender anyway, meaning that although the war would probably have ended sooner due to the sheer chaos caused by the assassination/coup there would still have been a fight to the end and the postwar fascists would now have a powerful martyrdom/dolchstoss myth ("They could have still won it somehow but then the aristocrats betrayed the Fuhrer!") to organize around.
Let's think about this from a consequentialist lens. Instead of "does punching a N@zi give me good karma points or bad karma points," the question is "what is the likely result of me punching a N@zi? If I ratchet up the level of violence here, where is the end point?" And I think you have to assume that the end point is an increase in the amount of violence and in the number of opportunities for fascists to create radicalization and destabilization. Additional violence does not benefit the argument for the rule of law. In 1944, that's a moot point. There is no risk of a more violent world than 1944. I'd say 1944 is literally the bar when it comes to a violent world. If you ranked every year of human existence over the last 100,000 years by level of violence, 1944 takes top prize. FA time is over. You're in the FO phase. In 1936 the goal is not to get to 1944 in the first place.
>There is no risk of a more violent world than 1944. I'd say 1944 is literally the bar when it comes to a violent world. If you ranked every year of human existence over the last 100,000 years by level of violence, 1944 takes top prize.
Just to be sure I'm following you, I take it you mean year that actually occurred, not including plausible hypotheticals? A USA/USSR nuclear war, particularly at the maximum of the cold war nuke armories, could have been bloodier (ashier?).
Stauffenberg was a fascist himself. He started to oppose Hitler when it became apparent that his path would lead to disaster. Him being successfull might have actually helped fascism.
Scott, you're twisting yourself into knots here to avoid acknowledging two simple things:
1. Nothing the Trump administration has done is "fascist", or particularly extreme by historical standards (you even list some salient examples!),
2. No one in the Trump administration, and no supporter of it minus some tiny epsilon, thinks well of fascism or describes ourselves as "fascist"
Hypotheticals like "What if Trump cancels elections?" are... I don't even have a word for it. The adoption by intelligent, mainstream public intellectuals of talking points on the level of the Clinton murder list. Trump is not going to cancel elections. There is no political movement in America to cancel elections, or to adopt the tenets of National Socialism. It simply does not exist. Weird as it is when people try to invent one, it's weirder when smart guys like you give them the time of day, and write long think pieces about absurd hypotheticals.
I don't think "not cancelling elections" is a valuable signal anymore. There are technically elections in Russia and North Korea. The smart move now is to seize enough power that elections happen but are technically fake.
I agree there is basically no chance that Trump gets as bad as Hitler or even Mussolini. I do think it's useful to consider the possibility that he's fascist in the same weak analogical sense that Bernie Sanders is socialist, even though there is no chance Sanders would turn us into the USSR.
I think there is a gradation of election integrity, that we're already slightly lower on that gradation than I would like, and I can see him going further. For example, I think there's a 10% chance he gets as bad as Hungary, which is not as bad as Russia, which is itself not as bad as North Korea - but still bad!
I am not accusing you of believing Bernie is exactly as bad as the USSR, I'm saying that Bernie would still be bad in various ways and it's not unfair to describe this as related to socialism being bad, even though Bernie's weak analogical socialism is not as bad as worse and more serious socialisms.
I don't think the Bernie comparison works. The salient characteristics of fascism that Trumpism arguably exhibits, albeit in much weaker form than Hitler and Mussolini, are actively evil characteristics -- bigotry, cruelty, desire to maintain personal power. In contrast, Sanders-style socialism has none of the evil characteristics of Soviet-style communism -- he doesn't want a dictatorship of the proletariat, or think it's a good idea to send people to reeducation camps. You may think socialism would lead to bad economic outcomes for the country, but that's just "bad" in the normal-politics way that bad economic theory is bad. The comparison with the 'extreme' form of the ideology becomes irrelevant.
tl;dr, Sanders is not to Stalin-style commnism as Trump is to Hitler-style fascism, because Sanders supports "a weaker version of the morally neutral bits of communism, with the evil bits removed" whereas Trump (arguably) supports "a weaker version of fascism as a package deal, evil bits included".
Well, I mean, [insert philosophical treatise here]. No one in the last three thousand years have ever agreed on the *exact* answer to this question. But there's still an intuitively relevant difference. When we say Candidate Alice who wants to maximize the suffering of orphans is "evil", this is clearly a different axis than when we say that Candidate Bob who wants to help orphans but believes shipping unmarked boxes full of venomous snakes to them will cheer them up is "bad".
Relevantly, I think Scott's own moral beliefs recognize this difference in the case of Sanders vs Stalin. To grasp at another overlapping dichotomy, I think Scott's disagreements with Sanders are mistake-theory-based, while his disagreements with Stalin or indeed Trump are conflict-theory based. I think when we say "Trump is a fascist, like Hitler" we are saying "like Hitler, Trump plays in conflict-theory mode, and moreover he plays dirty". And this is not a valid statement about Sanders/Stalin. (Although this isn't to say it's never valid about any modern leftists!)
Must say I’d like to see this too. If Scott has something I don’t know of that would sway me, I desire to be swayed.
I don’t want to think it’s the same old tired stuff I hear from others about how January 6 was an insurrection attempting to overturn a legitimate election.
(I suspect it was as legitimate as it needed to be, but I can still sympathize with those who disagree, still claim that if it *were* illegitimate then petitioning Congress to overturn it would be a legitimate thing to do, and still suspect that the worst excesses of the petitioners were instigated by Feds or Antifa, of which there were apparently plenty in place. If those admissions are enough to convince Scott I can’t be swayed, I’ll have to live with that.)
You’re uncharacteristically exhibiting some pretty heavy biases here, Scott. What’s your epistemic foundation for believing Trump to be fascist? Does he hate other races? Does he want companies to be subservient to the interest of the state? Does he no longer believe in free trade?
I don't think these three specific criteria are necessary for fascism; ideologies evolve over time, and neofascism can have a very different presentation to 20th century fascism whilst still having similar outcomes.
However: if we suppose that these criteria *are* necessary - haven't all three basically been met?
1) Persecuting other races: The persecution of immigrants (which hasn't been restricted to illegal immigrants), detentions without trial or access to solicitors, imprisonment in squalid conditions, the state-supported masked gangs who round them up, and the use of deportation as a political threat even at fairly high levels of government.
2) Making private companies subject to the state: Controlling the output of media (including social media/tech) companies using financial incentives and cronyism (for friendly ones) and a level of threats, attacks, political pressure, and litigation against the press never before seen in a democracy (for unfriendly ones).
3) Cessation of free trade: Imposition of massive sweeping unilateral tarrifs and trade barriers across pretty much the entire world, and pursuing a strict policy of US trade isolationism.
[Disclaimer: I'm not an American and don't know much about USA politics beyond what I read on ACX and what gets reported in the press - albeit both left and right wing press - in my own country.]
However - even if I'm mistaken about all three of these points, I don't think that is sufficient for refuting the claim of (neo)fascism, since (as per. the above) I don't think neofascism need be defined as dependent on these particular three points specifically, but rather on a far-right authoritarian demagogic circumvention of the checks and balances of a healthy balanced democracy; the tools used for circumvention can be different to the tools used by 20th century fascism whilst achieving the same outcomes.
I appreciate the thoughtful reply! I actually think that all tracks with authoritarianism. There’s no need to call it «fascist», or «neofascist» for that matter.
Moreover, you could easily make the case that the Biden administration was overtly racist (DEI) and authoritarian (imprisoned and censored political opponents, including journalists), but I wouldn’t call them fascist (or communist) for that matter.
It’s just lazy, inflammatory language which worsens the dialogue.
But he already tried to gin up people to overthrow a free and fair election in 2020 and constantly talks about being president past 2028. How is this an absurd hypothetical?
Trump 2028 is a joke. I know you guys don't get his sense of humor, so you'll just have to trust me on that one.
I have numerous criticisms of the conduct of both Trump and some of my fellow Trump supporters -- mainly the latter -- on 1/6. However, I don't think it's at all fair to say "he tried to gin up people to overthrow a free and fair election". He, and they, didn't believe the election had been free and fair. You're free to disagree with that (and so am I), but you should have an accurate theory of mind for them. Their logic was exactly what Scott is laying out in this piece -- and a great example of why it's so dangerous.
It's always worth pointing out that Trump never called for violence on 1/6.
Sorry, I don't think I will trust that this is all just a joke. You should read the Eastman memos, which clearly details the attempts to overturn an election that people in the administration knew they lost. Even if you manage to wave away the conduct of the rank and file j6 rioters, the administration had their hands knowingly covered in filth.
The basic plan was to ignore/throw out votes from states that didn't vote for Trump. There was an extremely tortured legal fig leaf, one that no one agreed with and everyone stated was incorrect, including Trump's team that continued to accidentally use terms like "fake electors" in their private communication.
I've read the Eastman memos. It's an absolutely spurious legal theory, but doesn't change the fact that Trump and his supporters believed they were rectifying a stolen election result.
Disputed elections with dodgy outcomes are not all that unusual in American politics. Read about 1877 sometime.
Many people are saying that everyone including many people within his administration (Barr, Stepien, Ivanka, Donoghue, Oczkowski, Cannon, etc) told Trump in 2020 that fraud hadn’t been committed, so he’s either lying about believing the election wasn’t free and fair, or so delusional (as in refusing to listen to anyone but himself) that it’s uniquely dangerous for him to be this powerful.
I think he's delusional. The time to steal an election is before an election happens, but he was convinced he was going to win and refuses to listen to people who tell him what he doesn't want to hear.
If he's able to convince himself that the 2020 election was so wrong that it neccessated a coup, how is it absurd to think that he can convince himself that the democrats and the deep state are going to try to steal the election in 2028 and the only way to stop them is to steal it better or not have it at all?
Yes he never explicitly called for violence on 1/6. But if you tell people the election has been stolen and they need to fight for thier country, it definitely makes it seem like a reasonable course. Which is why demagoguing that it was is so dangerous. Like I said, I empathize with the 1/6 people, If I genuinely thought the election had been stolen in 2020, I might have been right there with them.
It is very hard to believe it is a "joke" when many of his campaign promises were also labelled "jokes". In reality it turned out he was deadly serious about them.
It's not a joke, it's a probe. He's testing the waters to see if he could get away with it. I don't think anyone should feel confident in saying, "oh, the Supreme Court would *never* allow that" considering how they have ruled recently.
Some of his jokes start at "triggering the libs," advance to "seriously, not literally," and end at "promises made, promises kept," so I can see why some people get jumpy.
Do you mean like how having a Jewish mother makes one legally Jewish, and having a Muslim father makes one legally Muslims? Because profession of faith is still a fundamental tenet of Islam.
It's interesting to me that you are always just debating Trump, and how bad he might turn. He is a senile old egotistical man who won't live for much longer. A decade at best.
If I was from the US, I would be much more concerned about whoever will be his successor. Especially if said successor wouldn't need an election to come to power. At this time it would be JD Vance ...
I just... man. I can't help laughing at these comments.
How do you see Vance coming to power without an election? Specifically? (Other than if, God forbid, Trump dies or is killed in office.) There is no support in the American body politic for scrapping our Constitution and replacing it with a dictator. Literally none, zero, zilch. Ask me to imagine a contingency in which that MIGHT happen, and it's something like... the aftermath of WWIII? Maybe? When 90 percent of us are dead? Probably not even then.
I get that you probably see a distorted picture of American politics from overseas, but... I live in the deepest, reddest part of hillbilly MAGA country, and any of my neighbors would laugh in your face if you suggested J. D. Vance should cancel elections and appoint himself Reichsfuhrer. We practically WORSHIP the Constitution in these parts.
Trump dying was specifically what I had in mind though. He isn't exactly healthy and more than three years is quite a long time.
I don't think for a second that J.D. Vance would cancel elections and appoint himself. But republicans are already working on ensuring that the next election is even more rigged than the last one. And republicans are cheering those changes on.
You most definitely don't actually WORSHIP the Constitution. If you would, you would have spoken up when Trump declared that all constitutional amendments are at the whim of the president. When he tried to abolish the 14th through Executive Order 14160, he essentially said that all amendments, in his opinion are only valid for as long as the president doesn't issue a presidential order saying otherwise. Which essentially means that your first and second amendment are valid for as long as the president says so. And you guys didn't even flinch at that ...
I know I'm gonna regret asking, but how was the 2024 election rigged? Never heard that one before.
I don't agree with EO 14160, the courts (so far) haven't either, and I find it highly unlikely it will stand. That's how the system works. It's how multiple previous EOs from multiple presidents have been declared unconstitutional. If issuing controversial EOs is synonymous with declaring the Constitution is at the whim of the president, then Truman beat Trump to it by about seventy-five years.
I'm not even specifically blaming the republicans. Just the fact that Gerrymandering is a thing, from both sides, makes your elections less democratic. The way your voter registers seem to be forgetful at times also doesn't really boost confidence. I wouldn't even be confident to claim that at the national level it changed the election, or that it benefitted Trump. But on the local level these shenanigans happen and are turning US democracy into a joke. It would take some serious research I'm not qualified to provide to quantify which side profited more from the BS. But that it's still legal and done openly in the US is really awful.
> I don't agree with EO 14160, the courts (so far) haven't either, and I find it highly unlikely it will stand.
That's not the point. Your argument boils down to "it isn't an attempt at eroding the rule of law because it ultimately probably wasn't successful". That's not how that works. At best that proves that there is still hope for the US when resistance to authocratic tendencies succeeds ...
> It's how multiple previous EOs from multiple presidents have been declared unconstitutional.
An EO being declared unconstitutional isn't that same thing as an EO outright trying to reframe or anul an amendment to the constitution.
Also I didn't claim that Trump was the first president in US history with authocratic tendencies. Though the seizure of a steel mill doesn't really strike me as being on the same level of authoritarianism as challenging the constitutions validity directly ...
>How do you see Vance coming to power without an election? Specifically? (Other than if, God forbid, Trump dies or is killed in office.)
A president can resign, passing the office to the vice-president.
Suppose Trump just falls ill, but not mortally ill, in 2027, for instance.
Now, whether Vance could plausibly manage to cancel elections in 2028 is _much_ more of a stretch. ( Though AGI may be coming around at that point, and might flip over the table entirely in a variety of ways. )
"Fascism" aside there are lots of things that the Trump administration has done that are extreme by historical standards, in terms of consolidating power in the executive:
* firing people in the executive branch when it's illegal to do so. This one is most obvious because the supreme court has signalled they're going to overturn 100-year old precedent in order to allow it. If they're breaking 100 year old supreme court precedent, clearly they're going farther than people in the past.
* Arresting/detaining people based on the Alien Enemies Act and declaring that their presence in the US is against the US's interests based on political speech. Again, their description of what they're doing, not mine.
* Withholding funding from various programs they don't like, against the anti-impoundment act
* Allowing or blocking mergers depending on whether the parties settle a lawsuit that Trump filed against them.
* The FCC demanding critics of the administration be taken off the air (and actually succeeding temporarily).
* Pushing the DOJ to arrest/indict political enemies when the career prosecutors in the DOJ didn't think the charges were justifiable.
* threatening law firms unless they provide them with "pro bono" legal services
* accepting a billion dollar plane from Qatar in exchange for diplomatic favors
Honestly there's a lot more, those are just what come to mind.
"If they're breaking 100 year old supreme court precedent, clearly they're going farther than people in the past."
Well, not farther than the people 100 years in the past. SCOTUS has overturned long-held precedents before. Anyway, fascism is when the president arrests the judiciary, not when they rule in his favor!
"Arresting/detaining people based on the Alien Enemies Act and declaring that their presence in the US is against the US's interests based on political speech. Again, their description of what they're doing, not mine."
Not American citizens. Again, the president has abided by court decisions on these issues. Not fascism. Not particularly extreme.
"Withholding funding from various programs they don't like, against the anti-impoundment act"
All presidents play these games. Is it bending the rules, sure. So was declaring a "police action" in Vietnam. So was the "Dear Colleague" letter. I don't hyperventilate every time the president gets in a pissing contest with Congress.
"Allowing or blocking mergers depending on whether the parties settle a lawsuit that Trump filed against them."
No evidence of this.
"The FCC demanding critics of the administration be taken off the air (and actually succeeding temporarily)."
The FCC probably had nothing to do with it, it's a poor species of fascism that can't even cancel its critics for more than a week, and it's nothing compared to what the Biden admin did to its social-media critics.
"Pushing the DOJ to arrest/indict political enemies when the career prosecutors in the DOJ didn't think the charges were justifiable."
This one is hilarious, given that Letitia James literally campaigned on "getting Trump". I guess that didn't strike you as abuse of power. Anyway, presidents pressuring DOJ to arrest/indict is nothing new. Every president in my lifetime has done this. James will get her day in court.
"threatening law firms unless they provide them with "pro bono" legal services"
Haven't heard of this one. Got a link?
"accepting a billion dollar plane from Qatar in exchange for diplomatic favors"
> The FCC probably had nothing to do with it, it's a poor species of fascism that can't even cancel its critics for more than a week
That point is fair enough.
> and it's nothing compared to what the Biden admin did to its social-media critics.
This point is not. Social media is small beans and the government doesn't actually have authority over it. The FCC actually does have authority over broadcast TV, which reaches huge numbers of people.
The government exercising authority it doesn't have is worse than the government exercising authority it has, even if it shouldn't have that authority.
I agree in the case of Trump enacting tariffs by dictatorial fiat: he has no such Constitutional authority. But "jawboning" is a different matter: if a company is led by someone with spine (like Rupert Murdoch, who's not backing down from Trump's lawsuit on the Epstein letter) they can persist in its face.
“Dictatorial fiat” begs the question here. There are several Congressional acts that grant the President the power to set tariffs. Trump even cited some of them in his EO. It’s not clear to me that those acts are themselves constitutional, to the extent that they hand off Congressional purviews to the Executive. But if you argue that way, you throw the whole Administrative State up for grabs.
The highest rated TV programs reach maybe 4 million people. That's peanuts. Broadcast is almost, but not quite, irrelevant. Social media gets 10s of millions of unique views every single days.
Social media is much bigger beans than Jimmy Kimmel and all the legacy broadcast networks put together. You know what's really small beans? Libraries and what books are in them.
> Well, not farther than the people 100 years in the past.
Before 100 years in the past, the executive branch mostly didn't do the types of things now done by people insulated from being fired. It's less that SCOTUS switched 100 years ago, more that it was a pretty new situation. Also ... in US history there's a lot of things from 100 years ago we really don't want to bring back.
> fascism is when the president arrests the judiciary, not when they rule in his favor!
I didn't say they were being fascist, I said they are going farther than previous admins. The supreme Court being on their side doesn't change that.
> Anyway, fascism is when the president arrests the judiciary, not when they rule in his favor!
Don't have to arrest the judiciary when they almost always rule in your favor! Plus most people will agree, autocrats in this day and age like to keep the trappings of a democratic system, e.g. elections even if they're rigged.
> Not American citizens.
This isn't an argument that they aren't going farther than others, just that you think it's fine.
> the president has abided by court decisions
Releasing the person you arrested when the court says you violated their rights, doesn't mean that you didn't violate their rights.
But even so ICE has repeatedly detained US citizens with no provocation and ignored them saying so and offering up ID.
> All presidents play these games.
This isn't a rebuttal to the claim that this administration has gone further than others. It's like responding to "the president just shot someone" with "hey, all presidents bend the rules".
Also Congress overwhelmingly approved the Vietnam War, the "police action" thing wasn't executive aggrandizement.
> No evidence of this.
The merger approval came a few weeks after the settlement, and both the merger and the lawsuit had been outstanding for awhile prior; the chairman of the FCC said that the merger was based on promises about media coverage; and Trump himself linked the settlement to the merger in a Truth Social post: https://trumpstruth.org/statuses/32150
Do you actually believe that they are not linked?
> The FCC probably had nothing to do with it
The chairman of the FCC said about it, "These companies can find ways to change conduct to take action on Kimmel or, you know, there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead".
And again, Trump saying that they discussed directly with the White House, and threatening them over un-cancelling: https://trumpstruth.org/statuses/33072
> Anyway, presidents pressuring DOJ to arrest/indict is nothing new.
Do you have any examples of a different president telling DOJ to indict someone when the career prosecutors thought it wasn't justified? Trump directly told Pam Bondi to indict Comey in a public post and they fired the prosecutors who said there's no basis.
As for Tish James, whatever you think of her, it isn't an example of the executive branch aggrandizing power.
Other law firms have fought against the sanctions and I believe all of them have won, nobody thinks they're legal.
> Show me the quid pro quo.
I don't have access to private government communications, but does anyone seriously believe Qatar gave Trump a $1 billion dollar gift out of the goodness of their hearts?
I really can't argue with you if you think having the Supreme Court on Trump's side doesn't matter. They're the supreme legal body of the United States. Whose opinion of the legality of his conduct could be more dispositive?
I myself believe the president should have full and absolute discretion over the personnel of the executive branch. The first sentence of Article II is quite clear, and Congress' usurpation of the president's prerogatives in this regard hasn't (in my view) gone well.
If you regard that view as extreme or authoritarian, we'll just have to disagree. At least you don't think it's fascist.
Most of what you're writing here is just throwing shade, of the "do you really think..." variety. I rarely find that convincing, and never when it's about Donald Trump, who has been the target of more baseless smears than I can count.
> if you think having the Supreme Court on Trump's side doesn't matter
The way you appoint judges is so heavily politicised that the Supreme court isn't really indicative of anything in the US anymore. That's another part of your political system that you should improve. Not even because of Trump. It isn't any better when democrats are stacking the court either ...
> I really can't argue with you if you think having the Supreme Court on Trump's side doesn't matter.
Again what I originally argued is that Trump went farther than previous presidents, which is true, whether or not SCOTUS is "on his side".
Though he did of course repeatedly violate supreme Court precedent *before* they signaled they're likely to change it; and in many cases where the supreme Court is giving him what he wants, they aren't even agreeing that what he did is OK but finding a lack of jurisdiction/standing/etc.
Anyway, I'd say that defying the supreme Court is worse than *not* doing so, but that doesn't somehow mean that nothing he can do is problematic so long as the supreme Court acquiesces.
> I myself believe the president should have full and absolute discretion over the personnel of the executive branch. The first sentence of Article II is quite clear, and Congress' usurpation of the president's prerogatives in this regard hasn't (in my view) gone well.
Not only is the first sentence of Article II not clear on that, but it conflicts with the rest of the article. On a basic level executive personnel is specifically covered in the article, and the president is *not* given absolute discretion. Some personnel must be approved by the Senate, and Congress may decide for the others that their appointments can be vested in some other places.
Not to mention a bunch of other stuff in Article II that's totally superfluous with a maximal interpretation of the "vesting clause".
> If you regard that view as extreme or authoritarian, we'll just have to disagree. At least you don't think it's fascist.
I don't think a "unitary executive" is necessarily authoritarian. But that, combined with accepting an executive branch of the size we have, and no other checks on the president's use of the powers this would grant him, or even an idea that the president should be reluctant to use the power, necessarily is. The traditional conservative view would be a unitary but weak executive, the trump view is a unitary and strong executive.
> Most of what you're writing here is just throwing shade, of the "do you really think..."
The reason I'm saying it is because I think it's pretty obvious what's happening in those situations. I haven't actually heard anyone say that they *don't* think that, e.g., Qatar's "gift" was intended as a bribe, and I'm not even sure what the alternative explanation is supposed to be.
Seems to me like you aren't answering because the only realistic answer is that you *do* think it's a bribe - which you didn't even deny thinking in your previous comment.
No, the answer is I don't think it's a bribe, and I would need to see direct evidence of a quid pro quo to believe it is. Qatar didn't give anything to Trump personally. The airplane is not his, it's the US government's. The Biden administration also signed off on it!
Looks like yet another ginned-up controversy to me.
"He's not a fascist, he's following Court directives." Has it every occurred to you that courts can be fascist, too? I seem to recall that the Austrian painter was cozy with some friendly judges.
Technically Plessy was never overruled, but it was 60 years old when Brown substantially weakened it and it's basically been uncited since. There are times old precedent is just bad!
Wickard v Filburn is 83 years old and desperately bad precedent.
>The FCC demanding critics of the administration be taken off the air (and actually succeeding temporarily)
Yeah not really what happened. The FFC chair was kind of indirectly jawboning, Kimmel's a hateful unpopular trashbag, but apparently popular enough for people to shoot at an ABC station to bring him back.
What I said is that Trump is doing things that are more extreme than other presidents in terms of consolidating power in the executive. The fact that some supreme court precedents are bad doesn't change that.
But the fact that they overturned an old precedent to allow it does show that he is, in fact, doing more than other presidents did.
Re the current situation - the real principled conservative view on this is that not only should the president be able to essentially fire anyone in the executive branch, but there shouldn't be all these people in the executive branch with all these powers anyway. The traditional conservative view has not been that the president should personally have the power of every person who's currently in the executive branch, most would agree that is too much power for the president (up until that president was trump).
EDIT: re FCC - he directly threatened them, it's funny how trump and his minions can directly admit to doing the bad thing and people will still make excuses for them, and in many cases also claim that the other side did the same thing based on attenuated evidence and some leaps in reasoning.
"Do you believe the 2020 election was stolen and that Trump would have won it if it were fair?"
No.
"If you believe Trump did NOT win the election, how do you reconcile supporting him post-Jan6 if he's mentally unable to see that he lost an election?"
Because supporting a president doesn't mean believing he is, and always has been, right about everything. I'm certain a moment's reflection will reveal some profound disagreements with presidents you've supported. We have a two-party system; as Biden so astutely put it, "Don't compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the other guys."
Fair points and thank you for the response. I will tack on that I don't think I've ever really supported a president, just viewed some as having less-bad policies than others. I've voted third party multiple times, including 2016, but will confess to have voted D in 2020 and 2024 in what I perceived as damage mitigation, but not enthusiasm.
Technically, I didn't vote for Trump, either. I always do some pie-in-the-sky write-in, because I live in a deep red state (WV) where the outcome is never in doubt. But I would have voted for him if I lived 20 miles away in Pennsylvania.
Fascism/nazi (and Hitler) is bound to continue being used in frivolous and absurd circumstances because there's few other labels left that inspire the intended extreme reaction.
In a post religious West where accusations of heresy/blasphemy/being the devil no longer hold any sway, there needed to be an accusation to fill the gap and this is it. The vagueness of the definition is a feature not a bug, that way it doesn't take much effort to slap that label onto someone, if you squint hard enough you can make anything fascist.
When determining hard lines and limits it's alot more useful to use actual descriptive terms and come to conclusions based on those
There is, of course, still a secular, not-directly-ideological accusation used copiously on both sides: treason, flung around rather carelessly even though it indicates participation in a real, serious crime. Corruption, too, to a lesser degree.
There was a guy on Twitter who said it was treasonous too critique the F-35 project as an overrated, expensive flop. I've heard of ranking officers calling it treason to not support their own pet funding project.
Agreed, in the same way that Republicans call everyone communists so they can make people think about the USSR and death camps, even though none of the self-described socialists today want to do anything remotely similar.
The fascism term is a bit useless (if you are trying to be honest) among low-information voters because they just think of Nazis. So as long as Trump isn't putting Jewish people in concentration camps, they won't think it makes sense as a description. Among more informed people, who know about the entire history of fascism, it is a useful descriptor.
I don't think we should take "this person is a fascist" as a literal statement of "this person ought to be killed," *even if* the speaker would in general consider fascists an acceptable target for violence.
Like, the Nazis were unambiguously fascist, but I don't think we should interpret Woody Guthrie's statement as calling for genocide against Germany. After the war, a great many Nazis did not get killed, and I think that was a good and correct way to handle the end of the war.
This also is why I don't think it's worthwhile to split hairs over "is Stephen Miller a fascist or merely an I-can't-believe-it's-not-fascism authoritarian." Whether Stephen Miller should be jailed, executed, or assassinated, does not depend on the exact details of what he believes in his heart of hearts, but rather on the utilitarian calculation of how many atrocities he's commanding and how likely your violence is to stop them from happening. Once violence is on the table, there are other factors in play besides merely "is the violence against a good person or a bad person?"
(I think this is technically giving up option 2 in your list, but I think it's a pretty minor modification. Fascists may be an acceptable target, but not every acceptable target is a practical one. As you once said, be nice until you can coordinate meanness.)
C Bradley Thompson’s “America’s Revolutionary Mind” is a fascinating exploration of the philosophy (née the Scottish Enlightenment) that led to the revolution. One part that struck me was the argument that when George III began to impose unacceptable laws (unacceptable because the colonists had no representation or other recourse, and because of their notion that rights adhered to men because they were men, not as a grant from a ruler), the colonists had not only the right, but also *the duty* to rebel.
Compared to the depredations of modern government on its citizens, the laws imposed by George III were astonishingly minor, but the lack of recourse convinced them that (as the Declaration said) the only logical goal must be utter tyranny.
I don’t think we’re there. But I probably wouldn’t have thought we were there then either. Americans a couple of centuries ago probably felt like they had a lot more say in how their federal government intruded into their lives, but also it certainly intruded into their lives a couple of orders of magnitude less.
Maybe things are different here in the suburban Midwest, but I didn't think there was a major constituency for number 2.
Regardless of how bad an ideology is, if it's held by (approximately) the majority of the population, the right response is to vote with your feet and leave. If a person eliminates the ability of the people to change thier leader by voting in a free and fair election (a reasonable barometer would be that it is stated as such in mainstream newspapers of non-crazy allied countries), then only less peaceful ways remain to change leadership... Avoiding that seems like basically the reason we invented elections. Although in that case I personally would still probably choose to vote with my feet.
Similar to probably wrong, among people who say the 2020 election was stolen, I actually have a lot of empathy for the ones who showed up on January 6th, and have trouble believing people honestly believe themselves when they lazily maintain that it was stolen without acting like it's a five alarm fire.
I should add that if people start getting tortured or disappeared before an election that seems to have to qualify too. Wasn't thinking darkly enough...
American fascists who are using violence break the social contract that political violence is not ok, and therefore can become valid targets themselves (rules of thee are rules of me). Obviously, this creates a feedback loop - so breaking this cycle is the real challenge.
I think if this is your distinction, then you should say "it's acceptable to use violence against people who have started the violence themselves", and the concept of fascism isn't doing any work.
Well, that’s the point. The concept of fascism is a constructed one, so we can look at it’s qualities and criticize their implementation independently, allowing one to skip fruitless debates on whether a current regime is or isn’t fascist.
If this all results in an ultranationalist faction gaining power and starting wars of conquest, then being outside current US borders doesn't exactly guarantee safety.
As many folks I know have stated... if the mid-terms are stolen (in a meaningful way) then that's time for mass protest. If the mass protest is violently repressed, then it's time to answer violence with violence.
To be honest, I don't think either side of the political divide has the ability to steal an election. So it's mainly hot air. If the election is so close that getting 10 people in that key voting district to not show up and vote, then it was a coin toss anyway.
"I think people should reject premise (2) above and stop talking about fascists as if it’s okay to kill them." That's probably prudent, but 'talk' is the operative word here. Woody Guthrie killed zero fascists, and I suspect the same can be said for his guitar.
What is true historically?
a) German and Italian fascists did wonderfully after the war, outside a handful of exceptions. In fact, after a few years of very half-hearted accountability ('denazification'), German fascists (suddenly "former Nazis", at worst, and "partners for democracy" or "successful businessman", more commonly) were downright subsidized and favored by the occupying authorities - the entire matter became tiring, and of course you don't want to hand central Europe to socialists or Communists. This is a fact of which most Americans are probably half-aware.
b) Much of American folk song has the Spanish civil war as a referent. There, fascists were met mainly in the battlefield, where it was unambiguously acceptable to shoot at them. (There was some shooting elsewhere, some of it between antifascists factions; to put it a bit callously (towards the POUM and so forth), that's an error term in comparison.) That was the first stage of WWII - a stage the fascists won. So, none of the complicated task of what to do the day after.
One might then suspect that, when people talk about fascists as if it's OK to kill them, they are really... talking about talking about them as if it's OK to kill them? Talking about taking some down while they are shooting at you, and killing your friends in Granada? There's really not a lot of precedent for killing fascists in peace-time. Some hangings of collaborationists, and that's about it.
It seems that a lot of those who were lucky enough to be alive and free by 1948 could live lives like any other citizens of the sovjet zone, later GDR. Sometimes they were recruited by the internal secret service (Staatssicherheitsdienst aka Stasi).
Most were quietly rehabilitated - East Germany was *far* worse than West at denazification, and the general position was that the leaders had misled the people and now that they had been toppled, little needed to be done.
Spain wasn't a battlefield in WW2, they stayed neutral. The Battles of Khalkhin Gol weren't stages of WW2 either, that was a border conflict between the USSR and Japan, after which there was a non-aggression treaty which lasted for most of WW2.
Either statement is only technically true. In terms of ideologies, which is what we are talking about, the Spanish Civil War was the first major literal battleground between fascism and antifascism, and a prelude to the rest. Franco stayed out of WWII in part because his country was in ruins and possibly also out of prudence.
The Soviet Union was helping out Nazi Germany early in WW2, mutually planning the division of eastern Europe & Poland (which had previously stopped the westward advance of the Red Army) specifically. The UK drew up plans to bomb Soviet oilfields to stop them supplying Germany. The fact that the USSR had previously supported the opposite side in Spain as the Germans & Italians was irrelevant to that. After Operation Barbarossa, Finland was a co-belligerent with Germany against the USSR. This wasn't because they were fighting for an ideology, they instead saw themselves as in a Continuation War to the recent Winter War.
Ethiopia, unlike Spain, actually was a battleground in WW2. That was because Mussolini tried to attack Britain's holdings in east Africa. There have thus been (incorrect) arguments that WW2 can be dated to begin with the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, but in that case Nazi Germany was one of the few countries to provide any military support to Ethiopia.
You would have sworn correctly and I said nothing to the contrary. Italy had already conquered Ethiopia, but their attack on British East Africa resulted in British forces retaliating and kicking them out of Ethiopia, thus restoring Ethiopia's pre-invasion ruler.
First, let me needlessly defend Stephen Miller: calling people "Fascist" is hardly a sign of Fascism; and suggesting that somebody should be arrested for what one understands to be a threat of physical violence is not Fascism at all, but rather an expression of law-abidingness: American law, following law everywhere, considers threats of violence a crime or at least a felony.
Second: this post is in need of a definition of Fascism. It can be, in the modern style, "shit I don't like" and it can't conflate hardcore Communists like Pol Pot with real Fascists like Franco. Whatever Communism is, it's not Fascism.
Some time ago, I proposed this definition: "If you know your Fascist states, you know that their defining characteristics are single-party rule, nationalism, anti-feminism (women are expected to take a place as mothers and wives only, as a rule) and government control of the economy in partnership with the private sector." Happy to discuss and adjust if needed. We do require a clear definition here.
You said the defining traits of fascism were single-party rule, nationalism, anti-feminism, and government control of industry. "What they call themselves" was not on the list. Besides the name, China meets three of the four criteria you listed.
Thing with China is that it meets 100% of the conditions for Communism, so that's what they are: they call themselves Communists, use a Communist flag, walk around with pictures of Marx and Lenin, and have a constitution that describe the country as Communist. It's a slam dunk. I know a lot of people (like, almost certainly, you) feel bad because they want Communism to be a good, aspirational thing and not what Mao and Pol Pot did, and they want Fascism to be the thing they don't like and they can send their army to fight against (China) but that's not my problem.
I'm reminded of the distinction between "enemy" as a casual word for someone you don't like, the legal term of art for the target of a formal declaration of war (or a similar equivalent), and the foreign policy assessment that lies somewhere in between. The US has very few enemies, because they tend to die ugly deaths in short order. But there are quite a few *adverseries* to contend with on the grand stage of geopolitics.
Eliding the distinction is unfortunate, and goes hand in hand with a sloppy approach for when the extreme violence the US is capable of ought to be used.
Agree with most of what you say, and I don't usually call people "fascists" because it seems too loosely defined. Couple of reactions:
* Whether political violence is acceptable isn't just a question of how bad the target is, but the political situation. Are there times where it would be OK to assassinate the president? Most people would say yes, e.g. if he announces "ok guys I'm a dictator now, kill the opposition". But if that same guy is a lone Congressman with 0 national constituency, then no.
* It's hard to say that people shouldn't "talk about fascists as if it's OK to kill them" because one of the biggest and most defining events in US history, was basically us killing fascists for 4 years. But even though it was OK to summarily kill a nazi on Omaha Beach, it isn't OK to machinegun a neo-nazi rally.
* It's not the case that the left is more likely to talk up political violence. The right is constantly calling the left "fascist" and even more commonly "communist" (while also saying the two should be seen as morally equivalent); Trump personally constantly calling for people to be executed, etc; posts AI videos wishcasting violence against enemies; people always talking about civil war; etc.
* For Woodie Guthrie specifically, I take it as meaning more like this machine kills fascism. Makes more sense, he isn't saying his rad tunes are going to facemelt Nazis like in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but that they'll spread cool anti-fascist vibes and make their ideology go away.
* Is it "political violence" that we are blowing up boats in the Caribbean on basically nonexistent pretexts, and Stephen Miller according to media reports wants to do it purely for political/demagogic reasons? There's an asymmetry about how we talk about this with violence *by* the state vs by others. I think you can defend it but it should be pointed out.
Of course, you can just reuse the stock phrases developed for explaining why taxation isn't theft. Something like "the price you pay for living in a civilized society," and "but who will build the roads?"
It seems to me very clear that fascism, like most things, is a sliding scale and is an analogous term. German Nazi fascists were a different level of evil from Italian fascists, who were much worse than Franco's Spanish fascists. I would react to a Nazi with utter revulsion and horror, but I do understand why someone might support Franco. And, of course, if you want to be extremely strict with your definitions you could define fascism so narrowly as to only include Mussolini, or broadly enough to include the Malibu Police Chief.
"I don’t think this implies support for fascism, any more than saying that you shouldn’t kill communists implies support for communism. They’re both evil ideologies which are bad and which we should work hard to keep out of America"
Cany you clarify what you mean here, this doesn't seem like a fair equivocation to me as written.
I'm guessing it's supposed to mean that some forms of Communism can be as objectionable as some forms of fascism. E.g. a violent tyrannical Communist regime might be as evil or more evil than a mild kind of fascism that's only marginally ethno-centric and anti-democratic, just enough to warrant the label.
But communism isn't inherently a violent or undemocratic ideology the way fascism is.
Maybe the most central member of the "communism" cluster is a violent tyranny for historical reasons. But it seems perfectly coherent to be a communist who's against private property but other wise pro-democracy and pro-liberalism, in a way that it's not coherent to say "I'm fascist but pro-democracy and against ethno-nationalism."
Just being against private property doesn't strike me as the kind of view that needs to be "kept out of America" unlike almost anything that really could be described as fascism.
So it doesn't seem fair to equate them in abstract terms, especially given the post is about not applying terms too broadly.
Soviet Communism was, in theory, democratic via the soviets. But the logic of Communism is totalizing: you can't have a partial revolution. Parties that are opposed to the revolution are ipso facto opposed to the state. So "opposed to the revolution" becomes the go-to accusation for eliminating one's enemies.
And when it doesn't work despite supposedly being perfect, you *know* it must be because of saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries, who must now be hunted down. Weirdly, that never helps, but presumably that just means you have to keep going forever.
When people say "communism" they typically mean Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, Maosim, or something else along those general lines, not the people max called Utopian Communists.
For instance, if you want to retreat into a propertyless community with other hippy leftists, that's small-c communism (you have no private property, which is kinda the definition), but not what people typically understand by capital-C Communism.
I can accept that there might be a democratic non-violent version of Communism, but could there not be a democratic non-violent version of Fascism too?
It is hard to be sure (my impression is the Mussolini himself was not the most consistent ideologue...) but I thought the glorification of war was fairly central to Fascism??? If this is correct (and I may well be mistaken), then a democratic Fascism might be possible but a non-violent Fascism seems more self-contradictory.
It's not internally violent. That's what "violent" means in this context. Nobody considers the US to be a violent country because of its military escapades.
Many Thanks! Yes, that is a good point. An internationally aggressive, but internally peaceful version might be possible. I'm still a bit skeptical. I thought that using violence internally as well as externally was at least typical of Fascism, though I don't know whether this was embedded in its ideology to the point where removing it would create something that really needs a different name.
>Maybe the most central member of the "communism" cluster is a violent tyranny for historical reasons. But it seems perfectly coherent to be a communist who's against private property but other wise pro-democracy and pro-liberalism, in a way that it's not coherent to say "I'm fascist but pro-democracy and against ethno-nationalism."
It seems possible to have coherent partial agreement with either ideologies.
To pick two other facets of fascism, someone could be
fascist but pro-democracy and against ethno-nationalism and for corporatism (aka private-public partnerships - in some form these are pretty pervasive) and pro-war and pro non-ethno-but-pro-otherwise-nationalism
Private property is basically the single most important political institution in human history. Being against private property should be just as socially unacceptable as being a fascist (that is, either both or neither should be acceptable).
- The sort of equality pursued by communism is inherently evil.
- For this and other reasons, communism is an inherently evil ideology.
- Communism is an inherently violent ideology because there is no non-violent way to realistically pursue and achieve its aims.
- "Democracy" as such is not an inherent moral good.
- Undemocratic political systems are not inherently morally bad because they are undemocratic.
- Ethno-nationalism is not inherently morally bad.
Also in practice communism and socialism have caused vastly more human misery than fascism and its variants.
I'm interested specifically in what Scott considers the boundaries of acceptable politics. This seems like a very different view to Scott's and I can't imagine he would accept these arguments.
I mainly asked because the broad way he used the term "communism" sounded like he was taking an uncharacteristically illiberal position that I don't think he actually holds, so I wanted some clarity.
>Also in practice communism and socialism have caused vastly more human misery than fascism and its variants.
More, but I wouldn't say "vastly" - more like 2-3X, depending on how the blame for WWII is allocated. Hitler was not a rounding error.
>Private property is basically the single most important political institution in human history. Being against private property should be just as socially unacceptable as being a fascist (that is, either both or neither should be acceptable).
_Mostly_ agreed, but there are a _lot_ of edge cases. Should rights to portions of the electromagnetic spectrum be fully saleable and tradeable like other property? How about airspace over one's property - and, how high? Patents get traded as property - is it legitimate that their term is set by legislation? And on and on and on and on...
Greg Lukianoff said this in a recent article, making a distinction between fascism and RW authoritarianism:
"fascism was a weird melding of left-wing and right-wing ideas, combining nationalism, racism, and socialism in a way that won more adherents than it ever should have — especially among intellectuals and, distressingly, on German campuses. Meanwhile, right-wing authoritarianism is basically the story of the human race prior to the 20th century, when left-wing authoritarianism started to become more prominent."
This is the first time I can recall that Scott talking about stochastic terrorism, and he seems to frame it very negatively. Is there more detail about the reasoning for that thinking?
Isn't some muting good in certain cases? For example, if I advocate that everyone named David is an intrinsically evil person who should be forced to wear a scarlet letter in public and it's responsible for all evil, and a lot of other people also started saying that and spreading it, it seems like that social influence can eventually lead to violence, albeit indirectly. That's my understanding of the concept, is that just a bullet we bite for free speech?
Your premises sort of assume your conclusion. The problem with the world you posit is that lots of people believe the calumnies. You are positing the bad outcome. People are more likely to believe Im morally abominable if I actually am. Therefore, it’s best to let the marketplace of ideas adjudicate my moral worth. That’s basically what reputation in a free society is.
Well, to get into concrete details, what about Kirk? It seems like a lot of people hated his ideas, talked about how bad he was, and enough people believed it that one of them eventually killed him. I posit the bad outcome because it seems like it happened. If I'm correct that stochastic terrorism accurately describes the people who said that Kirk was evil and should be punished, why is that concept bad? Is it an accurate concept but still one that should be rejected? Why?
Yup, either Scott or someone else will need to expand on exactly what in that concept-space is "wrongheaded". I expect I mostly agree with him on what downstream scholarship, etc. is wrong here, but the top-level diagnosis clearly has some explanatory power re: the July 2024 Trump and September 2025 Kirk assassination attempts, and denying that will not lead anywhere good.
Equating saying that someone is bad with terrorism I think is problematic. Terrorism's kind of a loaded term to begin with, but to equate it with the expression of an opinion or statement of belief is a) over the top and b) ripe for abuse, because nobody wants to be associated with the word "terrorism."
How does physical violence against medical practitioners and administrative staff of places which offer abortions, figure into this? Because there are clergy(various faiths) and pundits who continually rail against abortion, equating it to evils which need violent opposition including illegal means, and then behave all surprised and innocent when a member of their congregation/audience carries out a shooting or bombing. "I said they were the enemies of God and called on righteous warriors to rise up and smite them, but you can't blame ME for what happened"; I've heard the term "stochastic terrorism" used in those situations. Was that inaccurate?
As David says, it's a term that can be used to mute your opponents, but the catch here is that it's based on a real phenomenon: if you tell enough people X, then a few of them will believe X. This ought to be self-evident, from the fact that textbooks exist. The stronger, less evident form is that if X is hard to believe, but you tell enough people X for long enough, then a few of them will believe X, and act on it.
The catch _there_ is that no one knows exactly how long you have to tell people X, or which people you have to tell X, or how farfetched X can be, but everyone seems to agree that these are factors in computing whatever P(belief) is. And when the action has a payoff in the neighborhood of highly influential people being assassinated, people have a high interest in knowing more about that function, and in getting it as low as they can, at least for themselves.
So there are movements to clamp down on any of those three, or all of them, but mostly the third one. The problem there is that everyone disagrees on how farfetched any given X is.
I've seen it discussed recently how more people these days are saying that political violence is acceptable in response to survey questions on the topic, and I always wonder how the question is phrased, because as you note, I think almost everybody would agree that political violence is justified *in certain circumstances.* Like if you were in the Soviet Union in 1939 and saw a drunken Stalin wandering alone down the Moskva River, I think it'd be unethical not to push him in.
On the other hand, you have to consider that a lot of the people who are willing to engage in political violence are not at all motivated by pro-social instincts and instead find violence useful for their own narrow interests, or perhaps are just driven by tribalist antipathy; they don't have any motivating principles other than "my ingroup is not wielding what I deem to be sufficient power at the moment." We seem to have a lot of people these days motivated by tribalist antipathy. This should probably raise your bar re: what circumstances need to exist before political violence becomes acceptable.
I agree with your conclusion that 2 is the obvious part of the chain that has to break. You can't use political violence simply because you've decided on a label. But the way you approached this makes me concerned for the political culture in SF/among rationalists which seems to have normalized violence far more than it realizes.
As an intuition pump, communism is a violent expansionary ideology that has killed tens of millions at a minimum and likely well over a hundred million. Further, communists control the second most powerful state in the world today and a few other states. Support for communism (not socialism, communism) in the US has tripled recently and it's fully acceptable to be Ezra Klein and say communism is his goal jokingly. None of this is true for fascism.
The right is expected to live in that world, and in a world where it has suffered multiple disproportionate assassination attempts (some successful), and not commit political violence. The left is expected to live in a world where fascism has low single digit approvals and where almost everyone who supports Trump will at least explicitly disavow fascism. And this has caused it to seriously reconsider its commitment to avoiding political violence.
Now my actual thought is that reactionaries are generally reacting to something and so you generally see the rise in fascism after the rise in communist violence. So this fits the pattern. But my point is this piece basically doesn't grapple with the idea that these tools could ever be turned on the left or the fact that avoiding political violence and mutual tolerance is not a polite concession by the civilized left but detente against the right doing the same.
Also, I think it's particularly foolish for the left to indulge it. Because when the knives come out the right tends to win.
I really don't think the right is the "faction of peace" that you're making it out to be. There have been multiple terrorist attacks in this country committed by right-wing individuals with right-wing grievances. And there have been assassinations and assassination attempts against left-wing figures by right-wing assassins.
It seems to me that the right-wingers who say that they're completely innocent and the left are the real baddies are just rationalizing away any guilt on the part of their side for all the attacks committed by people on the right while being as uncharitable as possible whenever an attack is committed by a person on the left. I don't know why I have to take their concerns very seriously when this is the mental process they're using to arrive at them.
I don't know who has a bigger violence problem; it's clear to me that there are violent people on both sides. And quite frankly, I don't really care that much who's worse. It exists in big enough numbers in the right and the left that I see it as more useful to place the blame on the individuals rather than collectivizing it to the entire political sides.
I'm not making the right out to be the faction of peace. Simply the side that lives in a world where communism is far more normalized and globally powerful than fascism. Usually people don't even bother to dispute that and skip to explaining why communism isn't like fascism or it didn't kill as many people as it did because denialism is far more normalized around communism than fascism.
My point is under these facts the right is still expected to be peaceful while under a much less harsh set of facts we get this piece of Decker being lionized for a Secret Service investigation. Is there an equivalent to that among rationalists? If so I'm unaware of it. I make, and need not make, any claim about right wing peacefulness.
I am aware of them. However, no equivalent of Charlie Kirk or the two attempts on Trump that almost succeeded. Thus "disproportionate" which implies both sides have some proportion.
This is a common form of defensive thinking: you subtly change the claim from a true one to an untrue one, drop the harder to debunk points, and then debunk that. It's a mix between a non-sequitur and a strawman.
Actually murdering two politicians, which I believe was enough to tip the balance in the legislature, had more actual impact than attempts on Trump that didn't even result in any serious injuries. You could add the attempted assassination of a SCOTUS judge, which again didn't amount to anything (though I think it's terrible another judge is reducing his sentence because he's now claiming to be trans). If you discount state-level politicians, I could add that somebody broke into Nancy Pelosi's home and attacked her husband with a hammer.
I assume you're not talking about the attempted assassination of Kavanaugh where there were actually shots fired. It's sad there's so many. But if you count up the total number of successful assassinations/killings against federal politicians the majority are by left wingers. Though there's not that many so it's a small sample size. And some of the victims are Democrats.
If you want to tally what it comes down to is how you define left or right wing violence. Generally speaking, it depends on who a couple of specific groups (like Islamists) get defined as. One study that showed right wing violence was overwhelming defined being pro-Palestine as right wing, for example, because it's a religious and nationalist cause.
None of which changes that you're avoiding engaging with my substantial point.
Some very confusing cases, like one where a group of black guys beat up an older white lady and her disabled son for not paying "the white tax" is coded right-wing. Which... you can argue it's not left-wing, but it's not meaningfully right-wing either. And that's downstream of different charging standards too.
Yeah, a lot of these people are nutty. That doesn't mean it's not a political act though. And yeah a lot of the studies are bad. That's without getting into the GIGANTIC incentives to "miscode" to get a headline.
However, although he didn't do his dirty deeds in the US, Breivik makes me reject broader claims about right-aligned (defined w.r.t. recent Western political coalitions, e.g. Islam-inspired violence counts as left-aligned for this purpose) political violence being less of a problem than left-aligned political violence.
Yeah, I think right aligned violence is a problem. As I said elsewhere, I want defenses of Stalin and Hitler (or Castro and Saddam) to both be seen as unacceptable. The difference is that one of those is FAR more close to mainstream acceptability than the other.
--ok, but it's just dumb luck (and the dumbness of the guy who tried it for not knowing that she wasn't there) that Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House, didn't have her skull fatally bashed in by an intruder. I think that would have been worse, although less dramatically caught on video, than a podcaster.
I'm not sure I agree it would be worse. Charlie Kirk is not just a podcaster. He's a major political actor who had White House access and directly advised Trump. He runs a major Republican organization and had roles in the party. He doesn't have an office. But he is the equivalent of say a famous and influential Biden advisor who runs a major branch of the Democrat Party. To be clear, my point is not "Nancy Pelosi wouldn't have been bad" but "Charlie Kirk was really, really bad."
As to it being dumb luck: I think that's a bit dismissive over the violence of the past five years.
Right-wingers famously take orders from Tim Walz, indeed (to be clear, the imagined Tim Walz that phoned their schizophrenic brain, not the actual goofball)
Xi Jinping is a credentialed Marxist theoretician who has produced significant works of Marxist scholarship. As are several people in leadership. China is not only highly communist under Xi it's gotten more thoroughly ideological.
I suspect you have a strange definition of communism which would probably get you arrested in any formally communist country. That's fine as a personal matter. But I don't really let people who think the current Pope is illegitimate own the word Catholic. And I'm not interested in letting a few leftists ignore the definition of communism used by most of the world and which hundreds of millions of people have pledged themselves to.
If you are interested in reading about how Xi has changed communist ideology then Xi Jinping thought is extremely available for reading. The 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party is a good starting point.
I think you think I'm a left-winger attacking Chinese "communism" from the left, on the basis that it is not pure enough to be real communism. In fact I am a right-winger who thinks it is too capitalistic, market-friendly, respectful of property rights, and unconcerned with equality to be real communism. Clearly Chinese "communism" is not the same as what happened in Cuba, the USSR, Maoist China, Venezuela, East Germany, etc.
Regardless, I suspect you have a strange definition of communism that is not the definition used by most people and which hundreds of millions of people have pledged themselves too.
China is a socialist market economy which is a very old communist tradition. It is not respectful of property rights. And communism is not all that concerned with equality. Marxism has a long lineage of ideological arguments that welfare is characteristic of fascism.
Genuine curiosity: the Chinese government owns the means of production, or can legally seize it at will with no real judicial oversire or compensation. Doesn't this make them communist by definition, regardless of whatever other oddities exist in the Chinese system (and there are many)?
> the Chinese government owns the means of production, or can legally seize it at will with no real judicial oversire or compensation.
So can the American government, if the Supreme Court declares it so. The fact that the Court would be extremely unlikely to do so is not categorically different as a constraint from whatever stops the Chinese state from expropriating everyone.
I think what matters is what actually happens on the ground, not the nominal rules. Are there free, liquid, efficient markets? Is entrepreneurship allowed? How much is private property respected, regardless of what the law says? Is the private accumulation of vast sums of wealth and capital permitted?
I don’t think “limited government” exists. The US government is sovereign. The sovereign is—by definition—that power which is unlimited. The fact that the US government *chooses* not to take certain actions does not mean that it lacks the capacity to do so, should it want to.
I find it somewhat mind-boggling anytime someone accuses the Trump administration of authoritarianism. An Administration that seeks to actively reduce the size of government and remove 10 rules for every one that is issued is incredibly libertarian and freedom minded compared to anything else we've had in the last four decades.
Yes, see my comment just above. Until Congress does their job, we get rule by executive order, which keeps power overly centralized, causes a lot of flip flopping and policy making, and makes everybody freak out about who is president.
As a single example of the cost of policy flip flop, we did a homeschool tour of a coal-fired power plant about a week and a half ago. The plant manager made it very clear that they spent millions of dollars between 2020 and 2024 doing design work to convert both generation units to Natural Gas based on who was in power. When Trump was re-elected, they dropped all that and decided to stick with the two existing coal units and instead add a third unit running on natural gas. This is in a grid sector that is apparently five gigawatts short in capacity and having to import power... but they could not plan on simply adding natural gas and keeping coal due to which butt was in one chair half a country away.
Currently, I think the path to getting Congress to do their job is going to run through the Supreme Court. If enough unconstitutional agencies and rules are abolished, the people's Representatives will be forced to actually pass real laws if they care about XYZ rule or restriction.
I do not consider my self a political optimist. I find the quote about the dark night of fascism always descending on America yet always landing in Europe to be sadly accurate.
Not mind-boggling in the slightest. He's not reducing the size of government, he's exploding the deficit (which Elon Musk has called him out on). He's claiming the authority to place tariffs even though only Congress has the Constitutional power to set taxes.
The Trump administration is largely focused on exerting power *without* creating fixed rules. Did they make a rule to bomb Venezuelan fishing boats? Did they make a rule to extract bribes in exchange for tariff exemptions? Of course not.
Also, I don't believe that any agency is actually doing this "cancel 10 rules" thing. While I don't have hard proof it isn't happening, I don't remember seeing any "10 rules eliminated" press releases in the past 6 months.
And hopefully they aren't! "We have blindly to eliminate rules" is a stupid way to run a country ... unless your goal is "abolish the concept of limited government, and instead have a dictator rule by whim and bribe".
There are plenty of comparisons out there about the volume of federal regulations now versus 20 or 50 years ago. Somehow, the country survived and was reasonably prosperous despite the lack of lots of rules and reporting requirements.
I don't recall Obama seeking authorization or rules to conduct drone strikes on American citizens in Yemen, or any of the other many warlike actions he took in other countries without Congressional consent. You could say the same about Bush, so it isnt specific to any party (although so far Donald Trump's record as a peacemaker instead of someone who starts wars is stellar). The amount of power Congress has delegated to the executive branch via letting agencies make rules which carry the force of law instead of passing laws like Congress is supposed to do is ridiculous. It's also not a problem unique to any presidential administration this century. The best way to sustainably constrain the power of the President is to defang and depower the administrative agencies. No regulation without adequately involved representation!
These days, it seems like people are only against unchecked Presidential power when it is the other side in office. Then it goes to the courts, and disputes over power fall into the hands of a pretty small set of people, who mostly all went to the same set of schools and share similar backgrounds as lawyers and judges.
We probably agree that too much concentrated power is a big problem, but have different solutions, and perhaps different opinions about who should be holding the power. Fixing the problem seems to rely primarily on Congress, and I have very little confidence in it becoming a respectable and functional body again at any point in the near future. Anybody with a high school diploma can balance a budget, and yet...
There's this charming American tendency (on both sides) to associate fascism with jackbooted restrictions on liberty rather than the cluster of beliefs around racial/sexual/national/cultural purity alongside strength-based hierarchy and corresponding economic arrangements.
As both a moral and practical matter, it might be useful to consider what levels of minority oppression and inequality make political violence acceptable, instead of milestones of speech restriction and defiance of institutions.
Alternatively, if one is trying to load the deck in one's favor the other way, one might instead consider what level of taxation or regulation makes violence morally acceptable.
It's interesting that during the Bush years the word "fascist" was thrown around quite cavalierly as well, but without the accompanying threat of real violence. It's unfortunate that the bad behavior of a few people can have so much power over our language
If your only options are "do nothing" and "kill the fascists" you'll find yourself in a concentration camp or laying down tracks in siberian permafrost before you manage to actually kill anybody. It's all about gradual escalation. (NATO, during the cold war, had an escalation ladder with dozens of rungs!) Government tries to boil the frog, it escalates a bit, the civic society escalates as well. You can publicly complain, join a demonstration, refuse to pay your taxes etc. before you get to the level of violent pushback. It's a quick and finely graded feedback machanism. And from afar, it looks like it works pretty well in the US. Compare to Russia: In the 90's they've had an actual democracy. But when it started slipping, there was close to no escalation from the civic society and here they are in the deep shit.
aren't we just reframing (or like revisiting) the paradox of tolerance? Like isn't that the whole point of the paradox --- that endless tolerance undermines tolerance so at some point those that value tolerance have to be intolerant
I think a lot of popular discourse around fascism, violence, and so on, is very confused because so many of the concepts are derived from the punk and hardcore scenes, especially in the 1980s and 1990s.
There was a large contingent of skinhead punks that people wanted to keep away from their scenes, and a certain amount of young men fighting each other was already normal.
In the United States, most of the slogans about punching Nazis, antifa imagery, debates over free speech vs. hate speech, that you see used by members of the general public traces back to some situation like this.
For example: the famous "Nazi bar" analogy which you hear constantly repeated. How many people have ever been to a bar where it's even possible for a Nazi to show up and a leftist bartender to threaten him with a baseball bat? I've never had that experience. In the story it's specifically a "shitty crustpunk bar".
I think it may be bad that these weird and famously dysfunctional subcultures have been given some kind of ownership over the concept of organizing politically to oppose fascism.
I think in that Nazi bar story, the bartender isn't even necessarily leftist. I can see the bartender of any cheap dive bar not wanting their bar to become a Nazi bar. But yeah, that's a good observation.
This is an extremely incisive comment. Good for you. As a "primitive" or 19th century style leftist, I concur that (hardcore) punk culture and anarchism have done untold damage to the reputation of the left. Great music, shitty subculture. Their promotion of lawlessness and violence drives me bonkers. A "solution" to fascism that is roughly as bad as the original problem.
Regarding the definition of Fascist, it's kind of like the problem of defining Socialist in that there are colloquial definitions and absolute definitions. If you try to use the colloquial one, a defender will No True Scotsman you with the absolute definition. If you use the absolute definition, such as nationalizing industry or having workers control means of production, you run the risk of your point being lost and a defender can still contradict you by pointing out a slight variation in the rather complex definitions and saying "So, what I'm proposing is not really socialism/fascism because it SLIGHTLY differs from the definition you gave" even if the spirit is 99% there.
Regarding when violence becomes "okay", that's a pretty difficult question. As a kid growing up in a conservative rural area, a lot of people were edging pretty close to calling for violence against Clinton and the FBI after Waco and Ruby Ridge. Years later however, a lot of these same people were cheering for local law enforcement shooting unarmed black guys (I'm ignoring the protests here, they were outright cheering and making racist comments about the shooting victims, even people like Walter Scott or Ahmaud Arbury). Ultimately, people are willing to overlook stuff from their preferred side, either cheering it, ignoring it, or possibly saying "Well, it was bad but...". People are also willing to get pretty jumpy when their non-preferred side does the same. As for where the line is, it's different for many people. I hate to take the Justice Potter approach, but sometimes you can just say you'd know it if you see it, but can't pre-define an existing line, just evaluate on a case-by-case basis.
> I think I land somewhere between Orban and Hitler, but I can’t say for sure, nor can I operationalize the distinction.
Orban is on track to lose re-election. The supreme virtue of democracy, no matter its multitude of defects, is that it removes the need to actually fight a civil war for political power, as you can instead just count up how many people would be on each side and skip the war to its presumed outcome without all the deaths & destruction.
little carve out of the right to bear arms for "bad people", a little bit of troop deployment, a few targeted arrests of political enemies, a little strong arming of American corporations, a few restrictions on who can receive emergency assistance, a few boons provided to loyal rich capitalists, a few Americans detained and beaten, a few lies about the status of American cities justifying more federal control, a few targeted arrests of political rivals, a few more pundits getting kicked off of mainstream media, a few loyalists getting put in charge of mainstream media outlets, more insistence that people must carry around their citizenship papers and normalizing that those papers are checked frequently, more restrictions on web access for the common good, more restrictions on travel for certain types of disfavored activity (or punishment of those who aid such disfavored travel). Slowly normalizing the idea that non-citizens should have fewer rights than they do. Normalizing that military action isn't accountable to legal process. Normalizing that it is ok to harm Americans who are peacefully protesting.
Soon:
Normalizing that taunting counts as violence and thus deadly force is a legitimate response. Normalizing that non-citizens don't have first or second amendment rights. Normalizing ignoring courts other than SCOTUS. Normalizing military presence at voting centers. Normalizing carefully and intimidatingly verifying the citizenship every person who votes. Normalizing refusing to let people through to the polls, even if they meet state voting requirements. Normalizing that it's no big deal that illegal immigrants die in custody. Normalizing that citizens shouldn't protest alongside non-citizens, because any reasonable person would know they might get shot if they do that. Normalizing further restrictions on the right to bear arms without proof of citizenship. Normalizing that it's normal for federal agents to maintain a list of who is buying weapons, even if state law prohibits it. Normalizing the rescinding of federal pensions for people who leave the country. Normalizing the FCC restricting the licenses of media companies, unless they are owned by allies of the government. Normalizing that all social media participation requires proof of citizenship.
Finally: arresting a bunch of rival thought leaders and seizing their passports since they are flight risks. Coincidentally, ICE picks up a bunch of people who don't have proof of citizenship, and immediately put them in a boat to CECOT. Coincidentally, hours later,the military destroys a boat that they claim was transporting drugs. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
There's no society-wude white line here, just the careful erosion of rights in the name of "common sense safety"
We submit that guns are the easiest metric: if the NRA protests a "minor" gun restriction and the government does it anyway, you need to start buying an AR 15 (start at $500) with cash, and/or start stocking up on 5.56mm ammo.
> Normalizing carefully and intimidatingly verifying the citizenship every person who votes.
What reasonable argument is there against this? Why would it be bad to verify the citizenship of voters when only citizens are allowed to vote and any foreigner that votes is committing election fraud (in federal elections)?
Behold! As you approach the polling place, you must walk through a gauntlet of masked, heavily armed federal agents. A sign at the entrance to this gauntlet reads: “Pursuant to the voter fraud act of 2026, any discrepancy in your voting paperwork, no matter how minor, is grounds for summary execution.”
As you approach the line, you hear a man’s voice at the front of the line screaming “It’s just a pound sign in the apartment number!” A shot rings out, and the screaming stops. Several people in line immediately start to shriek. A man on a loudspeaker shouts out “ATTENTION! Abandoning the voting process is considered evidence of voter fraud, and is punishable by summary execution. Do not leave the line once you have entered.”
You are confident in your paperwork, so you step forward. A few moments later, a woman shrieks “It’s my maiden name, I haven’t updated m-”. Another shot rings out. People in line are actively sobbing. You wish you lived in one of the “safe” voting districts, whose populace support the current President. They don’t have to go through this gauntlet.
I think this is much ado about nothing. Fascism is no worse than other forms of non-democratic forced collectivism (democratic forced collectivism being better). Incitement should not be a crime. People should take responsibility for their own actions. Sticks and stones...
Democracy is a set of rules by which everyone abides and that limits how much you can hurt your politicial opponent while your side is in power, lest they do the same to you when the pendulum swings and they are back in power. Fascists reject these rules because they accept no limits on how much they can hurt their opponents. They willingly position themselves outside of the protections of the liberal-democratic ruleset. Therefore, they absolutely are legitimate targets of political violence, up to and including deadly violence, because they intend to do the same, given the chance.
So if fascists are a legitimate target, when is the legitimate time? It is wrong to say that everyone has a different "red line" after which they resort to violence. The very notion of a red line is illusory; that's how computers function, but not humans. Humans are able to endure abuse, rationally inexplicable amounts of it, because they know that violence creates irreversible consequences, and they want to be really sure that the time is right. More often than not, the "right time" is a singular event, completely insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but around which all that resentment crystallizes into very real consequences that reach much further than could ever be justified by the event itself. Basically every culture on Earth and in History has experienced this; think Rodney King and the LA riots, Franz Ferdinand and WW1, Mohamed Bouazizi and the Arab Spring. Maybe the same will happen again in the USA; perhaps one ICE raid too many, a National Guard accidentally killing a protester, Ghislaine Maxwell pardoned and given a celebratory White House reception.
There is also no "trivialization of violence", some simple reward system of "Oh I killed this guy and life got marginally better, let's do that again!". Violence is a safety valve. It is the "ultima ratio regis", but also the "ultima ratio populi", and whether or not you believe that since WW2 or so we suddenly made a moral quantum leap and now live in a more enlightened age (I don't), then our proven history of violence was at least no obstacle to this current state of affairs.
No. There's a sleight of hand here: #1 (Many Americans are fascists) is a factual claim that you want people to be able to say *even if it isn't true now*. But #3 is "Political violence in America is morally unacceptable (*at the current time*)". Notice the problem here? The latter applies to the current time, and the former explicitly doesn't.
Your position should be:
Political violence in America is morally unacceptable (at the current time)
We should not say "many Americans are fascists" at the current time (because it isn't true at the current time).
Political violence in America may be acceptable in some other situation, but not now
We can say "many Americans are fascists" in some other situation (when it's actually true), but not now.
That may be what he meant, but it isn't what he said. And that's not a trivial difference. Because if that's what he meant, the answer is "if time t means now, #1 is false". And Scott doesn't dare say that #1 is false. First of all, his leftwing allies will all reject him if he does, and second, he probably doesn't want to admit it to himself. The whole song and dance about how #1 at least has the "potential to be true in the future" is there to keep him from having to admit that #1 is false today.
So of course sometimes by fascist we mean "person pushing policies we don't like" but sometimes by fascist we mean "person pushing policies that seem like they might lead to a genocide."
Seems like neither definition warrants violence when they are not a threat (I'm thinking of my youth when every neo-nazi movement in America just seemed pathetic and completely unthreatening).
but if we're talking about the latter, and it seems like they have a decent shot of taking over (or worse, already have) violent resistance seems almost compelled to me at that point.
I'm not attempting to locating trump/maga anywhere on this spectrum more just sort of sketching out how I would think about it.
What do you call Trumpian movement that uses tariffs and other levers to compel the compliance of private industry with political efforts? Corporatist(by the way used in the article, not the correct usage by the way) typically seek to strengthen Corporate power, this government seeks to saddle it to their political enterprise. The correct term is indeed fascism, but that I've never subscribed to the theory that violence is acceptable towards fascists. Revolution is an entirely different political phase where violence is the means utilized to reform. As you said, we're not at that phase.
This is well below Scott's usual standard. There have been reams of books and articles on the question of when, if ever, political violence is acceptable.* Scott could have summarized and critiqued that literature, as he often does. Instead, we get this?
An important distinction wrt political violence being justified: There are circumstances (which I hope to never see in my country) that would justify a civil war to overthrow the evil regime and replace it with something else. It's not at all clear how to define those circumstances, since civil wars are very destructive and there may not always be a bright line that the government has crossed that makes it clear that they're that bad.
But this applies to civil war. It doesn't apply to freelance political violence.
Consider some kinds of political violence that don't have much to do with civil war:
a. Street violence (showing up at a political rally you dislike with some friends and busting some heads)
b. Targeted violence (catching up with someone whose expressed ideas you dislike and beating him up or terrorizing him)
c. Rioting/looting/burning during a political protest.
These are all kinds of political violence that aren't anywhere close to civil war, have no chance of overturning an oppressive regime, but are often cheered on by some folks (mostly on the left) in the modern US. I guess (a-b) would be the "punch a fascist" idea.
ISTM that we can condemn those without risking giving up on the possibility that there can be justification for trying to overthrow an oppressive government. Similarly for stuff like targeted kidnappings, bombings, and assassinations that exist to spread terror to the other side, but have no hope of changing the regime or anything.
There's a lot of relevant context that's often elided in discussions of this kind. I'm going to use the first part of this comment to make it explicit.
1. The government is the organization that can do violence in some territory so effectively that nobody can stop them. (So: Microsoft is bigger, with more people, economic influence, technological prowess, organizational capacity, institutional memory & procedure, etc than the governments of many countries. It is nevertheless not a government, because there is no territory where it can do arbitrary violence with impunity.)
2. Governments come into existence when some organization does political violence effectively enough that it can no longer be resisted by anybody within the territory; it becomes the new government. (This is how the US government was created; it was originally a rebellion, committing political violence against the officers of Great Britain. It won, seized the whole territory, and now it's the government.)
3. The US Constitution is very smart, in creating various processes to change how the government works without having to violently overthrow and replace it every time; and in having elections to facilitate peaceful political transitions. It's much, much better to get a bunch of people together to vote and change the government, than to get a bunch of people together to fight the government and replace it. This abstraction (from mass violence to mass voting) is the fundamental principle of democracy.
And here's what I'm going to assert. The following isn't general principles everybody should know, but rather my own opinion:
The people of the US are fundamentally a democratic people. The terms "communist" and "fascist" are offensive to us because they're accusations that somebody has betrayed the US Constitution and the voting > office > law abstraction that we use to alter the government without violence. Those terms don't just mean "very far left" or "very far right". The Communists sent spies and saboteurs to subvert the American democratic process; the Fascists had private armies of brownshirts doing extrajudicial political violence. When you put those terms on someone, you mean that they'd be willing to, for instance, bribe officials, subvert election procedures, falsify evidence, etc, all the different ways that the democratic process can be corrupted, up to assassinating politicians and terrorizing the population. You're basically calling them an enemy of the democracy.
That's the reasoning behind the "violence against fascists is okay" idea. It's like marking somebody as an outlaw. Since they've betrayed the fundamental democratic abstraction, they shouldn't benefit from it anymore. (This is crazy and bad; both sides think the other side has betrayed the Constitution; so all you're doing when you yourself betray it is to prove the other side right.)
Anyway, it's not as simple as "political violence is evil", that way lies anarchy. The government creates itself with political violence, and maintains its existence by using violence to overcome smaller competitors (the mafia, rioters, extremist groups, drug cartels, etc) for control of its territory. When you talk about a government, you're talking about historical political violence crystallized over time into habits of thought, laws and institutions.
Hum, About the constitution, note that (cribbing from Naval Gazing) that when we rewrote the Japanese constitution after WW2 we did not make it near as labyrinthic as ours.
Orwell observed in the 1940s that "fascist" was so loosened in meaning as to simply mean "something undesirable". So I think that people who care about truth and precision should find a more precise word to use.
The rule is just the breaking of the silver rule: don’t do to others what you don’t want done to you. If a party normalizes state violence against their citizens / political enemies, they remove themselves from the civil rules of engagement.
So I would say that at the base level, fascists should not be considered acceptable targets of violence. But historically, the fascist parties did inflict violence on their citizens / political enemies, which is why the latent feelings are that fascists are ok targets of violence. So you can call a new party fascist (in the definitional sense) without thinking that violence should be incurred against them (latent feelings). But you should be worried about this party due to historical context.
So Newsom calling Miller a fascist is more meaning “you are the type of person who commits political violence against your own citizens” (verifiably true, see all the American citizens hurt and shot in ICE raids recently). And Stephen miller calling for Newsom to be arrested for saying such a thing is self proving that he is the type of person who condones weaponization of the state against political enemies.
"Fascism views forms of violence – including political violence, imperialist violence, and war – as means to national rejuvenation."
All of the violence and rioters and human trafficking and drug poisonings of our nation is coming 99% from the extreme left Antifa wing. It is why California is bringing back mask mandates, to give Antifa an excuse to hide their faces while they carry out violent operations by their fascist militarized civilians. Obama's Antifa brown shirts are the modern day fascists. Period. Full stop.
Human trafficking & drug smuggling is done for money, not political motives. And a whole lot of rioting is "for fun & profit", as Banfield put it in The Unheavenly City. There is political rioting, but January 6 would be an example of that, and it wasn't antifa.
Obama hasn't been president for over 8 years. He isn't in charge.
Jan 6 was a very peaceful riot. The only people killed were killed by the government, and there was barely even any property damage. Compare the George Floyd riots, which caused over $2bn of property damage across the country over the course of several weeks.
> And a whole lot of rioting is "for fun & profit"
While this may be true, the agents of the state that refuse to put the people rioting in jail _are_ doing so for political motives. In that sense rioting is political violence because it is being enabled for political motives.
I didn't understand your argument defending #1. It's completely consistent to say "there are only a few fascists right now, meaning violence is unacceptable, but if I was in pre-WW2 Germany and could stop the Nazi movement through violence, I should".
Second: it seems like all three can be true if you interpret the second statement to "fascists are sometimes an acceptable target for political violence" rather than "fascism implies acceptable target". And it seems like most antifascists who endorse violence are implicitly referring to the former; they're not going around asking everyone their political beliefs, they're punching protestors who they see as actively spreading those beliefs.
I am less completely married to the non-aggression principle than I was in the past but it still seems like a good guide in this case. Fascists marching through the streets, shouting "Jews will not replace us!" are not legitimate targets for violence. Fascists pulling a weapon and pointing it at someone are. As are fascists who say "On Monday, June 14, at 2:00 PM we are going to go kill this left-wing politician." All this is in accordance with existing law, and I find it sufficient - you can do violence to someone who poses a current, active, identifiable threat to you. Otherwise you cannot. Their ideology is irrelevant. There are border issues here (the first is an implied threat but imo not specific enough to make a reasonable person afraid of imminent violence) but the general principle is sound.
When it comes to actual government operatives, we have a harder case. We legitimize some violence from governments - for example, police can forcibly restrain someone committing a crime and most agree if they're convicted in court, government workers can then put them in a prison and forcibly keep them there.
So the question becomes "is the violence legitimate" but I and every other person on earth will disagree to some extent on what is legitimate use of state violence. So the bar must be higher than "I personally don't think the government should be permitted to levy an income tax so I can shoot anyone who tries to collect."
The actual answer is "when the breakdown of state legitimacy and social cohesion is less costly than enduring the current status quo" but on a meta level we should agree on this, because it's costly not to have shared values around these principles. As much as I've thought about this question (even pre-Trump, just reading history), I suspect my answer will always, forever, be "not quite yet." That said, I do truly believe we have non-violent, legitimate chances to pull things back. There's no sign yet that we're cancelling 2026 elections, and that might be a decent bright line. I would welcome some clarity on how other thoughtful people think about this.
Do you feel obligated to wait until the 2026 elections are canceled to take action? If there are ICE agents and red-state national guard outside every purple-county polling station on election day, do we still refrane from violence because the 2026 election was allowed to proceed? If we are only allowed to act against threats, does my status as a straight white dude prohibit my participation in the uprising?
Like I get you are trying to be fair minded, but the explicit plain-language position of the administration is that they will use state violence against political opponents and ethnically cleanse America. This is not a euphemism, words have meaning, etc. The executive branch is literally promising to use the state power, including the military and the judiciary, to imprison or kill their political opponents, and they appear to have the ability to do so, and are proceeding in that direction.
At this point it's like if a news agency interviewed a member of the NAACP, then brought on a Grand Dragon of the klan in order to get a balanced perspective and consider both sides.
It did occur to me after making this comment that elections are not likely to be cancelled. In the most likely case, they will instead by restricted, and voters intimidated. I still do think we have to be cautious about advocating political violence.
Other than that statement, my comment wasn't meant to be fair-minded about the present, it was meant to use extreme hypotheticals to point out issues with various justifications for violence. I'd agree that the stated position of the administration is that they intend to attempt a fascist takeover of the United States government. The question (to me, at least) is whether that attempt has literally any hope of success at all, whether a violent intervention would be helpful, and whether other means of stopping it can still be successful. And that's a moral position. I think you should only harm others when you have to.
The soviet union had elections in the middle of the 1930s purge. Imperial Japan had elections in '37 and '42, Obviously elections won't be cancelled. Russia has regular elections. So does Iran. I think even north Korea does. "Has elections" is necessary (but not sufficient) to have a democracy.
I think there's basically no chance of the 2026 elections being cancelled, making it senseless to talk of "waiting" for that.
> the explicit plain-language position of the administration is that they will use state violence against political opponents and ethnically cleanse America
No, it isn't.
> to imprison or kill their political opponents, and they appear to have the ability to do so, and are proceeding in that direction
Ok, which part would you like to critique? State violence against political opponents? We've got the targeting of the judiciary, arresting congresspeople, and forcing the DOJ to arrest the former director of the FBI (Explicitly stating it was because of trump's indictment), stripping security clearance and secret service protection from enemies.
Ethnic cleansing seem a stretch to you? The admin as declared they will end birthright citizenship and deport 1 million "illegals" per year. "Illegal" has been redefined to mean asylum seekers, individuals with green cards and student visas who are hostile to the Administration. Miller believes there should only be 100 million Americans. Trump describes people crossing the border as "animals" that "poison the blood of their country". If you replace "illegal immigrants" with "Jews", that is literally Hitler's policy as of 1933.
Re: killing/imprisoning opponents, do you consider people killed in ICE custody or killed after being deported to foreign countries to be supporters of Trump? Or do you think they might fairly be characterized as neutral or even negative vis a vis the president.
He also said "We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they're the big — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can't let that happen." He defines the entire democrat party as radical left fascist communists. And after that, he deployed the military to a bunch of blue state capitals.
Do you think this somehow doesn't count as "promising to use the state power, including the military and the judiciary, to imprison or kill their political opponents, and they appear to have the ability to do so, and are proceeding in that direction. "
If that doesn't count, what the hell do you think would qualify? Do you LITERALLY need masked government agents arresting citizens without cause before you admit MAYBE the admin is a bit fascist? Because we've crossed that line too. Do you need them to start building concentration camps? Because they've done that as well.
Is it just an aesthetic problem, because there's not enough skulls and hugo boss on display? Seriously, what are you even arguing here?
What are you referring to? Abe Lincoln had Judge Richard B. Carmichael arrested for opposing the military arrests of civilians and the suspension of habeas corpus. Judge William Matthew Merrick was placed under house arrest. Trump has judges ruling against him quite often, and as far as I can tell his response is to tweet angrily and appeal.
> arresting congresspeople
The only one I'm aware of was arrested at a protest, and released.
> forcing the DOJ to arrest the former director of the FBI
Seems like a terrible idea, but not a threat to democracy.
> stripping security clearance and secret service protection from enemies
Removing clearances has nothing to do with engaging in violence. Removing protection could be if there was violence against them.
> Ethnic cleansing seem a stretch to you?
Worthy of Mr. Fantastic. The US is an extremely diverse country.
> The admin as declared they will end birthright citizenship
It's not something they'd be capable of doing, and doing it wouldn't suffice to ethnically cleanse the US.
> If you replace "illegal immigrants" with "Jews", that is literally Hitler's policy as of 1933.
"Illegal immigrant" is not an ethnic/religious category, it is a legal one.
> do you consider people killed in ICE custody
Are you referring to the recent shooting in Dallas?
> killed after being deported to foreign countries to be supporters of Trump?
They can't legally vote.
> And after that, he deployed the military to a bunch of blue state capitals.
What did the military do there? I've only read an account from Matthew Yglesias, who said they picked up litter from the streets and by their presence made the area somewhat safer, which he regarded as inefficient since DC is already safer than many of the places they were deploying from.
> Do you think this somehow doesn't count as "promising to use the state power, including the military and the judiciary, to imprison or kill their political opponents, and they appear to have the ability to do so, and are proceeding in that direction."
Indeed it doesn't count. The "lock her up" chant was a command to imprison a political opponent (although that never happened), deploying the National Guard is a matter of appearing tough on crime, especially rioting. It's not a good use of the NG, but it doesn't actually impede his political opponents.
> If that doesn't count, what the hell do you think would qualify?
Putin actually did lock up someone who ran against him.
> Do you need them to start building concentration camps? Because they've done that as well.
We did that with Japanese internment.
> Is it just an aesthetic problem, because there's not enough skulls and hugo boss on display
No, the Italian fascists didn't have Germany's aesthetic.
>the explicit plain-language position of the administration is that they will use state violence against political opponents and ethnically cleanse America
Their goal is to deport all illegal immigrants and maybe some legal immigrants too. How is this "ethnic cleansing"? The criterion for deportation is being or not being a citizen. This is completely compatible with the civic multi-ethnic nation that America is understood to be.
If the administration immediately deported every single legal and illegal immigrant from America tomorrow they would still not be engaging in ethnic cleansing.
Scott, I have always appreciated your deep commitment to fairness and epistemic humility. Unfortunately, politics, morality and power are not objective sciences. Not withstanding that political violence is often a bad TACTIC, the moral case isn't hard to make.
The apparent contradiction in your 3 points can be reconciled by the following: the level of violence justified against facists is directly proportional to how much power they have.
Newsome defining far-right nationalism as anything patriotic political moderates and conservatives want is the reason why we can't have a discussion about politics any more.
There may well be a lot of fascists in America, but I'm pressing X to doubt that it is the ones who are being so called.
Did you notice that in “far-right nationalist authoritarian corporatist” you just have to swap two words then you can abbreviate it with FRANC? Just need a couple more attributes and you arrive at “Francoist”.
Excellent article. However, we already know the threshold for when mass political violence becomes legitimate:
It's when a Black fetanyl-addicted petty criminal with a heart condition dies in police custody after being restrained by a White police officer using standard methods
Via: "going through it stopping at a place on a way to another place". Shitload of violence happened on the way to the end of fascism in Spain. Why are you trying so hard to ignore it?
Those deaths were concentrated near the beginning, not the end of Franco's regime. That's way longer than it would make to attribute causality, and we have an entirely separate reason why it ended: he died of natural causes at an advanced age.
This subsubthread was about the _end_ of Franco's rule, which, after Franco's death from natural causes, was handed over to King Juan Carlos I, who reigned over the transition to a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament.
I am well aware that Francoists like to pretend that the hundreds of thousands of deaths he caused don't count, because his dictatorship didn't end with a second civil war.
If your inclination is to look at Franco and say "hey, I guess fascism doesn't always end badly, and we don't need to violently oppose dictators", I sure hope you apply that charitable perspective to Stalin, Mao, Castro, etc. They didn't need to be violently overthrown, they passed on power naturally and left a much more liberal system behind! Nothing to complain about, right?
Surely the entire point of democracy is that if the government annoys enough people to cause a successful revolution, the revolution doesn't have to happen because you can just vote it out.
As a very wise man once said, the entire point of the law is to get whatever would have happened anyway to happen without bloodshed.
So you shouldn't resort to violence until it's become impossible to get rid of the government by voting.
If you don't even have enough support to vote out the government you don't like, starting a civil war is likely to be quite counter-productive. Civil wars are usually very very bad.
If you're just talking about taking random pot-shots at your political enemies then all that will do is inspire them.
I think possibly the hero of one of Bernard Cornwell's viking novels, when discussing the anglo-saxon system of counting up oaths for and against, where a lord's oath counted for ten.
"If you're just talking about taking random pot-shots at your political enemies then all that will do is inspire them."
Incredibly important point! The plan of "fascists" becoming fearful and timid after you shoot a few of them didn't even work on the ACTUAL FASCISTS. They made a very famous song about Horst Wessel! And it definitely isn't going to work on people who don't consider OURSELVES fascists -- we'll just think you are an evil terrorist who must be opposed at all costs.
To this discussion one must add the mindset behind the name calling. It is one thing to discuss the authoritarian impulses of one side and whether the term fascist applies. You then really need to look into what actually motivates people and what divergent positions you might be lumping together.
It is another if the cultural climate itself has been hyper charged with emotional and black and white thinking. Then the other side becomes automatically evil and othered, and one is free to straw man and misrepresent divergent positions.
IMO what the authoritarian and conformity inducing impulses on the left contributed to young minds going through the left dominated education establishments, was an out of control negativity bias against Western societies in general and the US in particular. Introduced into susceptible minds, this was soul destroying and convinced them that “there was never anything good about America, it was evil from the start” (from a leftist discussion forum) and that the only path is to live in constant opposition. Neither a happy or safe place. As FIRE has demonstrated, the acceptance of various kinds of violence against speech is increasing disproportionately on the left, and this is a consequence of this catastrophic mindset, that can then move from one topic to another in order to find an outlet.
Let me offer a couple of clarifying examples:
FIRE addressed the following mandate to teachers within California’s community college system:
Professors were required to acknowledge that “cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid and intersectional” and to develop “knowledge of the intersectionality of social identities and the multiple axes of oppression that people from different racial, ethnic and other minoritized (sic) groups face” Professors were informed that "persons that think they are not racists are in denial" and that the drive towards color blindness in society "perpetuates existing racial inequalities". They were warned not to “weaponize academic freedom” to “inflict curricular trauma on our students” (FIRE Quarterly, Fall 2023)
FIRE successfully sued for this. They stated: "These regulations are a totalitarian triple whammy. The government is forcing professors to teach and preach politicized viewpoints they do not share, imposing incomprehensible guidelines, and threatening to punish professors when they cross an arbitrary indiscernible line."
This affected 54,000 professors, but FIRE was able to take action only because a few professors were willing to stand up as litigants in this case. Otherwise it would just have continued without resistance from within the left bubble, that apparently had no antibodies for bad ideas on its own side or expelled them from their system, because the mindset was widespread:
An example of institutionalized catastrophic thinking:
From guidances implemented first at Mount Sinai Medical School , then adopted at other major medical schools (Academic Medicine 95(12S):p S44-S50, December 2020) :
“There is no priority in medical education that is more important than addressing and eliminating racism and bias”… "It is impossible to embark upon this journey, especially for people who are White, without making an active effort to leave behind who we think we are, what we think we have accomplished, the titles and publications—all of it. These are meaningless in the face of what our colleagues and students of color face every waking moment of their lives. Worse than meaningless, they are unearned, and we have achieved them primarily because every day we are given advantages that others are not based solely on the color of our skin".
Credit to Rikki Schlott for finding this.
Much of what people object to on the right would not have happened but for this (and other examples of censorship or mandates, such as during covid). It caused many to go into full cultural self defense mode.
Quote from a neighbor: She asked what her son had learned in school that day. He summarized: "I learned that all white people are evil and that borders are racist" She added: "If someone messes with the gender of my child...."
Oh, I am following the documentation all right. And it is so easy to do! Trump is the most covered, commented upon and reacted to phenomenon in the world right now, and he can get push back from his own side, which is actually a pretty thrown together coalition and much more heterodox than the left. Indeed he often changes course, and is blamed for that also. And it is all out there, in the open, and often his attempts are clumsy and self defeating. I get the "what about Trump" point, but what I am looking at is how we got there. Here the left needs to look inward.
Left authoritarianism proceeded not by the behavior of a single person, who can be impeached and not elected, but collectively. Censorship and message control was achieved by institutional mandates, conformity and the hidden 'censorship industrial complex' now amply documented and admitted to. Much of it could be kept out of view, particularly by media denying that anything was really happening, but the overt manifestation was cancel culture, which FIRE has documented extensively, and found to be toxic wherever it entered, namely in all institutions controlled by the left as well as beyond, by cultural pressure. This would all be different if the ideas and solutions introduced were amazing, but a sufficient number of people found them fringe activist and crazy and lost even more faith in institutions than they already had - and looked for the exit. There was only one on offer.
One pattern I have noted (not alone) is a liberal tendency to go straight for the most catastrophic interpretation of reality (it is built into intersectional ideology), and great difficulty steelmanning an opposing view. From there we already had narratives of the US being the worst of all worlds, and an inability to see what those who wish to 'conserve' find worth conserving.
I have for years explained to my illiberal friends that if the left continued on that path, it would get a backlash they would not like and could not control. They did not like to hear it. Many economical and cultural concerns motivated Trump voters and they felt justified in their concerns and not listened to. The list of topics where greater communal consensus could have prevented bad outcomes are many and include covid, border control, and all the identity stuff which people actually care about. Particularly if they have kids. A friend of mine asked her kid what he learned in school that day. His response; "I learnt that all white people are evil and that borders are racist" She continued that if someone messed with her child's gender behind her back, she would kill them.
In stead of a hearing, dissenting voices were given some variant of a derogatory label picked from the most extreme end of the spectrum. The name calling continues as does the unwillingness to connect with what actually drives people, or that in some way they may actually have a point.
This is what got us Trump. I have no thanks to offer.
Now where we are, is in the next phase of reactivity, politically motivated killings. As FIRE and other have documented the acceptance of violent measures to control speech has already been increasing on the left for quite a while, now there is also action to react to. Or overreact to. Wouldn't it have been nice to avoid all this?
> The list of topics where greater communal consensus could have prevented bad outcomes are many and include covid, border control, and all the identity stuff which people actually care about. Particularly if they have kids. A friend of mine asked her kid what he learned in school that day. His response; "I learnt that all white people are evil and that borders are racist" She continued that if someone messed with her child's gender behind her back, she would kill them.
I appreciate readings these points of view. But as a self-identifying "liberal" myself, I can't help but feel this is a Motte and Bailey description of the culture war.
I largely agree with you on anti-white racism, intersectionality, collective guilt, "systems of oppression", and probably affirmative action and similar things. that is the Motte.
The Bailey... imo... is extending those defensible topics to "covid, border control, and transgender identity". Covid, its destructiveness, and the importance of the vaccine are scientifically validated topics (and have nothing to do with the "Motte" topics). "Border Control" is extremely aggravating to informed liberal ears, considering that Trump deliberately torpedoed a bipartisan border bill under the Biden Administration so that Trump would have something to run on (and again has nothing to do with the Motte topics). And alas, "Transgender identity" is once again a scientifically valid concept and not something that "gets messed with" by grade-school teachers. And I'm sure you can find many such people (Transgender people, who developed that way naturally and weren't "messed with" by their teachers) literally in the ACX comment section,
And while I'm not saying Transgender people's suffering is "worse" (because for chrissake, "Comparative Suffering Olympics" is the worst thing ever), Right Wing Media every day is spewing ridiculous hate and shame on people who are genuinely different and don't deserve it. White People (myself included) can and do deserve to have their suffering and problems acknowledged. And we can acknowledge one people's pain at the same that we acknowledge the suffering of another. So once, again, you've left the Motte and gone full Bailey.
Thank you very much for the comment. You are forcing me to become verbose. "The list of topics where greater communal consensus could have prevented bad outcomes are many and include covid, border control, and all the identity stuff" It is about achieving communal consensus.
During covid, numerous government and intelligence agencies, the white house itself and new NGOs created for the purpose, set up an “industrial censorship complex”. This was discovered only because Musk made the twitter files available to some journalists, such as Matt Taibbi (of Racket) and Michael Shellenberger, who were very surprised by what they found and provided ample receipts, viewable by all, on how the jawboning of public platforms took place. After the fact, Facebook and Google have confirmed this.
The stated purpose was to remove disinformation before it hit the public. Problem being that they soon removed information that was true, and mission creep made other politicized issues targets as well. This system has now continued in Europe, particularly England and Germany, imprisoning citizens for so called “hate speech”, as defined by one political side. The fear for conservatives was that this is where we were headed to. And of course liberals have now rediscovered the importance of free speech.
The result during covid is one of the tragedies of our time. In stead of being informed by real time data easily available, a panicky kind of groupthink (temporarily resolved during protests) set in on the left, combined with authoritarianism. A then Stanford MD, PHD professor, Ray Bhattacharya, pointed out that measures of covid exposure already in the population indicated that it was not going to be controlled with lock downs, and for the same reason that death rates were exaggerated (more cases to relate to death counts). There was no interest in pursuing this. Plus the massive age differential was underplayed. He and others pointed out that children in Sweden were never kept out of school. In most European countries children were quickly back in school, generally with no masks under 12, and no amazing wind tunnels installed. And the needle did not move a whiff.
For their efforts they were called out by Fauci and Collins for cancellation. Children are apparently not as susceptible to SARS type viruses, known, but Sweden based its practices on data from China, also available.
But there was no conversation here informing public policy. The priority on the left was message uniformity and behavioral conformity. And it has had costs.
Kids were left with the idea that their breath was deadly - and to themselves and their computers for up to 18 months in liberal enclaves, and extending beyond if we are talking full return to normalcy.
Choosing to give vaccines to the healthy young, particularly mandating them as was done, required establishing that there was a benefits to them, particularly if side effect, even if rare, were major, which some of them were.
In stead there was a concerted effort to suppress any sharing of information about side effects, even if true. Check he documentary "Follow the Silenced". Better to hear and judge real people.
As a result, a massive mistrust resulted. Compare Scandinavia, where people simply trusted that the government would keep them informed and continue to adjust practices according to the best data. They have not recommend vaccines for healthy people under 50 for a while now.
I followed all of this real time (originally from Scandinavia), but the book "An Abundance of Caution" by D. Zweig is a good reference.
The problems that people who have problems with with gender ideology have:
1. Giving a reported inner state social priority over the reproduction based distinctions that in fact keep civilizations going, and make one sex more vulnerable than the other. Educational institutions apparently received a “Dear Colleague” letter from Obamas education secretary, and suddenly gender theory was in schools, colleges and bath rooms. No public discourse, not run by congress. In stead the questioning were informed that they were transphobic. Senators were informed by a Biden appointee that misgendering a man in the hospital having a baby was improper and dangerous. And the witch hunt was on.
2. Gender ideology’s claim is that not acknowledging a reported inner state is a form of violence. This is a catastrophic notion, removing power from even the most knowledgeable and closest people observing that person, and also resulting in catastrophic perceptions of "extinction", "erasure", and the sense of being in a life and death struggle. You are now seeing trans issue related political violence.
Social transition in schools became justified, and likewise the practice of not notifying parents. Some states allowed minors to travel there for therapy questioned by their parents.
It popularized a “girl inside boy” (etc.) and “they know who they are” narrative, which replaced previous research of a much more complex and variable cluster of phenomena. Which I absolutely agree with anyone requires compassionate care exactly tailored to the problem at hand. Which absolutely has to be identified at the highest level of competency. Which can only be determined in an atmosphere of open discourse.
As an aside, I offer another example where inner states were considered absolute evidence. The drug epidemic. As a heath care worker myself I can absolutely report that the idea that pain was what the patient said it was, that pain was the 5th vital sign and that narcotics given for pain were not habit forming, was absolutely hammered into us from education onwards, and compliance was punitively enforced, from regulatory agencies down.
3. However, Scandinavian authorities found that the research and follow-up procedures underlying the “affirmative care” model had disqualifying methodological defects. Ideological capture? They are starting over, not ruling anything out though, including surgery. A professional review in the UK has come to the same conclusion. Please note that Scandinavians care as much about different gender manifestations as anyone. They just want to do the right thing.
4. Not only is a very invasive practice promoted, the opposite practice, speech therapy, which is fully reversible and does no harm at all, has in many liberal states been labelled as “conversion therapy” and outlawed. This creates an atmosphere of fear of questioning for health care providers and councilors, and interferes with free exploration. The logic here on display, is that the least invasive practice is harmful because of preventing someone from receiving the most invasive one.
A climate where only affirming evidence is accepted has no inner shut off valve, and had to drive itself into the wall that is Trump. Who benefited from that?
To the border issue I will just say that the notion that an open border is defensible is strange to me as a legal immigrant fully expecting to be deportable if I were dishonest or broke the law during the process.
Also not defensible IMO is leaving the management of the border to Mexican cartels and having a de facto permanent caste of vulnerable and exploitable workers. While I am not myself affected by any of this, I can see that some people might be, and would appreciate if someone listened to them.
I am not interested in referencing everything to Trump, and just point out that the lack of discussion and compromise on these issues got us where we are.
Thanks for the comment. Observably validated. I would only partly in jest call the underlying mindset something like "out of control social negativity bias" and suggest it as a DSM entry. Largely education induced, but amplified by a disposition for black vs. white and emotional thinking.
1) every discussion for whether someone is or isn’t “fascist” that I have ever seen has ultimately been an unhelpful exercise in semantics. Debates about whether Stephen Miller or Donald Trump are fascist (even in 2025) are no exception. I personally try to use some combination of “authoritarian” and “bigot” as appropriate, which usually capture what people actually dislike about fascism
2) Made the mistake of looking at the DSL thread for this article. See a bunch of idiots who are tying themselves in knots refusing to admit that maaaaaaybe the guy who threatened his critics with prosecution (something you cited in the article), whose tried to jawbone CBS into firing Jimmy Kimmel, who has deployed the national guard to cities to deal with disorder which, as near as I can tell, doesn’t actually exist, could POSSIBLY be regarded as authoritarian. Why a man who already tried to stage a coup once could possibly not be trusted to simply step aside when his term is done
Let's test our intuitions on what we mean by "morally acceptable" here.
A thought experiment - if you could painlessly assassinate a political figure and you somehow knew for certain that it would be seen by everyone as an accident or natural death (don't fight the hypothetical), at what stage would it be okay to do so?
This is basically asking (if you're a utilitarian): "at what point is the harm caused by this person existing (or acting politically) greater to the harm caused by killing this person?"
I think I'd have a relatively low bar for that - many of the actions you've mentioned in the article are harmful enough to justify the consequences for the fascist in question, and this "invisible assassination" would therefore be morally acceptable.
But the *actual* question of moral acceptability for political violence *that is viewed as political violence* is more like: "at what point is the harm caused by this person existing (or acting politically) greater to the harm caused by killing this person, and all the political backlash, revenge attacks, increase in polarisation, loss of national stability etc. that follows?"
For obvious reasons, I'd have a much, much higher bar for this.
> A thought experiment - if you could painlessly assassinate a political figure and you somehow knew for certain that it would be seen by everyone as an accident or natural death (don't fight the hypothetical), at what stage would it be okay to do so?
Isn't this the classic case of Prisoner's Dilemma ? If everyone gets their own "kill politician" button, and everyone chooses Defect and spams that button, then you don't end up in political utopia -- but rather a land of ghosts. Thus the correct move is to destroy the button instead, even though by doing so you suffer a temporary loss.
Or you end up in a world where all the defectors kill each other, leaving an optimally cooperative utopia...
But my hypothetical was trying to tease out "morally unacceptable" because it's wrong to use violence against people for their political opinions/actions, vs. "morally unacceptable" because of the second-order consequences.
My sense is that arguments that don't make that distinction seem confused.
Defect/Defect results in both Defectors losing. Defect/Cooperate results in just the Cooperator losing, and the Defector getting a large payout. That's why people choose Defect to begin with; and that's why Defect/Defect quite often ends up being the metastable equilibrium, a.k.a. land of ghosts. That's the problem with Cooperate: it requires constant work.
As for morality, honestly I don't believe there to be any such thing as separate from consequences. There's no grand Platonic realm where morals come from -- only incentives.
I think the logic for a stable cooperative equilibrium would be that the "politically engaged" people all kill each other from Defect/Defect games, and the people left behind are the politically disengaged, who don't have anyone to push the button on.
I wish Scott covered the fashionable slogans such as Punch a Nazi and how they fit into this framework. What does it mean to punch a nazi? Sure, that's a form of political violence, but allegedly a softer on. I assume it means you want to punch the nazi, not kill the nazi, you just hurt them enough to stop being nazis. At least that's my read. What happens if they punch back, though? How many times to we punch them again? Do we punch them until they die? In which case, why isn't the slogan Kill a Nazi?
My initial reaction to this article was that the real statement to reject was (1), because while "many Americans are fascists" might be true, everyone disagrees on which ones. Everyone disagrees, because the definition is vague. And when the definition is vague, all the energy goes into pulling it into whatever shape will fit over whatever someone doesn't like. As many have noted in the comments already: Orwell anticipated this decades ago.
Reject claim (1); if you have the luxury to make a formal, widely acceptable case for why someone is a fascist, then you have the luxury for a trial, and the US already has a system for that.
Leaving alone the fact that fascism is an empty word, I would be careful about using it, lest it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I think that those fascinated with the idea of civil war - on the Left and the Right - should be sentenced to ten years of reviewing of the historical documentation about the American Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, the War in Yugoslavia and other, and to write every day an essay about 'what happened to my wife and children after the other faction broke into my home and tortured and murdered me'
> So I think the natural conclusion is to abandon 2. Fascists, although evil, aren’t automatically a legitimate target for political violence.
There's a weaker version of 2 which is "Fascist _leaders_ are a legitimate target for political violence" which is not considered here and I think deserves consideration.
I think most people distinguish between movement leaders and followers. It would have certainly been acceptable to kill Hitler and Himmler, but the carpet bombing of Dresden (although I'm sure it killed many fascists) is much harder to defend.
I appreciate your attempt to address a difficult topic and I personally found it useful in clarifying my thinking.
One note about fascist synonyms: I've definitely heard "Nazi" used, which carries a similar negative connotation to "fascist." I've also heard "dictator" (specific to the leader, eg Trump in USA), and "authoritarian" (which admittedly doesn't carry the same degree of negative connotation).
I also still hear "racist", "sexist," "white nationalist", "KKK", and similar used in basically the same way to describe MAGA folks. In context they often make sense by themselves, but sometimes only really make sense as a makeshift synonym for "fascist."
...And I don’t want to abandon 1, because it seems like a factual claim that might be true - even if you don’t think it’s true now, it obviously has the potential to be true in the future - and we shouldn’t ban people from asserting true claims."
How many is "many"? A hundred thousand? A million? Out of a population of 340 million, how many Americans are real, genuine, actual Fascist as in "Heil mein Führer" type and not the "if you don't agree with me 100% on every tiny thing then you are a fascist" type of fascist?
"I think it’s probably bad practice to demand that reasonable people not use the word “fascist”. "
On the contrary, I think reasonable people should not use this word until they really do mean, and really can provide evidence to back up their claim, that those they are calling fascist are fascists. I presume we are meant to think the Phoenix Project lady is unreasonable, but that's what we're getting when "fascist" has lost all meaning beyond "this labels you as a bad person".
I'm not going to call Gavin Newsom a Communist or socialist, because he's not. He's a socially progressive liberal. I think it's stupid and counter-productive to call everyone "lefties" or Communists when they're not, and I think it's stupid and counter-productive to call everyone a fascist ditto.
So does this post mean you'll be voting for Katie Porter for governor of California? 😁 She seems to agree about the "many Americans" bit, what with the "How would I need them in order to win, Ma'am?" query (as an aside, this interview is comedy gold for the sheer entitlement on display: I don't need to give a flying fig about 40% of the electorate of California and as for the other 60% of course they are gonna vote for me and nobody else, it is a divine law inscribed on tablets of stone that the Democratic vote goes to the one anointed candidate which will be me, me, glorious me!)
"But the bigger problem is that you seem to believe that you’re entitled to people’s votes on account of being a Democrat. You’re all but daring people to vote for someone else. You may think that you’re making a factual point about electoral math, but you really just told voters: “We’re a one party state, dickheads. You’re gonna vote Republican? Fine: Good luck making eye contact with the wine moms in your neighborhood association after that. That ‘D’ next to my name stands for ‘Don’t you dare downgrade your social standing by voting for someone else,’ or ‘Deez nuts are available for sucking if you even think about not voting Democrat, because it’s California, bitches, and I’m gonna be governor whether you like it or not.’” And — unless I dramatically misunderstand your campaign — those impressions are off-message."
Thanks for the link. I knew Katie had fucked up from the few clips I listened to on X, but I hadn't realized that the entire interview was her driving her campaign off the edge of a cliff. OTOH, the same qualities that made her abrasive in this interview made her an excellent congressional interrogator when she was in Congress. I'd probably vote for her if she were to make it to the final ballot. If two Dems ended up on the ballot, though, I might consider voting for the other Dem. (For those of you who are non-Californians, we have open primaries and the top two vote-getters end up on the final ballot no matter what the party affiliation). I'd never ever vote for a Republican, though, because all the Republicans in California are bat-shit crazy (except for Arnold Schwarzenegger). ;-)
I saw references to it and thought "Oh come on, it can't be that bad" and then I watched it and whoops.
That's the entire point: she's not going to be running against a Republican, but against a fellow Democrat. Right now there are a lot of people tossing their hats into the ring for nominations, and a few more allegedly considering it. She has to get through all those, and a couple of the names are bigger than her. So there's no guarantee she will be in the final three or however many on the ballot.
Even if she does make it to be Porter (D), Other (D), No-hoper (R) then those 60% votes will be split between her and the other Democrat. People may well prefer her party opponent. In which case, she does need to coax some of the 40% deplorables to vote for her, and right now she's ensured they'll vote for the Devil in Hell first. If it's a case of Rehoboam and "My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions", then 40% may well decide to vote for the lesser of two evils which would be Anyone But Porter.
All that her rivals need to do is run an ad playing that clip over and over again. No need even to say anything more than "vote for Y". It'll be the equivalent of "Kamala is for they/them" which seemingly played well for Trump.
It's also a bad look because she seems to be "to Hell with those who aren't part of the True Right Side, their interests are of no concern to me and if in power, indeed I will actively work against them". You have to at least *pretend* to be even-handed when ruling the state before you get your mitts on the levers of power.
According to ChatGPT (for what it's worth), this was on halloween, and she changed into regular clothes before her finance committee meeting. She kept the mask on, though, and Republicans were outraged, OUTRAGED, for her disrespect for the institution (not sure which institution we're talking about).
I never heard about this incident, so the Rethuglicans evidently didn't get as much mileage out of their outrage as they did with Obama's tan suit or Fetterman's hoodie.
Motte: “fascist” is a useful technical term for a specific intersection of politics and aesthetics. It’s on par with “communist,” “libertarian,” or even “liberal.” The categories were made for man. We’re far enough from WWII that *Brown v. Oklahoma* is more relevant than *Chaplinsky v. NH.*
I feel a little guilty linking it, a little complicit in nutpicking. But since we’re talking about perceived threats, I think it’s worth giving an example. This is not an argument about prevalence or accuracy of such attitudes. It’s an observation that if you’re looking, you *will* find people who make Newsom look careful and conciliatory.
I’d like to keep using the practical, clinical definition. I’d prefer not to give the most shameless partisans more legitimacy.
> Your threshold may differ from mine, but you must have one.
I don't think this is a good approach. It makes it easy for fascism to divide-and-conquer its opposition.
Your red line was crossed today, so you revolt - but I don't join you because my red line is a little farther down the road and was not crossed yet. Decker won't join you either - his red line was crossed last week, he revolted alone, and now he's in jail. So today you too are alone in your revolution, which is therefore bound to fail and tomorrow you'll be Decker's cell-neighbor.
The threshold cannot be individual. It needs to be unified. It need to be a Fire Alarm.
Is there a distinction to be made regarding where the fascism is happening?
We acknowledge that violence against fascists abroad has been ok in the past (I don't know many reasonable people arguing against fighting Germany in WWII and there are many other examples) which presumes it would be ok in the future as well.
But if those same people were in our country it would not be ok? Like, using the WWII example, it was ok for Britain to fight Germany but not for Germans to do violence against Nazi Party beforehand? That seems silly.
Now, maybe this gets back to your question of line drawing and crossing. Germany crossed a line by declaring was on Poland. But the responding nations, fighting fascism, we not declared upon, they made that first step.
In any event, this means that intra-nation violence against fascism is basically never ok, because there isn't really a person-to-person or group-to-group declaration of war function (aside, I guess, from starting to do violence).
So under this framework, anti-Nazi Germans would not have been in the "right" to use violence against fellow citizens on the Nazi side.
And again, that kinda seems wrong to me. Maybe I'm nuts here.
Interesting article. I branched off your chain of reasoning in a slightly different direction: in law, we uphold an evidentiary standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt" before saddling someone with a label that can be punished with the death penalty. The probability of being killed because people are calling you a fascist (or socialist or whatever else the case may be) is drastically lower than the death penalty being applied once you're labeled a serial killer or whatever, but it still seems reasonable to have a high burden of proof for deciding someone can be fairly stuck with a label many people will connotate with "ought to be killed."
I think that, at the bare minimum, we should strive to maintain the norm that mere words are responded to with words, not bullets (as Scott had pointed out in his earlier days). So if there's some truly odious blogger out there preaching about how gingers have no souls to his massive audience, and his screeds set your ginger blood boiling... then calling for violence against that person should still be met with gasps of outrage, not approval.
Quote "And I don’t want to abandon 1, because it seems like a factual claim that might be true - even if you don’t think it’s true now, it obviously has the potential to be true in the future - and we shouldn’t ban people from asserting true claims."
Okay, but if you redefine the first statement from "Many Americans are fascist" to "Many Americans are fascist or might become fascist in the future" then there is no longer any logical contradiction in the three statements and your entire argument falls apart.
Forget fascism for a second. Clearly political violence is legitimate against political ideologies or systems that are sufficiently hostile to human rights, even if those ideologies are followed by a significant percentage of the population. That's an extremely uncontroversial claim to make. To deny this is to claim that abolition was wrong, that the US civil war was fundamentally unjust. In fact the very independence war that established the US would be unjust. And of course we'd also have to call the entirety of the fight against the original Nazis, both from within Germany and from outside, as illegitimate.
And having established that political violence is justified against some ideologies, even if followed by a large percentage of the population, the only questions left to answer is if fascism is such an ideology, and if the ideology of the a significant fraction of Americans can legitimately be described as fascism. In fact we can cut out the middle man and just immediately ask if a significant fraction of Americans follow an ideology against which violence is acceptable, without having to nitpick over the definition of fascism.
I think there's a pretty simple solution in that fascists are morally legitimate targets for political violence, but that you still have to do the utilitarian calculation of what the consequences of jumping off that slippery slope are.
>"I think it’s probably bad practice to demand that reasonable people not use the word “fascist”. It risks giving unreasonable people a heckler’s veto over every useful term"
In what way is "fascist" a useful term in any 21st-century context? It basically only means "right-wing plus the speaker wants you to instinctively hate the target and favor otherwise-taboo methods to silence them". Which, OK, is useful for someone who wants to convey that message, but we should understand that this is the only way the word is ever really used. If someone means to say "right wing but I don't mean to say we should start punching them", then it's just as informative to say "right wing" and much easier than saying "fascist" and trying to clarify that you're referring to some exotic class of non-punchable fascists.
It's at least possible that someone might want to argue that [contemporary political figure X] is practicing a brand of authoritarianism that is a closer match to that of Mussolini and Franco and you-know-who than to any of the other horrid forms of authoritarianism we've had to describe over the centuries. Not sure how useful that would be; I don't think there are any specifically anti-fascist techniques we would bring to bear that are any different than we would use against any other sort of authoritarian. But more importantly, aside from a few pedantic history nerds, almost nobody ever does that without meaning to invoke "...and we all agreed that we hate Mussolini and we're glad he wound up on that meathook". And the pedantic history nerds are going to have to spend many thousands of words explaining exactly what they do mean, so there's no real advantage to leading with "fascist".
Anybody who uses the term "fascism" today, in any non-meta and non-historical context, should be understood as saying "right wing" plus "unthinking hatred" plus "commence with the punching". This will not change. Once the historic meaning of a word has been this badly perverted, it is Literally Impossible to undo the damage. Canute would have had as much chance of holding back the tide, as Alexander would of convincing people that it is unacceptable to use violence against people labeled by the term that means "acceptable to use violence against".
We do need a language for discussing political violence, and when political violence is appropriate and who it might be appropriate to use such violence against. But we don't need that language to be couched in stealth and misdirection. So anyone saying "[X] is a fascist", should get at *least* the response they'd get for saying "we should punch [X], and everyone knows we should punch [X] so I don't need to justify that". Whether that means heckling or shunning or banning, will depend on the forum and the context.
And if we are ever so careless as to let e.g. "environmentalist" become *nigh-universally understood* to mean "person that we should punch because of their environmental views", then it will become necessary to similarly taboo "environmentalist" anywhere we want to have a productive discussion. We'll need a new term, maybe "conservationist" for someone whose pro-environmental policies don't rise to the level of punchability. But we haven't got to that point yet, and Scott's "some moron says it's OK..." doesn't come close to rising to that level, so there is still legitimate use for "environmentalist". Let's try to keep it that way, because "fascist" is a lost cause.
Hear hear. Actually the word has been useful to me as a kind of anti-shibboleth: anyone who uses it on social media almost certainly has nothing useful to say and can be blocked immediately. (I may be unfairly blocking some interesting historians discussing the 1930s but it's a price I pay gladly.)
I agree with Scott’s sentiment here, but the headline seems to have summarized the argument incorrectly…
“Facism” can’t be both a vague term that gets applied to almost everything, and a legitimate target.
It feels something like a Motte and Bailey argument. In the Second World War, the allies did use armed force against regimes described as fascist (Benito Mussolini). It would seem to not follow as an argument that this justifies force against the many other things that get called fascist.
I also think that the Woodie Guthrie quote and many like it were understood to not be serious.
What is different right now is it feels like the US is sliding into major political violence. Ands it’s not really because people are suddenly getting called fascist. Everyone’s been called a “Fascist” since the 1980’s, at least.
No one suggests that being a fascist should grant one immunity from violence. The allies did not attack Italy because Mussolini decided to name his movement "fascism". They did it because Italy was part of the axis coalition who waged war on other countries in order to conquer them.
Violence is only acceptable as protective force when there is no better alternative. If we had an effective and well-resourced justice system, we would never need violence for anything. On the other hand, if anyone, fascist or not, breaks into your house and corners you with a weapon, you're practically obligated to hurt them.
People are in fact being cornered with weapons and the justice system is not effectively protecting them. Self-defense wouldn't be political violence in this case, but what is a victim to do after surviving such an encounter, finding themselves no better protected or resourced than before, and meeting another person spouting the same views that nearly got them killed? Take the high road? They can if they have the resources to believe they can.
It comes down to a judgment of whether you think you can protect yourself and those you care about with the tools at your disposal. Can we blog our way out of this? Or vote? Or peacefully protest? Or accept the consequences of inaction? Violence is a function of losing faith in available alternatives.
I once watched ducks being fed in a chain link enclosure with an open gate. When the food was dropped inside, most of the roaming ducks successfully found the entrance, but the last stragglers found themselves on the other side of a rapidly diminishing pile of food - able to see it but not reach it. Confused, hungry, and being approached by more hungry ducks of a different species, a fight broke out. It would have been simple to just go around the fence, but they couldn't find this or any other solution, so violence became nature's last resort.
I feel like there are lots of ways to diffuse this trilemma at every point, but I'll give some of my primary reactions:
>2. Fascists are an acceptable target for political violence
Possible response: killing a fascist isn't *political;* violence, it's self-defense.
If a foreign army invades your nation with troops on the ground, is it *political* violence to shoot back? Or is it just the normal sort of retaliatory/defensive violence we have laws to protect and justify?
Fascists today are already pulling citizens into vans and sending people to foreign torture camps and shooting peaceful protestors in the face, and there's every reason to think they'll do worse in the future. Opposing them with violence now isn't a *political statement*, it's just trying to oppose tyranny and bloodshed before it becomes too entrenched to stop.
>3. Political violence in America is morally unacceptable (at the current time)
What does it mean for something to be 'morally unacceptable'? Do you mean in terms of deontology, utilitarianism, or virtue ethics?
There are many times when we might want to say that something is deonotlogoically wrong, but utilitarian correct.
Yes, these systems should all converge on the same answer under *normal* circumstances, but we're currently in precisely the type of extreme circumstances where you should expect the tails to come apart.
So there may be nothing inconsistent with believing 'yes, w should have a generic rule of thumb that political violence is wrong' while also believing 'yes, these specific limited instances of political violence are justified/necessary because of how much is at stake', if you are vacillating between deontology and utilitarianism, or etc.
More generally: a big part of the reason to *have* utilitarianism is to recognize when broad vague binary rules are failing to capture a specific unusual scenario. Finding a single utilitarian exception doesn't disprove or contradict the broad general rule, it's just a form of exception-handling.
>1. Many Americans are fascists
This may be conflating across different uses of the word 'fascist'. primarily, between fascist leaders/officials who are actually implementing fascist policies and doing fascist things in the world, vs. people who support/vote for those officials, or who just have abstract ideological or aesthetic preferences that overlap with fascism in major ways.
It's not unusual for words to have different meanings like this is different contexts; it's useful to be able to use the word 'fascist' to describe both a dictator and a writer, but you should only use violence against the dictator.
I think most people using the term understand this; that a fascist movement (like any movement) is made up of many passive members with only a vague association, as well as a few leaders and actors who actually do the violence.
And, then, again - those leaders and actors are the only ones who are legitimate targets for violence, but not *because* they are fascists, rather *because* they are hurting people and will hurt more if not stopped.
being a fascist is *strong evidence that they will keep hurting people* and will get worse over time, since that's how the history of fascist movements has always gone. But, still, it is the evidence of the harm they have/will cause that justifies violence, not their politics.
>3. Political violence in America is morally unacceptable (at the current time)
Whether or not it's acceptable. it's always, always and forever, been a part of American politics.
You can believe the morally correct thing would be for both sides to put down their guns and talk peacefully. That doesn't mean either side has a moral obligation to put their gun down *first*, and start talking rationally while the other side is still gleefully shooting them.
It's *bad* that we're in a world where political violence is used to suppress your opponents, but we've never *not* been in that world, and suddenly starting from zero and saying 'but why is political violence against *fascists* tolerated?' is an isolated demand for rigor.
Fascists are already committing political violence, *today*, and their opponents will commit political violence, too; yes this is all morally wrong, but that doesn't mean anyone will or *should* stop, and give their opponent an asymmetric advantage.
The asymmetry doesn't come from ideology. It comes from the state's monopoly on violence.
Regardless of whether you think Trump (or any official) is legitimate, you need to reckon with the fact that a majority of the country thinks they are, and will regard an attack on them not as "anti-fascism", but simply as an attack on the state, i.e. terrorism or insurrection. The reaction will not be, oh dear, we'd better elect the other party next time. It will be massive support for state violence against your movement.
It's a very bad idea to launch an insurrection when you can't even win an election. And when you CAN win an election, you don't need the insurrection. This is the secret sauce for why democracies are so stable, and political violence so comparatively rare.
I remember antifa (who define fascists as anybody agin them) turning up to beat up on some TERFs back in the day. One was a 70 plus year old woman. By the logic of applying fascist to anything not leftist enough for antifa, political violence would be acceptable there. As in killing the 70 year old.
ICE are a different story, although they seem to be acting within constitutional limits right now, they are a quite dubious bunch. Antifa aren’t going to turn up to that battle though, not when there are old ladies to terrorise. Nor I imagine are you. In any case you wouldn’t win.
Most civil wars aren’t masses of pitchfork-wielding folk storming the capital; they’re organised struggles between factions that already have command structures, weapons, and logistics — often splinters of the same state’s own army or political elite.
In the English Civil War both sides had trained troops, nobles, and officers; in the American Civil War both sides had armies, uniforms, bureaucracy, the whole lot. Even in the Spanish Civil War, where there was some popular mobilisation, the real fighting power came from formalised military units and foreign backers. Russia had the Bolsheviks take over the old czarist army, fighting against them were other members of the once czarist army
In America that would be state police or national guardsmen, fighting ICE or loyal Trump regiments. It isn’t going to be you. The civil war scenario - which is unlikely but not impossible - would be, therefore, conservatives vs ultra conservatives.
By the way one of things radical groups should never do is engage in actions that an agent provocateur would want them to do, to either discredit the organisation to push ordinary people into supporting more authoritarian responses.
I think using an "identity" (in the adjective sense, not the identitarian sense) like fascist (or any other) as carte blanche for political violence is a massive mistake. Once you've done that, all you have to do is decide who the shoe fits, and none of these shoes appear to have very strong, well-defined boundaries (that's a feature, not a bug). Even CRIMINALS are not valid targets for violence outside of a rather prescribed and adjudicated set of processes that we have encoded in law and legal procedure.
What justifies political violence is political circumstances, and not who the target is or what the target believes.
The term “fascist” has not only emotional but also *historical* baggage, enough that I would say it doesn’t make sense to use it to describe *anyone* in the modern era. There are approximately no “fascists” today any more than there are “whigs”. Or “nazis”. These three terms all described people with some set of views *in a specific historical period* and we have no continuity with that period. So if the underlying concept is still useful, due to the passage of time we’d need to make a *new* term for it, preferably one acceptable to the group as a self-description.
“neofascist” might still be an option but “fascist” is Right Out.
(To the extent the term “fascist” has a modern definition it seems to be either “person who opposes socialism” or “person I don’t like”.)
80 years ago Orwell said "fascist" basically meant a bully, and "fascism" simply meant something undesirable. I don't think we've gotten beyond that in public discourse.
People on the right aren't fascists in the political sense of the word either though. In general, the American Right is significantly less authoritarian than the American Left, and my understanding is that this goes way way back historically.
Examples: the American Right is generally anti regulation, and in favour of greater state independence, and a smaller government.
In general, the American Right is conservative (wanting to preserve tradition / precident rather than change) and in the context of America that means the constitution / founding father's vision, which is quite a decentralised anti-fascist view.
Ofc, you can have sub factions that are fascist, but in general, the American Right is not. I would argue the American Left is far far more authoritarian, more into censorship, more into centralised government and more into political violence (e.g., see recent YouGov poll data, where young 'liberals' where 4!! times more likely to endorse political violence).
In general, I see the use of the term as part of the currently standard left strategy of demonizing, otherizing and dehumanising anyone they disagree with. E.g., have views on immigration -> racist, have concerns about women's spaces -> transphobic, disagree with them politically -> fascist. Didn't vote for Hilary and Kamala -> sexist. Honestly, this is the way the regular democrat seems to use these words. They don't even have a mote, they are all bailey.
I don't love the linking of facism to a polical flank, left or right.
Fascism, at its core, is the idea that the nation should function like a single corporation, where business, labor, and citizens are all organized under centralized state control to serve a common purpose. It replaces both free markets and democracy with managed unity directed from the top. Violence and censorship were tools, not the essence; the real principle was obedience, the merging of private and public life into one state-run machine.
Mussolini’s vision was less about chaos or brutality, and more about building a tightly controlled, hierarchical order where the state acted as CEO and the people as employees. The thug part is sort of an add on.
In this context it becomes a lot easier to say the Trump style of government is fascist. I don't love saying that but he has a very corportist flair to his policy.
It's hard to call a person a fascist. Because a person is not state control.
The violence part is just an adjunct of any political belief.
Singapore Inc might be a more benevolent example of facism provide you don't do drugs.
If someone believes in corportist central economic nationalist control of economy then they are by definition a fascist.
If they like beating people up and putting them in prison they are a bad person who may also be a fascist.
The sleight of hand between "right-wing person I don't like" and "person it's justified to kill" ***is the point***. This is why we see the exact same dynamic with "Nazi" which is typically a lot less accurate of a term.
People wanted to say "Charlie Kirk should be hurt" but couldn't, so they said "Charlie Kirk is a fascist" and then made sure everyone knew how morally justified it is to "punch" fascists/nazis.
I honestly don't even know what Scott or the NYT mean when they write "fascist" but I know it's a completely different meaning than how I see that word used every day. In practice all you're doing by using that word "correctly" is providing more plausible deniability to the people who want to see blood (at least those that are on the left).
Good point. I think 99% of the times the left uses the word, it should not even apply in the political sense (i.e.they labelled person is not actually authoritarian).
"Fascist" just means "evil" to most people. And calling people "evil" is just a way of directing violence at them. There is no evil in reality. It's a human fiction that we use (essentially) to direct violence. So, if you call the other side "fascist", you are essentially declaring civil war. Fine, but then don't be surprised if other side uses violence against you.
Am I wrong for not thinking any of this discourse is in good faith? The issue is not even being framed as "when is it okay to violently overthrow an oppressive government?" but "when is it okay to kill people who we've managed to make an ideological label stick to?"
Left-wingers are leveraging the facts that: (1) WWII still looms large in the American imagination (2) People today seem to think we went to war with Germany because they were racist and fascist.
Therefore it's justified to kill anyone who we can call fascist. We already went to war about this after all! Reddit told me my great-grandad who fought on the beaches of Normandy was Antifa. What a convenient pretext to snipe the right winger coming to my school.
Obviously Trump hasn't done anything close to what left-wing idols like Lincoln and FDR did, and obviously they've called every Republican president in my lifetime a Nazi. Are people like KoopaKing in your comment section, who openly advocate for violence against the President and his tens of millions of voters, really so committed to the rule of law and the separation of powers? Or are they mentally unbalanced people who find it a convenient excuse?
To answer your question in good faith, in a liberal system you should not kill people for simply believing in any political system. Premise 2 is false.
In the case they organize and gain political power, there is still no workable bright line because overthrowing a leviathan is practically guaranteed to be extremely deadly and chaotic. Especially when you're overthrowing one that was popularly elected like a year ago.
It's fun to chat online, but is a president flouting a Supreme Court order by illegally deploying the National Guard (as an example of a possible bright line) seriously worth a bloody revolution? What if the National Guard leaves after a few months and nothing really comes of it? Would it still have been worth the mountain of skulls to prevent that fascistic act?
People are just not thinking seriously about what a violent revolution means, and what level of oppression is preferable to it. Probably because it's their opponent in power, and they're more fantasizing and LARPing than thinking.
Astral Codex Ten has been bullied by the wokeists, probably more than once, and now he's afraid to say what he really thinks. Moreover, he's afraid to think what he really thinks. The wokeists have successfully intimidated him.
Fascism is arbitrary and unfettered government intervention in every aspect of citizens' lives. This is closest to Mussolini's definition. Leftists who regulate everything are fascists, while Republicans, including Trump, are actually anti-fascists because they deregulate everything. Even to the point of abolishing the Department of Education. There have never been any fascists in history who abolished the Department of Education, or who would even think of such a thing. On the contrary, true fascists are always deeply concerned about what and how children are taught. Fascists always impose their ideologies through the education system.
Right, I think it's worth remembering that the set of people who would cheer the assassination of Charlie Kirk have a significant subset who would cheer the assassination of Scott Alexander.
*sigh* Can you guys really not come to terms with the reality that Scott is, in fact, a hopeless liberal? Nobody is coercing him. He's a coward of his own volition.
He's not a coward. These are his views and values, and I don't think we get anywhere by insulting him when he's generous enough to host we deplorables on here.
When ACX gets to Bluesky levels of "banned, blocked and reported for insufficient loyalty to the Party and the Party line", then call him hard names, but we're nowhere near that yet.
The man is entitled to state what he thinks and how he feels, for the love of God! It's his own Substack! Free speech includes "I think you're a wuss but go ahead and share your wussy opinions"! Even if we think he's wrong, even if he *is* wrong, "This is Liberty-hall, gentlemen. You may do just as you please here."
And another quote from "She Stoops To Conquer", which seems apposite for a political discussion:
"HARDCASTLE. No, sir, I have long given that work over. Since our betters have hit upon the expedient of electing each other, there is no business “for us that sell ale.”
HASTINGS. So, then, you have no turn for politics, I find.
HARDCASTLE. Not in the least. There was a time, indeed, I fretted myself about the mistakes of government, like other people; but finding myself every day grow more angry, and the government growing no better, I left it to mend itself. Since that, I no more trouble my head about Hyder Ally, or Ally Cawn, than about Ally Croker. Sir, my service to you."
Okay then, maybe "horribly misguided" is a better description. He's not willing to come to terms with what's necessary to get the changes he wants. Doesn't he realize he's getting almost everything he's asked for? And yet, he's letting perfect be the enemy of good.
Everyone has their own opinions on the state of the world. I think we have indeed gone to hell in a handbasket, and I am grimly and cynically resigned to the current state of affairs. Trying to reverse social changes is like Canute telling the tide not to come in, and I get the lesson he was trying to teach there.
But the pendulum swings, the see-saw tilts, the wheel of fortune turns, and who is winning versus who is losing changes with the tides and the moon.
He used to be strongly antifeminist. So strongly that I suspect he's still antifeminist and just chooses not to write about it, which would match Dan's diagnosis fairly well. But I don't think Dan is right about this particular issue.
> Astral Codex Ten has been bullied by the wokeists, probably more than once, and now he's afraid to say what he really thinks. Moreover, he's afraid to think what he really thinks. The wokeists have successfully intimidated him.
I don't think you have the mechanism right. I think it's more likely that he lives in Berkeley and he's accidentally absorbed a lot of beliefs from Berkeley without subjecting them to much in the way of critical thought. Somebody says something ridiculous, everybody nods along, and the nodding along is evidence that the thing actually wasn't ridiculous.
A while ago he wrote about how experiencing a lot of ambient noise at home is just an unavoidable part of living in a city. That's not a woke opinion or one that anyone is likely to intimidate anyone else into avowing. It's not a true opinion either, but that's neither here nor there.
> There have never been any fascists in history who abolished the Department of Education, or who would even think of such a thing.
Well, in this case the department was 100% captured by sworn ideological enemies. If Trump was able to control it, he might feel differently about abolishing it too.
Don't use political violence until democracy has so badly failed that it's easier to win a civil war than an election. And also, don't expect it to only catch on on your side. If people keep assassinating for right targets, they'll eventually start assassinating people on the left. They're the ones with all the guns.
It is probably important here to distinguish between "fascist" meaning a person who subscribes to or submits to a certain far-right ideology and "fascist" meaning a person devoted enough to that ideology that they are actively trying to coordinate mass violence. I think a lot of leftists are way too fast to put someone in that second category, but I do think it exists and is a category of people who it is reasonable to discuss committing violence against. "Reasonable to discuss" does not imply I currently think someone should do it, only that it makes sense to have a debate about when violence becomes acceptable against such a person.
(I am inclined to think it has a lot to do with how likely they are to actually succeed in their campaign, and how likely killing them or committing some other violent act against them is to actually end the campaign or reduce its effectiveness.)
The left is way more happy to use violence to bully their opponents. Examples: BLM riots, attempt to assassinate the president, assassination of Charlie Kirk, survey data showing left identifiers were 4x more likely to endorse violence. It's clear cut.
I would argue a lot of it, is less about recent violence, but more about the perception of which side is winning. And, if I remember correctly, the result held also for a similarly survey taken before Charlie Kirk's assassination, so it isn't just an immediate spike in response to that violent act.
With Trump in power, and seemingly popular, the left is thinking it needs to resort to violence and intimidation, while in the wake of January 6th, Trump had just lost, and the Democrats were in power, and hence had no need for violence or intimidation (but similarly the Right felt wronged and impotent, etc...).
By far the best way to get rid of Trump is to wait for him (or Vance) to finish the term, then vote him (or his successor) out of office. So far, he does not have committed any human rights violations which would justify ending the American democracy experiment and rise up against his regime.
My threshold for "fuck the will of the people, this must be stopped now" is actually rather high. If he sends death squads to kill Hispanic-looking people in the streets, or nukes Oslo, that would be sufficient cause, but I am very hopeful that he will keep at roughly his current level of performative cruelty, which seems vastly better than civil war. I also have high hopes that democratic institutions will prevent him from using his office to improperly influence the elections too much.
The situation with Hitler was different. It was very clear that the Germans were not willing or able to vote him out. The humanitarian costs he was inflicting were also much too high to justify giving the Nazis a few generations in the hopes that they would become more moderate on their own.
Personally, I think there are not one but two thresholds for political violence. The lower one is for purposeful political violence -- instrumental violence committed while pursuing some legitimate, achievable goal. There are generally cost-benefit calculations to decide if a particular action is acceptable, especially as far as non-combatants are concerned.
The higher threshold is for violence which serves no purpose except to inflict costs on the enemy. This makes sense under some schools of decision theory -- the purpose is not to make your timeline better, but to lower the probability that you will end up in that timeline. Killing enemy adults is a legitimate objective above that threshold. For example, it might be ok to respond with nuclear attacks on your cities by nuking the enemy's cities, even if such attacks serve little strategic purpose. Or it is totally acceptable to start an uprising instead of quietly getting on the train to Auschwitz, even if everyone knows beforehand that the uprising will be crushed.
Of course, the distance between the present situation in the USA and that 2nd threshold is ridiculously large (unless you are one of the ones getting deported to an El Salvador megaprison without a trial, perhaps).
Hitler wasn't even voted IN; he was appointed Chancellor by Hindenburg. It wasn't an elected position in Weimar.
Hindenburg actually loathed him and the Nazis, and seems to have believed that giving them an overdue shot at the big chair (after exhausting every other viable candidate) would permanently discredit them. As indeed it did.
This comment section is probably already long and dreary enough, but I would suggest a simple litmus test for whether someone is a fascist.
Ask them "Are you a fascist?" If they say yes, then feel free to assume they're a fascist. If they say "No, I'm a [something else]" then go along with that, and if you think [something else] is stupid then feel free to argue with that. Similarly, don't go around calling people "communists" unless they claim to be communists.
Forestalling an obvious objection, this rule doesn't apply to words with actual robust definitions.
Words are symbols and we have individual phenomenological responses to symbols exacerbated/mediated by social mores that occur at practically light speed. Good for those who can slow down enough to think/ration through the use of these words and symbols and for those who slow down enough to listen/consider. It takes courage to participate in imagination (following the logic) at any level without caving to fear. It changes the atmosphere for all of us.
It seems to me that the best solution is to push back on people using the term "fascist" (or racist, communist, whatever) on too wide a group of people. Obviously the connotation is meant to imply that the people being called fascist are like people who were called fascist in the past, and to remind people that we have previously agreed it was not just okay but good to kill such people.
But the reason we were willing to kill those people was not because they were right wing, or even right wing authoritarian dictators. It was because they started multiple wars and killed millions of people. If Steven Miller starts WW3 while trying to wipe out multiple ethnic groups, I will agree that he should be stopped by just about any means necessary, up to including armed revolution. But it seems that instead most of what he's saying has been within the Overton Window sometime within the last 50 years and is much closer to American norms than Nazi ones.
Calling him a fascist is inaccurate, and more so intentionally misleading in order to try to make him and his beliefs anathema in the political discourse. It lowers the value of discourse and cheapens us all. Similarly when Obama was called a Communist as an attack. At worst he was a free market socialist, well within the Overton Window. Likely not even that. Which means calling him a Communist is wrong and misleading in the same way that calling Miller a fascist is.
This seems like a good place to link to Performative Bafflement's essay in which he points out that collectivism has a far worse historical track record than fascism:
I also think it's relevant to point out that collectivism is far more damaging to political institutions than authoritarianism is. The fascist Axis powers all recovered relatively gracefully after the war, whereas Russia is still floundering 30 years after the fall of communism. Obviously there are confounding factors there, but the general principle still makes intuitive sense to me. Fascists don't destroy political institutions so much as subvert them to their will, whereas collectivism is a top-down reorganization of the basic principles that make society function, and in my view that's much harder to recover from. A metaphor would be a child who misbehaves vs a child who has metastatic cancer. The misbehaving child can be easily course-corrected without much worry but the cancer sufferer is going to need risky surgery and might never be the same.
The point is I think democracies can get much closer to fascism without risking long-term harm than they can to communism. I think political centrists intuitively understand that, I think 2020 shocked people into an awareness of just how close our institutions were to tipping over into a hard-to-dislodge collectivism (with identity groups playing the role of the proletariat), and I think that means that they're willing to tolerate a fairly significant jump towards authoritarianism as a corrective. That's certainly my view. It's not ideal but desperate times call for desperate measures. The only real risk of unrecoverable harm lies in the potential for Trump to disrupt the electoral process and I really don't think that's plausible. If he refuses to leave office in 2028, or suspends elections or otherwise makes it impossible to vote his party out then I think people would immediately revolt and I think they would be justified in doing so. But I would put the odds of that happening at far less than 1%.
I think the practice goes back to Adorno and Horkheimer's The Authoritarian Personality (1950), in which they developed 'F-scales' to assess someone's tendency towards fascism; they were concerned that there were Americans who were susceptible to fascist thought (although none of their findings, across the voluminous work, gave evidence which supported this). Variants of the scale (especially of the version by Bob Altemeyer) continue to be used in political psychology. Here you go, Are You a Right-Wing Authoritarian? Find out here!
It seems clear to me that calling someone fascist is supposed to mean "you're acting like a fascist, which means we should have grounds to hurt you; please stop acting like a fascist so we don't have to". But the people being called fascists aren't capable of introspection, and the people calling them fascists aren't capable of enforcing it, so the whole thing has become a farce. Nevertheless these modern fascists are wrong, and they're certainly capable of understanding why they're being called that, and ought to stop acting like fascists just because it's right to stop. It seems like they are so set on sticking it to liberals that it just makes them be more fascist instead, which is very pathetic and sad to see.
Charlie Kirk's main job was going to meet people who disagreed with him and engaging in civil debates, that's about as far from "acting like a fascist" as it's possible to get.
You know the answer---it's because of the views he espoused. What's the point of the rhetorical trickery? If you're confused about why people find him so reprehensible, there's a huge internet full of them telling you why; you don't need to ask me.
What specific views? I'm asking you. If you make the claim he has views that justify labelling him as a fascist, I think the onus is one you to provide evidence for that claim
This style of argument is super disingenuous and bad faith. You're pretending like there is no ambient culture around this--like this is the first time you've heard of Kirk being called fascist. It's a distraction: you don't have to engage with the claim if you keep interrogating what it even is. The onus is on you to not pretend like you haven't heard of Google (or LLMs, if that's more your thing).
For example, here are some of the tops for "Charlie Kirk Fascist" are a bunch youtube videos, essays, etc about the ways in which he espouses fascist ideology (="is a fascist"). Maybe there's a miniscule chance that your filter bubble makes you unaware these exist? Here's a random link that I found that gives a pretty good list of the arguments:
Although now that I'm checking, the Google results are quite polluted now with discussions about the assassin's fascism. I've ambiently exposed to many (many) reasons over the past few years, most of them in videos / social media. If you haven't, maybe that's why you don't know?
Also, I think many people are quite sure that Trump's whole administration is definitely fascist (don't tell me you don't know the arguments! Shutting down liberal departments of the government? Banning research that involves words tangentially connected to a particular ideology? Sending the military to liberal cities? Framing opponents as false flags, foreign agents, or pedophiles?) and Kirk is his supporter than therefore is fascist via that route.
I'm not saying you have to agree with the arguments--just don't pretend like you haven't heard them! It doesn't score you any internet points, it just makes you sound like an idiot Personally I'm not really one of these people who has such a confident definition of fascism that I'm comfortably defending "Kirk = fascist" at length. It doesn't really matter to me, because "Kirk = deplorable monster with dangerous/authoritarian views" is sufficient reason to condemn him.
My point is: it's a anti-intellectual farce to pretend like the discourse exist when you could easily just engage with it instead. It seems clear that when you do this, either (a) you literally know it exists (in which case, get out of your bubble) or (b) you're pretending not to know, in which case we have to infer that you can't defend him on merit so you're doing rhetorical tricks instead.
(There's also (c), you're some kind of astroturfing/political operative that's trying to poison the discourse to keep every mad at each other. I doubt this and I recognize that it's certainly bad faith to speculate about. But also it certainly comes to mind sometimes with how intentionally anti-intellectual people posting on here seem to be, since there's not much way to tell without interrogating someone's posting history at length.)
Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, there's also a (d) which I broadly subscribe to. I'm curious if this applies to you. I think often people have a "gut moral instinct" that somebody like Kirk needs to be defended, because despite his (on paper) despicable view, Kirk does speak to people's moral needs in a way that makes him resonate. (Clearly, since he has a lot of supporters). I've noticed that when people have this gut-feeling that someone is right, they will warp their rational stances quite a bit to justify defending them--often so far that the stances stop really making sense at all. For example a person might selectively not register any of the accusations against Kirk, because to register them would mean engaging with them, which might threaten Kirk's validity---and since Kirk is speaking to something important to them, his validity can't really be threatened. I think a lot of people's support of Trump is like this. He's disgusting, yeah, but he is able to stand up against an "abstract" threat--of domineering progressive morality, of a nation ruled by a ruling/intellectual class that is pretending like the economic foundations aren't totally eroded; of a narrative around racism that turns around and justifies racism against white people of a sort; etc--and that means that he must be _right_, and therefore gets defended by people who even 10-20 years ago would have found him despicable.
I don't fault people for doing this really; I think of it as more a skill issue: people should be better at figuring out what they really need, because I doubt it's actually fascism, and then better at separating that out and rejecting the fascist part. In particular we ought to have leaders in society who speak to those moral issues in a respectable way, without compromising other morals. I'm basically not aware of anyone managing to do this (although I have high hopes for the growing wave of millennial democrats, since they seem to be much less beholden to the creepy boomer-era backroom manipulation that has characterized politics my whole life. But who knows, maybe that will all get sold out in time).
>that's about as far from "acting like a fascist" as it's possible to get.
Well said! Kirk's discussions (and I disagree with many of his view) are _exactly_ the kind of civil discourse we need more of. He was doing Democracy _right_ .
Well, I'm at risk of sounding like I'm cheating: I'm talking about the people who are using the word correctly, not the people throwing it around for anyone who they dislike. There's a reason it has 'gone mainstream' in the last few years. If you pretend like there's not, of course nothing makes any sense to you.
It's also evidently not the case that that's something one can cite. It's obviously an opinion, not a fact.
Political arguing in this comment section would really have a much higher chance of being productive if people would argue in good faith.
I'm skeptical that you, Alex, are arguing in good faith.
Your last few comments have all centered on insinuations of unspecified behaviors that you call
>acting like a fascist
I don't trust you.
You have chosen to _not_ say what specific behaviors _you_ classify as "acting like a fascist".
_What are they??? Name them._
You have been hiding behind statements including:
>You're pretending to not know why people call him that. Why?
Which sound profoundly dishonest, as if you knew that everyone secretly agreed with your faction's position. In point of fact, most people probably don't agree.
So tell us, straightforwardly and honestly: If you consider Kirk to be a fascist, _why_ do _you_ consider him that? Stop hiding and insinuating.
My earlier comment was less "I (Alex) think the people they are calling fascists are acting like fascists". My comment was: "if you (not Alex) are confused about why they are calling people fascists, it's obvious (to Alex) that it's because they think they're talking about are fascists". People in here are acting *confused* about why other people are using that language. What is there to be confused about? They're *telling* you why. It's not a trick. They think that, and they have tons of reasons, which they're listing.
e.g. "Which sound profoundly dishonest, as if you knew that everyone secretly agreed with your faction's position. In point of fact, most people probably don't agree." You don't even know what faction I'm in. It's really not about factions. The person I was responding to was motte-and-baileying, hard: "all Charlie kirk did was talk to people" (one definition of fascism, conveniently limited for the purposes of defending Kirk). Whereas we are obviously talking about a different definition that involves their ideological stances and what they are a supporter of, rather than what they do---since that is how literally everyone uses the word, always. "Fascist" does not mean "is in the streets with guns", it means "a supporter of fascism". Like, obviously.
edit: I forgot what part of my first comment said cause it was a few days ago so removed the second part here.
I don't really care if Kirk is a called a fascist or not. If he minded the fact that people found what he did despicable he would have stopped. Same for a lot of the other people who are intentionally screwing things up right now. I would love to live in a world where if a person was being called fascist they would stop to think "huh, maybe I should not upset these people so much". Obviously that matters very much who is calling you fascist and whether you have power, of course: if lots of mainstream respectable people are doing it, you're probably wrong or at least being a shit; if random fringe idiots are doing it, who cares. (I will readily agree that there are plenty of liberals who were called fascist and, while that branding was almost certainly wrong as a matter of fact, they probably *were* in the wrong and needed to cut it out, and they did not.) Personally I have a political ideology where if you're really upsetting the other party you ought to attend to their needs/desires as well; I felt this way when the democrats were in charge and I especially feel this way now. (This is not a stance I see many other people holding.) But I have a lot more condemnation for Trump and co. because of their overt willingness (to the point of bragging) to do things out of spite, greed, and corruption. By and large I see the democrats as attempting to be good (but often blinded by their self-righteousness). I'll take that over intentional evil / "might makes right" / overt fascism any day.
Many Thanks for your comment. This is much better. It will take me a while to digest all you wrote. I do, mostly agree with your:
>Personally I have a political ideology where if you're really upsetting the other party you ought to attend to their needs/desires as well;
A caveat on that though: There are debates, notably the interminable abortion debate, where the two sides deeply upset each other, and this is probably unavoidable.
Edit:
>I don't really care if Kirk is a called a fascist or not.
This looks quite strange in a comment on a post which centers on who counts as a fascist, and what is a sane response to them. It is also strange in the context of your own words that:
>"Fascist" does not mean "is in the streets with guns", it means "a supporter of fascism". Like, obviously.
and your words:
>But the people being called fascists aren't capable of introspection, and the people calling them fascists aren't capable of enforcing it, so the whole thing has become a farce. Nevertheless these modern fascists are wrong, and they're certainly capable of understanding why they're being called that, and ought to stop acting like fascists just because it's right to stop.
If you don't really care whether Kirk was called a fascist, then why are you writing about that here?
>If he minded the fact that people found what he did despicable he would have stopped.
My best guess is that the Kirk's murderer considered Kirk speaking his mind to be despicable.
Do _you_ find Kirk speaking his mind despicable, and, if so, why _specifically_?
( Is there a point in discussing whether Kirk's views met any of the criteria for fascist, or are you uninterested in that? If your (?) objection to Kirk is independent of fascism, that's fine, but I _do_ want to hear whether _you_ objected to him, and, if so, _specifically_ why. )
Part of the context for this is that the left (and, to a lesser extent, the right) have spent the last two decades making the construction of outrage a cottage industry. They may actually feel the outrage they voice - but if we give in to that, they get a hecklers' veto over even discussing any viewpoint that they have worked themselves into a lather about. I do not accept that state of affairs.
The people who are using the word to mean "highly punchable right wing extremist I don't like, and I don't want you to stop and think too much before joining the hate", *are* using the word correctly. That's what the word means, and outside of some purely historical contexts that's pretty much the only thing the word means. There was a time when that usage would have been incorrect. There was a time when it would be controversial and disruptive. But that time is over; they've won.
If there are people who still use it to mean "this person's political philosophy is a much closer match to that of Mussolini and Franco than to any of history's other sorts of odious authoritarian", then they are now using the word wrong. Really, I suspect very few people use it that way(*) except in a Motte-Bailey sort of way where they mean both the political-history thing and the commence-punching thing but want to dance between the two for maximum effect.
But if there is someone who wants to convey just the political-history version along with "...and that doesn't mean that we should hate or punch them, at least not without thinking this through and talking it over", then they are using the word incorrectly. Because "fascist" *will* be understood to mean "hate on; commence punching", and using words that will convey a message dangerously different than you intended is the very essence of using language incorrectly.
* Outside of purely historic/academic discussions decoupled from any contemporary politics.
The part of the original post where he links the SF progressive journalist:
"But I don’t think the answer can be “violence is permissible when you can classify someone with a loaded term so vague that people regularly use it to describe expedited restaurant permitting”.
"San Francisco’s “pragmatic” politics aren’t moderate. They’re rehearsing authoritarian techniques that could scale nationally.
When billionaire-funded groups rebrand emergency powers as efficiency and dissent as disorder, we’re not solving crises, we’re surrendering democratic safeguards.
If we can’t name these fascistic tendencies in a liberal city, we won’t stop them anywhere."
If San Francisco, of all places, is now becoming an authoritarian wasteland ruled over by those of fascistic tendencies, then what hope for the rest of us?
Really, Alex? "Stop making me hit you"? That's the argument of an abuser, not a kind compassionate person who only wants to have a civilised discussion of differences.
Apparently I'm a fascist since I'm not on board with the slew of modern social liberalisation programmes. Fine by me, I don't give a damn. It is funny, in a black humour way, to see the former heroes of social liberalism now being called fascists for not moving with the Overton window (see Graham Linehan).
But truly, I have no interior life, am incapable of introspection, and will never be able to be improved by the kindly instruction of my betters, so I get the bullet, right? Not *your* fault, I *made* you do it because I didn't change how I behaved!
"It seems clear to me that calling someone fascist is supposed to mean "you're acting like a fascist, which means we should have grounds to hurt you; please stop acting like a fascist so we don't have to"."
No, I think - hmm, better use a less inflammatory metaphor here - it's to accuse your opponent of pig-wrasslin' and (best result for you) get them to splutter outraged denials of ever having been near a pig; see the LBJ anecdote:
The result you are hoping for is to get it out into the public consciousness that "A is a pig-wrassler", especially to those who may never have heard of A before. Now, the first thing that comes to mind in the context of A, is "They're a pig-wrassler" and A has to waste time and resources dealing with that, before they can get on to whatever topic they really want to discuss.
And most people won't even take the time to find out "but is it *true* that A is a pig-wrassler?", they'll just take it as truth because they read it somewhere on the Internet. And the Usual Suspects, the very online very activist set, will promulgate it as Gospel that A is indeed a pig-wrassler, no more need be said, even querying is it true leaves the enquirer open to accusations of pig-wrasslin' themselves.
"It seems like they are so set on sticking it to liberals that it just makes them be more fascist instead, which is very pathetic and sad to see."
The only way to succeed is to not give a thundering damn if your rivals call you a pig-wrassler (all supposing, of course, that you are indeed not wrasslin' pigs). The accusation is beneath contempt, you're not going to dignify it with an answer. Indeed, it may even be mischievous fun to double-down on "so common-sense opinion B makes me a pig-wrassler? well then, let's get into the pig-pen!" and stick it to the libs, as it were.
> i bet if I surveyed people at least some of them wouldn't think that sharks are fish.
I'll note that (a) that is the weakest possible claim you could make without stating that sharks are fish; and (b) it still might not be true.
Try it out. Ask ten people to identify which of a set of pictures are fish. Include a shark, a turtle, a grasshopper, a cat, a crab, and 3-5 "real fish". See what they say.
(It's necessary to include obvious non-fish in the poll so that the fact that you're asking the question doesn't reveal to the pollees that you want them to mark the shark as "not fish".)
What point is that? Wikipedia leads off by noting that "[True e]els are ray-finned fish", putting them in the same class as things like catfish or salmon.
Yep, turns out I was just wrong about this. I grew up doing a lot of fishing in the UK, where we learn that eels are not fish. I got it into my head that this was taxonomically correct, something due to the fact that eels in Europe only reproduce in the Caribbean(!), can live for three days out of water, et cetera. Basically, they don’t seem like regular fish. And I thought it followed that they actually were not fish. Turns out “fish“ covers a hell of a lot more kind of animals than I realised
The word used to be a lot broader than it is now. Think of starfish.
I think the animals generally accepted as "fish" today need to be a little more similar to each other, but they fail to form a clade. However, eels are one of the kinds of animals that we still consider fish.
Update: according to wikipedia again, fish are now "all vertebrates other than the tetrapods".
Whales aren't fish either, but that doesn't stop people from reading Jonah and the whale and ignoring that the Bible says it's a fish (to be fair, I don't think the Bible says it's a whale either, just that it's a big fish; later translations called it a whale) 😁 Now I have to make the allotted joke:
I think that 1 and 3 are obviously good, that 2 is obviously wrong at present but has been true in the past (e.g. under Hitler), and similarly I have every sympathy with e.g. slave revolts, so I think the interesting and important question is "under what circumstances does political violence become acceptable?"
Roughly speaking, I think that my answer is that a little violence around the edges is never justifiable. There are situations when an entire system of rule has gone bad, and challenging it by force is legitimate, but that if things have not gone that far then violence is not acceptable.
I think a corollary is that violence is only ever acceptable if it's being conducted a) by agents of a government, in accordance with the rule of law, or b) against supporters of a regime (or other powerful group) sufficiently bad to justify overthrowing it by force.
To justify violence outside a legal framework it's not enough that the target be evil, they must also be powerful (in some context - self-defence is justified if/because the target has the power to injure you, even if they're not politically powerful).
I agree in principle, but the “no political violence” norm depends on institutions still holding. Once they start to slip, that premise rides on sand. I’m not sure the logic would travel quite as well off the page.
Some commenters have lately noted that "fascist" seems to be a way to mark people as acceptable targets for stochastic terrorist violence. As some put it: "They don't attack you for being a fascist. They call you a fascist so they can attack you." If this seems true, it may be time to add "fascist" to the short list of accusations that count as "per se" defamation, meaning you'd better be able to back up your words in court.
Who the heck are "they"?? I live in San Francisco, supposedly an Antifa hotbed. Sure, we have "Antifa" here, they appeared during the political protests of the first Trump administration. They amount to about 6 kids on skateboards, who get overwrought during protests and do things like set fire to garbage cans and break car windows. Same think happens at sport events, by the same people. Stochastic? Hardly. (They're probably stock traders now.) There is no terrorist Antifa. However, there is growing fascism, and in my opinion, all those who love democracy should be anti-fascist, not cowardly little authoritarians with their prissy language policing.
I think the slipperiest part of this is the equivalence of saying that one's political opponents are an acceptable target of political violence and the actual belief or action that they are. People say a lot of shit and the internet (where most of this speech takes place) is particularly irony poisoned, but language is fundamentally figurative; reef of dead metaphor and all that. "Go to hell" isn't a threat of eternal damnation, "die in a fire" isn't a death threat, etc. The legal requirement of a true threat is much harder to meet, and includes basically none of the speech in question.
Also, if you think political violence can be justified, then threats of politcal violence are probably also justified, and presumably at a lower threshold. It would be a bit absurd to have a response function with a cliff, where if a leader has rigged x% of vote everyone is politely protesting, but they if they rig 1.01x% of the vote people start a hot civil war. If political violence is a constraint on regime policy, it makes sense to start signaling that well in advance of when violence is actually justified. You can think that threats of political violence aren't currently justified, but I think it requires a different argument.
> When Woodie Guthrie famously wrote on his guitar that “This machine kills fascists” - a sentiment imitated and snowcloned by later generations of musicians and commentators - nobody worried this was a bad thing. Nobody demanded that somebody stop the machine before it killed again.
My understanding is that Guthrie pasted the "this machine kills fascists" after Japan attacked us and war was declared. Then we were at war with three countries, one run by Nazis, one run by fascists, and one run by a nationalist military junta. Of the three, only Mussolini called himself a fascist, but Americans called them all fascists, and it was our duty to kill them.
Of course, Guthrie was a communist, and cheerleader for the war effort after Germany invaded the USSR. No one (except the American Nazi Party) thought it a bad thing for him to have articulated his animus towards fascists through his music. I grew up listening to Woody. Times were different then, but no one was horrified by his sticker or ditties such as this one...
And in retrospect, it was a good thing. Of course, very few people living today have memories of the threat that fascism held in the 30s and 40s. So, it may be easy for the younger generations to just shrug their shoulders when masked men drag people off the streets. The people doing the dragging may not call themselves fascists, but they definitely qualify as thugs.
Note that the rise of fascism coincides with the demise of those who fought on the Allied side in World War II. Only the sociopaths were thrilled about killing others but the enormous sacrifice of going to war was deemed necessary by the very great evil of fascism. Apparently fascism is wearing a more pleasant face now, with the usual promise of riches in exchange for human rights, and the younger generations think it's going to be different this time. Our parents and grandparents would be horrified by this moment. I, personally, and very sad that I will have to face the fact that many Americans are fascists. They want to see society maximally controlled, and do not much care about the violence wreaked on others as long as it's not them. They also dream of the riches that the sociopathic bandits who have taken control are collecting. Despite the fantasies of ease, this cannot end well for most of us.
> Note that the rise of fascism coincides with the demise of those who fought on the Allied side in World War II.
If you're implying that there was a cause and effect, just about every country that holds elections seems to have a fascist party. So, I don't think it follows that "the rise of fascism coincides with the demise of those who fought on Allied side." But maybe I'm misunderstanding your point.
> grew up listening to Woody. Times were different then, but no one was horrified by his sticker or ditties such as this one...
I don't think Scott's analysis of the sticker is on point. If Woody Guthrie had put the same sticker on a rifle he liked to display, the reception would have been different. It would also have been different if he had bludgeoned someone to death with his guitar.
In Woody Guthrie's time, violence against fascism was held to be justified because fascism was an exceptionally evil movement, inimicable to human rights. But I guess now fascism is just a lifestyle choice? If you have enough money, who needs human rights, amIright?
Prediction markets track odds for the 2026 Midterms and the 2028 Presidential Elections. In theory, if the president committed himself to actions that enabled his party to consolidate power, this would cause shifts in these market prices. In theory someone could build a model that tracked 'net probability points won due to anti-democratic actions' on behalf of the ruling party, where anything over 10 or 15 probability points added would be called 'anti-democratic'. This would require some modeling expertise to pull off but I am sure someone could do it.
I'm not sure that claim #3 is useful. Whether you view political violence as morally acceptable or not, it always exists. When someone is arrested for murder, that is political violence. The political will of the state to limit the killing of people to certain theaters by certain actors is maintained by detaining someone against their will. But I also don't think it is useful to label someone a fascist. Fascism is an ideology, and one cannot know the intent of another person. Rather, people's actions can be fascistic whether or not the person doing those actions is a fascist. People are not arrested for the ideology of murder, they are arrested for doing murder.
The question, then, comes down to what actions are fascistic and whether you support the use of political violence to suppress people who do fascistic things. Of course, unlike with murder, the state apparatus of the United States will not intervene in most fascistic action, because most fascistic actions align with the current interests of the state.
>When someone is arrested for murder, that is political violence.
No, it's not. "Political violence" means the unlawful use of force in furtherance of political ends. Arresting a murder suspect is lawful because the State has a constitutionally-derived right to enforce the law.
That's circular reasoning. The state determines what is lawful, and therefore the state would never be capable of committing political violence. Political violence is the use of force for the furtherance of political ends.
No, that's just a definition. Sure, the state can't commit political violence. But political violence is only one of the many types of violence (legitimate or not).
Trying to widen the definition is one of the big problems I see with discourse today--by widening the definitions of things, you can make unjust things seem more justified by sweeping in other stuff.
Per my response below, definitions are not particularly useful concepts. You say that people are widening the definitions of things, but concepts naturally undergo semantic bleaching and shift. Railing against these changes is just like complaining that nobody uses "whom" anymore. It's a prescriptivist approach. I understand political violence to be any kind of violence that serves a political goal. We can try to narrow that meaning by saying whether it can be lawful or unlawful, state or non-state, but that's just an attempt to give a strict definition to a broad semantic category.
It's not circular, it's definitional. My point is purely semantic. The State is technically incapable of committing political violence. However, elected officials can commit political violence if they exceed their lawful authority in the exercise of their power. Of course in that case they're no longer considered lawful representatives of State power and therefore bear the responsibility for that violence themselves. Just like a lawful execution cannot be properly described as murder (because murder is unlawful killing and lawful execution is ... well, lawful) the State itself can't be ever be said to have committed political violence.
If your point is purely semantic, then there isn't any reason to discuss it. As a descriptivist, I believe words mean what people use them to mean in a given context. And I believe most people understand political violence to refer to violence meant to achieve a political goal. If most people think such violence becomes unpolitical when the state does it, then I concede your point. In that case, though, I'd argue that political violence becomes even more necessary. Otherwise, how are we to protect ourselves from the unpolitical violence of the state?
>The State is technically incapable of committing political violence. However, elected officials can commit political violence if they exceed their lawful authority in the exercise of their power.
Hmm... Given your second sentence, I'm going to take your first as intended to mean: "The State, when acting lawfully, is technically incapable of committing political violence."
But the law is a huge accumulation, starting with the Constitution (writing from the USA), plus amendments, plus thousands of statutes, plus precedents - many of which are vague, many of which conflict with each other. A huge volume of State action is in a gray area, not clearly lawful or unlawful (e.g. all of the disputed actions on immigration law by the current and previous administrations.) So enforcement of a disputed law (which often has political ramifications) might plausibly be viewed as political violence.
I think a State can be considered to commit political violence in certain circumstances; when the agents of the State detain a murderer against the murderer's will, that is not political violence (nor, I would contend, violence); if the agents of the State are detaining members of a certain political party or other minority group based on political reasons, that is political violence (e.g. Erdogan dealing with the coup attempt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Turkish_coup_attempt; he extended the reaction of the State to the Gülenists and this was plainly in order to get rid of political opposition).
Is there a set of words you'd accept that includes the things that Scott meant by "political violence" and excludes the things that he didn't mean by "political violence"?
It's not entirely clear to me from Scott's post what things he doesn't mean when he says political violence. I bring up the example of state-initiated political violence to point out that the notion of objecting to political violence is naïve.
The state enacts violence to maintain itself, and even if you determine that this state-initiated violence does not count as political, that violence still occurs. Scott himself articulates that, at some point, political violence becomes a viable option, "between Orban and Hitler" for Scott. In other words, at some point the violence of the state must be countered with violence, and I'm not sure it's meaningful to say that one of these is political and the other isn't. Rather, the assumption seems to be that the violence of the state is tolerable or good until it sufficiently diverges from one's values. For me, the clearest way to articulate that is to say that people support political violence that furthers their material goals, and oppose political violence that harms their material goals.
If more people agree that the state's violence isn't political, then I am happy to acknowledge that consensus. Though it does seem convenient that the daily violence we tolerate does not count as political violence, whereas the violence that we must avoid except in the most extreme circumstances is political.
Explain to me what is political about "I don't want to be murdered, so I depute the authority to representatives of the government of the people to arrest murderers"?
Okay, we can quibble about "governments are politics" but in general how do we deal with "some people are going around murdering"? Do we say "everyone should have the right to engage in violence, the State gets no power to limit the right of killing certain people to certain actors"? Do we say "it's okay if the State never kills anyone in war or peace, they just arrest murderers but never use force against them, the cops don't get to shoot anyone even in self-defence, and there is no capital punishment"? Where is the line drawn?
I think maybe you misunderstand my point. I believe murderers should be detained. When state officers detain a person because they broke a law of the state, in order to subject them to a court of the state, with consequences determined by the law of the state, I do understand that to be political.
Just because I support it, does not make it non-violent or non-political. We all have a (fuzzy) line where political violence goes from being good or necessary to dangerous and destabilizing. Scott says as much when he states that his is probably "somewhere between Orban and Hitler." He is talking about non-state political violence, but I would argue that he is implying the existence of state political violence. The political violence of Hitler justified a politically violent response. I would rather not mask the political violence of the state as apolitical in order to easily legitimize it.
"The political will of the state to limit the killing of people to certain theaters by certain actors is maintained by detaining someone against their will."
And most people would be very happy that someone running around stabbing people in the neck is detained against their will, given that their will is "I want to run around stabbing people in the neck".
Calling that "political violence" will make nine out of ten cats switch off from listening to whatever point you want to make.
I'm going to stake my own personal line in the sand here.
As a private individual not participating as an official member of an armed military engaged in hostile actions under a regularized command,
the utmost outer bounds of legitimate violence lie where I could usually get away with a self-defense defense to a charge of assault or murder/manslaughter/etc. That is, *imminent* defense of *self, others directly near me, or other sentient beings* against *significant* *physical* threat. And then only to the degree necessary to stop the threat and no further. And in most cases, the moral line lies INSIDE the legal line--there are legally-valid actions that are not morally justified but not the reverse.
Words, beliefs, and political actions (voting, etc) **never**, under any circumstances, pose a significant physical threat to my life or those around me. Thus, political violence is *never* justified. Yes, that includes all cases. No, I would never be justified in assassinating Hitler, unless I were a member of an active, violent revolution against the state and this was part of my military mission, ie an act of war rather than a personal attack.
That said, there are cases where *taking part in a violent revolution* may not only be justified but morally required. But even then, it's only justified *to the degree that you're acting as a military member*. Even for the Allies in WWII, walking into random Germans' homes and shooting them because they were members of the Nazi party *would be unjustified*.
So no. Someone being a "fascist" *or even a dictator* may, possibly, justify *armed revolt*. It will never justify *individual vigilante-style attacks*. Against anyone. And violence by a private individual against a private individual, acting in their personal capacity, other than direct self defense against an imminent, significant physical threat to life or health is NEVER justified.
I think there's a fallacy in how you're handling the trilemma here. (This is the kind of thing that would be tedious to point out on most blogs, but this is ACX, so...)
My read of the blog's position: We can grant that #1 may be true, since it's an empirical question (and see e.g. twitter.) #3 is moral rather than empirical, but you say that it's true that "political violence against fascists is impermissibile" on the weight of political violence being very bad. And therefore, since the trilemma requires one falsehood, #2 is false.
But we've conflated two senses of "bad" in the handling of #3! It's readily apparent (if you take a history course) that political violence is bad in practical terms; it is destructive and generally leads to overall lower utility for all concerned than the modal peaceful situation. It does not follow however that political violence is *morally* bad, in a way which would make it "impermissible" and therefore show that #3 is true.
At best, we could say that #3 being false would be bad in practical terms, because therefore #1 and #2 could be true . And, like, yeah; if there are fascists in America and people are going around shooting them, that's really bad for rule of law and other (practically) important things. But this state of affairs could still be moral, in that we haven't shown that there aren't people who it is moral to do violence to.
In the final analysis, of course, it's a wash; given basically any plausible utilitarian theory, and/or basic acceptance of political liberalism, political violence is pretty clearly morally bad in anything resembling the modern scenario (either because it results in lower-utility outcomes, or because it violates human rights to political expression or rule of law, or whatever.) But the trick that was used to try to get around the necessity of that kind of analysis fails, I think.
That makes sense, and I see where our disagreement lies. I'm a descriptivist with regard to linguistics, so I don't believe that definitions are meaningful. Cognitive linguistics shows that people conceptualize ideas as broad semantic categories, with those categories having fuzzy edges. Any argument that attempts to strictly define political violence (lawful or unlawful, state or non-state, etc.) is not compelling from a cognitive linguistics perspective. Rather, I understand political violence to be anything within the semantic category that includes violence meant to achieve a political end.
"I'm a descriptivist with regard to linguistics, so I don't believe that definitions are meaningful."
Okay, but if "fascist" means "I don't think six year olds should be put on puberty blockers*", then what damn meaning do words have at all? We may as well just grunt and point and jump up and down, because that's what such usage of terms has degraded to.
*Please note! This is rhetorical exaggeration and not meant to be a genuine description of any demands!
As you point out, your example is a rhetorical exaggeration. Descriptivism doesn't mean that words don't have meaning, it means that words don't have *inherent* meaning. If most people agreed that that's what fascism means, then that's what fascism would mean. But because nobody thinks that's what fascism means, it isn't what fascism means.
In any case, I actually agree with Scott's point that we should be careful about overusing the term fascism. Because there is very little consensus on what fascism means (Scott himself points out that attempts to define fascism only get you in the ballpark of its meaning), you might say the word with one semantic context in mind, but the person that you are talking to might bring an entirely different semantic context to the conversation. That doesn't mean that either of our usages is incorrect, in the same way that if I am speaking to a Brit and they call fries "chips," they are not incorrect.
It's best to clarify what one means when one refers to fascism. I could say, "I think this is a fascistic policy in that it is ultra-nationalistic." The other person might say, "I usually think of fascism as having more to do with a cult of personality surrounding a leader or party, but I understand what you mean by calling this policy ultra-nationalistic."
>But against this, most people who say “communist” would be happy enough to replace it with some applicable superset/subset/near-synonym, like Marxist, socialist, anticapitalist, far-leftist, Maoist, etc - and people seem to argue against communism just fine.
I think the analogy holds: people use fascist, authoritarian, far-right and Nazi fairly interchangeably.
Note that Woodie Guthrie performed for the USO during WW2 - to a small but real sense, his machine participated in utterly legitimate fascist-killing. Without this crucial aspect, it would just have been silly and bombastic, but considering the situation, I think it was earned.
The question about in which circumstances is poltical violence warranted can be answered by thinking about the escalation ladder. The escalation ladder refers to usually don't escalate all the way to nuclear weapons (for example) right away. Participants usually limit themselves. It's always dengerous to escalate in a conflict because there's a risk that escalating will give your opponent an advantage, but if you think that you will gain an advantage by escalating, you might do so anyway to get that advantage. Most of the time though, you want to avoid excalating but to do that you have to confinve your opponent that it isn't worth escalating aagainst you. This is why countries spend so much money and resources on big armyies and things like nuclear weapons even if they don't intend to ever go to war. It's because being prepared for war and showing your enemies that you're prepared for war makes war less likely.
The same is true with politics. The question isn't "when do we start killing people?" It's "how do we improve the odds that we will come out on top if and when we get to the killing people stage of political breakdown?" The solution isn't "punch a fascist", it's prepare so that when a fascist tries to punch you he's the one that ends up on his face.
It might be worth mentioning that many theorists don't consider Franco a fascist, but "merely" fascism-adjacent. The actual fascists were the Falangists, and while they became influential, they weren't the ones in actual charge. The Franco regime was in many ways "just" a regular military dictatorship.
Of course, if this was what you intended by "Francoist", then it's particularly precise.
Sure, there were plenty of fascist parties about across much of the globe (including the extremely "soft" Brazilian Integralists, for instance), and several of them came into power during WW2. Franco might not have been a fascist, but the Spanish Falange certainly was. The Iron Guard regime in Romania was (it was so fascist that other fascists thought it was a bit excessive). The Ustasha in Croatia was. And so on.
The Nazis were a weird and somewhat unrepresentative subset, I would say (for one thing, fascism is almost always Christian and frequently Catholic, and the Nazis ditched this bit). Calling the Nazis Nazis is therefore more precise and useful - it doesn't mean they weren't fascists.
"Lictor, unbind the fasces." Learned about that in sixth grade, I think. Along with plebians and patricians and Latins and Etruscans.
This discussion is reminiscent of the controversy over the SPLC's "hate group" designations that led to a guy shooting up the offices of Focus on the Family years ago.
There is something odd about defining fascism as "a type of far-right nationalism". Isn’t "far-right" a place- and time-specific term, making it completely useless for the purpose of clear and lasting definitions? A person in 2045 India will have a completely different understanding from us, or from someone in 1960s Argentina.
People often say words like "nazi" have lost all meaning and just became another term for "asshole", but here it is literally true. "Far right" does not even make a claim at being a useful descriptive term.
Sorry to make a tangential comment, but that X user's framing Julie Pitta's actions as "robbing" a cafe feel like they're meant to mislead. I have no particular horse in this race- I don't, and never have, lived anywhere near the Bay Area. This is my first time hearing of Julie Pitta or the current political situation in San Francisco. But based on a Google search, it seems like Pitta just removed a sign from a political candidate she did not like that was posted in the cafe. I do not condone this, but I disagree that that should be described as "robbing" the cafe. So it appears that @kane is using connotation in order to mislead here.
"it seems like Pitta just removed a sign from a political candidate she did not like that was posted in the cafe."
Ha, here's an opportunity for me to plume myself on superior virtue/be excoriated for not being sufficiently pro-the struggle of truth versus evil.
Way, way back when I was eighteen, there were signs up in the third-level institution I attended that were pro-contraception (this of course was the edgy Student Union stuff about the latest referenda in the Irish culture wars). I disagreed with this, and was tempted to tear them down. But then I reminded myself that no, even if I thought a position was wrong and indeed harmful, the other side had the right to express their views in the public square.
So - was I a stalwart defender of free speech, or a disappointment to Julie Pitta? 😁
> I think it’s probably bad practice to demand that reasonable people not use the word “fascist”. It risks giving unreasonable people a heckler’s veto over every useful term - if some moron says it’s okay to kill environmentalists, we can’t ban the term “environmentalist”
But "fascist" isn't a useful term. If it was one, that hasn't been the case for many, many decades. Today it means "person who is disliked by the speaker". It makes sense to ask people not to use it in arguments for the same reason it makes sense to ask people not to use the word "shithead" in arguments.
Except the Satanic Temple types are all "we don't really worship Satan, we don't believe in a literal Devil, we're just using the trappings to wind up the Fundies" (which is why I think they should be ignored, because they're smug idiots and rather pathetic dress-up, not worth giving them publicity by getting publicly outraged at their stunts. Yes, I would like to smack 'em in the face for the tastelessness of some of their crap*, but better to ignore them and let them pretend they're being so edgy with statues of Baphomet** and Petrine crosses).
Anyway, I agree that "fascist" should be restricted to "really is a fascist" but the term has gone the way of "racist", "transphobe", etc. that it is now functionally meaningless apart from indicating "I think you're a big meanie!"
Oh, I'm sure there are genuine "yes really the Devil" Satanists out there, but the ones grabbing publicity are the likes of the Satanic Temple.
So I think they're dumb (and playing with fire because yeah I believe in the Devil) but that doesn't mean they should be oppressed by force. I might *like* to drag them all off to a dungeon on grounds of being annoying edgelords who are terminally uncool, but nope. Can't do that, shouldn't do that.
If we take "Satan" to be defined by the teachings of the Catholic Church, it's essentially impossible for anyone to worship him sincerely, since he is opposed to the welfare of humanity in general and of each human individually.
You could have a group worshiping a deity that they believe the church has unfairly mislabeled "Satan", but... so what?
> Except the Satanic Temple types are all "we don't really worship Satan, we don't believe in a literal Devil, we're just using the trappings to wind up the Fundies" (which is why I think they should be ignored, because they're smug idiots and rather pathetic dress-up, not worth giving them publicity by getting publicly outraged at their stunts. Yes, I would like to smack 'em in the face for the tastelessness of some of their crap*, but better to ignore them and let them pretend they're being so edgy with statues of Baphomet** and Petrine crosses).
Well sure, that's the way I feel about neo-Nazis too.
America's government routinely engages in murderous violence abroad or social murder of its own people, and its political system is impervious to changing that and if anything becoming more closed
I think 3 is an increasingly untenable position - although the one caveat I'd add is that violence should target power-brokers making decisions to i.e. blow up Venezuelan fishing boats or aid genocide in Gaza, and not some guy with a swastika tattoo.
I've been called Nice Hitler on here so obviously I don't believe “violence is permissible when you can classify someone with a loaded term so vague that people regularly use it to describe expedited restaurant permitting”. But sheer devil's advocate: consider the French resistance. They (obviously) believed there were lots of fascists in France, that it was acceptable to use violence against them, but on the other hand killing the first guy in a Nazi uniform you see would not be worth the information you reveal about your modus operandi.
I think the problem with 2 is that it implicitly assumes that whether somebody is legitimate target of violence is purely a moral question and does not depend on empirical factors like the prevalence of the ideology. If an evil ideology is only supported by one percent of the population and they are indeed extremely bad by the standards of their society, it might be okay to kill them, but not if they are a third of the country. In that case, even if they are super evil attacking them will just provoke retaliation on a comparable scale, which is a losers game, much better to cooperate in the prisoner’s dilemma, even though both of you reasonably prefer to defect, if the other would cooperate.
Honestly, even Scott falls into this a little because he thinks that whether revolution is justified is purely a matter of what the government has done and not dependent on things like how likely the revolution is actually to succeed. If you could overthrow Stalin you obviously should, but the most likely consequence of rebellion is red army brutally putting it down and Stalin potentially responding with even more tyranny. Now granted, sometimes it’s worth rebelling, even if you would not win, because for example, if you rebelled against Hitler during World War II, it would weaken him as he would have to pull resources from the war effort. Still, my main point is that you have to look at factors like the prevalence of the ideology, the likelihood of success and the broader effects instead of just looking at the moral character and actions of the government and the ideology.
Also, while it’s true that you can miss use stochastic terrorism the same way you can miss use incitement to murder that doesn’t mean it’s a useless concept. You should be able to call people very bad, but if you go around celebrating someone’s murder or even don’t make it clear that your audience understands that murder is bad, you are in fact being irresponsible in the present political climate. Insisting that no moral responsibility should attached to your actions because a bad actor is insisting on a completely ridiculous level of responsibility. Regardless of what level of responsibility you grant doesn’t make any sense. It’s not like you being okay with irresponsibility. Will change the opinion on the Trump administration. Some level of risk of provoking murder is acceptable for communicating valuable ideas, but there is such a thing as being too willing to take such risks. You can acknowledge that calling people bad is fine while admitting that there are actors in the public sphere who are frankly reckless with their speech, including the Trump administration.
> Many Americans hate other races, want the state to control the economy, and want to abolish individual rights?
They transparently do. If you don't see them, you might be looking in the wrong direction.
They might phrase things slightly differently though. For example, they might say things like "Whiteness is a disease" so still deny they hate a race because "race isn't real"; or say they only want "common-sense restrictions" on some individual rights.
The Italian fascists did their best to -protect- Jewish people, and other "undesirables", from the Nazis, even after the Germans occupied Italy.
Fascist != racist.
And yeah, lots of Americans want the state to control the economy. "Abolish the fed" is a pretty extreme position very few people adhere to, and yet it's basically the position that people who don't want the state controlling the economy must support.
And everybody disagrees about what individual rights should be abolished, but outside the most principled libertarians, pretty much everybody wants some of them abolished.
One fairly obvious test is that fascists (Italian Blackshirts, German Brownshirts, Romanian Iron Guard, Spanish Falange, Brazilian Integralists, American Silvershirts, Irish Blueshirts*, Hungarian Arrow-Cross) engage in political violence, and therefore violence against them is justified.
[*To be fair, the Blueshirts were formed to defend Cumann na nGaedheal party rallies from by IRA goon squads.]
I haven't seen any "MAGA" or "Trumpist" or Republican street fighters attacking anyone.
Scott, this is…beyond disappointing. You are very smart, an excellent writer and have displayed both a high level of integrity and a strong moral compass, on top of which you (for obvious reasons) have a very strong stake in the integrity and livability of the U.S. as a nation. So when I say that this piece is staggeringly counterproductive–counterproductive towards its own stated goal of keeping people peaceful and restrained–I hope you will understand that in doing so I am desperately trying to help and that my sole and only interest here is keeping all of this from getting even worse.
You got one thing partially right: nonviolence is fundamental to any sane and correct response to the things the U.S. government is doing. But “partially." It will continue to be the only sane and correct response even if Trump ignores judicial orders, cancels elections or wipes his ass with the U.S. Constitution on live TV. “Nonviolent” most certainly does not mean “compliant,” mind you. It just means “nonviolent.” No bombs, no bullets, no bricks, no fists[1]. I hope I don’t have to remind you of all people of the power of nonviolence; I directly credit “In Favor of Niceness, Community and Civilization” for helping shift my views in that direction.
Unfortunately, I think you got pretty much everything else wrong. Starting with how fundamentally silly it is to write a piece splitting hairs over whether to call the jackbooted thugs “fascist” or not. Yes, people are scared and angry and ready to lash out. But the notion that the reason they lash out will be because somebody call the goon squads running around kidnapping and shooting people “fascist” is the galaxy-brained take to end all galaxy-brained takes. If people DO lash out with violence–and I will say again that they absolutely SHOULD NOT–it will be not be because somebody called the thugs too many mean words. It will either be because of the trauma of experiencing their communities and neighborhoods being invaded and brutalized or from the fear of seeing it happen to others. Fear and trauma make people stupid and violent, and masked men with guns are quite a lot better at inflicting those things than any seven-letter word.
Which brings me to the next point: political violence. Of course I understand who you were talking to and why, but nevertheless talking about “avoiding it” and it being "unacceptable" as if it were not CURRENTLY HAPPENING is not just tone deaf in the extreme, it’s also directly aiding the I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-fascist administration’s goals of painting their extraordinary actions as “business as usual.” Let’s make this clear:
1. Political violence is currently happening in significantly more extreme, more visible ways than usual[2]. The amount of it that ISN’T coming from the right is a rounding error.
2. The primary dealer of political violence right now is the U.S. Government. It has thus far been keeping a veneer of lawfulness over this violence, but the veneer is often paper thin.[3]
3. The violence is being actively cheered on by most of the same people who have been steadfastly supporting Trump all along. Nobody with even rudimentary pattern-recognition should expect that very many of these people will stop cheering if and when the veneer of lawfulness is discarded.
4. This means that “political violence in America is morally unacceptable (at this time)” this is egregiously wrong. It SHOULD be unacceptable. It is to you and many others. But it is perfectly acceptable to millions of your countrymen. They quite clearly want lots more of it. This should be staggeringly obvious to anyone who’s been paying ANY attention the past few months.
5. The violence is not being done at random, or merely because I-can’t-believe-they’re-not-fascists like violence (though of course they do). It’s being done for the purpose of consolidating power.
Which brings us to the topic of civil war, the point where I feel you go the most egregiously wrong. Of course civil war is terrible and no sane person wants it. But speaking about it as if that were a choice that was in their hands is preposterous. The U.S. left cannot possibly start a civil war right now. Nor the U.S. right, for that matter, if we’re talking only of the general populace. It’s not 1776 anymore: nobody is starting a “war” with a world-class superpower with small arms. When Tolkien wrote “so might a child threaten a mail-clad knight with a bow of string and green willow,” he was still imagining a far closer contest than that. At worst you could have an(other) insurrection or two, certainly nothing that could be called a “war.”
No, the only entity in the United States of America that is CAPABLE of starting a war against the citizens of the United States of America is the U.S. Federal Government. That’s it. That’s the whole list. Despite that very short list, it’s terrifyingly plausible. Because it’s not really “the U.S. Federal Government,” an entity that has a history of generally sober (if often ruthless) judgement in the sphere of geopolitics. No, instead it’s the commander-in-chief of the U.S. military, a man who a year ago was ranting about immigrants in Ohio eating cats and dogs on live T.V. That’s right, the only person who can say “yes” to a U.S. civil war right now is one Donald J Trump. Everyone else’s choices are about how easy to make it for him, if he chooses to do that.
And that, ultimately, is what it is ALL about. How easy it is for Trump to wield force against the people of the U.S. He’s already doing so more than any president in our lifetimes. And anyone even half paying attention to the words and actions coming out of the White House should have zero doubt that he’s eager to do much more than that. You talk about the dichotomy between frog-boiling and “revolution;” the correct choice is neither. Both of them give the White House much more ability to wield political violence, one slowly and one quickly. You must reject both.
And that is why I so ardently believe both that open opposition to this government is vitally important but that it MUST be visibly and unquestionably peaceful. You must push back EVERY time they try to escalate the violence and coercion, but you must do so without EVER giving them anything that looks like an excuse. You can see just how slaveringly eager they are for an excuse by the ever more ridiculous firehose of lies coming out of the White House: everyday urban crime is an emergency that requires the national guard, Portland is a battleground, and left-wing terrorists lurk in every shadow. But even those baseless lies are accompanied by real, serious escalations, and need to be opposed. Court battles need to be fought. People need to show up and be as simultaneously highly-visible and undeniably-non-threatening as possible every time they send out the goon squads: those Portlanders in the inflatable costumes have exactly the right idea. And of course the lies and violence and corruption and above all the staggering incompetence all need to be exposed, need to be shown as far as possible as often as possible. It needs to be crystal clear who is doing the violence, who is doing the escalation, who is telling the lies and above all what the objective is.
And all of that requires a clarity and resolution that is totally incompatible with this sort of asinine pearl-clutching. YES, they’re fascists YES, we should call them fascists. YES we should be talking about ways in which they are doing fascist stuff[4]. I very much doubt it will bias people toward violence in any way their actual actions haven’t already, but if you’re worried, finding the right rhetorical flourishes to point out their incompetence and absurdity will be FAR more helpful than quibbling over the word. And definitely a better use of your time and talents than these trite and ridiculous false equivalencies about how social media moderation or accurately describing people’s political view or enforcing basic accountability on the powerful are basically the same as a strongman using the single most powerful political entity in the history of the world to torment people he doesn’t like. That is not being fair and equitable and seeing multiple perspectives. It is being a stooge.
I don’t want to end this with an insult, even in the name of calling a fish a fish. So I’ll say again that as deeply as this piece dismayed me, I do still like and respect your intelligence, talent and integrity. Having taken several pages to write all that out, maybe it was not-so-obvious why this was a counterproductive thing to write (though millions of people HAVE been getting it right). And certainly fear and stress don’t help with clear thinking; as strident as I am, my deepest and sincerest sympathies go to you and everyone else living through this (even having long-since left the U.S., it’s a significant source of both for me as well). So I absolutely trust that you will be trying your best to help keep the world from shattering. But a wise man once said “reality doesn’t grade on a curve.” Outcomes are what matters. Let’s produce some better outcomes.
[1] Sandwiches are perfectly OK though: sane adults can understand the difference between throwing a brick and throwing a footlong.
[2] Which is still much, much less extreme and visible than it could be, or than it has been in other times and places. But mostly humans are calibrated based on their own experiences, not based on some absolute scale or abstract sense of history.
[3] And of course “lawful” has never been incompatible with “horrifying and unjust.”
[4] If you would like a more precise discussion of what that means, I refer you to this excellent piece. Written, you’ll note, before the election and quite predictive.
Is it 'legitimate political violence' if I agree with it, and 'dangerous domestic terrorism' if I don't?
Definitions matter. I remember having a discussion with an otherwise intelligent person while living in the US who dropped the line 'Feelings are facts.' without irony. If people use 'fascist' as a label for someone they strongly disagree with, then it doesn't legitimise political violence. I think the right approach is to leave aside the terminological debate and lay out clear red lines which would justify violence - Scott more-or-less does this; but the talk about fascism is mostly orthogonal to that. Ultimately it comes back to the debate over prescriptive vs normative use of language: do words mean what the dictionaries say, or what people intend?
So... why does it even matter whether violence is "justified" or not? The real question is, does it even make sense? You have utilitarian sympathies, don't you? What do you think you're actually accomplishing even by just attacking the administration on this blog? If they have the means to seize federal power, they really don't care what a small group of west coast libertarians think of them. I doubt it would even convince your own readers (specifically the ones who support the administration), seeing as you spent the last decade inadvertently making the case for why such extreme measures were necessary in the first place. "Don't fight battles where you don't have a good chance of accomplishing something" is warfare 101.
I hope you'll reconsider when you inevitably get your own visit from the Secret Service. None of us wants to see anything happen to you or your blog.
"And fascism is a type of far-right nationalism. "
No, no, no, why does this zombie myth never die?? Fascism is so patently obviously socialist/Left wing that it beggars belief that any on the Left still bother to pretend to argue the proposition.
If one replaced "Jew" with "Israeli" in Mein Kampf, we would have a modern leftist academic textbook! It's why China morphed from Maoist communism to post-Mao fascism in a few short years - they were so close in spirit and practice, with the major difference being moving from ownership of the means of production (communism) to control of the means of production by introducing free-market efficiencies that were ruthlessly beholden to the State (fascism). All the other governmental sociopathies stayed intact, such as hypernationalism, racial preferencing for Han Chinese over other minorities, complete control of the press, and the rest.
Fascism (National Socialism, the European variety as commonly understood) is a sub-branch of socialism that arose as a direct ideological mimic of Russian fascism (aka International Socialism, or communism) after 1917 except with property rights intact (it was evolutionary socialism not revolutionary socialism) and Jews substituted for capitalist/bourgeois (much early Russian propaganda had both). A gigantic state apparatus in Germany that controlled the means of production and the direction of resources into creating an empire is an exact description of the Soviet Union, which had an empire stretching across Asia.
Many German and Soviet official speeches can be mirrored without issue by swapping Jew for Capitalist in the text. NB – there is Left wing racism (state sponsored, all encompassing, institutionalized eg Nazi Germany, Stalin’s oppression of minorities including (guess who!) Jews, the UN decades long demonization of (guess who!) Israel and Jews) and Right wing racism (individuals being racist to other individuals). Of the two, the Left-Fascist version is by far the most dangerous.
Think up a new name for Right wing racism if you like, just don’t pretend it is Fascism. Left, take ownership of your blood-soaked past and your current ideological sociopathies, it’s the first step to a cure.
So your belief is that one might find, for instance, the text "But an Israeli can never be rescued from his fixed notions. It was then simple enough to attempt to show them the absurdity of their teaching. Within my small circle I talked to them until my throat ached and my voice grew hoarse. I believed that I could finally convince them of the danger inherent in the Marxist follies. But I only achieved the contrary result. It seemed to me that immediately the disastrous effects of the Marxist Theory and its application in practice became evident, the stronger became their obstinacy" from a modern leftist academic textbook?
It seems to me you are using a weak definition of fascism and a strong definition of political violence. When defined that way, of course there is an inherent issue - if 30-50% of the country falls into the weak definition of fascist, the only end result of justifying political violence is civil war. However, a more strong definition of fascism and weaker definition of political violence results in much less of an issue. The slogan I heard most often in leftist spaces was "punch a nazi" and not "kill a fascist", although to be fair I don't know how much that has changed in recent years given the state of twitter.
Personally, I don't know where my "line" is. I don't think even minor forms are justifiable (or effective, although that's a different conversation) until a person hits somewhere near the "wants an ethnostate" area of right-leaning authoritarianism. My line for anything more extreme than that is far beyond my line for just leaving the country out of disgust.
PS: Maybe a hot take but I think the deportation (successful or not) of non-citizens for political speech also falls under a weak definition of political violence. It has the exact same goal of discouraging political expression through punishment.
I'm not sure I'm familiar with the car attack you're talking about, is this the James Alex Fields one or a different one? The James one is the only one I know of, and afaik that was a pretty clear case of the guy being both mentally unstable/schizophrenic *and* a nazi/white supremacist. Agreed that guns have no place whatsoever near protests, I remember there being a pretty recent case where that caused injuries/deaths.
I'm generally in agreement with it being better to just let people show their true colors and "hoist their own petard", but I think some exceptions can be made for community gatekeeping.
Government throughout the West has been taking away our rights for more than a century. AJP Taylor wrote, "Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman… He could travel abroad or leave his country forever without a passport or any sort of official permission."
Now we can’t build on our own property without government approval, we are charged 30% for the privilege of having a job, and we have to know whether the legal way to clean a greasy machine part is to pour solvent on the part and wipe it or to pour solvent on the rag and wipe it. The overwhelming intrusiveness of government in our every-freaking-day life is such that it strikes at least half the country as crucial to their survival which clown gets elected as President.
The fact that we are even having conversations like this is symptomatic of the fact that Our Democracy effectively died decades ago.
I find the project of trying to find an axiomatic / coherent moral framework to be inherently flawed.
I think it's hard to define violence, or understand its effects. There is actual violence and threats of violence, and various amounts of credibility to those threats. Threats of violence can have chilling effects and can shape society in really fundamental ways.
Overall, society is a complex dynamical system https://dlants.me/climbing-ed-cla.html . While we are learning to understand these sorts of systems better, and characterize them through concepts like attractors and phase transitions, I think we are still far from being able to tell what the actual consequences of any particular action might be.
Even if you could predict the outcome of a particular action with some certainty, I think there's the question of defining morality. From my perspective, our sense of morality is built upon our evolutionary history, and as such is something that is fundamentally built upon local heuristics (in Kahneman's terms, morality primarily resides in system 1, rather than system 2). Attempts to extrapolate our moral heuristics via logic or formal systems will ultimately lead one to discover contradictions, or to arrive at conclusions that are absurd and no longer feel human.
Which still leaves one with a question, which I think you are exploring in this post Scott, of what is one to do? How does one make decisions and act if one accepts these things?
I guess I have two ideas.
One was expressed to me by a friend when we were discussing things recently, and I think it's a really useful parable: Imagine you're trapped in a mine. There is no hope for escape. No one will ever find you, or know the actions you take. I think in a situation like this, you're still going to comfort the children.
The other is something from the existentialist tradition. You might accept that from a logical / formal / mathematical frame, all of this is absurd. However, we are not experiencing the world through that frame. We are all fixed in a human frame. As such you might as well embrace your human frame. I think we can choose what feels moral and meaningful for us to do. We can understand that ultimately this choice is arbitrary, but choose it nonetheless, without seeking to appeal to something outside of ourselves (some set of axioms or universal consistency or some knowledge that we are right).
Appreciate your writing! I think a lot of us are grappling with these questions currently.
The only problem here is a binary thinking: you either are A fascist or you are NOT a fascist. Some might see some potential difference between shooting Hitler and shooting a young mother who voted for him
(And also: what if political violence is unacceptable, but can become necessary if other conditions become unacceptable)
There's a kind of "if you pose me a direct paradox, my brain will begin to emit smoke while I repeat DOES NOT COMPUTE" energy to this particular format of "these three things, without any nuance whatsoever, cannot technically logically be true propositions simultaneously"
I think basically every modern first world country is fascist, we just don't use that term anymore in anything like a meaningful way.
Nationalism should properly be seen in contradiction, not to the other modern ideologies, but the context in which it arose: An emphasis of national identity over local identity. Texas and Michigan are the only states with strong identities anymore; New York City and New Orleans are cities with strong identities. But mostly people identify first and foremost as "American"; this is nationalism, from the context that gave rise to it, where it was about forging a national identity out of a large disparate group of more local identities.
Likewise, basically every first world country operates, economically, as some degree of indirect command economy, the unholy merger of government and corporate powers; the federal government establishes priorities that corporations follow, and in turn the corporations exercise considerable control over government priorities. See the rise and fall of DEI for one way this operates, and the revolving door of government jobs to corporate sinecures for those who toe the corporate line for the other.
The emphasis on national interests over individual rights is basically how modern taxation operates. Again, from a historical context, the idea that the government would take a quarter or more of your income - two out of every eight hours worked is worked for the government, or four out of eight for many European nations - would seem frankly insanely tilted in favor of the national interests over individual rights.
Large standing armies are the norm; militarized police are, likewise, increasingly the norm. From a historical perspective, our societies are incredibly militarized.
The US is unique in how -little- we suppress the political opposition, and yet every administration has engaged in it for the past century, whether targeting anarchists and communists or right-wing people or people who disagreed too loudly with the government about anything the government currently cares a lot about.
So I kind of laugh at the accusations of "fascism" flying around. We're not arguing over whether or not we should be fascist, we're arguing over which exact flavor of fascism we're going to live under.
>Likewise, basically every first world country operates, economically, as some degree of indirect command economy, the unholy merger of government and corporate powers; the federal government establishes priorities that corporations follow, and in turn the corporations exercise considerable control over government priorities. See the rise and fall of DEI for one way this operates, and the revolving door of government jobs to corporate sinecures for those who toe the corporate line for the other.
It's funny. In one of the other threads people were talking about whether democratic forms of Communism and Fascism were possible. I suggested that partial versions of both were possible, and, as part of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/fascism-cant-mean-both-a-specific/comment/165183895 suggested that part of such a thing might contain
>corporatism (aka private-public partnerships - in some form these are pretty pervasive)
Yeah, as far as I know, _that_ part of Fascism, at least, is in every nation in the West (and elsewhere as well), much as you describe in the paragraph I quoted.
“ But it wouldn’t serve Gavin Newsom’s purpose to call Stephen Miller a far-right nationalist authoritarian corporatist, because Gavin Newsom specifically cares about the negative connotation of “fascist”, rather than its meaning. I trust he’s relying on some sort of weaker negative connotation, like “far-right nationalist etc “ . This is probably the crux of the issue . I would prefer ethnonationalist Christian fuckamentalist. But it’s an important point what we call people and what connotations we attach to words - I would ask is fascism evil - as you stated. Most fascist (maybe all) have been murderous , brutal , torture and often on a large scale and against their own citizens ( when they disobey or don’t get with the message ) (the same goes for many Marxist or Marxist like regimes ) . Interestingly some might say USA has already slipped into the brutal category , in terms how it’s dealing with citizens and murderous ( blowing up boats in the Caribbean - and who knows who they were Maybe some MAGA fishermen in a day trip) . Just some thoughts.
Probably worth mentioning that communists generally, but the Soviets specifically had a habit of accusing random political enemies of being fascists to engender WW2 jingoism in support of suppressing, expropriating, and eventually killing them.
Poles, Ukrainians, random farmers and generally the inconvenient group du jour were labelled fascists. If you read first hand sources from the era, the verbiage and tactics were essentially the same. Hard to believe there wasn't a direct transmission of propaganda style from the Soviets to the American left
Right, no one in Ukraine cares about the Germans. They know fascist means counterrevolutionary / reactionary, both then and now, and identify as such.
Which, imo, is the most succinct way to describe the term in its American application. A fascist is a counterrevolutionary and vice versa. Which is how you get "looser zoning == fascist"
Just to note that I was mentally humming Manic Street Preachers' "If You Tolerate This, Then Your Children Will Be Next" even before I got to Scott's link in the piece 😁
Might disagree with some of the politics, but they made some great songs!
Communism isn't evil, authoritarian dictatorship is. And you can have communism without it. You can't have fascism without it, because it is what fascism is, when it was a corruption of what communism wanted to be.
> 2. Fascists are an acceptable target for political violence
> 3. Political violence in America is morally unacceptable (at the current time)
Logically, only the last two are in actual conflict, and I could rephrase the 2nd one as "[designated group] are an acceptable target for political violence". So it seems obvious that the 2nd one must be wrong.
Of course, if no such person in [designated group] exists, then the whole thing is irrelevant, since no one is actually an acceptable target.
For clarity: state violence physihcal violence performed by state agents, as well as coersion or threats by the state. It is not automatically bad (most people prefer criminals be arrested and incarcerated). When I say "state violence against political opponents" I am being very specific: using the state to target people/groups based on their politics. There is a reason the NG arent being deployed to Red State cities.
Otherwise, I don't know how to react to your positions. It seems to fall into a few buckets: it's not totally unique to trump, he doesn't really mean it, he failed to do the bad thing he promised to do.
Like, just because America built concentration camps in WW2 doesn't make it good that we are doing it now? Just because he didn't "lock her up" doesn't make threatening to jail your opponents acceptable? Just because his promised use of violence on Democrats hasn't happened doesn't mean it's not a threat? Just because illegal immigrants are a political category rather than an ethnic one doesn't make purging them acceptable (especially given the overlap of the political category and ethnic/racial categories align so closely).
It's bad, and I don't know why you are ok with it.
I'm not going to play your game and pretend chanting 'lock her up' at a rally was just a primal desire for non-partisan anti-corruption. That's disingenuous and you should know better.
But even if it WAS a reasonable interpretation, it would still be bad. It is bad when the head of state decides who to investigate and prosecute. Do you WANT a return of the Star Chamber?
The problem with the Star Chamber was that it had not only the power to investigate and prosecute, but the power to judge and declare punishments, and was only notionally constrained to actual laws. AND that it was secret. IE it arrogated to itself all the facets of government.
If all they can do is prosecute before an independent judge and jury, using laws that were passed by someone else...well...yeah. That's the executive's *job*. And the only one with independent power in the Executive IS the head of state (in the US system). There is no such thing as an independent DOJ/prosecutor--that's a constitutional abomination. Congress can't carve off some of the president's authority and give it to someone else; the president can delegate it, but it can't be taken from him.
I'd say that Article II courts (ie administrative courts) are actually closer to the Star Chamber than anything the president is doing now.
* Judge and prosecutor tightly linked? Yup.
* Unfair, arcane proceedings that don't give proper due process (by normal court standards)? Yup.
* Making up their own laws (even if they call them regulations)? Check.
* Secret? Mostly check. They don't have to publish their findings, their actions are not precedental, etc.
* Violation of separation of powers? Check check check.
But those are "non-controversial" (among academics and fans of government power generally) unless they take a position those academics don't like.
They also, er, are civil courts without imprisonment power.
To be clear I'm not going to argue that the administrative state isn't a problem, it's just not capable of locking people up without buy-in from the judicial branch.
So they can't imprison you. But they can put an non-dischargeable (in bankruptcy) judgement of ludicrous size and then play silly games like claim it's not a final judgement and you need to appeal within the system, which will take until the heat death of the universe...yeah. That's lots better. /sarcasm
I don't think your interpretation of fascism works.
(a) George Orwell, long ago, wrote that "fascism" had ceased to mean anything except an expression of disapproval. (Just as "democracy" has ceased to mean anything except an expression of approval.) That remains true currently.
(b) The common tendency is to call anyone "right wing" a fascist. But "right wing" itself is not a well defined category. It can refer to anarchocapitalists; constitutionalist libertarians; classical liberals; American-style conservatives who believe in an originalist interpretation of the Constitution; European-style king/land/army/established Church conservatives; nationalists generally; racists; theocrats, provided they aren't Muslim theocrats . . . There just are no positive traits shared by all of these; only the negative trait of being targets for leftist hostility. Note, for example, that Javier Milei, a self-identified anarchocapitalist (and in practice a pragmatic free market libertarian), gets called a "fascist."
(c) I think that saying that "fascist" should not be used to mean "people it's okay to kill" is too late. That ship sailed back in the 1930s.
(d) There is a line of verse that says "To kill in war is not murder" (it might be from Robinson Jeffers), and you can argue for doing violence in war. But then there is a body of thought about what constitutes a just war or a legitimate casus belli. And there is also the question of whether you think it's prudent to take up war. In any case, if it's not war, turning to violence is a matter for the criminal law. There isn't a "they were fascists" or "they were on the wrong side politically" defense for charges of murder, and I think it's best that there shouldn't be.
Fascists just need to get over themselves and embrace the label. Communism was approximately as bad as fascism and yet today's communist sympathisers don't typically get all defensive when their opponents literally call them communists.
The problem they both share is authoritarianism, which I'd roughly define as when somebody wins an election with a deviation from independent estimates of more than 10%p. Or if there is no election, obviously.
Do they need to own it, or are they really self-blind enough to not know they are fascist? Like with free speech, it was super important to the Right, but now they are suppressing it more than Democrats ever did. Orders of magnitude different. But do they realize it? It seems like a lot of issues important to the 'Right' during a campaign, go out the window when in power. They don't care about free speech at all, but do they make the connection and have any internal self reflection on that? To realize they are the baddies?
I'm not trying to say whether politicians in power now are fascist or not. I'm saying there are plenty of people in America, where if you described fascism to them, would support it. But the label itself has far more taboo associated to it than the label "communist".
Trump is the POTUS, and I'm not sure that _he_ has any self reflection. On most anything he says (particularly lacking on any statement containing "worst", "best" or other extremal adjectives).
There are plenty of people being called communists by their opponents, such as, well, basically all Democrats by Republicans, who do in fact get defensive about it. Zohran Mamdani, for instance, basically the leftmost prominent Democrat at the moment, denies the label here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEMo_D2S8G0
Perhaps he denied being a communist because he isn't one. For example, I'd deny being a furry because I'm not one, that doesn't mean the label "furry" is taboo, or that being a furry is completely unacceptable.
It's instructive that Mamdani doesn't say something like "it's unacceptable to call someone a communist" or "it's unacceptable to believe communism is good". He just says 'I'm not a communist' and moves on.
I mean, you very directly are. You are saying that non-violent fascists shouldn't be considered exceptional enough - should be considered too normal - to warrant measures such as "murdering them in the streets".
To be clear, I agree with this! I think fascists *shouldn't* be considered exceptional enough, at this time, to warrant arbitrarily exterminating the lot of them. I think that SJ has gone *way too far* in de-normalising fascists - e.g., you actually have to make this post. But as a simple matter of fact: yes, you are "trying to normalize fascism", and it'd be better to defend that than to deny it.
> political violence will always be inconvenient; it will always be tempting to put it off until some further red line is crossed. But if we always give into that impulse, nobody will ever resist dictatorship or start a revolution against an unjust government.
I would like to note that resistance against an unjust government doesn't necessarily have to involve political violence. Mass non-violent civil disobedience is also a method to dismantle oppressive institutions.
Political Violence has been happening for awhile by the Right towards the Left. But the other re-framing that happens is "its a mental health issue". Every time someone on the Left is killed, suddenly the Right is "this was a mental health issue".
Take a look at all the mass killings in last decade, and large percentage is from the Right.
But as soon as it is a Right on Left killing, everyone on the Right is suddenly very concerned and deeply touched by the need for better help for the "mentally ill'. Totally ignoring that it is mostly the Right leaning that are in the basement soaking up hate while polishing their guns.
The Left kills one guy, and suddenly there is outrage. There was no outrage for everyone dying on the Left, there was actual cheering. The Right has been cheering on political violence for awhile now.
The Right cheered and celebrated when environmentalist were killed. And at numerous rallies, called for killing Hillary and wanting her dead.
1142nd comment: Words to describe Trump as least as good (resp. badly) as 'fascist': 1. Despot 2. Dictator 3. Coupist 4. Autocrat 5. Tyrant - Though he "jokingly" wished to be "dictator for one day" https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_slFT6lw_l8 (i.e. usurping all needed powers on that one day, to be for all following days the 'real ruler' without 'silly' constraints - else there would be zero sense in being dictator for "one day" or as he said before: "day one" - otoh, it seems Trump does not even know the meaning of the term "dictator" - and surely not what 'fascist' means.), I 'd prefer despot or autocrat. But, as those sound Greek to most: "king" as in "NO KINGS" is fine, too.
But what to call Trumpists?! Oh, 'Trumpist' is actually excellent. As Peronist was or Francoist/Maoist/Stalinist etc.. Glad, we so easily can stop insulting fellow citizens who never read the wikipedia entry about corporatism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism
To clarify: I do call Trump neither a fascist nor a despot, because I do not think he is the one or aspires to be the other - I do admit he could be called that way, depending on definitions and exegesis. I agree that calling people 'fascists' who do not call themselves that way is pretty much always counter-productive - and in most cases: plain wrong.
The real problem with "fascist" is exactly its too vague definition. Unlike "environmentalists", where many self-identify as such, basically none of the political targets who are called fascist self-identify as that.
Therefore it should become a slander (spoken) or libel, after Congress specifies what the characteristics of a fascist are. Franco, Mussolini, Hitler; Xi in China now.
The evil of Hitler is different, and far worse, than the fascism of Mussolini or Franco, and in the Spanish Civil War, there would have been greater evil done had the Stalinists won.
Fascists have some 3-6 specific characteristics, which no elected Americans have all of -- tho exactly what characteristics are required to be honestly labeled a fascist remain unclear. "Almost fascist" is the kind of far weaker rhetoric that we should strive for, because it implicitly argues against justifying violence.
Scott Alexander asks if it is ok to kill fascists. Well...
...before drawing the knife, the non-fascist should consider: “maybe the fascists are better at this than me.”
Fascism, unlike left-wing ideologies, is one of the voluntaristic ideologies. As opposed to intellectual ideologies.
That is, it is one of the ideologies that glorifies will & ability to act, and looks down on intellectual hair-splitting debates of what the founding ideological fathers really meant.
If you try to kill them, they will cheer you along. Since that’s the triumph-of-the-will, I-dominate-you-or-you-dominate-me, game their ideology commits them to. And they tend to be rather good at it.
The German communists of the 1930s learned this the hard way. One of the reasons the Nazis won, was that the SA was better at beating up communists than the communists were at beating up Nazis. The communists beat up Nazis for historic-materialistic reasons. The Nazis beat up communists because beating up opponents is fun and what power is about.
A slight segway: The Economist interviewed one of the founders of the New Right many years ago. He was a lot of fun, and among other things he remarked that in his youth he had attended Antifa-like gatherings where English-major hippie-and emo-types talked about the necessity of the revolution. He broke in at some point and said: “Say, do any of you own a gun?” Of course no-one did. “Well, I own a gun. And most of my friends own a gun”.
I would not vote for the guy, but it was hard not to chuckle.
It could but mostly doesn’t because so many college professors & other high status folk support socialism of some sort, which is so close to communism.
All those celebrating the murder of C Kirk are saying he was so evil it was good for him to be murdered. Not merely killed in some risky protest, but targeted. Based on the lie that was a fascist, thus ok to be murdered.
This made me think of Orwell. In Homage to Catalonia Orwell summed up his attitude towards the Spanish civil war as, “If each person killed one fascist then the war would be over, how hard can it be?” He of course learned that it wasn’t that simple. Being anti-fascist and killing them wasn’t sufficient to be on the side of good. His experiences in that war led directly to his thoughts in 1984.
Once again with this piece Scott demonstrates why he is one of the few intelligent center-leftists around.
And yet, he “cheats” by refusing to state clearly that point 1 (“Many Americans are fascists“) is almost certainly false today, by leaning on “well, it might not be false in the future” and the largely irrelevant here “people should be allowed to claim untrue things”.
Just because in a country that still has a First Amendment (despite the clear preferences of the majority of Scott’s fellow leftists) one has a right to say something doesn’t make it true, or quite possibly true. Nor is it a reason to ignore whether or not it is true!
And the fact that something *might* be true in the future doesn’t change the fact that it is false now.
This is just how political discourse works in the current year. The firehose of flasehood is just a special case of the Firehose, writ large. Set loose 79 ideologically potent memes. If #4, #27 and #80 conquer the arena, and together imply that every conceivable atrocity you might visit upon your enemy is their fault and they had it coming, then you've won. It doesn't matter if #12 utterly contradicts #14, or if #20 and #31 together imply it would be moral to eradicate the entire human race. The sort of people fluent in the 'art of the hose' find these logical complaints hilarious.
I too dislike the use of "fascist" as a cudgel, and try not to use it that way. But as a term, it is analytically accurate and powerful and I’m not going to give that up. If I say that the Trump regime is fascist, it’s not because I hate them and want to hurt them. It’s because I believe that is the most salient term for what they are doing, and to the extent I hate them and want to hurt them, it’s downstream from that. They are fascists, they want to hurt me, I want them to go away but it’s clear some hurting will be involved.
So. While I admire Scott’s willingness to think clearly about hard issues, he is missing what is really going on. Fascists are already hurting people (most obviously immigrants but also scientists, government workers, trans people, and so many others); the question is how to respond. Violence may not be a good tactic but it is most definitely morally acceptable, we are already under a regime of violence, don’t kid yourself about that.
"person who it is acceptable to hurt because of their politics" I think that already crosses my red lines. Once someone has a "[category of] person who it is acceptable to hurt", that already restricts the part of belief-space they live in. "because of their politics" seems to be often tacked on as a justification for feeling good about wanting to hurt people in the first place.
Yes, if you take your moral philosophy examples far enough, it's ok to lie to an axe-murderer and Ukraine gets an exemption.
At the moment, the first guy to put on a frog costume probably did more for the cause than all the violent-leaning people on the left gathered together.
Curious whether anyone here has read Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg. When it was published, in 2008, I think it was considered a troll job -- a right-wing pundit's "I know you are but what am I" defense. I read the book a couple of years ago, and I found persuasive the argument that American progressives of the early 20th century envied the power and organization of European authoritarian but rewrote history when those authoritarians committed atrocities.
I'm no historian, and I haven't read enough to confirm or deny Goldberg's account. But I do think he was making a serious argument (even if his tone was snarky here and there).
What do you all think of the notion that fascism is actually (or at least can be characterized as) a phenomenon of the far left?
>"Still, I found myself able to see things from both perspectives."
Miller isn't expressing a perspective. Miller is waging step one of a deliberate coordinated campaign to make it effectively illegal or impossible to warn about fascism or to criticize his agenda.
His goal is to pretend "using your first amendment rights to criticize us" = "criminal incitement to violence and supporting a terrorist organization." This has nothing to do with sincere discourse.
But yes, it is illegal to murder fascists, and should be illegal (as all murder should be), and murdering them is also a bad idea to boot. Creating Reichstag Fires won't stop fascism, it just gives them an excuse to clamp down.
In my experience many times the word fascist is a way to vent emotions about a thing that people find upsetting or controlling of a situations innaproprietly
It's very unclear to me why Scott thinks the problem is with the word "fascist" or any connotation thereof. The problem he's addressing seems to be a much more general question about how we want our societies to work.
Scott writes, "it’s important to protect the right to accuse people of being very bad, since people are often in fact very bad".
Ok, so let's just replace "fascist" with "very bad person" in Scott's internally inconsistent triptych.
1. Many Americans are, in fact, very bad.
2. Very bad people are an acceptable target for political violence
3. Political violence in America is unacceptable (at the current time)
If 1 is (or were, in the future) true, and we'd still like to hang on to 3, what do we do about 2 in that case? The question has nothing at all to do with "fascism".
It's obvious that in a well-functioning society -- a society in which there are other ways of getting rid of very bad people, like elections and prison -- we should dispense with 2, just like Scott argues. But everyone agrees with that already.
The hard question is what to do in a not-well-functioning society. What should responsible, civic-minded German citizens have done when it was clear that there was no legal or civilized way to get rid of Hitler? Was political violence acceptable *then*? If yes, how do we tell when we've reached that point? If no, isn't there some point where the line of "protecting civility" crosses over with the line of "if you don't use violence now, there'll be no civility left to protect?" I don't know what the answer is, but at least the Founders clearly thought political violence could be a good idea under some circumstances, and explicitly motivated the 2nd amendment with that reasoning.
If there is one thing I do not want in the world, it's a bunch of rationalists who have decided that based on the precautionary principle, they need to engage in violence ranging from bullying of free speech to murder.
If this means we have to suppress consequentialism for the good of society, so be it. (I don't think that's exactly hypocrisy - I'm OK with the state doing the minimum damage to civil society in order to protect its citizens.)
Fair enough, but this isn't just some niche topic for rationalists to be technocratic about. This is pretty much just the Big Hard Question underlying all post-holocaust thought. The best post-holocaust thinkers (Arendt, Frankl, Weisel) grappled with pretty much the same thing. Lots of holocaust movies, including the recent Oscar winner "Zone of Interest", pose similar questions. I don't think anyone has come up with an entirely satisfying answer or prescription that everyone agrees is the right thing to do when a particular line is crossed, but not before.
I've been thinking on this more, and I think the "kill Hitler" analogy just fails. It's just too hard to recognize Hitler, so the number of people you have to kill in order to get Hitler is unacceptable.
Doesn’t sound like the analogy fails for you, but rather that you think the answer is just “political violence is never acceptable”. Ok, but then you have to argue that killing the number of false-positive Hitlers you’d have to kill to get to the real Hitler is a bigger number (or at least makes for a worse society) than the actual number of people who died because of Hitler, and that’s a tough row to hoe.
I think the precautionary principle leads to disaster. I haven't worked out the math, but just by observation, there's something wrong about the way people put it into practice.
I'd be ok with killing 2 or 3 innocents to kill Hitler. 5.9 million innocents is way too many, even if it saves 6 million lives. 25 is probably too many for me.
In circumstances of democracy, the rule of law and some basic degree of freedom of speech and political organising, political violence is bad. In a war, violence against the enemy military is legitimate even if a particular soldier is by most definitions good.
The question isn't about the target, it's about the situation; premise two is false.
The reason it because fashionable to be in favor of violence against fascists is because fascists attempted a genocide. So, in the wake of WWII, it was just like saying "I am violently against genocide." Which is surely justified.
The problem is that genocide turns out not to be a necessary characteristic of fascists. It's almost like they learned from history or something. I am a proud anti-fascist (and not just of the genocidal kind - I am against authoritarianism of all sorts). However:
There is one, and only one, legitimate excuse for violence. And that is to protect someone from even greater violence. There is protection of life, and there is being an assh*le, and not much gray area in between. Remember the famous words: "Violence is the first refuge of the incompetent." (I know that the actual quote is "last refuge", but that's demonstrably wrong).
So reserve your threats of violence for the violent. Smart fascists can better be resisted in smarter ways. We are rational people, are we not?
"Few people use fascism in a purely innocent denotative way; if they did, it would serve their purposes equally well to replace it with a synonym (like “far-right nationalist authoritarian corporatist”)"
This seems wrong? My assumption when people says Fascism is exactly 'far-right nationalist authoritarian corporatist' (typically with some white nationalism mixed in)
I think Fascism is a truly badly abused word. Its original Italian version was largely theatrics and spinelessly opportunistic politics, and the only really remarkable thing about it was their fondness for using political violence.
This is why they have a bad name, "Our political programme is breaking the bones of people like you" said Mussolini, and if one thing moderate leftists, liberals and conservatives agree with is that this is not acceptable, we have to settle things by law, not violence. Even monarchists believe in a kings lawful right to to rule. This was simply barbarism. This is why Orwell wrote that "fascist" means largely "bully".
But Fascism did not have a monopoly on political violence - they mostly learned political violence from Communists... and just about any ideology can result in political violence if the tensions are high, think the American Civil War...
Besides, Mosley's British Fascism was not even violent. I have read up on that man and he is best described as a kind of an social democrat with soldierly theatrics... mostly interested in reforming capitalism without abolishing it. He was anti-war and pro-EU.
So we should better avoid this word. For most common purposes, just "barbarism" will suffice.
I’m getting to this five days late, but feels safe to say that part of the reason there are so many comments on this post that it can barely load (>1300 at this point) is because hundreds of people logged in to post (as I was about to do just now) about how “people absolutely use “fascist” as a synonym for “person who it is acceptable to hurt because of their politics”” is not “obviously true” to them.
Something to note- By descriptive linguistics, "fascism" has multiple definitions and people using the same definitions to mean different things is not only common but is a typical if unconscious political strategy/ I.e., terrorism, racism, etc. There is the narrow historical meaning of a specific ideology, things that share a lot of voerlap with that, then the looser meanings which mean totalitarian, often especially in the case of racist or nationalist views. The negative descrition of MAGA would be more akin to authoritarian populism.
It feels to me like the obvious conclusion of your essay is that civil war is sometimes going to be the only thing that will solve a particular problem a populace has with an authoritarian leader (I'll not weigh in on whether that makes it "acceptable") but that interpersonal violence against "this guy who [I claim is] fascist" is never acceptable and is just as unacceptable as any other call for political violence.
Note also that assassinating your enemies is not necessarily even a great way to empower your cause, given 2nd-order effects and martyrdom etc, and things can be unacceptable for being *stupid, shortsighted, and counterproductive to your own goals* in addition to in fact also being unacceptable for being destructive to this nice commons we share.
In other words, killing *fascists* (the people, as individuals) is likely to empower *fascism*, the ideology, by making it seem (to people who already sympathize with it) more necessary to have authoritarian rule to stop the wanton violence. And it's actually fine if there are lots of fascists around as long as fascism has little power! Whereas if fascism is in charge, then even if everybody thinks that's bad (but has to pretend to like it to not get shot) then this is really bad!
Humanity is just barely beginning to grapple with the relationship between physical warfare and memetic warfare.
I think Miller is probably the most onerous of the MAGA circle and what most people see as the worst of that lot ideologically so I think that was the framework Newsome was using that term in. And Miller really is awful.
Wile I am certainly not advocating for any actual violence (which would be doubleplusungood and verboten), it does warm my soft, over-empathetic heart to know that, while they may never face any semblance of actual justice for their crimes, people like Stephen Miller will have to live out the rest of their lives knowing that, among the people around them - from complete strangers to friends and family, including their own children - many secretly believe that their [Homer slide] would not only be morally permissible, but virtuous and worthy of celebration, and that mere inertia and some rapidly shifting pragmatic calculus (lack of opportunity, personal safety concerns, etc) is all that has so far prevented them from acting on this. I therefore heartily encourage making this fact common knowledge.
I'm not that familiar with the case against Stephen Miller. I assume it's something more than "he wants to enforce US immigration law," but I'm not sure what it is. Did he kill Trotsky with an ice pick or something?
Sure, and the situation is perfectly symmetric between flat earthers and woke globalists in the sense that both sides have opinions on the shape of the earth and think that the other side is wrong, but the symmetry quickly collapses once you look beyond either side's genuine or purported self-image, and also take actual reality into account.
(Which, sadly, not every side of every argument is equally good at. No amount of rational argument will convince someone who has already drowned to get out of the water and come back to life - which sucks for them, but shouldn't convince those of us who haven't drowned that maybe drowning is great because no one who has actually done it has later changed their mind and un-drowned)
I'm late to the party, but I think the idea of violence to fascists is stealing a base. Communists are at least as bad as fascists worldwide and historically. Is Zoran Mamdani a communist? Is Bernie Sanders? They're as communist as most "fascists" are fascist, IMHO. I'm opposed to killing them.
The comparison is IMHO instructive. What we're saying is that because there's a slightly higher risk that Mamdani or Sanders *might* liquidate the kulaks *someday*, we should commit violence against them *now* when they advocate rent control or demonize capital, because it might be too late later. That seems pretty clearly immoral to me in either case.
When trying to show that three propositions can’t be true at the same time, it would be really helpful and instructive to use deductive logic. Derive a statement from one or two propositions that is the negation of a statement derived from the remaining proposition. This way it’s actually clear there’s a real contradiction and not just “tension.”
It is offtopic, but I think perspective of a person from inside of Russia on how slowly dictatorship creeps may be useful.
Dictatorship tends to creep slowly. I remember what was the first thing Putin done in his first first term. No pressure on journalist, no sudden election tampering, no. Just every TV channel in Russia praised Putin to no end. Putin songs, Putin icons, Putin paintings. Seriously, I was like ten, and I felt cringe even back then.
Then it's "voluntary-compulsory" photos of Putin everywhere. If there's no photo, then school director (principal?) will be fired for any reason except for no photos. Any official, really.
Major TV channels and newspapers where not persecuted, just bought out by "people close to administration [of the President]". Those people bought a lot of independent media and large enough private companies those days, with nobody paying attentions.
Then, in second phase, there was "war with corruption". You know, when you are not corrupt enough to pay for protection from FSS (aka FSB and not KGB goddamn it!) nor are you close enough to Putin and friends, you declared corrupt and your property is confiscated. Since almost all rich people got rich without one crime of another, nobody blink an eye.
Only after that second phase, there was political pressure. At first, its target was "non-system opposition" aka "not obviously clown opposition". Around that time, web pages began to be blocked. It was torrent portals at first, than "information, dangerous for the children" and so on. Only from 2020 to 2025 "prison time for likes and reposts" became common enough (they were before, but it was rare). About 20 to 25 from first first Putin term. I missed a lot, but that's not really important.
Now compare this slow and careful frog boiling to Trump's brazen speedrun for autocracy. People on high position are afraid to say something out of line. ICE as a common scare. Political pressure for large business, and much more. Yeah, Trump is building a dictatorship. I'm not sure how impeachment works, but it sure as hell time to write senators to start the procedure
These Trump comment sections start out fun but they have such little staying power. They become so repetitive about 1/3 of the way through. We are just rephrasing the same tired old arguments over and over and hoping for a breakthrough. But it never comes.
Generally the question on #3 is “do you think the state is engaged in political violence?” This is what tends to justify popular revolutionary political violence. I don’t think this post really makes much sense as it lacks consideration of that.
With black masked ICE men in unmarked vans on the street this is a very reasonable question to ask right now, and it is why the possibility of popular political violence is rising. “When ICE comes to our neighborhood should we throw Molotov cocktails?” is a rather different question than “should we storm the Supreme Court for ruling against roe v wade?”
I wonder if Americans would think political violence in other developed democracies is acceptable because speech is criminalised and political opponents can be jailed?
My view is that violence is acceptable - when the benefits, estimated with wide error bars, outweigh the costs of violating the taboo against political violence. This restricts the circumstances dramatically.
Leaving cases of idiosyncratic tyrants who are particularly bent on a particular course of evil action that would be unlikely to be continued by their replacement.
I'm not saying that American SJers *aren't* going to disproportionately die en-masse, but if you do, it's either going to be because you violently revolted against Trump and got killed in combat, or because WWIII happened (probably over Taiwan) and a bunch of US cities got nuked (in the latter case, many other Western nations will also have their SJers disproportionately die en-masse).
You can choose, personally, not to be subject to either of those. If you want to call New York City, the Bay Area and Washington DC "extermination camps" because they might get burnt to a crisp at some point, I guess I can't stop you, but they're not isomorphic to Auschwitz; you're allowed to leave. Hell, I left Melbourne (or technically, didn't return) due to this hazard. And, obviously, you can choose not to revolt against Trump.
Much as I disagree with SJ (though I also disagree with Trump), I don't want you guys dead. You can save yourselves, and I hope that as many of you do as possible.
FYI, I'm a well-established commenter who's been featured in "Highlights from the Comments" twice (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-aducanumab https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-909). Only you can decide to write me off as crazy or not, but I'm no troll (I'll admit the username's a bit whimsical; in my teens I was a fan of mycology, and I'm still a fan of the fantasy genre, so when I was 13 and needed an online handle I decided to pun on that).
I did say "if"; I don't think it's certain that either of those will happen. But, hey, you were the one who brought up the topic of "extermination".
It seems to me you interpreted cl’s comment in a way that did not seem the intended meaning, probably deliberately, then gave a bunch of advice based on this alternate interpretation. Which seems a bit trolling, or at least neither necessary nor kind. I remember an old commenter somewhere who would take the stance that the real “Trump Derangement Syndrome”consisted of supporting Trump, and then would reply to comments acting like this was the obvious consensus definition. Your comment reminded me of that. Cl’s post seemed kind of over the top to me but was at least a response to what it was responding to.
I interpreted the post as saying "we [American SJWs] are all going to be murdered by Trump". I wanted to argue against the claim that Trump is Hitler 2.0 and is going to Endlosung them, but I *couldn't* say "you're not going to be killed", "you're not going to be *disproportionately* killed", or even "you're not going to be disproportionately killed *by Trump*" because, as noted, I believe all of those are plausible.
So I focused on the points where these scenarios differ from his/her hysterical fantasies in terms of action recommendations.
I'll admit that part of why I went so hard on "I don't want you dead" is because on several occasions when I've brought the "it's pretty plausible that we have a nuclear war in the near future, and if we do then the deaths will disproportionately be SJWs due to the urban-rural divide" issue up (even in the Ratsphere!), I've been accused of *wanting* that result for culture-war purposes (e.g. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ssc-survey-results-on-schooling-types/comment/12030337 https://www.themotte.org/post/1169/smallscale-question-sunday-for-september-15/251226?context=8). As you might imagine, I really do not appreciate that accusation - yes, I oppose SJ, but I am not so morally bankrupt as to want to turn all SJWs into charcoal! - and so I tried to head that little absurdity off in advance. Apparently I can't do that without getting accused of trolling instead, which I also hate; lonely dissent is suffering.
100%, 99% of political activity is about getting the feeling of righteous anger. Creating change is hard, hating is easy and pleasurable. It’s a strong drug.
>am I missing some?
The: "but, but, but, killing everyone with $net_worth > target_number is moral! They are automatically Fascists!"
Banned for this comment.
Holy is not the opposite of evil. That would be good.
This.
You understand that if you start shooting Republicans, America will not cheer you as "anti-fascist". We will regard you as an evil terrorist who must be stopped by any means necessary. Nothing could be more beneficial to Trump's standing than an actual violent insurrection. You would be proving him right and making yourself a scary threat all at once. His popularity would make Bush after 9/11 look like Hoover after 1929.
I'm not going to argue with you ideologically since that's an obvious lost cause, but I hope it is still possible to appeal to your pragmatism. Do not start an insurrection when you can't even win an election.
I'm reminded of that one story in the Sequences that explains what truth is, and why it's important to have an accurate assessment of reality. My condolences.
I am indebted to Paul Botts for pointing out the irony that Judge Immergut _is Trump's own appointee_ . https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-402/comment/163643862
The first link goes to the same article as the second, it seems like it should go to a Twitter post
It feels like the obvious answer is that "Fascists are an acceptable target for political violence" is wrong, and the broader claim that "political violence is unacceptable" is true, and should also include "calls for political violence are unacceptable."
I'm not sure I agree that calls for political violence are unacceptable.
I tried to be careful to say that political violence is unacceptable *now*, but that there are certain situations (eg Hitler) where it becomes acceptable.
But in order to recognize when it becomes acceptable, you need to be able to have the debate about whether it's acceptable now, and some people in that debate will necessarily take the yes position, or else it's not a real debate.
I think the answer is https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/02/be-nice-at-least-until-you-can-coordinate-meanness/
Agreed it's a hard question, see my response at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/fascism-cant-mean-both-a-specific/comment/164945229
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/2096.htm#article6
"Article 4. Whether human law binds a man in conscience?
...Objection 3. Further, human laws often bring loss of character and injury on man, according to Isaiah 10:1 et seqq.: "Woe to them that make wicked laws, and when they write, write injustice; to oppress the poor in judgment, and do violence to the cause of the humble of My people." But it is lawful for anyone to avoid oppression and violence. Therefore human laws do not bind man in conscience.
...I answer that, Laws framed by man are either just or unjust. If they be just, they have the power of binding in conscience, from the eternal law whence they are derived, according to Proverbs 8:15: "By Me kings reign, and lawgivers decree just things." Now laws are said to be just, both from the end, when, to wit, they are ordained to the common good—and from their author, that is to say, when the law that is made does not exceed the power of the lawgiver—and from their form, when, to wit, burdens are laid on the subjects, according to an equality of proportion and with a view to the common good. For, since one man is a part of the community, each man in all that he is and has, belongs to the community; just as a part, in all that it is, belongs to the whole; wherefore nature inflicts a loss on the part, in order to save the whole: so that on this account, such laws as these, which impose proportionate burdens, are just and binding in conscience, and are legal laws.
On the other hand laws may be unjust in two ways: first, by being contrary to human good, through being opposed to the things mentioned above—either in respect of the end, as when an authority imposes on his subjects burdensome laws, conducive, not to the common good, but rather to his own cupidity or vainglory—or in respect of the author, as when a man makes a law that goes beyond the power committed to him—or in respect of the form, as when burdens are imposed unequally on the community, although with a view to the common good. The like are acts of violence rather than laws; because, as Augustine says (De Lib. Arb. i, 5), "a law that is not just, seems to be no law at all." Wherefore such laws do not bind in conscience, except perhaps in order to avoid scandal or disturbance, for which cause a man should even yield his right, according to Matthew 5:40-41: "If a man . . . take away thy coat, let go thy cloak also unto him; and whosoever will force thee one mile, go with him other two."
Secondly, laws may be unjust through being opposed to the Divine good: such are the laws of tyrants inducing to idolatry, or to anything else contrary to the Divine law: and laws of this kind must nowise be observed, because, as stated in Acts 5:29, "we ought to obey God rather than man."
...Reply to Objection 3. This argument is true of a law that inflicts unjust hurt on its subjects. The power that man holds from God does not extend to this: wherefore neither in such matters is man bound to obey the law, provided he avoid giving scandal or inflicting a more grievous hurt."
"Article 6. Whether he who is under a law may act beside the letter of the law?
Objection 1. It seems that he who is subject to a law may not act beside the letter of the law. For Augustine says (De Vera Relig. 31): "Although men judge about temporal laws when they make them, yet when once they are made they must pass judgment not on them, but according to them." But if anyone disregard the letter of the law, saying that he observes the intention of the lawgiver, he seems to pass judgment on the law. Therefore it is not right for one who is under the law to disregard the letter of the law, in order to observe the intention of the lawgiver.
...On the contrary, Hilary says (De Trin. iv): "The meaning of what is said is according to the motive for saying it: because things are not subject to speech, but speech to things." Therefore we should take account of the motive of the lawgiver, rather than of his very words.
I answer that, As stated above (Article 4), every law is directed to the common weal of men, and derives the force and nature of law accordingly. Hence the jurist says [Pandect. Justin. lib. i, ff., tit. 3, De Leg. et Senat.]: "By no reason of law, or favor of equity, is it allowable for us to interpret harshly, and render burdensome, those useful measures which have been enacted for the welfare of man." Now it happens often that the observance of some point of law conduces to the common weal in the majority of instances, and yet, in some cases, is very hurtful. Since then the lawgiver cannot have in view every single case, he shapes the law according to what happens most frequently, by directing his attention to the common good. Wherefore if a case arise wherein the observance of that law would be hurtful to the general welfare, it should not be observed. For instance, suppose that in a besieged city it be an established law that the gates of the city are to be kept closed, this is good for public welfare as a general rule: but, it were to happen that the enemy are in pursuit of certain citizens, who are defenders of the city, it would be a great loss to the city, if the gates were not opened to them: and so in that case the gates ought to be opened, contrary to the letter of the law, in order to maintain the common weal, which the lawgiver had in view.
Nevertheless it must be noted, that if the observance of the law according to the letter does not involve any sudden risk needing instant remedy, it is not competent for everyone to expound what is useful and what is not useful to the state: those alone can do this who are in authority, and who, on account of such like cases, have the power to dispense from the laws. If, however, the peril be so sudden as not to allow of the delay involved by referring the matter to authority, the mere necessity brings with it a dispensation, since necessity knows no law."
I agree with this as a philosophical anarchist. However, we must note that taking this as a universal standard is anti-democratic as everyone judges the morality of laws independently and acts violently on that principle. The underlying assumption of liberal democracy is not ideal, but a least bas option- that we settle this by some agreed upon process then through the war of all against all.
It's not a hard question for me: as long as you have a political process in the US to constrain or throw out your government, political violence is unjustified. If the problem you have is that "not enough Americans care about this horrible thing to change the government over it" then that's too bad.
And from a pragmatic standpoint, violence generally isn't going to solve the problem in the first place; rather, it is likely to make the populace far less sympathetic to the plight of those victims of torture.
That's a fair question. I mean, it's not, because there would be no government left after WWIII, or if there was, law and order itself would be moot, and thus, violence would likely rule the day.
But let's take your hypothetical: we blow up 3 gorges dam, killing millions, and for whatever reason didn't suffer the effects of, say, a massive nuclear exchange or other event that upended law and order, and for whatever reason most Americans just didn't care, so there wasn't a massive political outcry (that seems completely unrealistic, but for the sake of argument...), I'd leave. This is no longer my country, since my fellow citizens appear to be completely amoral at best, and I would leave and probably join a country which was opposing these things while still embracing basic freedom, should such a place exist. That would probably take time, and in the mean time, I would attempt to persuade anyone I could that what we had done was wrong and cannot be allowed to continue or to ever happen again.
In the much more likely case that there was a very robust public political argument over it, I'd stay and try to persuade as many as I could to my side so we win the political argument, and if those objecting to such lost that fight decisively, I'd have to spend a lot of time thinking about what the appropriate further action is. But violence would not be on the table as long as persuasion and self-government still is.
But this is all thought experiment. The country that would destroy the 3 gorges damn without a very compelling reason would be a different country than the US where I reside today.
I think Scott’s point is that “have a process to constrain” is very broad. How capable of rigging elections does a government have to appear before violence is acceptable? I admit we’re probably not there yet, but the administration has signalled a willingness to shadily circumvent the courts, so what else is there?
This is something that many MAGA supporters felt after the 2020 election. Election procedures were changed in many states within months of the election in the direction of making them harder to audit, using COVID as an excuse, often seeming to violate state constitutions. There were many irregularities on election night that the state didn't seem too interested in investigating. And it was a very close election.
But there was probably no viable route to contesting the election with violence. The American state is perfectly willing to use its substantial capacity for violence and subterfuge against right wing groups. So in the long run, it was still better to bide their time and just re-elect Trump four years later, with a vengeance.
The "harder to audit" was largely done by republican controlled counties who assumed the ability to "check" ballots would favor the dems. That may have been true, but the problem was that the counties that did this were majority republican so it likely actually hurt republicans more.
And there really weren't these iregularites that you claim. This was also a MAGA talking point that got repeated ad nauseam.
Now as someone who volunteered for Ron Paul, I saw all sorts of voiting shenanigans in the primaries by both republicans and democrats.
I looked into these claims when they came out considering it a possibility. And what I found was... nothing.
The election was one of the most secure ever.
I found ONE significant oddity. There was a county in florida where there was inclement weather. A recount was being done and they told people they could go home if they wanted to.
One woman stayed, but she was supposed to be supervised. She wasn't. This was a clear mistake. However, there are multiple couints. She did one recount of a batch of votes. Even if she somehow managed to switch every Trump Vote to Clinton which would have been a very difficult feet given the levels of security, it wouldnt have affected the outcome.
The other "irregularites" cited were just people observing things they misunderstand with the prior bias that dems were going to cheat.
For example places where late large dem vote totals came in after inital republican leads. Thse are very easy and logical to explain. Republican counties tend to be more rural and GOP voters on average are older and vote earlier. So those counties were able to count and certify their votes faster.
Large urban areas which lean heavily democrat take much longer to count and certify the votes. So those big swings late are the urban results coming in.
Nothing unsual about this and its a consistent pattern across elections though the specifics vary.
Others were things like
"I saw a truck picking up votes at the place I was voting that drew away."
Yes, because the votes weren't counted at your small polling station, they are shipped to a larger center.
I saw some guy who had this ridiculous series of hour videos where he starts backwards and comes up with a supposed vote changing algorithm he claims was emplored and spends hours on it, showing his work, to explain how this very convoluted algorithm that had hours of steps of complexity could have been ujsed to change the vote totals without anyone noticing anything but would account for so and so statistical oddites. If you watch these videos its clear hes doing this backwards as he reaches his conclusion then spends hours messing worund with some algorithm modeling program to fit it to the election data versus supposedly showing that it proved statistical oddities compared to previous election vote patterns over a century. Garfabge in, garabge out.
There were many claims by Trump and many lawsuits which failed over and over again. This notion that were consistent irregularite that no one investigated appears to just be a popular claim, not one that has evidence.
Violence is, unfortunately, really effective, especially when deployed against those who have isolated themselves from being held accountable for their actions. The single most effective action of the entire BLM period of protest came in August of 2016 when Michah Xavier Johnson shot 14 police officers, murdering 5, before becoming the first US citizen in the US killed by a robot.
Johnson was, by all accounts, a madman. Additionally, as large metropolitan police departments go, the DPD was actually kinda known for seeking accord with the populations they policed. There were problems, but DPD was not the NYPD, the Chicago PD, or even in the same chapter of the book as LAPD or the LASO.
After these heinous murders, the fact that DPD wasn't reasonably hated contributed to the chilling effect they had on police resistance to holding itself accountable in my opinion. Facts were that the following 6-8 months represented something of a watershed in policy and enforcement changes. The powers that be were much more interested in holding themselves to account when mistakes or malfeasance hurt the public. Since being "one of the good ones" didn't protect the DPD, it could happen to them too at any time.
You may see this event differently, but it really did presage some of the more effective months for police reform in the US. I don't think this means that violence should always be the first tool reformers reach for, but I believe that it does show that a more-or-less functioning society can have parts that are beyond the tyranny threshold that can be improved by political violence.
See also: the assassination of Shinzo Abe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Shinzo_Abe
> Abe's killing has been described as one of the most effective and successful political assassinations in recent history due to the backlash against the UC that it provoked. The Economist remarked that "... Yamagami's political violence has proved stunningly effective ... Political violence seldom fulfills so many of its perpetrator's aims." Writing for The Atlantic, Robert F. Worth described Yamagami as "among the most successful assassins in history".
Which implies that "violence" is a word that needs to be carefully defined. It is one thing to assasinate one man and another thing to massacre everybody wearing a red hat.. The system itself survives the first kind of thing easier, even gets strengthened by a martyr. For example, assassinating MLK did not turn back the Civil Rights movement.
I guess it's really effective when it's effectively used. Which means you need tons of luck/skill to actually execute them. Something people don't really associate with angry mobs. And don't forget, violence is always a double sided sword, expect to be punched back. Somehow it reminds me of this old post https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/02/be-nice-at-least-until-you-can-coordinate-meanness/.
An individual act of violence could be quite effective. The problem is that the great majority of them aren't. So far as I can tell, there is no reliable way to tell beforehand which way it will go. So you are sacrificing a life on the off chance it will do some good...
Obviosuly this assumes some kind of constraint on the extent of the law. If there was a political process to restrain that was no longer effective and the law calls for you to e imprisoned or killed based on your race gender or some factor where you lack an option to obey the law, no one will submit to such on the principle of just authority
I think it is interesting to see how people here would feel about the historical actions of John Brown.
Well, wouldn't political violence have been justified against School of the Americas operatives in South America by South Americans, at least? (I know "South America" isn't a nationality but maybe Salvadorans in the early 80s, say?)
To be honest I don't know enough about the incident with Kazakhstan to say.
I don't think the question is about 'taking a side' so much as discussing what methods should be used in which situations once you do "take a side."
This brings up the point I made, that most speech is about the appropriate way for the state to use violence. Without understanding a lot of the assumptions and confusions that go into these divisions the topic will be hopelessly confused.
Take for example ICE. From my philosophical anarchist perspective, ICE is the aggressor (immigrants werent coming after them with violence) and actions against them fall ethically into the category of self defense. Now I don't think violent resistance is practical, but that isn't the same as ethically justified.
When you get to areas like where you are going, the entire pretext of state violence, i.e, the social contract, has to be tortorously stretch to applied.
This type of condemnation of "violence" only treats resistance to the more powerful force as "violence" The violence by the more powerful force is "just" government or maybe the claim would be here "defense against communist aggression" or some such.
World War 2 wasn't "political violence", it was a war. And we didn't go to war because we disliked Hitler's political opinions, we went to war because he started invading neighbouring countries.
I'm almost certain Scott is saying the citizens of Germany were justified in committing acts of political violence against the Nazi government (e.g. attempting to assassinate Hitler), not that the US was justified in going to war with Germany (which of course they also were, but that's a different question).
It is worth bearing in mind that (writing from the USA) we now have nuclear weapons. Internal political violence that has a decent chance of escalating to a nuclear civil war is _much_ worse than anything that could have happened before 1945. _Maybe_ having Pol Pot in control of the nation (perhaps 40% fatalities) is of the same order as a nuclear civil war. Very little else is.
Many Thanks!
>we already have nuclear-contaminated parts of America, and adding a few more won't do much harm.
If it got to that point, I'd be surprised if it ended with "a few" (unless one side had all the nukes, as in WWII). I do agree that if it ended with e.g. losing three cities, that wouldn't be a nation-ending event. Three hundred, though...
Few holes in deserts Nevada certainly isn't equivalent of widening the Bay of Bay Area.
Nukes have little chance of being used in a civil war. The same deterrence factors exist as in regular wars and also on top of that there's the aversion to nuking what you see as part of your own country.
Many Thanks! No one knows. In most conflicts, the natural course is escalation. De-escalation is very difficult, as is evident even in political discourse within the US. If the US fought another civil war with some nuclear weapons on each side, no one knows what would happen.
The US didn’t go to war because of any German invasion of any country. It was Pearl harbour and the German declaration of war on the US.
It was a non-inclusive "we", not necessarily encompassing all my readers or even the person I was replying to.
*We* went to war with Germany in 1939, maybe you didn't.
(Of course I wasn't born then and I imagine you weren't either so these are really weird forms of "we" and "you".)
I’m English. We went to war in 1939. The US didn’t. I’m using we here to mean Britain (and empire). I think any other use of we would be suspect and hand waving about neither of us being alive then is an attempt at deflection.
Of course you might be British and I’m wrong to assume otherwise.
I'm Australian, we went to war the same time you did. You're welcome.
And I guess we should both apologise for assuming the other was American (just because we're both here arguing about American politics for some ungodly reason...)
Which part is it you don't you think applies to wars - "political" or "violent"?
Thats why "political violence" needs to be carefull defined. On a certain level, it as very obviously political violence. There are all sorts of assumptions here that are treating all types of violence as "not really violence" because they are done by groups with claim to authority. From a libertarian/anti-authoritarian perspective, this is a huge blindspot for most people they can seem to get around.
Calling someone a fascist could mean you should keep an extra close eye on them for purposes of when political violence might become acceptable, as they're opposed to democracy and likely to try to dismantle it, at which point the threshold gets crossed.
Do you think your are better at violence than the Fascists? Do you think killing them would be an effective way of reducing their numbers?
Or getting them to stop their violent political project?
Or weaken their resolve? Make them doubt the justice of their cause?
Do you think it would swing, others to your side?
I think it's a resounding no to all of these questions. Asking if it's ok to kill Fascists is a Fascist question. You need to ask how to effectively fight Fascists, and I don't think it's violence.
Resounding no to *most* of those questions, which is cause enough to refrain, but "better at violence than the Fascists" has historically been a surprisingly low bar. Obsession isn't the same as competence - they don't know when or how to stop, so they under-prepare and overextend.
They might not be good at fighting wars. But they are great at using state power against internal desent and undesirables.
That's not being skilled at violence though, that's being efficient with an already overwhelming advantage.
The question is, "do you as a private individual think you are better at violence than the Fascists who are currently in charge of the government or are trying to take over the government."
The historical exception being the Francoists of Spain, who won their Civil War and then wisely kept out of World War II.
And looks like Fascists won all civil wars they had, at least the famous ones (tautologically). German certainly isn't defeated from inside, despite what Nazi propagandize themselves of WW1.
WWI germany was imperialist and authoritarian but not fascist
Yes, in foreign wars. In internal conflicts, their track record is generally good. They can simply intimidate people. They don't even need to shoot much - just people with scary guns, scary uniforms and scary faces parading down the main street typically makes their opponents fold.
For example the Marcia su Roma was a myth. They did not march to Rome, because the government got so scared, it collapsed and handed over the reins to Mussolini. Then they held a victory parade IN Rome, took some heroic posing pics, and sold this as the myth of march TO Rome.
And it was a bipartisan myth, the liberals were so ashamed that their leaders spinelessly folded, and they supported the myth it was a big armed attack on the city, so they lost to overwhelming force. In reality they did dare to shoot a bullet.
In the current context which is what we are concerned with. the state and MAGA are far better armed and organized then the opposition and it isnt even remotely closed.
1. No. 2. Yes. 3. Yes. 4. Yes. 5. No.
6. Mixed results ending in a wash. Some people would stop sympathizing with you, but some people would also join what they perceived to be the winning side.
Indeed. In response to the "when is it time to kill them?" question, I would go towards the practical of "not untill there is some chance of victory."
I would say it is not the time for violence but rather the time to prepare for violence in the hopes of avoiding it.
That means things contrary to the way many on the left think- arming, training and organizing for defensive purposes.
Protests are not effective and are only being used by the administration to justify more authoritarianism.
Part of the greater enthusiasm for war on the right (as evidenced by the different reactions of leading politicians and figurs) to the Charlie Kirk assasination was the reality that one side has all the weapons, training, organization etc.
It is an ugly reality, but well established that (generally) people are more reluctant to support war/an aggressive takeover the harder it will be to win and the better resistance the opposition can offer.
I think at this point, the left needs to take the threat seriously and understand just how terrible acceleration would be. preparation as deterrance and some possibility of survival if the worst comes to pass.
I've always loved that article, and I am just a consequentialist, not a utilitarian.
But rather than a rule, this could be a case for a cost benefit analysis, almost in the opposite direction of "Be Nice Until You Can Coordinate Meanness":
Political violence has no value when there is sufficient consensus. Why harm a political opponent when you can simply all agree not to give them space in The Atlantic?
Political violence only gains value as consensus breaks down, and since it dramatically accelerates the breakdown of consensus, you pick a moment where consensus is already so weak that the benefits (simple, us vs them jungle survival benefits) outweigh whatever remaining consensus value you're burning.
"then they came for me, and, uh, actually there were a lot of my friends left, and that's when we fought back"
I applaud you for thinking that there is a line that can (or must?) be crossed when the stakes reach that threshold. At a certain point I think the task is just identifying that threshold - at what point does a person constitute an existential risk to ... what exactly?
I think in America the answer to that has to be "Democratic Republicanism" with an emphasis on the Constitution. I am by no means political, but I think - for America to continue to function at any real level - the forms of democracy must stay central, if not the substance.
As someone who spent many of my college years studying Fascism (specifically the Japanese instance, but contextualized of course via the European Axis powers) and *consistently arguing against the use of the label outside of extremely specific contexts,* this may be the first time in a while where I am seeing political actors tick off multiple boxes on the checklist at once.
One thing to remember about Fascism, in its historical context - it's not quite as top-down as it is often imagined. Often, the middle is pressuring the top and the bottom. By which I mean, there can be big political actors, and the average person - but intermediating them is a large mass of powerful organizations. Prior to the rise of a Fascist regime, one of the most insidious ways it can take root is by finding footholds in these organizations. Once organizational power and money can be subordinated to their political agenda, so, too, can those above and below them.
To be clear - I think nobody in remotely mainstream politics has CHECKED ALL THE BOXES for Fascism as it is classically understood to date. Trumpian policies are increasingly moving in that direction, but not enough to warrant serious consideration of the label.
But I am shocked to find myself in a position where I actually think recognizing the rise of Fascism may be of importance.
https://cmarmitage.substack.com/p/i-researched-every-attempt-to-stop
I read this recently, and while I am not certain I agree with all their perspectives, it is a very sober look at the issue - and I agree, the mechanisms that help Fascism get in power are very, very hard to stop once put in motion. The breaking point would appear to be *Democratic acceptance* of *undemocratic values.* Once we explicitly elect someone who defies the Democratic expectation of governance, it's pretty much game over and there is nothing we can do (save pray or rebel).
When I was younger and bolder and Trump was running for his first term, I often asked incensed Liberals, quite seriously, what level of a threat they believe he represented to the institutions of democracy. My central litmus test was whether there was a moral imperative to assassinate him - for indeed, I hate to say it but if there were ever a case for using force in politics, it would be to prevent a tyrant from seizing power.
I got one affirmative answer to this hypothetical, and I asked perhaps 5 or 6 well-meaning liberal Americans.
Again, I do not think this is the question we ask to justify violence. This is the question we ask to start the discussion on where the line sits - the very conversation we are having now, and which is warranted. I only hope that the answer to the question is not needed, at the end of the day.
If I recall correctly, wasn't the confiscation of guns in Nazi Germany actually quite targeted? It was not so much a blanket ban/confiscation on guns across the country, rather a ban/confiscation of guns targeting specific groups of "undesirables" (I.E., Jews and Gypsies). Interestingly, some sources also claim this was just a formalization of existing law - police could already target these groups for confiscation on flimsy grounds, the 1938 law just gave them a mandate to confiscate *all* guns from those groups.
I do not say this to detract from your point -- on the contrary, I feel like it actually aligns *even more closely* with the current climate in the US.
That was a fun article. Because it is obvious that any kind of radical change, mean or not mean, is going to be really hard to coordinate. Most people most of the time just want to coast. So it mostly cashes out to the centrist position that things should largely stay the same - unless some crisis does require coordinated radical change. For example a housing crisis can lead to a "housing revolution", rewriting all the rules. But otherwise things mostly stay the same. In previous historic periods when words had different meanings, that would have gotten you called a conservative.
I assume you are distinguishing calls for the government to do violence. Where those lines are drawn very much matter in terms of definitons, arguments and ethics
What's the difference between political violence and violence?
Fascist policies and forces are already killing people and taking away rights here in the US.
What has to happen before fighting back stops being 'political violence' and becomes 'self-defense'?
Is the answer that you're only allowed to fight back against the foot soldiers, not the ringleaders? That seems backwards and cruel.
Is the answer '10,000 deaths justifies fighting back, before that it's terrorism'? But in that case, the whole reason for pointing out fascist tendencies is to show what happened the last 10 times fascists took power, arguing tat the future deaths are inevitable if nothing is done, and trying to solve the problem with much *less* violence earlier in the process. Is that type of foresight and learning from history flatly never allowed?
Well Scott pretty much answered that in the piece. He said there is a time for violence. Not now.
Both MAGA and American leftists seem to over estimate the power of their legal pea shooters against the most well armed paramilitary police force in the world ( before the army and national guard are factored in). That leaves you to shoot at political leaders or bloggers, which will lead to the crackdowns you presumably don’t want.
If the “fascists” are to overextend the power of the federal state and its armed militaries or paramilitaries, opposition will come within other elements of the state police forces, national guard or within the army (if you are pining for civil war) not the ragtag of antifa or (for the other fantasists) armed fat MAGA types. The latter could be defeated without a shot by defending a hill and watch them die of breathlessness as they try attack.
What actually did happen the last 10 times fascists took power? Who even are those 10? Just taking the 3 most uncontroversial examples, Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, only one of them was exceptionally horrific. The other 2 were garden variety authoritarians.
The whole violence is justified against fascists argument seems to rest on the premise that fascist = the next Hitler, but that becomes less and less true the more people you include in the definition of "fascist."
Franco is definitely controversial, and it's highly questionable whether he was a "real" fascist. A more unequivocal example would be the Romanian Iron Guard during World War 2.
While I don't know the truth of the matter, a book I had studying the political systems of non-democracies said no to Franco being a fascist. Rather, as they portrayed it, he made a bunch of promises to the fascist faction when he needed their support in the civil war - and then when he won the civil war, he never got around to fulfilling those promises. To be clear, he did remain a dictator; that much doesn't seem to be in dispute.
Note that that's just me pretty much echoing the book's summary. If they ever gave details, they were located further into the book than I ended up reading.
The Ustaše were Croatian fascists whose atrocities made even the Nazis queasy. They claimed to be acting on behalf of Christ.
Never know what you’re gonna get when fascists come to power.
I think it's fair to say Imperial Japan was essentially fascist
Yes, killing anyone for political reasons is wrong. That's mostly the end of the discussion..
I think killing Hitler would have been fine.
Killed by who, and when? We can judge him in retrospect, but how do you do it in the moment? Being at war is different than a political difference within a country. So I assume you mean for his fellow Germans to kill him. Which they tried and failed.
Yes, and it would have been preferable if they had been successful. They certainly didn't act immorally for trying.
After the Enabling Act of 1933, etc. eliminated the regular political process, yes.
That is not the situation we are facing in the US today.
killing in war=killing for political reasons
A thing to remember is that most free speech is in fact a call for political violence, ie., an argument about how the state should operate, which uses violence as its ultimate means of compliance. There is the distinction of calls for political violence outside this framewor, and this is where it gets muddied with people being confused about these things and why they exiost.
I’ve been thinking about Decker’s article, especially in the light of the Charlie Kirk assassination. I didn’t care about his article when he wrote it but I do know.
When must we kill fascists?
When must we kill Decker?
EDIT: There are a lot of people in my replies who would reach Decker’s threshold for death in my opinion. Not who he would’ve chose but still. Where does the rhetoric end and actions begin?
When?
Your latest post on your account is titled “The Time For Violence Against Conservatives Has Come”.
I don’t think there’s any discussion to be had with you anymore.
“Every single Republican, from Trump to Congressmen to voters, need to be made to feel fear.”
A direct quote from you. Why are you so violent?
You called Trump “the leader of my side”.
I didn’t even vote for him. All I need to know is that from what you have said, the cursory comment I said about Kirk is enough for you to label me as one side, a side you said deserves violence.
What are we even doing here?
>tarrifing [sic] other countries for what they already tariff us
>opposed by [...] the entire rest of the world [...] that are engaging in freer trade agreements
🤔
We don't tariff goods from Vietnam at 50% either, do we? It looks as if this was threatened, and then an agreement was reached such that we tariff Vietnam at 20% and they tariff us at 0%, down from a prior average of ~10%.
Regardless of the details, though, I meant to suggest that it sort of seems as if the rest of the world does not actually oppose tariffs, 𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘳. Or do you mean that the rest of the world just opposes the U.S. levying tariffs upon their own goods? Undoubtedly so; I don't think Republicans would deny that, though.
That's not to say that I think the tariffs are a good idea—my default assumption is that the freer the trade, the better—but if they turn out to be effective at persuading other nations to lower their own tariffs upon U.S. products, as Vietnam did, then maybe they were a good idea after all.¹
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¹(Except that now the shoe is on the other foot—20% vs. 0%—and that seems counter-productive; I think the rationale is that this will help reduce the trade deficit? ...though I'm not clear on why the balance-of-trade with a particular nation matters, exactly.)
>Sure, and the rest of the world does not actually oppose wars because they sometimes partake in them.<
I accept this framing: nations oppose wars declared against them, but they must—at least implicitly—support wars that they declare. Similarly with tariffs, and most other things also: self-interest tends to predict position.
>Nobody runs their trade or tax policy by imposing a global 10% tariff baseline and using trade deficits divided by exports to target every sector and every country that way<
True, as far as I know, and I admit to being somewhat mystified by this program of Trump's (e.g., why the 10% baseline? the main—putative—benefit of "reciprocal tariffs" is, so far as I can see, the possibility that other nations will respond by lowering their own barriers to trade; but doesn't the blanket 10% contribute nothing to this, and in fact even weaken it...?).
>Like even this year's Trade Representative report https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/files/Press/Reports/2025NTE.pdf just flatly disagrees with all the claims made by Republicans on tariffs.<
Could you point me toward where it does so? I'm not doubting that it does—my impression is, indeed, that economists in general disagree with the tariff program—but skimming the introduction & appendices didn't lead me to anything very enlightening (but I do mean "skimming", heh—it's somewhat dry reading, by my standards–).
And therefore you propose -- what? Institutionalizing all Republicans as schizophrenics? Sluggish schizophrenia, perhaps?
"we can look and see that everybody except Putin and Orban oppose Republicans,"
Perhaps you should get your eyes checked.
You do realize that your links don't substantiate what you claimed?
Also note that opposing something doesn't mean, even, that you know it's false. You may oppose it because you know it's true but you benefit from the opposite situation.
I think a minimum bar is "don't do things that absolutely will not help at all in any way", and neither the Kirk assassination nor killing Decker would clear that bar.
'I think a minimum bar is "don't do things that absolutely will not help at all in any way"' - Scott Alexander, 2025
(I just found this line hilarious for some reason. You're so right Scott, this really is the minimum bar)
And yet... some would be surprised by this line :)
The political version of "First, do no harm".
The problem about opening this sort of debate is that more than any other form of debate, it’s very easy to turn emotional and bitter. We can try and bind it within the boundaries of reason but even if we ban anyone who goes too far in direct rhetoric, you can’t prevent people from reading it and taking their own emotional responses from it.
That's just part of the price we pay for free speech.
And yet Charlie got killed over free speech
What's the claim you're making here? Should we start preemptively restricting speech that could, maybe, make someone violent even if it doesn't call for such? Shut debates down as soon as they get too heated?
When must we kill John M?
That’s just speech.
That ... doesn't seem to be true?
So far as I know, the murderer's motive was something like this: Charlie Kirk is hateful towards trans people; this is unacceptable; so I'm going to kill Charlie Kirk. Which is horrible and, yes, itself absolutely unacceptable, but isn't "over free speech" in any sense I can make sense of. Charlie Kirk didn't get killed _for advocating free speech_.
(You could argue that Kirk got killed because of things he said, and therefore his murder was "over free speech". I think the first part is right but the second part is wrong. If I insult someone's mother and they shoot me dead, I haven't died "for free speech". If I tell an armed policeman that I have a bomb and am about to set it off, I haven't died "for free speech". If I live somewhere that has slavery and advocate fiercely for its abolition and a slaveholder kills me because they'll be much poorer if slavery is abolished, I haven't died "for free speech".)
A better way to put it is that he get killed over his speech in a widely publicized event, which reinforces chilling effects on speech of others, making this a free speech issue.
I think you're stuck in a semantic point here. "Getting killed for free speech" is a colloquial way of saying "getting killed for saying things that one has a constitutionally protected right to say". I'll point out that the examples you gave are not constitutionally protected categories of speech: insults are considered fighting words, which are not protected; threatening violence is also not protected. Advocating for an unpopular political opinion, as in your abolitionist example, IS constitutionally protected, so it would be correct in a colloquial sense to say that that person died for free speech.
Part of the problem is that the very smart kids who like to debate the parameters of this and calculate exactly how many utils you get out of killing fascists tend to not be the people who actually commit violence (one struggles to imagine Nicholas Decker in a fistfight), and thus the debate is mostly hypothetical to them and their fun is in the intellectual stimulation of the debate.
Whereas the people who do commit violence tend to be much dumber* and less likely to run the regressions correctly to produce the correct results; the fun for them is in the actual violence!
Jason Manning noted in his review of the book Fragging that a very typical pattern in a fragging was smarter white soldiers bitching about killing their officers with no intent to do it; it was their much dumber black colleagues who tended to actually throw the grenades.
*the Charlie Kirk shooter is noteworthily an exception here)
The interesting complication arises when you consider just how much connection there is between those two classes. The white soldier advocating for fragging becomes a lot less innocent if he does it within earshot of soldiers whom he knows can be easily manipulated into violence. There's obviously a spectrum of influence and plausible deniability there, but the distinction isn't as clear cut as your comment suggests.
I'm reminded of the fuss liberals made when Gabby Giffords was shot because of the "implicitly violent" language that Republicans had been using on the campaign trail (e.g. using hunting metaphors like "we're targeting our Dem opponent" or "we need to take the liberals out"). I think the current liberal rhetoric would fail very badly if judged by that standard.
I’d do okay in a fist fight.
I made a similar point a while back in response to the murder of the CEO of United Healthcare: those who endorse the killing seem to think that are promoting a principle that people should feel empowered to assassinate people you consider sufficiently villainous. But the principle actually being promoted is that potential shooters should feel empowered to murder people *they* think are suddenly villainous. And a marginal potential shooter is, by virtue of being a potential shooter, the sort of person who is likely to be unusually bad at making that sort of judgement.
I read through one of the lists of American political violence in recent decades and ... what a bunch of screw-ups. Zero Colonel von Stauffenbergs on the list. Lee Harvey Oswald might rank above the average for general functionality and good decision-making ability among Americans who decide to kill over politics.
Any nominations for most dysfunctional person on the lists? Off the top of my head John Hinckley Jr. comes to mind...
Are you sure it didn't help them? I mean, they've permanently removed the most important conservative activist from the game board, and all it cost was a bunch of conservative influencers raging on X for two weeks and the failed cancellation of Kimmel.
From an amoral, Machiavellian perspective, violence worked for the left (as it has historically).
It’s hard to evaluate the net impact. It helped get antifa listed as a terrorist organization, massively energized the right, and made the left in general appear violent and dangerous. Kirk can’t be easily replaced but eventually someone will come along to fill his shoes, and that person could be farther right than Kirk.
It's Fuentes, and it's happening as we speak.
>It helped get antifa listed as a terrorist organization
Probably a good thing for the left in the long run.
If the administration actually targeted antifa groups and only antifa groups, that would probably be a good thing for the left in the long run. If they use "antifa" as an excuse to arrest left-leaning people whenever they want, that's definitely bad for the left.
I'm being a bit facetious but I can see it going either way.
They only target antifa black-bloc groups: the left gets rid of bad publicity without having to do it themselves.
They target more broadly: the left gets to finally feel persecuted, and this invigorates more support.
I fear the Left has been learning all of the right lessons from recent history.
The Right, of course, never seems to learn a goddam' thing.
It's not that they are too principled; it's that they are incompetent and weak, which makes it even more pathetic.
The Left put busloads of people in solitary confinement for 6 January, even those who weren't there. They debanked or cancelled their enemies with impunity (even Melania Trump couldnt open bank account for years), they blocked the entire media ecosystem from spreading the true story about Biden's laptop, removed Parler from both app stores and AWS, and eventually removed Trump from social media. They even came close to putting him in prison.
Right cant do even a 2% of that in response of this unprecedented event. The fact there is such asymmetry of power actually makes me worried that we might see large scale civil conflict after the MAGA base realizes that they are not able to count on their political representatives to protect the from the Regime.
See above - it apparently didn't happen at all.
Fox News is a cable channel. It doesn't need a broadcast license.
It's interesting that you expect that the Kirk Assassination should demand a similar response to Jan 6th.
That's certainly not an obvious claim to make, one I would disagree with.
(btw: nice username broseph—my icon there is inspired by, I would guess, the same source. 😎)
>𝐼𝑡'𝑠 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑡𝑜𝑜 𝑝𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑐𝑖𝑝𝑙𝑒𝑑; 𝑖𝑡'𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑖𝑛𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑝𝑒𝑡𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑤𝑒𝑎𝑘, 𝑤ℎ𝑖𝑐ℎ 𝑚𝑎𝑘𝑒𝑠 𝑖𝑡 𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑛 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑝𝑎𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑐.<
Come to think of it, you're probably right about that... unfortunately. Where are—say—the 𝘙𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵'𝘴 activist judges? The Right's entryists, academics, True Believers, censors, propaganda, riots...? There seems to be a disparity there.¹
Same for things such as the "Community Relations Service", the FAA's sudden "biographical exam" / university admissions / countless similar efforts, the social-media–co. pressure (see, e.g., ol' Zuck's testimony), "Sanctuary Cities", selective enforcement of the law & selective flouting of the same, the proliferation of "Grievance Studies" departments...
I'd 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 to say that it's because "well, we are opposed to such things on principle"; but—the asymmetry begins to make me uneasy. Symptomatic of the issue, maybe, is how even the messaging from the "grass-roots" right-wing online community tends to be "just unplug & homestead bro disengage from it all"—which is perhaps good advice (& I've basically taken it, myself: my Substack, such as it is, has no political position or content)... but is 𝗻𝗼𝘁 very conducive to any sort of social or political victory.
Truth be told, I am not really all that fond of the Right, either: Trump has done some good, but also a lot of bad—and the Right has, largely & for many years, seemed to me to be something like... an alliance between greedy Affluenza cases & anti-intellectual social Luddites,² so to speak—but I have been driven into its figurative arms by the way that the alternative 𝘬𝘦𝘦𝘱𝘴 𝘨𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙣 𝙬𝙤𝙧𝙨𝙚.
(I still remember when, over ten years ago now, I found Reddit leftists mocking the ideals of "free speech" & "meritocracy" & "even-handedness" & "objectivity"; not, you understand, saying that we 𝘧𝘦𝘭𝘭 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘵 of these ideals, but disparaging the 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘷𝘦𝘴... to hundreds of upvotes—sc., these were 𝗽𝗼𝗽𝘂𝗹𝗮𝗿 sentiments! Before then, I felt—my perception was—that both sides could agree upon ideas such as "we should strive to ensure that speech is as free as possible" or "we shouldn't support stripping freedoms away from enemies, or other policies that can be turned against us later... even if we think it's in a good cause now" or—the lowest of bars, one would have thought—"some things are objectively true".
(The first time I saw "mathematics is just white oppression" was, I think, the last time I considered myself to be on the left... heh.)
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¹ 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘴 𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘤𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘢𝘭𝘸𝘢𝘺𝘴 𝘴𝘰 𝘤𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘥—𝘑𝘢𝘯. 6—𝘢𝘴 𝘢𝘯 𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘮𝘱𝘵 𝘢𝘵 𝘢 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘸-𝘰𝘧-𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘵𝘩 𝘰𝘳 "𝘳𝘪𝘰𝘵"; 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯, 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘴—𝘦𝘹𝘤𝘦𝘱𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯 𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘦𝘳 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘴𝘶𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘢 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘬𝘦 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴 𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘳 (𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘳𝘦𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘢𝘴 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦𝘥 𝘣𝘺 𝘱𝘩𝘺𝘴𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘪𝘯𝘫𝘶𝘳𝘺, 𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘤𝘩)—𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦; 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘯 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘰𝘧 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘵𝘩, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘯𝘭𝘺 𝘩𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘭 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘙𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘴𝘰𝘳𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨. 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘯𝘥, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘶𝘭𝘵 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘙𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵'𝘴 𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘱𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘴𝘩𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 & 𝘧𝘦𝘢𝘳... 𝘢𝘯𝘥 this 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘰-𝘵𝘰 𝘦𝘹𝘦𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘳 𝘰𝘧 𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵-𝘸𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵!
² my general policy is "let people do what they want"—I'm fine with gays, got no problem with someone being trans, have always loved drugs³... ahem; etc.—but the progress of society since ~2010(?) has recently made me wonder if perhaps the ol' "slippery slope" arguments didn't, in fact, have more validity than I had credited them with... heh.
³ (𝘩𝘢𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘵, 𝘴𝘢𝘥𝘭𝘺... 𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘴 𝘰𝘶𝘵, 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 can 𝘣𝘦 𝘢𝘥𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦, 𝘢𝘧𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘢𝘭𝘭—𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘬𝘯𝘦𝘸?!—𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘢𝘳 𝘰𝘯 '𝘦𝘮 𝘪𝘴 𝘮𝘪𝘴𝘨𝘶𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘥, 𝘢𝘵 best; 𝘢𝘵 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘴𝘵, 𝘢 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳.)
"right-wing online community tends to be 'just unplug & homestead bro disengage from it all'..."
Right. This is a big issue. The right spares itself anxiety and mental illness but at the cost of societal influence.
Can we get a source on people not involved in Jan 6 being put in solitary confinement for Jan 6? And on Melania Trump not being able to open a bank account for "years"? I'm aware she claimed one bank account of hers was cancelled in her memoir (without providing evidence that this was in fact for political reasons), but that seems very different from what you're claiming.
Possibly this guy?
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-us-canada-66717948
> They debanked or cancelled their enemies with impunity (even Melania Trump couldnt open bank account for years),
Can you provide some kind of citation for that? She claimed in her memoir that one of her bank accounts got closed down. She never said which bank. I don't think she ever claimed she had trouble opening a bank account for any extended length of time. I don't think she ever followed up on the claim in her memoir in any way at all.
You seem to be right. I misremembered the story: it was the bank she used at the time that denied her service, but I presume she was able to find another bank.
However, while going through the sources, I found it quite disturbing to realise how widespread de-banking was at the time. They even de-banked Barron Trump, which I find especially gruesome, given that not targeting children for their parents' actions is supposedly a cornerstone of civilised society.
https://oversight.house.gov/release/comer-investigates-apparent-politically-motivated-debanking-of-thirty-tech-founders-first-lady-melania-trump/
It energised right wing cancel culture. Which is another thing that’s comes around and goes around. So everybody stop cancelling everybody would be the wise, but that’s not recoverable either.
Turning Points has received more applications to have chapters than it had chapters before.
Why is Kimmel the only significant one? There were quite a number of people fired for their comments.
We're any of them significant? Like, anyone you'd heard of prior to this?
The leftists who complained furiously about them had heard of them.
Whereas I still have not.
I actually disagree with this. I don't think Kirk was uniquely influential. Whatever his value to the right was, I think it's vastly outweighed by the moral backlash that his murder caused. Ideologues generally have more symbolic value as martyrs than as advocates. More than anything else I think that fact is what keeps a lid on political assassinations.
If Tyler Robinson wanted to maximally advance liberalism he probably would have been better served by pretending to be MAGA and assassinating a popular liberal.
I mean, sometimes. In this case it seems to have got the whole left into the mood of justifying it rather than condemning it, and opened up the previously taboo discussion of "well maybe we really should start killing our political enemies" rather than the opposite.
Hence this whole thread.
Yes but that’s limited to a small number of already-committed progressives. I think there are many more centrists who see that reaction and say “wow, progressives are terrible.” I think that, on net, Kirk’s murder will hurt democrats in the next election.
Only among "centrists" who are so profoundly dumb that they think Robinson's action was part of a secret left-wing conspiracy.
Who justified it? Or do you mean criticizing Kirk in any way after his murder is "justifying" it?
> If Tyler Robinson wanted to maximally advance liberalism he probably would have been better served by pretending to be MAGA and assassinating a popular liberal.
That wouldn't have worked because they'd have just ignored it like they did with the assassination of Melissa Hortman.
That didn't get any traction because Hortman was too obscure. That's why I said popular. It has to be a national figure.
Also the assassin more closely fits the deranged wingnut mold than the political assassin mold, similar to the would-be Trump assassin. Neither of them were really used to tar their respective parties. They're much more reminiscent of Jared Lee Loughner than Tyler Robinson, e.g. motivated more by mental instability than politics.
How very odd that a young man raised in a very conservative religious family, apparently in a committed gay relationship (probably experiencing much internal conflict over this), took extreme, irrational, unprovoked violent action to protect his loved one, and you call this amoral violence by the LEFT. What part of the murderer is a left-wing radical? His gonads? His heart? How does one frightened lover represent the half of all Americans that you call "they"?
Violence almost never helps. By the time it does, it's because there has been a lot of other violence already. Hitler got away with a lot of violence before the only solution was more violence. Violence against Stalin would've been acceptable long before WW2.
Hitler came about in a time when there was open street violence between at least 3 major political contingents. People we're often killed in these battles, buildings were burned etc etc. It's not like he took power *and then all the violence started*.
Well, the open street violence was perpetrated to a massive degree by Hitlers own goons, the SA ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung
"After Hitler rose to Nazi Party leadership in 1921, he formalized the party's militant supporters into the SA as a group that was to protect party gatherings."
"Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, members of the SA were often involved in street fights, called Zusammenstöße (collisions), with members of the Communist Party (KPD). In 1929, the SA added a Motor Corps for better mobility and a faster mustering of units."
When he took power, the violence actually did start though. Research the "Night of the Long Knives". Hitler consolidated his power by getting rid of anyone in the party who could challenge him and wasn't aligned with him.
Ernst Röhm, Gregor Strasser and many others were murdered. Gregor Strasser btw. was the leader of the wing that warranted the term "socialist" in the NSDAP. That's the first aspect of his movement Hitler got rid of. An aspect all people who claim that Hitler was actually a leftist ignore. Hitler had distain for leftist ideology and only used them to get to power, then got rid of anyone who actually had this ideology.
The Night of the Long Knives was specifically triggered by it being the Army's requirement to support Hitler - get rid of his paramilitaries so that the Army could (think they could) feel secure.
(This was before the Waffen-SS became a military factor - the Army would have been opposed to that as well, but by then it was too late.)
You are giving more context to the reasons this event took place; but it doesn't change the fact that "he took power *and then all the violence started*."
The Night of the Long Knives was just one example. Another was the „Köpenicker Blutwoche“ in June 1933. I can go on with examples of escalating violence after the election of Adolf Hitler. The boycott of Jews started the 1st of April 1933. Dachau was opened in March 1933. The concentration camp Oranianburg followed quickly after. In April 1933 alone tens of thousands of people were arrested.
The street fighting before the election of the NSDAP was just a warm-up phase for the Nazis ...
This reminds me of an old student project that made a fake advertisement for Mercedes, mocking their new brake assistent. The original claim was that the car would avoid collisions with pedestrians by performing an emergency stop.
In the fake add the car actually accelerated and drove over a young boy in the Austrian countryside, with his mother crying his name, "Adolf", in hysterics while the car leaves "Braunau am Inn", the birth place of a(n) (in)famous Adolf ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEME9licodY
I'm not claiming that Kirk or Decker would have ever reached this level of infamousy. Nor do I claim that it's possible to predict such a thing for any other human being. But the fake advertisment really drives home the moral issues with political violence to prevent worse outcomes, since those outcomes are always by definition unknown. It's a clever take on the prevention paradox IMO.
The core issue is that it's much easier to determine after the fact that a certain individual would have deserved death to prevent worse outcomes than it is to predict it. In another timeline Adolf Hitler might have simply been a bad, poor and unsuccessful painter.
Back to the topic: To me as a German todays America feels a lot like Germany in 1933. That's not a call for political violence. But it definetly is a call to action to anyone who doesn't agree with the fascist tendencies US politics exhibit at the moment. Rallies, strikes, civil disobedience and other forms of non-violent protests are most definetly warranted at this time. Especially against all attempts to threaten future elections, but also against the behavior of your ICE agents ...
Germans telling you that we recognize the signs. We are kind of experts in recognizing them nowadays ;-)
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I actually support banning the AfD. It's a party full of actual Nazis (not fascists, Nazis as in "Would have been early member of the NSDAP in 1933"). This party is anti-constitutional in its nature.
The american equivalent would be a party openly compaigning in the US to reintroduce slavery and to turn half the population into slaves.
Maybe I get the US wrong. But I'd certainly hope that this would be grounds to not let this party campaign on the grounds of their political goals being unconstitutional.
In America we have freedom of speech and freedom of association, so we are allowed to campaign for any policy we want. Yet you would be hard pressed to find anyone advocating to bring back slavery. I believe Germany's suppression of a swiftly growing political party is a far greater authoritarian threat than ICE's enforcement of immigration law.
Your freedom of speech eroding under your very eyes is one of the reasons it's feeling very 1933ish to us Germans. The Jimmy Kimmel issue was kind of the most recent warning to you guys that play time is over.
I disagree with you assessment regarding the "suppression of a swiftly gowing political party" vs "ICE". The German constitution even allows and calls for violent resistance against anyone trying to abolish the constitution. Our constitution starts with "Human dignity is inviolable. It is the duty of all state authority to respect and protect it.". Notice how it says "Human", not "citizen". The AfD doesn't even want to honor that paragraph.
But considering your cultural background I'm not surprised that this isn't important to you. The US constitution only cares about citizens after all. There is no freedom of speech in the US for tourists, VISA holders and any other people with a foreign passport. And while Jimmy Kimmel got his job back for now, the VISAs of people with the wrong oppinions have still not been restored. Yet, you still pride yourself for something you've already lost to a great degree ...
There is an active slave trade going over the southern border. There are those who call it "fascist" to try to shut it down.
There's a constant tension between people who think the lesson of fascism was "don't negotiate on high-level abstract liberal principles" and those who think "don't negotiate on suppressing specifically awful and retrograde worldviews"
The latter are proponents of paradoxical "militant democracy," where the former would be accused of a paradoxical suicide pact liberalism.
>"The american equivalent would be a party openly compaigning in the US to reintroduce slavery and to turn half the population into slaves."
That would be detestable, but notably in the US system such a party could not, Constitutionally, be banned.
That just makes your constitution even worse. I knew that it only cared about citizens. But that it doesn't even guarantee basic human rights to its own citizens is quite something. You should probably amend that once you get the chance ;-)
Based on German history, it's pretty clear you guys aren't exactly experts in that.
It's by studying our own history extensively that we became experts in that. You are proving my point ...
> we recognize the signs. We are kind of experts in recognizing them nowadays
No, you aren't. You just think you are because you hallucinate these supposed "signs" in a lot of places while ignoring (or cheering) ACTUAL authoritarianism.
Believe what you want. It's your country and you'll be the ones having to suffer the consequences ...
This operationalises pretty well as a general rule on political violence.
Take as a starting point that there is a set of scenarios where it's acceptable to try and forcibly overthrow the government. Where you're in one of those scenarios, violence is justified if, and only if, it's a necessary (or very helpful) part of a coherent plan to overthrow the (presumably tyrannical) government. Killing random people because of their opinions will basically never reach this level, even in a dictatorship.
This punts part of the question back to, "When is it ok to forcibly overthrow the government?" I think that's straightforward as well in one scenario: where there's no prospect of removing the government through democratic or peaceful means.
I think there's also an argument for a second scenario where overthrowing the government meets some reasonable metric of self-defence; in a hypothetical Nazi Germany with elections, saying Jews would just have to shrug and get killed seems absurd. That's much fiddlier to draw a line on though, and it's also not clear where overthrowing the government is meant to go (elections don't solve the problem). This problem, although it seems farfetched, is basically Paul Kagame's origin story.
> That's much fiddlier to draw a line on though
Seems straightforward enough to me. If there are two groups of people, A and B, and group A is a government which is actively trying to kill everyone in B, that's called a war, meaning B and B's allies are broadly allowed to shoot back - at least in any manner consistent with the Geneva conventions and suchlike.
What if Group B is “people who have committed capital murder” or members of a terrorist group? What if the government’s not trying to kill Group B, only intern them or expel them from the country?
In my thinking, a minor crime syndicate picking a fight with the cops and immediately losing is still, in some sense, a war - just a very small one, with a particularly uncontroversial outcome.
> members of a terrorist group
That's... wow, I'm baffled how you'd be confused about this. Yes, obviously a terrorist group is de facto at war with the government they're doing guerilla attacks against, with corresponding implications for tactical necessity of violence. Joining or deliberately perpetuating such a group might still be immoral for strategic reasons, and all that reasonably-foreseeable violence would be a major factor in such a determination.
> “people who have committed capital murder”
Not usually a cohesive group, any more than, say, "people with a prime number of active hair follicles." As for individuals... heroic loners falsely accused of serious crimes, evading and inconveniencing law enforcement until they collect enough evidence to exonerate themselves, is common enough in fiction to be a cliche, so 'trying not to get caught' clearly isn't widely regarded as inherently wrong all by itself.
> only intern them or expel them from the country?
Kidnapping or home invasion aren't usually considered any less serious than direct violence in terms of how much force is acceptably proportionate in response - not least because success at such would make potential follow-up violence much easier. The more important factor is, was there some less destructive option which could also have accomplished the defensive goal? https://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=935
But the question isn’t whether a terrorist group is trying to overthrow the government, it’s whether they’re morally justified in doing so (and killing people in the process) purely because the government’s hunting them down, which seems like the answer is no.
If you’re including expulsion, should illegal immigrants be able to use force to stop themselves being deported/overthrow the government that’s trying to deport them?
My point is that you probably have to wade into an object-level question of who the government is justified in killing/detaining/expelling to determine who is morally justified in trying to overthrow an elected government in response.
From a philosophical anarchist perspective, the ethical if not practical answer is self defense. If one si threatening you or someone else who is not aggressing against them, self defense is acceptable. People who are committed to such (like police mean out on patrol) also count as ethical targets.
Not a practical answer, just an ethical one. Its pretty clear who is the aggressor when it comes to violence.
At minimum you should consider killing them when you have run out of options for preventing them from doing physical harm to others. AFAIK decker has never physically harmed anyone, but plenty of fascists are illegally kidnapping innocent people and throwing them into gulags, for example.
Still though, Decker himself has said that you should wait until the fascists "shoot first" so to speak, ie: they do some obviously immoral, illegal, and brutal thing to a large group of innocent American citizens, because that gives total casus belli to start a civil war.
The Gulags were run by the most anti-fascist people around. 100,000s of fascists were sent to the Gulag. It is evidence that being anti-fascist doesn't make someone good.
Oliver, the use of the word Gulag is just a stand-in for "political prison", not actually a reference to Soviet gulags. I hope you are smarter than this.
You're using fascist in the connotative sense that's being critiqued here: bad people. Do you think these federal agents are trying to enact a technically-correct Fascist state? Or are they part of a generally authoritarian regime? Personally Trump et. al. seem more like Chavista/Castro populist socialists than fascists if we go line by line on their agenda and attitudes. I don't care for it either way but a proper description is key to a proper prescription.
There's actually open debate about whether the immigration raids and deportations are illegal, especially in the specific cases. I would say that 75 percent of the actions this year are SOP for immigration agencies from Bush to Biden.
I tend to agree with your second para.
"seem more like Chavista/Castro populist socialists than fascists"
Right. But machismo *over there* is not treated the same as machismo here. Socialism with a certain aggressive male pathos really isn't socialism to American progressives. It once could be, but no longer can.
What’s your non-fascist solution for deporting all or almost all illegal immigrants in the United States?
It's important to note that the reason they've chosen the fascist solution is not for lack of good non-fascist ideas.
Would you like to explain what those theoretical non-fascist means are? Because the liberal establishment would certainly use their entrenched position to fight back against any attempt to change the status quo.
Ah, the bill that codified 1.5 million illegal immigrants per year into law.
Decker's writing encourage other people to conduct violence against garden variety American conservatives. Why should that one degree of separation protect him? It's pretty easy to add parameters to a hypothetical mathematical model where Nick Decker's premature death is net positive utility for mankind.
It's frighteningly easy to use utilitarian logic to justify any sort of action one wants to do.
Decker has precise thresholds where violence becomes acceptable (as we all do) that as far as I know current fascists have never had. They seem to just want to kill people for pleasure. Of course you can rationalise any behaviour, but not all rationalisations are equally correct.
>When must we kill Decker?
Surely we can get by with just banning him from ever writing or speaking in public again? He can go be a deaf-mute farmer at a monastery.
I think I’ve been pretty consistently against both.
I think with this sort of a thing there is a huge difference between people who have opinions/supporters vs those actually doing the violence themselves. Of course in a civil war/total populist takeover, there are no civilians which is a horror of civil war I think a lot of people don't grok.
Orwell wrote a great article in 1944 on how the word "fascist" had lost much of its meaning.
https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc
Beat me to it.
and me
And the term was fairly new then. The worst characteristics are indistinguishable from any other authoritarian mindset. Altogether not a very useful term anymore I don't think.
"Fascism" is meaningless, if it means anything it refers to the sort of "strength in unity" idea promulgated by all political movements of all stripes everywhere.
The Italian Fascists' German counterparts had a much more meaningful name for their movement: National Socialism. This is a much better and more accurate label for the entire sort of thing, and if we'd only stuck with that label then we could be having meaningful discussions about it.
But the left-socialists (like Orwell and his less cluey brethren) of the time didn't want to acknowledge their common ground with right-socialism so they used "Nazism" as the name for a particular party and "Fascism" as the name of the general sort of movement, when it should have been the other way around.
So now we spend all our time arguing over whether all sorts of modern people are members of a long-defunct Italian political party, which is as ridiculous as arguing over whether they're Bull Moose or not.
Bundles of sticks are the real fascists
Yeah, I was really surprised when nobody mentioned the Fascist undertones to Hillary’s “stronger together” slogan.
By that logic ‘e pluribus unum’ is fascist
Exactly. But when the modern right uses phrases like that, it's all pearl-clutching, "ooh, fascism".
To go back slightly further, take a look at the photo of the Lincoln memorial, noting the armrests:
https://www.nps.gov/media/photo/gallery-item.htm?pg=2810931&id=fa23d1b7-5045-42d1-82d0-c06970e8b6c6&gid=E0A2864D-49E3-4B95-B0B5-708F19B9ABAB
Yes, those _are_ fasces, and yes that _is_ consistent with his putting the U.S. back together by force of arms, over the violent objections of portions of it. Compelled unity is bloody. C'est la mort.
There are literal fasces on American money and in American public buildings
>But the left-socialists (like Orwell and his less cluey brethren) of the time didn't want to acknowledge their common ground with right-socialism
Orwell himself acknowledges there are similarities in the essay you are responding to:
>But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor *Socialists of any colour, are willing to make*.
Yep!
The one sentence that seems most relevant now (though the who essay is relevant) ... being:
"It will be seen that, AS USED, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. "
Lots of people doing bad things in American politics would actually be doing virtuous things if what they believed about the world were true.
Just as one example, if Joe Biden really had stolen the 2020 election, only the people who stormed Congress would have been taking the preservation of the American system of government seriously, and their many many fans would be a bunch of poseurs who had the opportunity to put their money where their mouths are, and did not.
A fascist who is right on the cusp of wiping away American liberties and rights for a generation or longer might be a valid target for political violence IFF that person’s program had been correctly diagnosed and the violence had a reasonable chance of averting the outcome.
But given how sloppily such terms and labels are deployed, to draw a line high enough that the 95% confidence interval is still on the fascist part of the scale, one must essentially wait until a politician puts on a full black bodysuit and marches down to Congress with a rifle shouting “I am a fascist, it is time to do a fascism, here is how I will do so,” followed by a seven-point-plan to institute all the greatest evils.
I don’t have a great solution for this, I will just observe that any actual fascists out there surely benefit from these consequences of injudicious language.
Realistically the win case for Jan 6 would to be delay the confirmation for long enough for further investigation to be performed to find evidence of sufficiently widespread fraud to justify holding some kind of fresh election.
That's the sanewashed version anyway. In reality you've just got a bunch of bored angry people who gave spent a year in quarantine watching the left burn and loot over some equally bullshit cause and deciding it's their turn.
The body tasked with identifying fraud in a Presidential election is actually Congress, during the counting of Electoral Votes. So a protest outside of the Capitol building that calls attention to fraud is actually the right thing for 'regular people' to do during a stolen election. What storming the building is supposed to do I'm not sure.
I don't think the Courts could remedy a fraudulent election where the Electors have already voted. They certainly have no power to order a new election. The only real influence they have is saying which votes do and don't count.
No, Trump had a specific coherent plan, put together by Eastman: make Mike Pence throw out the electoral votes of seven US states, thereby causing Trump to win, either the majority of remaining EVs, or by vote in the House by state delegation. This theoretical action would take place on January 6, as that's when Pence, as President of the Senate, opens the certificates, in accordance with the 12th Amendment to the US Constitution. Pence refused to do this, as he believes in the most basic elements of American democracy, so Trump sent a mob to intimidate him into submission. The mob may not have understood every detail of the plot, but they did understand it came down to Pence - that's why they were chanting "Hang Mike Pence."
All the actions taken by Trump follow the plan laid out in the Eastman memo. If there was a better plan than that, what was that plan?
Can you link me to something where I could learn more/give me a starting point for research? This is the first I've heard of this
I don't think I necessarily have to take people's claims about what they believe as being in good faith. I.e. I think a lot of "Biden stole the election" claims are motivated reasoning from people who would use violence to overturn elections commonly if they could.
Trump started planting the seeds for the stolen election narrative in April 2020, then really ramped it up at the end of July. Or you can go back to 2016 when he suggested it would be rigged.
What's the source for "Georgian Democrats in april 2020" -- I know Stacy Abrams said some things after losing in 2018 but not in 2020.
Ironically one of the most quoted sources on the rigging in the 1960 presidential election in Illinois is from a 12 year old Hilary Rodham who was so shocked she became a committed Republican activist.
But that's just standard politics. Here's a long montage of Democrats doing the same: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX2Ejqjz6TA
Do you really think that YouTube shows the same thing as a sitting president alleging it will be stolen well in advance of the election, continuing to it say it for 60 days after, calling the Georgia Secretary of State and pressuring him to change the vote tally while hinting that he could be prosecuted, then holding a rally outside Congress during certification, calling your own VP a coward for not overturning the results? That’s just normal politics?
Dunno about jail for officials, but there have been prosecutions of voters. A woman in Texas got five years for double voting in 2016. In 2020 A murderer in Colorado voted on behalf of his dead wife. In 2018 an election in North Carolina was thrown out and done again in 2019 because of election fraud.
> calling the Georgia Secretary of State and pressuring him to change the vote tally
This is worse. The rest is just more of the same.
Trump's claim is that if all the votes were accurately counted as they were cast, he would have won 2020.
Democrats saying: "Trump won because foreign disinformation got people to make misinformed votes" or "Trump does not really represent the people because although he won the election, he didn't win the popular vote" is not even in the same solar system as claiming that the voting machines secretly switched the votes. Do you realize how "Foreign interference got people to vote in ways they wouldn't have otherwise" is a substantially different claim than "Foreign interference switched the votes that were cast by Americans"?
The only thing that is remotely comparable is Gore 2000, an election where there demonstrably was legitimate question the degree to which votes in a few specific counties were accurately counted, and that asking for a recount in those counties is a completely reasonable avenue of seeking redress.
This is a personality piece on three nobodies with no influence in the modern political climate who are also 9/11 truthers about the 2004 election.
You are trying to compare this to a mainstream belief in the modern Republican party espoused by the President of the USA and Fox News and still held by 40% of the party.
Do you think that being able to find someone with fringe beliefs means that the parties are at all comparable? Do you think these are equally representative of the broader beliefs in their respective parties?
Fair enough, but I also think that a lot of "January 6 was an insurrection" claims are also motivated reasoning from people who would also use violence to overturn elections of they could.
I think there's a scary number of people on both sides who want to do that.
No, it's a pretty straightforward reading of what happened. Donald Trump attempted to use force or threat of force to intimidate Mike Pence to throw out the EVs of seven US states, in order to win when he actually lost. I don't understand what is supposed to not be an insurrection about this. Not enough guns? So if Mike Pence had been surrounded by a mob of 300 unarmed people, pushed, shoved, kicked, and finally, after being beaten black and blue, decided to throw out the EVs to make the pain stop, it still wouldn't have been an insurrection because he didn't have a gun pointed at him?
the commander in chief is just a name. the president is not a god king who can simply command the military to do whatever it wants at his leisure. theres a story about richard nixon directing a nuclear strike against north korea while in a drunken stupor; henry kissinger told the top brass of the military to stand down and wait until the morning when nixon sobers up and he forgets all about it. the commander in chief isnt that powerful.
if trump directed a military-led insurrection against the government as opposed to the moron-led insurrection, the military most likely would have refused the order.
This keeps happening.
Alice says "I believe X, therefore I am doing Y"
Bob says "Y is evil and X is obviously false, therefore you must only be claiming to believe it as an excuse because really you're evil and want to do evil things."
I have seen many many cases of this, from either side, and always, the answer has been that Alice really does believe X.
(For examples: X = "Abortion is murder", X = "Biden/Russia stole the election", X = "Vaccines don't work/have major side effects", X = "Homosexuality is sinful", X = "Women are an oppressed minority", etc. Those specific examples are all things I can guarantee you someone out there actually really believes, although I personally think all of them are both false and harmful. But let's not get into the weeds on that.)
I agree, and think that's one good argument for restraint and humility - if I think we are in an illiberal democracy (I do) and that the normal operation of the Constitution has been suspended (I do) then arguably we should be forming a violent resistance. But I disagree because I could be super wrong. And I would not want to be subject to violence if someone else thought the same with as much confidence as I have.
I have lots of reasonable hope - people have a visceral negative reaction to cancelling elections, so even if the GOP attempts it I think it's likely to fail and backfire. Many of the things this administration is doing are just the natural result of one party controlling the full federal government, and so nobody being empowered to check the executive, a problem we've bounced back from in the past. So despite the conditions for violence arguably being there, I have low confidence that violence would be effective, or that less disruptive means wouldn't be more effective. And I think anyone considering whether legitimate violence is needed here or in any case should do a similar calculation and ask about their own level of certainty. Of course, a major problem is that extremists tend not to do that calculation and reasonable people tend to do it, so we end up with only extremists being able to wield this tool. So to sum up I have no point and I'm just talking.
If MAGA people were factually correct about things like the 2020 election, immigrant violence, Trump's mental fitness, etc., I think it would have to be only by coincidence. They would still be doing something very wrong, which is exercising power on the basis of a very flawed epistemology.
We have a moral obligation to try and understand what is true and what isn't, especially before engaging in violence, or voting for leaders who will act with the backing of state violence. If we refuse to put in that effort out of laziness, or because we emotionally or socially prefer some narrative, we deserve moral rebuke, even if the beliefs we land on turn out to be accurate. The reason we deserve that rebuke is that by exercising power without understanding reality, we endanger people.
This isn't the only reason the MAGA movement deserves rebuke- the bad epistemology is sometimes, though not always, motivated by other moral failures like a desire to dominate, or a very narrow circle of moral concern. But I think it deserves to be condemned even in the absence of those other motivations.
I also don't think they benefit from being labelled "fascists". When used descriptively, the word is notoriously vague, but when used normatively, I actually don't think the word is vague at all- I think it has a very clear, widely agreed-upon definition, which is "someone who is sufficiently similar to the Nazis and their allies to morally deserve the shame of being associated with them." The word, in practice today, is a moral condemnation, like the word "cruel". Who, objectively, are the cruel people? Well, that's vague. But if someone condemns you for being cruel, you know what they mean.
Moral shaming of that sort has been common throughout human history because it's effective. I do think Trump and his people have earned the shame of the "fascist" label; I think using it is accurate according to the word's modern normative definition. I also think it probably is effective at reducing the social status of his movement- mostly because, on reflection, a very large number of people seem agree that the label is normatively accurate.
You assume the point in dispute.
> If MAGA people were factually correct about things like the 2020 election, immigrant violence, Trump's mental fitness, etc., I think it would have to be only by coincidence. They would still be doing something very wrong, which is exercising power on the basis of a very flawed epistemology
This is true of both sides of politics and has been since forever.
Very true. The Wokes' sloganeering is every bit as irresponsible and divorced from evidence.
Imagine if the Dems had sent a paramilitary force into red states to remove confederate flags and enforce pronoun use
Unfortunately, they administered the equally tyrannical tool of attempted public shaming
When they do violence, they are terrorists. When they don't do violence, they are cowardly. Your highly motivated reasoning seems weak.
Many Thanks, but your comment doesn't respond to mine.
When e.g. the Dems enforced pronoun use, they used threats of depriving dissenters of their livelihoods as their preferred flavor of force.
Eisenhower mobilized the National Guard to enforce Brown v. Board of Education...
I think public shaming is obviously less violent and bad than paramilitary force, even though I dislike both.
I've long thought we should appreciate people for doing the right things, even if they didn't do it for the right reasons. Even if they didn't know why they did it.
We already kind of have an answer for this. Let's take the case of murderers and rapists. In our legal system you do kind of have to wait around for them to actually murder and rape people before you can lock them in a cage, or at the very least until they march around screaming "I'm going to do a rape/murder" as in your comment.
“This machine kills fascists” is undoubtedly relevant, but it seems in bad faith to take it at face value - seems like a burger company claiming their products “kill” vegetarians by converting them to eating meat. I think most people interpret Guthrie’s slogan to mean “This machine kills fascism”.
If a burger company's ads were "This restaurant kills vegetarians", I think many people (including me) would have further questions!
I think the actual story is that during WWII, people who built guns and bombers would sometimes put "This machine kills fascists" on the actual fascist-killing military hardware, and Guthrie (in the context of WWII) thought it was funny to put it on his guitar. I'm not sure what further conclusion we can draw from that (it was during WWII, when killing fascists was much less civil-war-ish), but I'm a little nervous about how the phrase is used today.
Even then, we weren't killing fascists, we were killing people from countries with whom we were at war. We didn't do a lot of bombing runs over Spain, despite Franco's regime being fascist, because we weren't at war with them.
Hey, it would reduce factory farming.
I suppose the idea was in the irony - use something normally employed for actual weaponry doing actual killing to instead label a tool of art that merely "kills" the ideology. So in that sense it was quite a positive use, the twist being exactly that it doesn't really kill, it spreads ideas.
I find it deeply frustrating I had to go this far down into the comments to find someone who understands how metaphors work.
I don't get it, is this a bit? He was obviously talking about how the Allied armies were using his songs as recruitment material.
EDIT: Wait, is this just people confusing Guthrie with Bob Dylan? Because these misinterpretations make a lot more sense if people are imagining the slogan being done by a folk singer writing hippie anthems in the '60s, rather than by a WWII-era Marine writing propaganda for the military he was serving.
If you want real irony, one of the things that machine was used for is to praise the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
Can't locate a recording, but the lyrics survive:
I see where Hitler is a talking peace
Since Russia has met him face to face
He had just got his war machine a rollin’
Coasting along and taking Poland
Stalin stepped in, took a big strip of Poland
And gave the lands back to the farmers.
A lot of little countries to Russia ran
To get away from the Hitler man
If I’d been living in Poland then-
I’d been glad Stalin stepped in
Swap my rifle for a farm…trade my helmet for a sweetheart.
That machine had to wait for Stalin's permission before killing any fascists.
>Stalin stepped in, took a big strip of Poland
>And gave the lands back to the farmers.
A particularly bitter irony since the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was after Stalin's Holodomor.
Many Thanks! I'd call the Holodomor about equivalent - possibly 7 million dead.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to interpret it as anything other than “this music causes people to abandon fascist ideology” unless you’re going to claim that the singer of “This Land Is Your Land” was, what, threatening to go around bludgeoning people with a guitar?
As I said elsewhere, I'm not sure if this confusion is a joke or not, but he was clearly boasting about how his music was being used to recruit for the army.
"This land is your land" seems like a kinda fascist blood-and-soil anthem when you think about it.
I'm not saying that Woody Guthrie was a fascist, just that it wouldn't surprise me if it turned out the same lyrics had been generated by a different process in another universe.
Yup. I always loved this song, of course, like most of Americans. I had mixed feelings learning about the two original verses that he left out, both of which have made a comeback. I loved the verse about him watching poor people stand in line for bread. I was totally appalled by his attack on private property. 10 years later and I'm not appalled anymore. Our property customs are the result of a compromise and negotiation that have lasted for 1000+ years. Our property laws (and the overarching customs that guide them) are pragmatic stop gaps. They aren't sacred principles handed down from God at the dawn of time.
Exactly. Using "kill" in a way that actually has nothing to do with killing is an incredibly common figure of speech. It's also a very common figure of political speech to take all the other side's statements as literal fact, while excusing the same from your own side as just jokes, exaggeration, or figure of speech.
He was in the USO during World War 2, so he participated, albeit indirectly, in actual fascist-killing.
To be fair, some kind of guerrilla mariachi going around in WW2 Europe smashing Nazi skulls in with his armoured guitar sounds like a pretty rad movie idea.
"The pen is mightier than the sword."
It should be remembered that between September 1939 and Operation Barbarossa Guthrie thought fighting fascism was a terrible idea only supported by people controlled by Wall Street bankers and campaigned against the draft and military preparation. It is impossible to tell but it is quite likely that some of the "fascists" he wanted to fight were supporters of Trotsky.
Slapping a "This Machine Kills Fascists" sticker on an ice ax for the humor value.
The entire problem is that WWII era American society would itself be considered "fascist" by the standards of today. Because racism and nationalism became the ultimate evils, rather than racial extermination and imperialism (or rather, the former is viewed as a greased slope to the latter), most Western societies prior to WWII are retroactively bunched closer together with the Nazis on the evil scale than would be evident to those societies themselves at that time.
Don't forget this is the pre Civil Rights era (and read some of the opinions of soldiers at the time), so someone could say "I'm a segregationist American patriot, not a fascist" and even those who opposed them and had positions on integration that preconfigured the Civil Rights era, would actually believe them. Today, the moral difference between pre-WW2 non-fascist American and European societies has been squashed together in a way where if someone says "we should kill fascists" people who basically DO just want 1950s America (also viewed as evil because pre Civil Rights era) are viewed as rounding off to the same thing. Obviously fascism was thrown around here and there back then too, but nowhere near to the same degree, because the moral squashing of the past hadn't happened yet.
Yeah, I find it weird when opposition to immigration is implied to be incompatible with "liberal democracy." The immigration policies of the countries that actually fought the Axis powers were extremely restrictive.
But all burger places kill vegetarians. Think about what all the burgers are made of!
Vegetarianism as a philosophical position is different from the biological trait of having an herbivorous digestive system. Plenty of cows would gladly eat meat if it were available to them - calcium-deficient deer have been known to suck the bones out of baby birds.
I don’t necessarily see a contradiction between (2) and (3). You can think that fascists are a legitimate target for violence in that you wouldn’t morally scorn an individual for attacking a fascist, and at the same time think that political violence will generate a number of negative externalities without actually solving the problems brought about by having a large portion of the US population being fascists. Basically something can be morally justifiable without being a good idea to actually carry out.
Thanks, that's useful pushback. I do think violence is currently morally unacceptable and not just impractical, but I agree it's not as logically airtight as it originally claimed.
Hot take: violence is bad whether it's political or not. Political motivation alone neither makes it more excusable nor makes it worse.
(Similarly, incitement to violence should be treated with equal gravity regardless of political motive / affiliation. Arrest the leftist calling for the Nazi to be punched if and only if you also arrest the Nazi calling for the leftist to be gassed.)
Sure; and as it happens western justice systems do in fact make a distinction between premeditated crimes vs crimes of passion, so no new exception is needed to capture premeditated acts of terror.
Arguably there's room for a useful distinction between "murder of someone known personally, premeditated to look like an accident or otherwise avoid raising a fuss" vs. "murder of a stranger who happened to support a rival political faction, premeditated to maximize disruption and spectacle."
Both involve deliberate killing, which the law certainly needs to firmly discourage if it's good for anything at all, but the latter is also effectively a public threat against every surviving member of the victim's faction - 'let that be a lesson to the rest of you' - which constitutes further, separate damage to the fabric of civil society.
I've always been against hate speech laws, considering them to be thought crime laws. but now that I think of it, laws against terrorism and political violence are kind of thought crime laws, too. I don't know what to make of this. I'm not even sure if premeditated murderers are more likely to reoffend then impulsive murderers.
do you disapprove of John Brown? The Yugoslave Partisans? These were forms of political violence
John Brown failed, and just got people killed. The Yugoslav partisans succeeded.
I am responding to someone saying political violence is never acceptable with examples that I think are hard to disapprove of. I also would not say that John Brown failed at all.
"But his truth goes marching on"
Perhaps he only failed at his direct goals.
Everyone who is violent has something that drives them to violence. The mere fact they were political alone is not what we use to decide what we think about it. With that alone and no other context, they'd get filed in the same bin as, oh, any of the random nutters that write their ravings in a "manifesto" before they do a shooting as seems to be a regular occurence in the US. We actually look at the whole situation, as for any other violent incident. The details matter and you have to judge case by case, whether it is political or not.
Hence, as I said: "Political motivation alone neither makes it more excusable nor makes it worse."
Something being bad doesn't mean it isn't necessary. Cutting people open is bad, but removing a cancer may save a life... or a republic.
"Political motivation alone neither makes it more excusable nor makes it worse."
I'm not saying it's never necessary. I'm saying the "political" label alone is not what we use to judge, and after you've looked at the situation in detail adding the extra label is redundant. "Political violence" is a thought-stopping phrase. It gets trotted out when someone wants you to make a snap decision and/or overgeneralise.
After the fact we can punish assault & battery less than we punish murder, just as we punish attempted murder less than actual murder. But beforehand we don't know what the actual result of violence will be, and some people actually do die as a result of getting punched in the head.
>Is it useful to mention that a lot of the antifascists are talking about punching a fascist?
Agreed. The severity of the action called for, or actually performed, matters.
If someone had _just_ punched Charlie Kirk, or, say AOC, we would be having a much less rancorous discussion.
Civil disobedience is widely regarded as at least potentially okay. The *absolutely fundamental* part is that you're public about what you're doing and that you're willing to take the punishment if found guilty in court.
This is also what makes it (sometimes) effective in the first place - without that part, it's mere hooliganism.
Or the opposite: A deontological general rule against political violence is good and important, but there may be specific extreme situations at the tails where utilitarian concerns outweigh the general principle, and fascism may be one of those.
This isn't that weird; the value of having utilitarian calculations is often to catch unusual exceptions to a broad deontological rule.
This was my thought, too.
Let me see if I can come up with an example that is maybe less loaded than "fascist" currently is.
Murderers (and perhaps other categories of serious criminals) are a legitimate target for violence. (I'd guess that most, but not all, people who are anti-death penalty are generally against it on quasi-procedural grounds not because they don't actually think murderers can a legitimate target for violence).
But vigilanteeism in American is morally unacceptable (at the current time).
Both of these seem reasonably broadly acceptable? But we can also understand there are times & contexts where vigilanteeism might be morally acceptable.
The limiting factor is the "not acceptable at this time", not the categorisation of some people as being valid targets should "at this time" change.
Even leaving aside far-fetched hypotheticals about the collapse of effective state authority or widespread corruption/malfeasance we can look at cases like the murder of Ken McElroy.
From wikipedia, for those aren't familiar with him:
"Over the course of his life, McElroy was accused of dozens of felonies, including assault, child molestation, statutory rape, arson, animal cruelty, hog and cattle rustling, and burglary.
In all, he was indicted 21 times but escaped conviction each time
[...]
McElroy was shot and killed in broad daylight as he sat with his wife Trena in his pickup truck on Skidmore's main street. He was struck by bullets from at least two different firearms, in front of a crowd of people estimated as numbering between 30 and 46. Despite the many witnesses, nobody came forward to say who shot him. As of 2025, no one has been charged in connection with McElroy's death."
Per social contract theory, someone who commits murder has unilaterally defected from a broader agreement we all have to refrain from killing each other, and as such is no longer protected by it - but the rest of us, not having defected, are still obligated to deal with that threat using as little additional violence as reasonably possible. In Ken McElroy's case, apparently the formal mechanisms for doing so had been tried and found wanting, so empirical "minimum necessary" kept incrementing upward.
Any given witness, after the mob dispersed, might have thought to themselves, "Could the shooter(s) be coming for me next? Eh, probably not. Even if it somehow gets to a point where I've had, say, nineteen blatantly unjust felony acquittals, all I gotta do is remember to plead guilty and throw myself on the mercy of the court for the next one."
I push back against your assumption that most people are against the death penalty on procedural reasons. I would say that many, perhaps most opponents of the death penalty do not believe that retributive violence is appropriate against murderers. They truly believe that violence is only justified in the context of stopping and/or incarcerating the murder. Although naturally incarceration involves continual implicit threats of violence.
I have an admittedly strange compromise position where the death penalty is wrong, but I think murderers should be blinded or otherwise permanently disfigured. I figure it meets the demands of justice, safety and financial responsibility. You should see my fellow bleeding heart liberals freak out when I share this view. I posted this view on a Reddit group where you are supposed to post the most outrageous thing you believe, and it was removed by a moderator because "this must be bait, there's no way you really believe that."
Regarding your view on vigilantism, I think you're understanding of vigilantism is naive and overly influenced by Hollywood films. I regret that vigilantism has a large fan base in this readership and there is not much pushback.
Nor does your interesting anecdote about Mr McElroy clarify the situation. Even if vigilantes only killed innocent people say, 1 out of 6 times, that would represent an incredible travesty. It's a fundamental rule of anglo-american jurisprudence that it's better for 10 guilty people to go free than for one innocent to suffer. I do not know how much traction this princie has internationally, but it's a principle I hope we never forget
"Almost nobody uses fascism in a purely innocent denotative way; if they did, it would serve their purposes equally well to replace it with a synonym (like “far-right nationalist authoritarian corporatist”) or even a more specific subvariety (like “Francoist”). But it wouldn’t serve Gavin Newsom’s purpose to call Stephen Miller a far-right nationalist authoritarian corporatist, because Gavin Newsom specifically cares about the negative connotation of “fascist”, rather than its meaning"
I think "far right" would actually have served a similar purpose. I find that most people just understand "fascist" to mean something like "very far right", and many would still grant the same connotations and implications (e.g. it's OK to use violence against the "far right").
This might just be a difference of intuitions - I think if Gavin Newsom had called Stephen Miller "far right", everyone including Miller himself would have just shrugged and said "yeah, I guess".
Yeah, the juice here is entirely in loading your target up with negative affect.
And, of course, left and right are just labels for temporary political coalitions in one place at one point in time.
They don't have much to do with policy preferences.
Remember how free trade used to be a centre right idea, and now the right (in the US) loves tariffs?
In British politics anti-semitism is now firmly a left thing, in the peat the literal Nazis were also big fans.
Traditionally in post war Germany Catholicism was associated with the centre right. I've you've listened to a Pope recently, they are pretty much commies. (Though I have to admit that's probably closer to what you should expect if you read their book.)
The commies didn't think they were commies.
Which commies?
Probably. But I do think that there's some fundamental "core" behind what is right and left from when these terms were first used before the French Revolution to now (see e.g. Scott's "Thrive vs Survive" theory, which I agree with mostly), but obviously the specific policies and even some values of "Right and Left" can shift depending on time and geography.
I also feel that the argument can be made (as has been made by others) that currently the Right is mostly "tribal" while the left is mostly ideological. This explains a lot of modern politics, for example why less educated voters in most Western countries tend to favour the Right (especially the populist right), while more educated voters tend to favour the left. Also, it's a reason for why "cancel culture" was developed (mostly) by leftists, as the left cares more about "ideological purity" than the right, who cares more about a strong leader" who can lead the "tribe" (the "tribe" usually being an ethnic or at least national/citizen group, though sometimes it can be broader or narrower, depending on the context). And while the right these days is probably ideologically a lot more diverse than the left, the left has more problems unifying and especially appealing to a large group of voters because they tend to be much more ideological and thus less accommodating of people with different views, which on the left seems to be seen more as a moral failure than on the right were more people are accepted as part of the "in-group", at least as long as it's seen as electorally valuable. Of course, different voting systems create different incentives, thus in the US with its two-party system its more difficult for the Democrats to be seen as "moderate" as long as they are seen as being the party of the far-left than in most EU countries with proportional systems where the far-left voters usually don't vote for more centre-left parties. And yeah, some policies have shifted from being "left-coded" to being right-coded", such as being against vaccines or promoting more domestic manufacturing, simply because the right's "leaders" have changed the minds of their followers (as I explained above, this isn't relay the case for the left, except that in the US opposition to Trump now means "lefty" for most people, especially on the right).
IMHO, here in the UK, "far right" is understood to be loosely synomyous with "fascist" and both terms mean someone who it is right and proper to hate and verbally abuse (but not physically - we haven't sunk that low yet). This equivalence is clear from the fact that nobody is ever called "centre right".
People say "centre right" in the UK all the time, normally Tories describing themselves. I agree that "far right" is taken to be literally a synonym for neo-Nazis (I generally hear "fascist" use almost apolitically to describe officiousness). I'm not sure "extreme right" would be though; describing Farage as "far right" sounds like calling him a Nazi, describing him as "extreme right" sounds more descriptive.
Whilst you are correct that Tories describe themselves as "centre right" that is not how they are described in normal conversation. People rarely say "the centre right", they just say "the Tories" or "the Conservatives" which is precisely why even "the right" is more usually taken to mean "the far right" rather than the centre right plus the far right (Of course there is no "near right" ever :-)).
That’s a good point. I’d say “the far left” as well. It could be the lack of cohesive organisation maybe - “far right” is quicker than listing a bunch of splinter groups.
https://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&client=ms-android-ee-uk-rvc2&source=android-browser&q=centre+right
Perhaps Farage is better described as center-right? Reform currently is running at 34% in UK polls ( https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/uk-opinion-polls ), well ahead of all other parties. He is _not_ a fringe candidate.
He's certainly not a fringe candidate! Farage has a traditionally far right goal (Reform are talking about repatriation existing immigrants) combined with a reassuring orthodox conservative image and some left-wing policy goals like scrapping the 2 child cap on benefits. Hard to categorise. I feel populism generally is more of a hot mess than fascism was.
Many Thanks!
The problem with "far right" is that it entirely misses the point about what is wrong with fascism and naziism. If you draw a line with Clement Attlee somewhere on the left and Sir Winston Churchill somewhere on the right, putting Hitler and Mussolini on the right around twice as far from Attlee as you put Churchill, or for that matter you put Stalin on the left twice as far from Churchill as Attlee, it does nothing to explain what was actually wrong with those people. The problem with Hitler was that he was a murderous dictator and not that he was particularly right wing.
I mean, that's what you think. There's a lot of people (on the left) who genuinely think that the right-wingess, rather than the war and mass murder, *is* what's wrong with Hitler.
I think he would say "no, I'm center right".
Idk about Miller, but others haven't shrugged. Iirc Musk got the FBI to stop working with the Southern Poverty Law Center because SPLC called TPUSA "hard right."
The far right wants to legitimize itself by calling itself centrist
I wouldn't have worked, because "too many syllables". People respond emotionally to short words. Add a few syllables and the emotions lose force.
> it would serve their purposes equally well to replace it with a synonym (like “far-right nationalist authoritarian corporatist”) or even a more specific subvariety (like “Francoist”).
One of those is like 50 syllables, the other nobody actually knows or understands.
The purpose of language is to communicate' we often sacrifice specificity for ease of communication and for being easily understood by a wide audience. That's why we have words like 'fish'.
'Far-right' doesn't work because it is commonly understood to be relative to the Overton Window; 'Far-right' wouldn't necessarily imply an intent to subvert the constitution or end elections, for instance.
Trump is certainly not a far-right authoritarian.
But I think it might be a more accurate charge to call him a centre-right authoritarian. His policy preferences are well within the mainstream (minus a few personal idiosyncrasies on things like tariffs) as demonstrated by the fact he repeatedly wins elections.
Centre-right (or centre-left) authoritarians typically haven't been much of a thing, we usually associate authoritarianism with extremism. But my theory would be that authoritarianism is a pattern you resort to when you can't get your way through normal means; centrists don't usually have much trouble getting their way, but the machinery and institutions of the US are so entirely captured by the Democrats at the moment that a centre-right leader simply _cannot_ execute ordinary centre-right policies without running into a morass of resistance at every level (as in Trump's first term). Therefore if he wants to get anything done then he needs to resort to measures which it might be somewhat fair to call authoritarian.
For example: it's normal mainstream policy for ICE to go out and catch and deport illegal aliens. However, in some cases you have state and city governments actively working against the ordinary legal actions of the Federal Government. This forces Trump to play the "national guard" card. It would be better if the National Guard card were left unplayed, but it would be better if local authorities could simply cooperate with federal authorities in ensuring the rule of law.
>Outright obstruction is criminal, but that's not what's happening.
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has been damned close to outright obstruction.
>Pritzker has repeatedly affirmed his commitment to protecting undocumented immigrants, particularly those without violent criminal convictions. In January 2025, he stated Illinois would "_stand in the way_" of certain federal deportation policies, citing the state's Trust Act, which limits local law enforcement's cooperation with federal immigration agents.
To put it another way: He may be able to construe the law in such a way that he is within the letter of it (that's for the legal system to decide) but he is damned surely violating the _spirit_ of the immigration laws.
I agree with Melvin:
>It would be better if the National Guard card were left unplayed, but it would be better if local authorities could simply cooperate with federal authorities in ensuring the rule of law.
Surely illegal aliens in a Democrat state is a problem for the Democrats in that state and a boon to the Republicans so that cannot be an explanation for Trumps actions with ICE and the National Guard. Also, if Democrats wield such influence, how did they let Trump get elected twice. Try to be consistent.
I'm not sure if I'm reading you correctly, but are you saying that Democrats see illegal aliens as a problem? That would be something I've never heard from a Democrat's mouth. I live in the US and Melvin's take seems right on to me.
No. I mean that illegal aliens, to the extent that they are a problem, are primarily a problem for the state that they are in. In a Democrat state they are not doing any harm to any Republicans in other, Republican, states so why is Trump so keen to "help" the Democrats? Logically he should be appealing to his base by squeezing every last alien out of Republican states. The only reasonable explanation is that he's just trying to provoke a fight.
I think Trump's constituents appreciate ICE activity anywhere it is needed, and cities like LA and Chicago seem like high-visibility, high-ROI areas for laws to be enforced that haven't been. Provoking a fight with Democratic governors might be a bonus, if it's a fight Trump thinks he can win.
I basically agree that denying (2) makes sense: I think MAGA (especially last few months) is looking like a 21st century version of Fascism: corporatist economics with big companies working in close cooperation with the executive, crush and go after dissent using blunt force not sublety, control the most important media organs. There is continuity with previous bad things done by past admins (Obama, Trump 1, Bush, Biden etc) in the sense that there was 'advice' to tech companies or random activist DAs starting dodgy prosecutions of trump, but its now looking more like a 'unified theory of power' in Ezra Klein's words than any of these previous approaches, like its being done FOR a unified purpose of having civil society, big tech the courts etc bend to a small groups will https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-authoritarian-menace-has-arrived
And I know there's a wing of people here who will say, but the dems wanted that too, they was just more subtle about it, look at the twitter files, look at the broader so-called 'independent civil society' and how it all lined up behind one agenda... and look, I think these are 'on a spectrum' in some very technical sense that a supernova and a house fire are on a spectrum. Like they're different in kind, and also one is WAY LESS BAD to the extent that you can compare them as similar at all. I also think Scott thinks this even though he does his best to avoid making direct comparisons between left and right anti-liberal tendencies.
But this is also not 1930s Italy, the biggest disanalogy is that there isn't the same focus from Trump on the state embodying the will of the people, but is is authoritarian, personality driven, very nationalist and at least a bit corporatist.
I think the correct thing to do is say it looks fascist, or bears the same relation to fascism as modern far left groups like antifa do to 1920s revolutionary leninists, but no that doesn't mean we're at the violence is good level. Though I do think that we are into Orban territory now.
I basically agree with all of this except that I'm not sure how to think about the issue brought up in your second paragraph. I think if you extend the left's trajectory over 2010 - 2020 another X years in the same direction, you get a regime that controls large swathes of private activity, bans large categories of dissent and criticism, and is very hard to dislodge. I think it's slightly exculpatory that no specific individual had the entire plan in their head in the same way that Trump/Miller are consciously aiming at authoritarianism now, but I don't know how much difference that would have made in practice, and I wouldn't want to have to make that case to conservatives in order to make them feel like they're the ones unilaterally violating a norm.
I don't think it's reasonable to extend the lefts trajectory the way you are hypothesizing. By 2020 woke was already on the down turn and "cringe" among the youth. I simply don't see a way that it would've continued the way it had
I think this is easier to see in 2025 than it was in 2020.
The woke left peaked around 2022. With the death of George Floyd in mid-2020, it was firmly in the ascendancy. For the following two years, anything and everything became about racial equity, even to the point of eclipsing the pandemic's presence in the public consciousness.
I think 2021, but that's a mere quibble.
>2020 woke was already on the down turn
You mean the year it went into overdrive and encouraged mass riots, racist vaccine distribution policy, and people ran the risk of losing their jobs for *not* posting a sympathetic black box?
> You mean the year...
Yes. Trajectories track derivatives, not moments in time. Parabolas have peaks.
> racist vaccine distribution policy
If what you mean by this is "federal/state/local governments were exclusively giving early access to vaccines on the basis of race", this didn't happen. If you mean something else, you should clarify
> people ran the risk of losing their jobs for *not* posting a sympathetic black box
this definitely didn't happen for any definition of these terms
> If what you mean by this is "federal/state/local governments were exclusively giving early access to vaccines on the basis of race",
I like the "exclusively" you threw in there to give yourself an out. Sure, it wasn't *exclusive*, they just used a nice technocratic weighting system in which race counted more than most other factors. A lot of attempts at ethnic cleansing are like this now; they feel the need to be have a touch of subtlety in the age of democratized media.
Citation needed. I'm fine with dropping the exclusively. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I lived in two very progressive places and did not hear a single time anything remotely approximating "racial minorities are weighted higher to get access". The doctors, the old, and the immuno compromised got early access, in that order.
Please provide a link.
> I simply don't see a way that it would've continued the way it had
...Because they would be overthrown by force. Which is what's happening now.
They would have never given up power willingly. The system was designed to entrench their rule. So the system being destroyed is a prerequisite for change.
Who is 'they'? Please describe the 'system' you are talking about?
Leftists, obviously. They have a mass media apparatus and an academia in thrall to their morality. Even if they lost, they would spin up the propaganda machine again, and centrists would vote for them next election, because the average American is a moron. So yes, the system for disseminating their ideology will be destroyed (alongside the entrenched bureaucracy protecting it), because that's the only way to ensure a long-term national shift in morality.
I'm sorry, do you hear yourself? Who are 'the leftists'? Do you just mean 'the Democratic party and anyone who votes liberal'? Do you mean 'anyone who isn't maximally far right on every subject'? Or are you referring to a specific group of people? Is, like, Oprah a leftist? What about Kendrick Lamar? Dick Cheney recently supported Kamala, is _he_ a leftist?
Doesn't every authoritarian movement claim they are taking extraordinary measures and violating the law to prevent the destruction of the nation? Why should we take your claims anymore seriously this time?
Okay thanks for the reply and it's good to know we're on the same page about a lot of this and what you actually believe about the left vs right wing threat here. So let me organize my thoughts:
First: is the claim that really authoritarian things like Democrats packing courts and making fake interpretations of the constitution to let them criminalize dissent would have happened eventually, or just that you can draw a trendline in that direction and it's possible in principle, but wouldn't have a really occured? Because there's a massive difference between "here's a concerning trend" and "this would realistically have occurred." The hypothetical is inherently hard to argue about so it's basically unknowable, but I'd at least like to know which version you mean. If the point is just "there is a trendline we could extrapolate but it's unlikely to hold" then we don't disagree.
Second: there's a vocal, explicit appetite on the Trumpian right for bulldozing institutions. Miller calls judges who rule against Trump "terrorists." Musk and others openly praise Bukele for destroying judicial independence. They say out loud that independent institutions checking executive power are bad and should be removed. Where's the equivalent on the left? The concerning left-wing stuff: payment processors, campus speech codes, bureaucratic overreach, stays diffuse and uncoordinated precisely because there's no one actually advocating for centralized authoritarian power. That doesn't mean you can't do some authoritarian things but it is a really significant brake. Progressivism is fundamentally unsuitable for this. It's this weird hybrid of far-left cultural analysis (structural oppression, systemic critique) combined with stated commitment to liberal principles (free speech, institutional checks, democratic process). That combination makes it really hard to actually govern in an authoritarian way. You'd need to jettison the liberal principles entirely, at which point you're not talking about progressivism anymore - you're talking about actual revolutionary socialism. The ideology itself has internal blockers.
Third: has this ever actually happened? The charismatic strongman who says only I can fix things and I embody the will of the true people of the nation is a cliche for a reason, but the slow-drift-from-diffuse-progressive-consensus path... where? Maybe Indira Gandhi's Emergency is an example of a center left or at least not a revolutionary socialist government getting to proper authoritarian overreach, but that's still one leader making explicit decisions in a country with weak democratic institutions, and it got reversed. If this were a real comparable threat, we should see historical precedent. We don't.
I think the fact that as you say there is no plan on any leaders head for authoritarian rule is THE crucial thing, not just "mildly exculpatory". I don't think you can sleepwalk into severe authoritarianism. Somebody needs an actual plan at some point for it to get really bad! And I can't imagine who on the left could develop and execute such a plan while remaining popular enough to implement it.
Which brings me to the fourth epistemic point: the whole thesis requires seeing invisible coordination. "Cathedral," "conspiracy without conspirators," diffuse consensus somehow acting like unified intent. And yeah, class interests and structural forces are real, but this framework makes it so easy to engage in conspiracy-adjacent reasoning. You can attribute agency to anything, connect unrelated events, posit hidden coordination precisely because you've defined the threat as having no visible center. I think this invites exaggeration even if there is a real problem, and (especially if you want to be fair minded to both sides AND one is definitely authoritarian right now and using all this as an excuse for its own power grab) I think it can become a mental trap.
So even setting aside whether we agree on the specific facts about Twitter Files or campus speech or payment processors, which I suspect we don't, I don't think the "trendline extrapolation" to an extreme authoritarian regime actually holds up except as a very unlikely edge case.
Look, maybe I'm wrong and changing technology/culture means this could happen differently in the future to how it's ever happened before.
But right now, all the really bad examples in recent history are populist strongmen, mostly on the nationalist right and some on the revolutionary socialist left.
TLDR: One path as far as I can tell just ends in modern day Germany, with its Constitution protection office making dubious rulings about which parties are "anti -democratic" and its police investigating rude tweets about politicians. But the other path ends in the other Germany.
This is a really good response.
> The other path just ends in modern day Germany.
Germany is slowly working its way to banning the AfD, though. It's not guaranteed but at this point the only real blocker is that the CDU is part of the current coalition government and its current leader is opposed (but many of the people who could replace him are in favor). The latest appointees to the constitutional court are in favor too, so that obstacle has eroded substantially.
The idea that you need a strong central singular authority fails to predict what happened in the run-up to the 2024 election in the US. Colorado's Supreme Court, which does not answer to Biden in any way, decided to block Trump from running in that state (only to be reversed by the US Supreme Court). These kinds of measures are slow and telegraphed in advance, because without a central source of orders you need consensus-building for each new abuse, but it can keep building over time.
To be clear, that was my entire point. As repulsive as the AFD is, it's no worse than the 2016 Republicans. https://www.richardhanania.com/p/is-the-afd-crypto-fascist-no-more I don't think modern Germany has a great track record on free speech, in terms of free speech suppression due to "academic progressive cathedral consensus" it's the worst offender maybe ever. The worst offender on the right wing side is the other Germany.
Okay, but "academic progressive cathedral consensus" is incredibly narrow and reasonably modern. If you try to give Trumpism a similarly narrow label, "protectionist anti-immigration populist personality cult with poor respect for separation of powers" you get what, Orban? Andrew Jackson? That shrinks the gap in terribleness substantially.
Going straight to Nazi Germany seems like not just a stretch, but the biggest stretch possible, mostly for rhetorical purposes. Especially since we have an entire "win, govern, lose" cycle for Trump's first term to look at. It's not impossible that *this* time, Trump has a plan to become dictator. But it's hard to justify this position.
I think it should be ""protectionist anti-immigration populist personality cult with active contempt for separation of powers and individual civil liberty plus a belief that the entire state apparatus should be an extension of the executive." Which is a mouthful, but I think that's kind of the point, there's no way to distill it down that isn't dishonest unless you mention the deliberate coordination against democratic norms.
The gap in terribleness between present-day Germany and present-day Hungary might not seem so large if you insist on a scale that can include Hitler, but why would you? As you say, Nazi Germany is not very relevant to current politics; meanwhile, the Republicans aren't at all coy about wanting to turn the US into something like Hungary. They invite Orbán as a keynote speaker, they are holding CPACs in Hungary etc.
And on a normal person's scale, it's still the case the Germany is about on par with the US in quality of life (the US is richer and more dynamic, and arguably its constitutional system has better philosophical foundations; Germany has better work-life balance, more livable cities and less polarization) while Hungary is a shithole and getting worse by the day.
Yeah I agree with your and Hanania's take on the AFD. But since I am from Germany I do understand where the fear of the AFD comes from, even If I disagree with it and consider it somewhat ridiculous. But the trauma of the Nazis and WW2 still is something that's an important part of modern German culture and political discourse, and thus the analogy between the NSDAP and AFD makes some sense if viewed through that lens, though I disagree with it mostly (yeah, there are ethnic nationalists in the AFD, but they don't advocate for anything on the scale what the NSDAP did, and thus the question is if ethnic nationalism is considered to be something that is so beyond human decency should be made illegal, and a lot of Germans seem to think it should be even if most people in other countries will find them ridiculous for this and banning the AFD would actually make Germany more "Weird" in the Western World than allowing the AFD to be part of government).
BTW I believe that modern European history relating to Fascism and Communism and how either of those are seen vis-à-vis being "the ultimate evil" can also explain why the former Eastern Bloc countries tend to have more negative views on communism than fascism, and why the AFD is so popular in Eastern Germany especially...IMO if the AFD were to be banned, a lot of their voters would leave for Eastern Bloc countries such as Hungary, Slovakia and Czechia, and possibly Austria.
>They say out loud that independent institutions checking executive power are bad and should be removed. Where's the equivalent on the left? The concerning left-wing stuff: payment processors, campus speech codes, bureaucratic overreach, stays diffuse and uncoordinated precisely because there's no one actually advocating for centralized authoritarian power.
Yeah, when you control all the relevant institutions and use them tyrannically constantly (including criminal prosecution for jokes on twitter!) you don't clamor to tear down the institutions - they're working just fine for you.
Yep, it's the biggest structural advantage leftists have that they never admit - that they have managed to subvert liberalism (and to even claim its name), which leaves the hapless rightists to both play on the field tilted against them, and to always take PR hits for being against Most Holy Democracy Itself. Of course, the right only has itself to blame for letting this happen, but the outcome isn't good for anyone not insane.
The other thing here is that this heavily weights actively using the state to do things. If the state actively refrains from properly doing basic fundamental state activities for long enough that can lead to its own destructive manifestations. Laxity on border control, of course, directly led to the right wing populist surge democratically, though the consequences of being lax on border control have been much more destructive in, say, Sweden, than they have in the United States.
This also was planned, which is why left wing (and also Catholic, let's not leave them out) NGOs planned this, and why Biden said it was a source of "our strength" and why it was the positive subject of magazines until the right complained too much and then it became the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory. It seemed they did have a state plan, but it didn't necessarily involve the state passing onerous laws, though if you want to see that, it's worth looking at Europe. While in the US you could say that Trumpism is more authoritarian than the more institutionalist Democrats who preferred to have power through information and education organs, a number of European governments actually do have the power to arrest you for insufficiently leftist statements.
The funny thing about comparisons to the Nazis is that Hitler flipped out over Jewish influence over a still incredibly German society, demographically speaking. In modern day Europe, by comparison, there are countries where the capital city is now majority foreign extraction. You can either care about that or not, but it is interesting that Hitler engaged in the extermination of the Jews on the basis of demographically marginal but theorized large impact, whereas when the entirety of the Western world is facing demographic turn over the likes of which has never been seen before, inarguable massive change, the worst you've got so far is that in America there's a buffoonish narcissist TV host whose worst crimes are having bad schizophrenic economic policy, bullying network edutainers, and not holding millions of high due process trials in order to execute mass deportation.
I don't think this post will be taken well, but that feels like getting lucky in some way.
>The other thing here is that this heavily weights actively using the state to do things. If the state actively refrains from properly doing basic fundamental state activities for long enough that can lead to its own destructive manifestations. Laxity on border control, of course, directly led to the right wing populist surge democratically, though the consequences of being lax on border control have been much more destructive in, say, Sweden, than they have in the United States.
It seems strange to me, if Trump and his supporters really are fascists, that the left doesn't just support stricter border control. That's the main issue behind his success, after all.
If you could stop WW2 by giving 1920s Germany a closed-border immigration policy, why wouldn't you?
This is what the moderate center-left in the UK sort of are doing (but failing). The Labour Prime Minister gave a speech that was castigated by the further left as being reminiscent of Enoch Powell's rivers of blood speech.
This move has likely been made for two reasons: 1: The Conservatives had power for 15 years and basically ossified and enshrined what was previously established by New Labour, leading to the "Boris Wave", an enormous inflow of post-covid migrants, and 2: Reform, an actual right wing nationalist party are now wildly popular, causing the ordinarily left wing Labour Party to have to drop trans stuff and outflank even the Conservatives on immigration.
Of course critics say that this can't be maintained (because the left of the party has pro-migrant principles), and trying to copy Reform won't actually keep them out of power. Given Starmer has done a load of other unpopular things like pass the Online Safety Bill (another bipartisan Tory-Labour wonder), and is planning Digital ID, and has the worst polling in 40 years, it's likely he wasn't the man for this job. Right wingers/nationalists also don't believe him about the "smash the smuggling gangs" rhetoric, since his government tried to obfuscate that the Southport killer had been reading Al Qaeda training manuals, and that he was just a typical "Welsh schoolboy".
So, it's possible that the establishment could've stopped this by merely doing border control plus progressive stuff, but woke and its insistence on white privilege and post-colonial repentence likely made that impossible. Also, establishment conservatives and centrists were cowards (as mentioned with the Tories basically continuing Labour social policy and keeping their institutions in place such as staffing the ministerial position for Women and Equalities instead of abolishing it, and Merkel in Germany opening the borders during the height of the migrant crisis would also count, if the CDC is considered establishment conservative). Conservatives being cowards (cuckservatives in the 2016 MAGA parlance) is why Trump's "So what?" attitude to normal institutionalism and formality seemed refreshing to the Republican base.
The right time to have made the proper corrections in this area was around 30 years ago.
>(including criminal prosecution for jokes on twitter!)
Also
>“When you start to criminalize dissent, when the head of the federal government, through the president, through the Department of Justice, is saying you might be a domestic terrorist if you raise your voice, I think that’s appalling and is chilling and is very, very dangerous,” said Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.
( from https://komonews.com/news/nation-world/doj-domestic-terrorism-response-to-school-board-protests-spurs-parent-gop-backlash )
These are reasonable points. A comprehensive response would take *way* too long to write, but here are a few counterpoints to consider:
- Groups that are closely related in ideology don't need to coordinate. From c. 2015 to 2024, the American left was overwhelmingly motivated by equity. (equality of outcome) Kamala Harris explicitly endorsed this ideology.*
- The urge to bulldoze institutions was shared by the left. During the 2020s in particular, a popular slogan on the left was "disrupt and dismantle", which was applied to anything that was deemed to impede equity.
- Bulldozing institutions can be counter-authoritarian, so it's important to evaluate the effects individually. For example, Trump dismantling the Department of Education prevents the federal government from commandeering the education system its own agenda, supporting a check on federal executive power. In contrast, "dismantling" racial or gender inequity in the Supreme Court would require packing it, undermining a check on federal executive power.
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4kowE_YIVw&lc=Ugy2Lb5MOky3HWYH7Lt4AaABAg.9FZk2k9c20D9GTb00Lt8cF
"Groups that are closely related in ideology don't need to coordinate." This is the most false thing I have read in the comment section for this post. This is absolutely untenable, based on even a cursory survey of political and military history. Closely related groups absolutely do need coordination, because otherwise they tear each other apart squabbling over tactics, leadership, resources, messaging and "the narcissism of small differences."
If you want more specific historical references to follow up on this, I suggest looking into the Russian Civil War, the Angolan Civil War and the Spanish Civil War. It was reading about the Spanish Civil War that caused me to have an epiphany about the left. I realized "socialists are just Communists in sheep's clothing. They are more or less the same" didn't make any sense. Not when socialists and communists have fought shooting Wars against each other, and seemingly have little motivation to cooperate.
While it may look to you like the left has been transcendently successful over the course of the past 17 years, that's all in the eye of the beholder. You have no way of knowing if the left has crippled itself, COMPARATIVELY SPEAKING, due to disunity. For all we know, we might be living in a Scandinavian style system with a cradle-to-the-grave welfare system, if not for left disunity.
>stays diffuse and uncoordinated precisely because there's no one actually advocating for centralized authoritarian power
Diffuse and uncoordinated but, up until this year and there's continuing massive resistance, it affected basically every university and HR department in the country.
Just imagine how effective they'd be if there was a centralized power!
Tinfoil hat time: we just *don't know* if there's a centralized power behind that.
Also in January 2021, Apple and Google removed Parler from their app stores, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) suspended its hosting services.
Now, I don't know whether this triple attack was coordinated, or if just the three corporations were sufficiently Woke, or sufficiently looking to curry favor with the incoming Biden administration to not require coordination. I'm not convinced that it matters, one way or the other. The _effect_ was of a coordinated attack on MAGA speech.
> If this were a real comparable threat, we should see historical precedent. We don't.
This is arguable. I think it works as long as you're satisfied with all the long term trends of modernity leading to the present established order.
If the only trend lines you disapprove of are ~5 years long, I agree. If you think there exist a few bad ~200 years long trend lines (ex: Kaczynski flavored stuff), I think you'd be justified in being worried about the emergence of new ones.
I think your argument relies on the assumption that the only sort of badness you should be concerned about is "regimes where the consensus among those polled in them is that they're horrible" and not "regimes I personally would call horrible".
The difference I'm thinking of is whether in 100 years you ask somebody in that society if it's a bad regime vs if I time travel to that point. Imagine asking an original American colonist whether the current American government is bad or not.
I think the argument "concerning leaderless trends don't continue indefinitely" really depends on what you consider concerning. A reasonable opinion is that future-people should have the last words about what is good for future-society, but that seems similar to me as foreign-people should have the last word on foreign-society (implying that you can't try to influence a cultural practice that you consider abhorrent like burning widows on pyres if the social consensus is that it's fine).
That last point is a great point, and it's the kind of comment that makes me wish Likes were enabled. (Also, it should be "widows" instead of "windows", right?)
I feel like this is the take that should have been everywhere right before the election.
Certainly Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Fidel Castro in Cuba come to mind. And probably also Lenin, who starts as you suggest but then is succeeded by Stalin.
Lenin had no way of knowing that Stalin was going to be such a ruthless and incompetent leader. No doubt if Lenin had known, he would have executed Stalin immediately.
>The concerning left-wing stuff: payment processors, campus speech codes, bureaucratic overreach, stays diffuse and uncoordinated
Re the payment processors:
https://upgradedpoints.com/credit-cards/us-credit-card-market-share-by-network-issuer/
gives the volumes for the credit card payment processors as:
6.4 trillion for Visa
2.7 trillion for MasterCard
1.1 trillion for American Express
0.2 trillion for Discover
It isn't _quite_ Visa + debris, but that isn't far off either. It's damned centralized.
RE: no historical precedent for diffuse movements leading toward authoritarianism
I think there is a category of counterexample that is actually quite prevalent, both historically and in the modern day: theocracies. This requires a large contingent of true believers, social punishment for anyone who expresses or sympathizes with disbelief, and honestly not much else -- ie supernatural beliefs are not a core part of the mechanism. Parallels between wokeness and religion have been made plenty of times before, and I don't think it is a stretch to say that it could allow for that same kind of diffuse coordination that exists in theocracies, but it is of course not overdetermined.
> If the point is just "there is a trendline we could extrapolate but it's unlikely to hold" then we don't disagree.
If the trendline was going in that exact direction, you need an actual reason it would be interrupted to be able to predict it won't get there. It looks to me like Trump's actions are what interrupted it. Had we elected Harris, as I voted for, we most likely would have made another four years of progress towards that dystopia.
> The concerning left-wing stuff: payment processors, campus speech codes, bureaucratic overreach, stays diffuse and uncoordinated precisely because there's no one actually advocating for centralized authoritarian power.
Indeed, the dystopia is made of decentralized authoritarianism, not centralized.
> combined with stated commitment to liberal principles (free speech, institutional checks, democratic process).
Anyone else remember "freeze peach" and dog-whistles for racism? The progressives gave up free speech, and now they want it back. (Or, more likely, the loudest voices are from different, more principled. people now.)
> has this ever actually happened?
That's actually a really good question. What would this look like from the outside? News headlines would portray it as progressivism gradually winning the fight against racists, since the fight is done by manipulating consensus social reality into agreeing that the regime's enemies are racist. Sounds not unlike the Red Scare. In more general terms, one could view it as a social-moral victory of one culture over another, such as Athens over Sparta.
> And yeah, class interests and structural forces are real, but this framework makes it so easy to engage in conspiracy-adjacent reasoning.
A good point and a warning worth heeding, thank you.
> Somebody needs an actual plan at some point for it to get really bad!
Nope, not at all. Tribal war is human nature.
> TLDR: One path as far as I can tell just ends in modern day Germany, with its Constitution protection office making dubious rulings about which parties are "anti -democratic" and its police investigating rude tweets about politicians. But the other path ends in the other Germany.
I hadn't thought of it quite that way before. I'd say this assumes we have already explored both paths all the way to the end, when in fact I think one of them (if not both) has a ways further it can yet go, which luckily no one has travelled along yet before. (Or perhaps they have, if Judges 17-21 is historically accurate.) I think the current location of the Overton window is a good ways from either end, so I want to keep it about where it is rather than keep sliding it along.
I think the extrapolation is nonsense the same way that it is in xkcd's "you're going to have 30 husbands next month" comic is. Exactly because it wasn't some intentional plan, but rather a drift due to cultural shifts, it would simply eventually change direction again as people get tired of it and push back (in fact, it's what has happened; except the push back is going way overboard now).
Unfortunately, it's not nonsense. Institutions like to increase their power. (Effectively, even though the institutions have no intelligence or self-awareness per se.) This combined with increasing speed of communication and data processing mean that centralization of control is going to increase, with or without any plan...in fact, even with plans to the contrary.
In a way this is something like Parkinson's law. It's something inherent in the design of the system. Yes, it's only a rule of thumb, but it's one that works. When it becomes easier to exert control, more control will be exerted.
> I think if you extend the left's trajectory over 2010 - 2020 another X years in the same direction, you get a regime that controls large swathes of private activity, bans large categories of dissent and criticism, and is very hard to dislodge.
Are you talking about 'the left' in terms of 'the 50% of the country more liberal than average', or 'the left' in terms of 'elected democratic officials'?
If the latter, this seems kind of insane to me... the top Democratic officials were neoliberals, increasing funding to police, very far from being progressive in any meaningful way. The idea that they might cancel elections or defy the courts feels like it has zero justification to me, and I'd want to hear what you're basing that intuition on.
If you mean the former... isn't that just society progressing? Like, everyone deciding gay marriage was ok and it was weird to be against it isn't *fascism*, it's just new ideas winning in the marketplace. However stifling a new social consensus may feel to the people outside it, it's entirely different from the *government* stripping rights, kidnapping people off the street and sending them to foreign prisons, defying the courts and undermining confidence in elections.
> The idea that they might cancel elections or defy the courts feels like it has zero justification to me, and I'd want to hear what you're basing that intuition on.
I mean I don't think they'd cancel elections as such. They'd just make it impossible for their opposition to meaningfully gather or get funded or form parties.
Imagine what a world would look like where the Left controls enough institutions that their rule is unquestioned, *but* they still want a fig leaf of democracy. You'd wind up with two parties, a "let's go further left" party and a "let's stop right here" party. When the left party was in power it would drag the country left, when the "right" party was in power it wouldn't actually go any further right, it would simply be a pause. The left-wing party would call themselves "progressive" and the fake right-wing party would call themselves "conservative".
This is of course what has already happened, everywhere across the Western World. There is no such thing as Right-Progressivism any more.
One reason to have pushed back on that stuff under Obama and Biden is so those tools weren't lying around and those techniques hadn't been normalized by the time we got to Trump 2: Electric Boogaloo.
It's hard to say because it's so loosely defined, but in general I am against the idea "X did a somewhat bad thing, then Y did a million-times-worse version, moral of the story is that X is bad". No, moral of the story is that Y is bad.
Especially since it's there's often a spectrum from acceptable actions with some drawbacks, and clearly unacceptable extreme versions of those actions, and it can be hard to draw the line but even so there is clearly one side that's OK and one side that's not OK.
I think we should go ahead and draw a line that puts government pressure on media/social media outlets to control what they say and politically-motivated prosecutions and using regulatory/tax agencies to punish political enemies on the "not acceptable" side.
Is the government requesting something from a media company applying pressure? I think there's some gray here that's hard to thread. I don't think the Biden or Obama administration would have done anything to social media companies that refused to stifle Covid misinformation, but I could see the mere request cause some unease. Nevertheless, I think it would be correct for the government to request such things. Hard problems in a world without gatekeepers.
To be clear, I said at the end I also factually disagree with a lot of these claims about progressive overreach, but I'm trying to just avoid getting stuck in the brambles of arguing about all of these gray area cases
> I don't think the Biden or Obama administration would have done anything to social media companies that refused to stifle Covid misinformation
why believe this?
every company at that scale is subject to discretionary government pressure in dozens of ways -- e.g. Twitter was (is?) under an FTC consent decree -- and Obama's government was notorious for using those avenues to pressure companies to play political enforcer (e.g. Operation Choke Point)
would they just suddenly have an attack of conscience, and start behaving way better, when it came to covid on social media specifically?
Would those administrations even have to do anything themselves for various independent agencies to investigate the perceived enemies of the administration? Didn't Elon Musk's companies suddenly get a lot of extra legal scrutiny after he bought twitter? I could be wrong.
Because they didn't do anything in some examples:
https://fortune.com/2019/10/09/facebook-biden-trump-campaign/
Yes. The government knows that they can't give an order like that, so they "suggest" it, knowing that the company will get that the real message is "do it or we will use our regulatory power over you to punish you." Mob bosses don't tell their subordinates "I order you to kill Tony Soprano" either, but somehow the message gets through.
I don't think these things are actually bad in all cases.
E.g. "using regulatory/tax agencies to punish political enemies" - if you run on a pro-environmentalism agenda, win the election over the opposition from polluters, then have the EPA push the agenda you ran on, that is "using a regulatory agency to punish political enemies", should that not be allowed?
Now, slippery slope, hard to draw the line, etc - but it being hard to draw the line is not an argument to collapse all distinctions. Unless you're willing to go all the way and say something like nothing that could ever be compared to a bad thing is allowed.
Enforcing the rules as neutrally as possible is fine, but specifically targeting the companies whose lobbyists fought your side's election for retaliation is very bad. This does not seem like all that subtle a difference to me.
Seems like that would create perverse incentives. "My company paid lobbyists to oppose this regulation, which didn't work, but now if you send inspectors to see if we're actually complying with it, that means you're targeting us unfairly as political opponents!"
Do you mean targeting *as retaliation*? I.e. *because* they were against you?
Because otherwise what you said isn't different from what I said if the bad conduct is being done by only a handful of companies, e.g., in a sector of the economy with only a few key players.
If you do mean retaliation ... are you making a specific claim about Obama/Biden?
Yes, of course it shouldn't be allowed. The EPA has no legal authority other than to enforce environmental laws written by congress. So unless the new president also gets legislation passed through congress to give the EPA that authority, it is completely illegitimate to use the EPA to target your enemies.
The EPA writes regulations ... and re enforcing environmental laws, you can imagine a situation where the in-power administration lets their political allies violate those laws with impunity and the new guy runs on "we will actually enforce the environmental laws that are now being ignored".
You ever express any concern about Douglass Mackey being prosecuted?
Who is he and what was he prosecuted for?
A joke on Twitter, about voting by text.
So "concerned" about free speech that you wont bother to check.
I dunno: if you kill the Khan's envoys, and the Mongols retaliate by wiping your civilization off the face of the Earth, I think the moral IS "don't kill envoys."
It's funny because on this thread I'm arguing with someone saying that Trump is not doing anything out of the ordinary, and now with someone comparing him to the Mongols. But anyway, our entire system depends on the idea that we won't treat each other the way the Mongols treated their enemies.
As does either side's political support; the moment Trump says "fuck you guys we're the Mongols now", he - and all the people who respond with "fuck yeah time to rape and pillage" - will end up dead or in prison.
Heh, heh. Actually I'd agree with the other guy that Trump ISN'T doing anything particularly extraordinary, just applying the standard tools of state coercion that previous governments have used to different targets (and to the same targets, but to different ends).
Do you think there's a significant difference in levels of state coercion between the US government circa 2025 and the Mongolian empire circa 1258?
>Actually I'd agree with the other guy that Trump ISN'T doing anything particularly extraordinary, just applying the standard tools of state coercion that previous governments have used to different targets
Agreed. I think Trump is pushing them slightly further, much as every president has pushed them slightly further, following a trend going back perhaps a century, maybe more. I'm not thrilled at it. There is something to be said for keeping power more distributed, but the Presidency (and the Federal government as a whole) grows more powerful, term by term. I suspect the biggest single jump was during FDR, not Trump.
And who's making those people dead and/or putting them in prison? Because if it's the same people as the people raping and pillaging...
>And I know there's a wing of people here who will say, but the dems wanted that too, they was just more subtle about it, look at the twitter files, look at the broader so-called 'independent civil society' and how it all lined up behind one agenda... and look, I think these are 'on a spectrum' in some very technical sense that a supernova and a house fire are on a spectrum. Like they're different in kind, and also one is WAY LESS BAD to the extent that you can compare them as similar at all.
Admittedly this is something I do not quite get. At least from my perspective (a Postdoc at a respectable mid-tier university), the left never was, in the slightest, subtle about it. They are openly and explicitly suppressing dissenting opinions in most scientific topics, and if I privately talk with colleagues, many of them will freely admit that this is the case (some in a regretful tone, but also many almost gleeful). They merely are in ideological alignment with the majority of the mainstream media apparatus, the majority of state employers, the majority of educators etc. so even talking about this publicly non-anonymously is silenced, let alone allowing coordinated efforts to subvert this state of affairs. They only have lost significant parts of online spaces so far, which has massively opened up discourse (but still mostly anonymously). And from my wife's side of our family, which is also mostly academics, but grew up in the DDR (communist eastern germany), they all agree that the last two decades have distinctly felt like society creeping into the same direction, the same culture of fear around expressing dissent, the same whisper networks of contrarians, the same institutionalized ideological agents(in some cases literally; there recently was a controversy around a former stasi employer now leading a left-wing meldestelle; naturally she still has that position).
I don't even like Trump and consider him a boorish fool, but no matter how I look at it, the right's efforts are just pitiful in comparison. A late-night host gets cancelled and immediately re-employed in just a few days? lol. Comey gets a taste of his own medicine? lol. Some programs with "DEI" in its name have to think about how to rebrand themselves, while still blatantly continuing the same policies? lol.
I'd even go as far as saying that, across the entire west, the left is STILL the supernova, while the US currently suffers from this house fire named Trump.
My threat assessment lies somewhere between yours and MorningLightMountain, so I appreciate your comment as a counterbalance to his.
Well said! Trump has been far from harmless, but the silencing of dissent by the Woke was _pervasive_ . Harris even _personally_ explicitly said of online free speech "It has to stop." . The context actually makes this worse. She was talking of the speech of Trump, her political rival. My _suspicion_ is that Harris yearns for a one party State.
All the talk is about violence, but, although I expect to find few who agree with me, I think this type of tyranny that you describe is worse. At least violence is honest. No matter the collateral damage I support Trump in removing funding from universities and I don't think he is going nearly far enough.
They don't "control the most important media organs". Media criticizes them all the time. Even the Wall Street Journal is insisting on their coverage of that birthday letter to Epstein in the face of Trump's lawsuit.
Well said! I read the New York Times's daily summary, and it is _obviously_ biased against Trump and the GOP. Every time they can choose an emotive term, they choose one critical of the GOP. If Trump controlled the NYT, it wouldn't look _anything_ like what it looks like.
> looking like a 21st century version of Fascism: corporatist economics with big companies working in close cooperation with the executive, crush and go after dissent using blunt force not sublety, control the most important media organs.
This is the problem with the whole "fascist" label. I would call your definition a pretty reasonable one, and yet none of them are really reasons anyone would cite if you asked them what made Hitler so bad. Both Democrat and Republican regimes of the last 50 years all meet 2 out of those 3 points. The third "crush and go after dissent using blunt force" is the only one on that list that anyone would use to justify violence against the regime, and yet there are governments all around the world that do it, but still nobody is calling them "fascist" or suggesting that we go to war with them.
A common definition of fascism is "palingenetic ultranationalism", where the first part is about national rebirth, literally making the country great again.
The phrase "MAGA" basically says "yes, this is what we are!"
It’s probably the most common scholarly definition. Obviously Making Italy Great Again was a core objective of Mussolini’s.
Personally, I prefer to get the corporatism in in some way as well.
I think this article is missing the action v belief distinction.
Attacking a harmless retired grandma is psychopathic even if she covers her wall in posters of Pol Pot. If a vigilante is provocked by a belief that exists mainly in the mind of their victim, that suggests a search for heresy rather than a desire to protect society.
I mostly agree with this, but I think it's tough - is voting for Trump an action? Marching in a pro-Trump protest? Being Trump?
I think there's some sense in which politics has to screen off all of that - as long as you're operating legally within the system, you have an ironclad defense against your bad opinions *and actions* making you a legitimate target for violence. For me, the gray area comes in when you are sort of kind of operating within the system, but also subverting the system at the same time, to the point where we can never be sure whether you're really within the spirit of the system or have just hacked it so far that it can no longer register its own violations, eg https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/defining-defending-democracy-contra .
User banned for this comment.
Agree that the comment seemed to have subjective value in the argument.
The number of people who believe something isn't a convincing argument for allowing it to override community norms of politeness. I can't speak for Scott, but if the post didn't start with "Fucking lol" and end with accusing those critical of Trump of having neurosyphilis, it might have made it through. As is, I'm happy to have those sorts of needlessly incendiary comments moderated out.
Out of curiosity, what was the comment? Substack used to let you see that if you clicked a link, but it isn’t doing that here
It does just fine for me. Or you on an app or on the website?
I was on the app, shows up for me on the website
I like this approach, where you let us see the comment you banned a user for. Transparency is really the only way to go about it ...
IMO that wasn't permaban worthy
Scott, I'm agreed with the other commenters saying this doesn't feel ban-worthy, and I'm getting increasingly confused about how moderation / banning is even supposed to work. Are you just going with what you happen to see and be annoyed by while you're in the comments?
Because this banned user comment strikes me as *WAY* less malicious than...
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-399/comment/156482260
...which you still haven't addressed after almost a month, despite:
1. Multiple people reporting it via the Substack function
2. Others emailing you and receiving a reply you'd look into it, and,
3. Your comment publicly chiding me for objecting to you not addressing it (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-the-russo-ukrainian-war/commeYt/161038136?utm_source=activity_item).
It's hard to imagine #3 didn't make you curious enough to click through to read one of the single most gleefully sadistic comments ever posted to ACX, personally directed to a (supposed) employee of Charlie Kirk and survivor of the shooting (!).
So this is very weird indeed!
Let me be clear:
I never suggesting that you never moderate anything unless you can promptly moderate everything. I'm not even sure how you managed to draw that conclusion.
What I'm stating is that your procrastination batch banning is not effective for policing the behavior of users wearing sock puppet accounts, as Wuffles did here and as Charlie's dead I'm Happy did in one of the worst comments ever posted to this blog.
To repeat myself, I completely understand that it's impossible to police 1000+ comment threads, which is why I'm suggesting there needs to be a different - ideally collective - strategy for discouraging sock account shitposting.
How on earth is Christina's linked comment not banworthy?
I would happily say they are all actions. My point is that the rhetoric at least is about attacking or ostracizing people for their status as "fascists", they seem to think it describes a person in their soul. There does seem a fairly odd idea that there is a discrete fascist v non-fascist distinction.
My understanding is that of, cases heard by the Supreme Court that involve the Trump administration or its policies/actions, 95% of the rulings in lower courts were against the administration, and 90% of the Supreme Court rulings were in its favor.
When the court said the administration is not allowed to ship prisoners off to foreign torture prisons without due process, the administration said 'they're already in the air, you have no jurisdiction anymore' (even though that's completely made up and not a real legal doctrine) and sent them anyway. When the court said 'give us all the information about this shipment and how the timing was decided so we can see whether you intentionally sped it up to defy our ruling,' the administration said 'No, fuck you' and faced zero consequences.
The system is already subverted. If that's going to be your threshold for political violence, I think you have to say it's already justified - or at least admit that a large number of people have very good reason to end up believing we're at that point already.
>95% of the rulings in lower courts were against the administration, and 90% of the Supreme Court rulings were in its favor.
The disconnect between lower court rulings and SCOTUS rulings is actually the rule for SCOTUS sessions, typically 70%-80% reversals of the lower court over the last 25 years. Now, of course, SCOTUS gets to decide which cases they hear, but, still, reversals by SCOTUS, once they decide to hear a case, should not be a surprise, much less evidence that SCOTUS has been "subverted".
2 points:
1. Understood, but, going from 20% upholdings to 5% upholdings is still 75% fewer upholdings. Ceilings effects are a problem, but big changes at the margin can still reveal a lot.
2. Yes, 90% overturning would not itself be hugely definitive, you do need more context.
For example, that 90% of the cases they take up WRT the administration are rulings against the administration; even if most courts also overturn most rulings, I'd expect that most courts take cases that initially ruled for or against the administration at more even rates, based on the merits of the case; taking and overturning 90% cases ruling *against* the administration feels like evidence that those cases are being targeted, in order to help the administration.
For example, how many cases are ruled on the shadow docket instead of getting a full hearing, and how many cases are being settled on procedural injunctions instead of reaching the merits of the case; this one I am less sure on the data about, but my impression is that both of these have seen a sharp increase under this administration, mostly because the things the administration is doing would be obviously unconstitutional if the court had to consider the merits in open court.
Many Thanks!
>how many cases are being settled on procedural injunctions instead of reaching the merits of the case; this one I am less sure on the data about, but my impression is that both of these have seen a sharp increase under this administration, mostly because the things the administration is doing would be obviously unconstitutional if the court had to consider the merits in open court.
That could be, but, unfortunately, without _seeing_ the merits in open court we can't really say.
>1. Understood, but, going from 20% upholdings to 5% upholdings is still 75% fewer upholdings.
Many thanks, but I'm confused. Where did the "5% upholdings" come from?
The 20% is from the historic record.
If we know that SCOTUS rules for Trump 90% of the time, while the lower courts rule against Trump 95% of the time, it seems that
one way this could happen is for 15% of the lower court rulings to be upheld: 5% from pro-Trump rulings from the lower courts to be upheld and 10% from anti-Trump rulings to be upheld.
I think the minimum is 5% upheld, with all the lower court 5% pro-Trump rulings reversed as part of the 10% SCOTUS anti-Trump rulings, 90% of the lower-court anti-Trump rulings reversed, and only the remaining 5% of the lower court anti-Trump rulings upheld as the other part of the SCOTUS 10% anti-Trump rulings.
I don't think that these numbers have enough information to tell us which of these alternatives is the case.
More to the point, aren't the total numbers of cases thus far pretty small? The statistics of drawing conclusions from small numbers of instances get pretty unfavorable. Roughly speaking, for N independently random samples (albeit with a closer to 50:50 distribution) the standard deviation is roughly sqrt(N). To get 3 sigma, we'd need 3*sqrt(N). Do we have it?
Leftist here. I will readily admit that we are not "within the spirit of the system" and that we are trying to "hack it." That's a fair cop. Maybe it's not politick to admit it but it's not like we can keep it a secret. You guys can read Marx and Zinn just like we can. We want to destroy the American system of government and replace it with something completely different. We have a different understanding history and we do not believe and most of the alleged virtues of the American system. We want to more or less destroy the Constitution and start from scratch.
That would be a risky move, but we feel it is a bigger risk to not do it. I guess leftism/socialism, in it's very core, is antithetical to traditional bourgeois notions of patriotism, reason and moderacy. I consider myself a patriot but my patriotism is so different that I will readily admit that it may not be taken seriously by traditionalists. My patriotism sees the nation as the body of living citizens, not as a geographical region or an ideology or a piece of paper. My loyalty is to that body of citizens, not to any piece of paper.
One thing here is, as you indicated, "fascism" is an incredibly popular accusation on *both* sides of the American popular debate, on the right only marginally less - or perhaps no less - than on the left. "You know who else supported evolution?" "Abortion is a modern holocaust." "Raise your right hand if you support gun control." "Fascists also supported socialized health care." And so on and so on, if you've debated American right-wingers online you've encountered all of these multiple time, along with many other fascism accusations (let's not even get to the debates on Israel/Palestine...) What's the accusation that the most famous right-wing domestic terrorist in the US made before committing his assault against the Oklahoma City Federal building in 1994, according to his sister? That the feds were "fascist tyrants", according to https://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/06/us/sister-says-mcveigh-s-anger-led-to-a-vow-for-vengeance.html.
Even recently, the time period of 2020-2022 saw many public officials, in US mainly Democrats, get termed fascist by the loudmouth brigade of the other side for enacting certain public health measures. (Many of these measures were unwise, but that doesn't make then fascist.). This would be combined with literal accusations of, well, *everyone* being genocided with vaccines or at least being put under permanent WEF fascist tyranny, and demands for a new Nuremburg Trial for all doctors, politicians and public health officials in charge of said measures.
Is there a special reason to assume this particular accusation is *particularly* poisonous when the direction of left-to-right rather than right-to-left? (This blog post did not indicate so, of course, but the recent discussions I've seen otherwhere still generally don't seem to cover this aspect.)
You have a good point. Frankly, I'd like both sides to drop the term. It seems to net out to: The other faction is exerting power, and the speaker doesn't like it.
I wish I didn’t have to say, “But they started it!” But I do. Democrats have been calling Republican Presidential candidates Hitler for as long as I’ve been alive, and I’m an old man.
If (I say “if”) we are ignoring them when we finally have a Hitler in power, it’s their own damn fault.
I daresay that both of these trends go back decades upon decades, probably right back to the Hitler became a thing. Ayn Rand was calling JFK and LBJ fascists in the 1960s (https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/the-fascist-new-frontier/), and I distinctly remember seeing that she already compared FDR to the fascists in the 1930s.
Ayn Rand is a different sort of fish than elected officials. And comparing FDR to the fascists had a much different valence before Hitler. I seem to remember reading that there was considerable sympathy on both sides for the Fascist Experiment (which "made the trains run on time", not that it did) before it became clear what went along with it.
It wasn't hugely difficult to find an example of a politican doing the same (https://marcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu/classes/33d/projects/media/AnalogiesUSPresHitlerMegan.htm):
"LBJ was also likened to Hitler because of his policy of merging big business with government and labor through his "Great Society" reforms. Representative William Miller claimed that this merger was comparable to Hitler's fascism, as the alliance between the government and business gave Hitler increased power (N.Y. Times, Finney, John, Miller Attacks Big Government, Oct 28, 1964). "
Miller was Goldwater's VP candidate at the time.
That's fair. I don't remember anybody making noises about killing LBJ voters then, and "comparable to" has still not escalated to "literally Hitler".
I need to finally get around to reading "Days of Rage".
>I distinctly remember seeing that she already compared FDR to the fascists in the 1930s.
In the milder sense of public-private partnerships and greatly expanding the Federal role (likely unavoidable even if he had disliked it - he had WWII to deal with!), that isn't wholly wrong. (writing from the USA) Fortunately for us, a lot of the programs that he put in place (e.g. Social Security) have proved generally supported and generally positive.
I'll admit I'm not an old man, but at least for my entire life Republicans have also been calling Democrats Mao and Stalin
I think that this article could have used a little more clarification/discussion of what exactly you mean by "acceptable". Is political violence of any kind going to lead to good outcomes? Clearly not. But *if we lived in a world where it did* I think we are well beyond the point where it would be immoral.
There's a trivial utilitarian sense in which anything that leads to good outcomes is good. But I think I bite the bullet that even if some sort of violent coup against the current regime succeeded and replaced it with some regime I first-level liked better, the damage created by violating the norm against violent coups would still be worse than the benefits of object-level success (and that this wouldn't be true in more serious cases like Hitler).
For one thing, the assumption that a coup or self-coup or whatever that overthrows the current order will get us to a better place is a very questionable assumption. I think it's way more likely that this sort of thing just gets us that high-tech police state we've always wanted a few decades early. Depending on who wins, the person attaching electrodes to your tender bits in some black site will have their pronouns on their nametag or will have an American flag pin on their lapel, but it won't make so much difference to you by then....
Somehow, the idea of a special service torturer having a pronouns tag is morbidly funny.
In the broader sense, however, "even if" in Scott's comment was important: it's not that he considers that premise likely, he just says that even that unlikely premise wouldn't be exculpatory because of third-order consequences.
>Depending on who wins, the person attaching electrodes to your tender bits in some black site will have their pronouns on their nametag or will have an American flag pin on their lapel, but it won't make so much difference to you by then....
Great line!!!
Is the obsession with language policing a modern phenomenon? It seems like a large amount of effort is spent on trying to shame and alter the language of those we disagree with, both on the left and right.
I can somewhat understand the impulse when it comes to actual slurs. Like, ok, yeah, words used specifically to insult someone of a specific group probably aren’t acceptable in public life. But all the other words we use that are even moderately politically charged?
Why do people bother trying to shame those who use the word fascist? Why bother shaming how Black people are called in America from Negroes—>Colored —> African American—> Person of Color —> black —> Black —> POC, etc. (maybe a bad example but this is the one that’s changed the most that I can think of).
Maybe there’s some short term political clout to be gained when you successfully change the language we use to discuss something? I just don’t see the tangible benefit, and definitely not enough to account for the huge amount of time and effort the national consciousness spends on this stuff.
It's a modern phenomenon, almost certainly related to the amount of media we all consume.
In, like, 1770 or 1850 people might read a weekly/monthly paper but that was it. By, like, 1960, people started consuming 5+ hours of TV per day and we're up to, like...7-8 hours of internet use on average today. So people are swimming in media. And, while we don't fully understand how specific word choices affect people, there's still a wide variety of ways we can shape people's understanding of the world to our benefit.
So...the average American spends half their waking life staring at some form of shiny box. If the voices on the shiny box call my outgroup "bad word" then hundreds of millions of people will associate my outgroup with "bad word", which is good for me. My out group obviously does not want this. Therefore, we fight about what words we call my out group. If hundreds of millions of Americans did not spend a ton of time staring at shiny boxes, like, say, in 1850, then no one would care about word games. Since everyone does, we do.
Orwell complained a lot about lapse use of political terms eroding their meaning and twisting connotations. That was before mass TV adoption but after the radio I suppose.
In 1770, a colonial in a large town or city would have read several political broadsheets or libels during the week, probably a newspaper or two, gotten into hot arguments in a public house, and maybe listened to a political or religious speaker in a meeting house or in the public square. Everywhere you went, people would be talking and opining about the issues of the day. I don't think the media environment was anywhere near as sparse as you say. People have always been very politically engaged. Media can be gossip around town, printed or otherwise, it can be public speeches or rallies, it can be a play or satire. People consumed different forms but I think you need to back up an assertion that 1960 was materially different from 1760. The graph definitely goes up with smartphones, but I wouldn't be surprised if that is the first departure from a centuries-old trend that dates back to the printing press.
The Soviets did a ton of it. The French Revolution did some.
Contrast with the two British political party nicknames for liberals and conservatives derive from negative terms for thieves (they just decided to lean into them rather than shame people for using them). But of course, speaking ill of the monarch was a crime.
People trying to shame the use of actual slurs has definitely been an impulse for a very long time. Preferred terms is definitely iffier - there's definitely a tendency amongst even 19th century colonialists to go 'well what do the locals call themselves/this place' vs 'well let's just call them whatever we like.' But I haven't read as much 19th century political discussion as I would like in order to pronounce on this.
What else is there to yell about, if not the other side's yelling? Object-level policy decisions are mostly either solved, or complex and nuanced enough to be unsuitable for propaganda.
I cannot possibly be the first to note that, as Orwell put it, for most humans, "Fascist" simply means "any political movement that I don't like".
EDIT: seems I wasn't the first.
This is a good counterpoint. What level of action you don’t like aesthetically are you willing to accept as politically legitimate?
A related question one needs to always ask when thinking "The government should prevent this" is "Am I personally willing to kill for doing this?"
In that context, we should look aghast at how many people are willing to kill others for aesthetic reasons.
The government has plenty of means of coercion short of killing people.
Yes, but every one is backed up by the threat of killing you if you do not comply with the lesser forms of coercion. That is what makes government a special organization: we allow them to initiate violence against people and ultimately kill them for not following the rules. The entire enterprise rests on "If you do not do what we say, we will kill you." We often try to put many milder punishments in the way, but at no point is there the option to put up with or avoid those punishments and have the government say "Oh well, we tried," and then leave you alone.
No.
For example, Germany will forcible put you in prison, if you don't pay your taxes for long enough (and refuse to comply), but they won't kill you over it.
Similarly, if you don't get a license to carry a gun, in many countries the main consequence is that no one will sell you a gun. And the gun shop keeper will be very annoyed with you for wasting her time. But there's no further punishment.
Or to make it less politically loaded: think of a 17 year old in the US trying to buy a beer.
If you sell the 17 year old the beer, you will be arrested. If you don't go along with the arrest, you will be killed.
You're not thinking holistically. In a sense, every criminal law is backed up by an implicit threat of death. Because if you break the law, and then you don't comply peacefully with law enforcement, they have a mandate to use force to detain you, up to and including potentially lethal force. Of course, "potentially lethal force" and "lethal Force" are kissing cousins with similar valance. The libertarians are absolutely right that governance is inherently violent. Where they're wrong is thinking that there is a viable alternative.
Outside of America and certain parts of Eastern Europe, I believe it is almost universally recognized by educated people around the world that fascism is a far right ideology. Beyond that, everything is up for debate.
Even that is a vague term, in that "left" and "right" are not coherent ideologies so much as coalitions of interest groups.
They are highly predictable collections of interest groups. Collections that recreate themselves time and time again, in different modern contexts and societies. So there is value in the terminology.
You sure? I can think of, to give the first example to come to mind, wildly shifting family policies in the Soviet Union.
Life in a coalition isn't always easy. There are always big dogs and little dogs. But even the little dogs are going to be better off then say, landlords, who are almost always going to be outsiders to the coalition. It's structurally almost inevitable. The same thing applies to hereditary aristocrats.
You've never heard of oligarchy or rent-fixing?!?
Yeah that's probably true. IMO for Western Europe, and Germany even more so, "Fascism" and "Right-Wing" are almost synonymous and seen as being negative from a moral perspective - basically if you're a "right-winger" you are a "fascist" and thus an affront to common human decency. "Communism" and "leftist", on the other hand, aren't seen as being synonymous and thus not seen as being negative, in fact I'd say that being "leftist" is seen as rather positive by a lot of people in Western Europe since it is associated with Social Democracy and Social Democracy is widely hailed as being a major reason for making Western European countries becoming those with having the best quality of life after WW2. It's of course different in Eastern Bloc countries, where "Right-Wing" and "Fascism" aren't nearly as synonymous, and leftist is much more associated with communism, and thus seen much more negatively since communism is blamed for the economic underperformance of the Eastern Bloc relative to Western Europe. Also, ethnic nationalism was never seen as negatively in Eastern Europe compared to Western Europe, since the former never had colonized other countries themselves (with a few exceptions), and instead were often part of empires and thus "colonized", which means that the "woke left" is seen as being very ridiculous in the Eastern Bloc, and the EU is seen more negatively by many people because the EU is associated with the "woke left" now by many in the Eastern Bloc countries.
No, European leftists do not typically act as if "right wing" is synonymous with fascism. This is an exaggeration to the point of falsehood. As of now I see this as a habit of a loud but fringe minority on the left.
I think the left has become fascist as well. They employ all the same tactics, the only difference being that they espouse left wing beliefs. I believe the term fascist has evolved past its historical meaning and now means any political supporters that try to force others to obey, regardless of actual political views.
And as we face seen recently, the extremes of the left and right have circled around and are more similar to each other than to moderates.
Some of this just comes down to meaning "authoritarian regime that treats dissenters poorly" when you say fascist, right? It's like the folks who called Obama a socialist--what they really meant was "he has more left-wing economic policies than I would prefer," but "socialist" sounded worse, so they went for that.
What tactics do you refer to? "Any political supporters that try to force others to obey" - a government always tries to make its citizens obey its laws. I don't think this is a useful distinction as written.
Forced to obey their political views, not the law. Forced speech by university professors for DEI, censorship over political ideas they don't believe in (including media overreporting anything that confirms their beliefs and underreporting anything that goes against their beliefs like during COVID), deeming dissenting political views as worthy of assassination (the point of this post).
Those are textbook fascist tactics.
That adds some help. I guess I just believe that much of this is political views that get enshrined in law - like anti-racism, anti-sexism.....to something like bans on mis-gendering. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong in fighting for anti-discrimination legislation. The political process is used to create and remove those things. I wouldn't call any of that fascist.
Paternalist censorship over covid misinformation may be wrong, I'm not sure it is. We are in a new world without gatekeepers - perhaps an argument can be made that its within the interests of public health to censor such things - but as always - the person who decides what to censor is the issue.
I don't consider any of that fascist. Advocating murder of political opponents has been part and parcel of nearly every political movement at some time, so that's also not categorically fascist.
In my view - Fascism is unique is seeking to provide a veneer of democracy while folding-in the non-state power centers to prevent actual democracy. Those power centers are usually corporations, judges, labor unions, and perhaps the church. In some cases they seek to create their own non-gov power centers, like the German Labor front replacing existing unions, and the Hitler Jugend. The concern with the trump admin is the naked wielding of tariffs and other regulatory bodies to coerce private industry to support their political enterprise.
> Paternalist censorship over covid misinformation may be wrong, I'm not sure it is. We are in a new world without gatekeepers - perhaps an argument can be made that its within the interests of public health to censor such things - but as always - the person who decides what to censor is the issue.
The people who would've been calling the shots beclowned themselves severely. Heck, this community in particular is notable for predicting that the new virus was likely to be a plague while mainstream figures were saying things like "hug an Asian today to fight virus-related racism".
If that was your takeaway from that period I doubt we'll find much common ground.
I note that this is a content-free sneer that attempts to paint my position as being beneath consideration. This is not an acceptable standard of discourse.
>Fascism is unique is seeking to provide a veneer of democracy while folding-in the non-state power centers to prevent actual democracy. Those power centers are usually _corporations_, _judges_, labor unions, and perhaps the church.
The Woke certainly did a lot of that with corporations (e.g. what Apple, Goggle, and AWS did to silence Parler - also a lot with social media corporations: pre-Musk Twitter, Facebook, etc., also a lot with legacy media, e.g. the New York Times, the Guardian, etc.). And a lot with Woke activist judges.
One other power center not on your list, but folded into Woke power is most of the educational system. Higher education basically became an ideological monoculture, and substantial (most?) of earlier education as well.
It is very frustrating that no one here is willing to actually use the proper definition of fascist or pretend like there isn't one. Fascism isn't simply employing some flavour of authoritarianism, it is specifically an ideology built on national mythology, hyperrealism, fetishisation of violence for its own sake and not for any specific goal, and eugenicist racial politics, on top of the generic authoritarian tactics. The left doesn't really do this.
Definitions change over time. I've been using the term "fascist left" for a while now and I believe it fits. I think the definition of fascist has changed, just like Nazi. Casually calling Stephen Miller (who is Jewish) or Trump (whose daughter and son-in-law are Jewish) Nazi is absurd. But here we are today, so I think you just have to accept the fact that definitions morph over time.
Uh, sure, I can agree that definitions change, but then what's the utility of the word? Using authoritarianism as a tactic is fairly standard everywhere, and that's what you really mean, so you may as well use that so as to not confuse people with your personal definitions which may differ from the norm.
Besides that, nazism is not the same as fascism and there's a reason people like Newsome are calling Miller a fascist and not specifically a nazi. Of course being jewish or being related to jews doesn't preclude one from being fascist, or even nazi quite frankly. Self-hate exists.
The left has a national myth of America: it's a blood-soaked imperial state which genocides and enslaves non-whites.
It has hyperrealism: did you know that the police kill a thousand unarmed Black men every year?
It has fetishization of violence for it's own sake: Punch a Nazi!
It has eugenicist racial politics: whiteness must be abolished!
And against all odds, it manages to be corporatist! DEI/Pride cooption of corporate entities to achieve socio-racial goals, jawboning of media to promote or suppress specific ideological messages.
All of this is just a failure to understand what the specific terms mean.
1. National myth meaning a desire to return to some fake point in history where things were supposedly good. It doesn't mean "believing fake stuff about your nation". Also leftists want to move forward not backward.
2. Hyperreality as a tool is used by the left, but obviously much more common on the right. Oftentimes leftists are wrong by mistake, whereas the right revels in being wrong as a political tool. We can see the obvious differences between Trump and any of his opponents.
3. No, "punch a nazi" is oriented towards some positive goal. You will disagree with that goal, but it is not a celebration of violence for its own sake. The right thinks it is virtuous to be bloody.
4. No matter how much you might try to contort it, leftists have never seriously or at scale advocated for actual eugenics programs against white people. Even your own wording does not imply eugenics.
5. I really hope you aren't stupid enough to think most corporate decisions, particular ones as mundane as putting flags on products, is A) unique to the left B) done by specifically motivated leftists rather than executives trying to make money
The modern right across the West is missing two if not three of those requirements (not entirely sure what hyperrealism means in this context). Ergo, also not fascist.
I think it's highly arguable that they have almost none of those traits.
Hyperrealism is a rejection of truth or even truth-seeking as a political tool to achieve political ends. The point is to make sure everything is up for questioning and no one knows what is real, so it becomes easier to push your agenda.
"fetishisation of violence for its own sake"
Sounds like a straw man to me.
It's really not difficult to find fascists who think violence is in and of itself a virtue marking a strong ideal man, and something which must be used to maintain the hunger that drives fascism.
The common term would be "totalitarian", I think.
A couple of thoughts:
1) If you add the parenthetical "but not at the current time" to #2 as well, then all 3 statements can coexist.
2) It's always better, as I take Ibram X. Kendi's main point in his anti-racist book to be, to use fascist and racist as adjectives instead of nouns. It's the acts that can be fascist or racist, not the people.
3) The term political violence seems always to need more thought than in essays like this. It's usually narrowly defined as specific people assaulting, injuring or killing other people. But why do we exclude something like cutting medicaid eligibility which leads to some people's impoverishment or death? Isn't ICE attacking protesters in Chicago political violence, or sinking suspected drug boats (with little public evidence released) in the Caribbean the same? If they are acceptable, then I think you have to disagree with #3.
1. Why would killing fascists often be acceptable, but not at the current time? If we don't have a principled reason for the exception, don't we risk adding it in manually every time there are fascists?
2. Is this true? Is it true of communism as well? We shouldn't call Lenin a communist, we should just call his acts communist? Why? Isn't it pretty helpful to have a word for Lenin's consistent political and philosophical stance? If not, what is the categorical difference between fascism and communism here?
3. I think the difference between political policies (like extending or constricting health care eligibility) and extrajudicial violence is that one is operating within the system, the other outside of it. If you don't like the US Constitution, I guess your only option is violent revolution. If you do like the US Constitution, then part of abiding by it is agreeing not to meet legal policies done in accordance with constitutional norms with illegal violence. See eg http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Property/Property.html . Insofar as some of these actions (like the drug boat) are unconstitutional, I agree there's not a clear difference, and you have to decide how much leeway you're going to give for people to disagree on what's constitutional before you want to go full revolutionary.
1) Why isn't the same true of your formulation of #3 then? I thought that was actually what you were arguing when you suggested negating #2 to resolve the contradiction -- or were you really suggesting abandoning #3 as well, because there is never such a time?
2) Based on Merriam-Webster's definitions, there is an overlap between fascism and communism, but their aims are different. I would argue that fascism, racism and communism are legitimately nouns, and that their "ist" forms are adjectives, or ought to be. I'd make an exception when someone claims the label to apply to themselves (as Lenin did, or as Richard Spencer does when he calls himself a racist); surely communist is as much of an epithet as fascist or racist.
3) I recognize the "system" difference; I still think taking away someone's access to an essential need for political reasons (such as mollifying one's base of voters) is political violence, because it results in injury or death. I don't think that justifies killing the politicians who do it.
4) "If you don't like the US Constitution" except when it helps you, then you don't need to abide by it when committing state violence. That goes for all US Presidents to date, to varying degrees; all have stretched the constitution when they could and all have committed state violence at one point or another. Especially since Congress stopped declaring wars.
Edit: I'd just add that although I agree that the state should have a monopoly on the use of force (in non-revolutionary times), that doesn't mean that all use of force by the state is always legitimate.
The difference between those three is that the term "racism" was coined by a detractor of it, arguing that native Americans can be reformed of their culture on reservations, against the idea that the problem was in their ancestry.
It seems like you're advocating that people get to decide what they're labelled. Presumably they'll do that based on the connotations of the label, which isn't conducive to the rest of us understanding the situation. I think you should call someone a communist who consistently espouses communism, and call someone a fascist who consistently espouses fascism, rather than allowing them to spin themselves as something prettier.
I'm not advocating for that one way or the other, although the first amendment (IMO) implies that everyone does get to label themselves. I'm advocating for the use of -ist words as adjectives instead of nouns, and for focusing on the behavior of the person rather than labeling them. The reason this is important to me is what you bring up: calling someone a racist or fascist provokes an emotional reaction from them that interferes with dialogue. It's kind of like the recommended conversation style for parenting and in therapy -- avoid labels and you-talk, focus on behavior and how their behavior affects me.
It’s pretty silly to cite Merriam-Webster and then deny exactly what it says, that “communist” can be used as either a noun or an adjective. It actually expends far more text on the former than on the latter.
Good point.
Lenin was a member of a party that actually called itself Communist, just as Mussolini's party called itself Fascist.
Which in this case is a proper use of the term "fascist" as an adjective modifying "party". I think calling someone or oneself a fascist is probably a useful shortcut in colloquial language, but it problematically shifts the emphasis to the person rather than the behavior or ideology, which is why it can turn into an epithet.
I agree that constitutionality is important context here. Political violence is never acceptable as long as there's a nonviolent political means to achieve your objectives - that's what our constitutional system seeks to preserve. We (usually) have peaceful transfers of power because we've created effective means for competing political wills to be assessed and implemented. The Constitution lays out the bounds of acceptable conduct by the government, and along with federal and state law lays out the bounds of acceptable conduct by the populace.
There exist balances of power within the system to hold each branch of government accountable to the Constitution, but when these balances break down, we have a problem. Fascists are not a threat under normal conditions, and violence against them is not acceptable under normal conditions, because the Constitution by its very nature precludes a fascistic (or communist, or etc) government in this country; fascists in that case are merely people expressing opinions and beliefs, and their right to do so is protected by that same Constitution. However, once fascists take political power and violate the Constitution, and the several branches of government fail in their consitutional duties to check those abuses, then the people are justified - and have a duty - to apply any means necessary to restore constitutional governance. There's a very deliberate reason we have millions of Americans who have been trained in the organized application of violence and are sworn to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
Sinking boats (with people on them) is definitely violence. I don't know what form of "attacking" you're referring to, but law enforcement engages in (legitimized) violence. Cutting eligibility is an entirely different story though, that's just not how normal people use the word "violence".
Well, normal or not ... I don't care much about the normalcy of the use. I'd agree that there is a hierarchy of degrees here. Cutting eligibility is not itself violent, but its effects can be violent against people who lose it. It is a cause of their death or injury -- we can argue about the directness of the cause. Then we can talk about what the reasons (stated or otherwise) for the cuts were. A genuine concern about budget priorities, or kowtowing to voters who believe (or perhaps have been taught to believe) that the people losing eligibility deserve to lose it? I'd say the end effect of the cuts is still violence, but blameworthiness depends on the reasons and the alternatives, as does the choice to resist fascism, as @J. B. Persons pointed out above.
Violence is a different thing from blameworthiness! I mentioned that law enforcement engages in legitimized violence, and quite often that is the opposite of blameworthy. In a different comment in this thread I asked whether it would be "evil" for law enforcement to shoot a mass shooter, deliberately causing harm/death to that shooter. It was something of a rhetorical question, because I expect the answer of normal people to be "no".
Yes, of course you're right. I would also answer "no" to the question of whether it's evil for law enforcement to shoot a mass shooter. But legitimized is not the opposite of blameworthy, and legitimized does not equate to legitimate either. I think we all understand that there are at least two meanings of the words "innocent person": someone who didn't do something, and someone who was not convicted due to lack of evidence, a technicality such as the statute of limitations running out, prosecutorial misconduct, etc. Legitimized violence by a state agent might look like something that is deemed subject to qualified immunity (even when not supported by facts on the ground), or use of force that's questionable but that isn't investigated. Legitimization is the act of trying (not necessarily succeeding) to make something legitimate.
By "attacking" I'm referring to (admittedly disputed) accounts of ICE agents using force against protesters where the protesters may not have been threatening the agents. Just because the agents claim legitimacy doesn't mean it shouldn't be taken as seriously as the charges that the protesters instigated or assaulted the agents -- you can't call one of them violence without calling the other one violence too.
I explicitly wrote that law enforcement engages in violence.
I wasn't accusing you in particular of anything. Sorry for the use of "you". I meant "one can't call one of them violence..."
Just be unfailingly good and love the better version of someone than they might be presenting. And respond as the highest possible version of themselves would ask you to respond.
...;.gorram it, I'm gonna argue this.
In your personal life, this seems like a great way to be a sucker and an enabler.
At the societal level, I cannot help but note that bad people often win and good people often lose and the consequences of those victories and losses are really important. It is more important to win than lose nobly.
That's what bugged me about this: it's not consequentialist! Getting a good outcome is more important that doing things good. The morality of the outcome is more important than the morality of the act. If you act with goodness and love and end up in a (fascist/communist/lizardman) dictatorship, that's bad.
Highest possible version doesn’t want to be a piece of crap.
Other people are different than me. Many of them aspire to live in ways I would find morally abhorrent...and vice versa.
If I extend charity to my ideal of who they should be, rather than who they aspire to be, this ends badly. If they do this me, it's either confusing or offensive.
To remove CW from this, some people don't want to do big baller stuff. A lot of people want to do the minimal work possible, then get high and play video games all day. I think this is literally spiritual and intellectual death. They do not appreciate it when I try to interact with their highest possible version of themselves.
I agree it can be patronizing. But we all have to make these kinds of moral guesses on each other’s behalf. There are worse things than for a stranger to think, “This is beneath you.”
Some Guys comment reminds me of the bell curve meme where high- and low-intelligence people agree on the same thing: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/1*uMs06ROBVq0Q_-5xcrc__A.jpeg .
"Getting a good outcome is more important that doing things good."
Not only is this disputed (deontology), but in the current environment everybody thinks they are retaliating for violations by the other side. Might be the only way to break that cycle is to be magnanimous FIRST and hope for the best: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/ .
Violent revolution is impermissible as long as democracy is still functioning. If you can throw the bastards out at the next election, then there's no reason to resort to force.
If elections prove meaningless, either because of fraud or widespread suppression, or just outright ignoring elections, then the next step is widespread protests and civil disobedience. If that fails, then luckily we live in a federal republic where certain states can take action in a way that is still subject to oversight and checks and balances. I'd rather not contemplate what that actually looks like, but I don't want violent revolutionary factions and vigilantes taking matters into their own hands.
I don't think we're going to get to that point, though. At least I pray we won't
If the state can torture political enemies, democracy is not functioning. I do not think we are there now. Do you?
I'm referring to internal political enemies, not foreign. Torture of foreign political enemies(as despicable as that is) is not a clear and present danger to the internal democracy of a country.
I think we as Americans have a long history of killing and torturing foreign folks we don't like (should I list all the wars and conflicts?). I don't see this as evidence that Constitution is failing or that this administration is 'super' despicable.
If the majority of people support that torture, or even just know about it and still vote for them, it's still democracy.
Regarding torture, that's a fair critique. There's a parameter space where the justice system stops functioning that I hadn't considered. But, off the top of my head, my reaction is that it depends. I'm glad we didn't have a violent revolution in America during the Bush administration. But in a hypothetical scenario where a President abducts his political opponents and tortures them to extract false confessions, I'd say one can't wait until the next election to take action. But are there any examples of someone doing something like that but still leaving power if they lose the next election? I suspect not. I think that by that point democracy is probably already dead.
Regarding removing democracy in other countries, my initial reaction is to say no, I don't want to have a violent revolution in my country if I can still vote current officials out of office.
Most people demonstrably are, outrage against "enhanced interrogation techniques" isn't high on any major movement's agenda.
I think one of the bright red lines that must be drawn is the president trying to extend his stay in the White House for a third term without a constitutional amendment. The president has "joked" about this topic many times, seemingly to test the waters. If he doesn't agree to the peaceful transfer of power then political violence for his immediate removal would be warranted and justified. I'd be interested to hear what others think.
I’ve heard at least some of the jokes but I haven’t heard any with enough specifics to know whether we are talking about with or without an amendment. (And of course being that specific would pretty much kill the joke.)
But in this audience I’m a little afraid that floating an amendment would just be proof of his evil: Oh, how sinister, using Article Five against us!
I think we can defer arguing about Trump trying for a third term till he registers as a candidate for 2028 (for the case where he intends to run (unconstitutionally) but still intends to hold the election (and, perhaps, abide by the results)).
_Cancelling_ the election would be a more severe, immediate problem.
FRAN, as in Far-Right Authoritarian Nationalist, looks like a useful acronym to me. It's specific about what it's calling out, doesn't add any 20th century baggage like 'fascist' has, and as a bonus, you can call someone a (EDIT: scratching this out because I've already fumbled it in my head). I'd leave out the Corporatist part, because I'm not sure how many FRANs are currently Corporatist, and I don't want to sideswipe the French by calling it FRANC.
Just abbreviate Corporatist to CO and then you can call them FRANCOs.
That's clever and funny ;-)
maybe throw in "oligarchy" or something to avoid giving the corporate angle undue weight?
If you managed to invent a new word that perfectly described your target while excluding non-targets, it would take about 3 seconds before people start calling Mitt Romney a FRAN.
Thank you. The point you're making seems exactly correct.
I've recently seen "They don't attack you for being a fascist. They call you a fascist so they can attack you."
Indeed. I think of Scott's essay about 'stop crying wolf about fascism.'
Well now actual fascism's here and all the screaming about how Romney was one is not exactly helpful to being taken seriously.
Get to Orban?
What does that mean anyway?
Orban is a democratically elected leader of a EU country. He is as much fascist as Merz Or Meloni.
I know of course it is perfectly acceptable to slander Orban in many circles to prove oneself a liberal or even a mainstream conservative in good standing.
See my discussion of Orban here, especially Part III: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/dictator-book-club-orban
Back when you posted this and people were always debating Orban, the point that almost all the media was controlled by Orban allies came up, and the common response was that the US is similar because the "mainstream media" and heads of social media all agree with some loosely defined liberal consensus around key issues.
IMO if you accept that idea, you have to look around now and see that most media outlets and heads of social media are either Trump supporters, or have made payouts to Trump. Meta, Twitter, Youtube, Tiktok, ABC, CBS, Washington Post, WSJ, probably others I'm forgetting...
Many have made payouts because he sued them. But the media continues to criticize Trump. I mentioned that Trump is suing the WSJ over that Epstein letter, but Rupert Murdoch is refusing to budge.
Agree re WSJ, but the WSJ's editorial line is more on Trump's side than the Dems, even before any lawsuit or anything.
Also true they continue to criticize Trump (though we'll see about CBS's new management), but that doesn't mean there's no pressure. Can also mean they are dialing back the criticisms while trying to maintain some credibility, if ABC turned into Fox News overnight it may well be less helpful to conservatives than if they moved meaningfullly-but-not-decisively in that direction.
Also just to say it, the payouts IMO are extortion and impeachable even if they don't result in any change in coverage, same as if Trump went around extorting laundromats and car mechanics.
It doesn't matter whether the WSJ sides with Trump over Dems on 99% of things, the lawsuit shows he PLAINLY doesn't control them.
What I said a couple comments ago is "most media outlets and heads of social media are either Trump supporters, or have made payouts to Trump"
If they aren't controlled by Trump but still mostly support him, that falls within what I said.
Left has No Enemy to my Left while Right has Everyone to my Right is Fascist.
Fascist doesn't mean that you can't be elected democratically. Historically many fascist dictators actually were democratically elected.
If anything one could claim that Orban, due to having to work in the framework of the EU, wasn't and couldn't be very successful in making sure that no future election would remove him from power. Though the authoritarian aspect of fascism is just one aspect of many. The chrony capitalism is something Orban has perfected much more, and something Merz can't really be accused of (I know to little about Meloni to comment about her). That's also the reason Orban has never tried to leave the EU to get rid of their comments. He likes milking the EU way too much. Another aspect of fascism is the nationalism. On that scale Orban is definetly much more far gone than Merz.
Merz is a right-wing politician. But he isn't a far-right nor a rightwing-extremist. And he definetly isn't a fascist. He hasn't made the slightest attempt to subvert democratic institutions in Germany. He hasn't even tried to damage them to the benefit of his own party. Orban has done all of that in his country.
A dictator may be elected once but to keep having to fight elections isn't quite the thing a dictator does.
Crony capitalism is neither here or there.
Only thing that makes Orban a fascist is that he isn't keen on third world immigration. But this isn't the fascism of 1930s.
> A dictator may be elected once but to keep having to fight elections isn't quite the thing a dictator does.
Most dictators of our day and age have learned from the past and know that keeping sham elections around is actually benefitial to them. Which is why most current dictators hold them and simply make sure that the result doesn't surprise them.
> Crony capitalism is neither here or there.
So, I take it that you haven't read the article linked by Scott about Orban?
> Only thing that makes Orban a fascist is that he isn't keen on third world immigration.
No, that's the only thing that he does that has little to do with fascism. It's the way he organizes the Hungarian state, how he's taken control of the media and his general policies that make him quite a bit fascist.
Orban faces and wins real elections. Like Modi of India, also in the list of authoritarian strongmen.
A degree of cronyism is inevitable in any setup in this age. That's why I don't see cronyism as anything to do with fascism.
Insufficient enthusiasm about third world immigration is what marks out Orban along with also being not-so keen on gay agenda. This is precisely why he is said to be fascist strongman.
> If anything one could claim that Orban, due to having to work in the framework of the EU, wasn't and couldn't be very successful in making sure that no future election would remove him from power.
He changed the Hungarian voting system to almost ensure that. Votes of people living in big cities are worth almost nothing under the new system, only the rural votes matter. Then he banned all media that criticized him.
So, in theory (and maybe also in practice, let's see the outcome of this election) he can be democratically removed from power, but only if people outside the cities can synchronize on that in absence of any coordination by media.
Yes. That's as far as he was able to go. And that already got him in trouble with the EU (for good reason) ...
Democracy and fascism are not mutually exclusive. (I have no opinion on whether or not Orban in particular is a "fascist")
Fascist is merely a slur applied by the Left against Right.
Right-leaning individuals use it to mark anybody to their right.
In the US this might be the case. Most US citizens also use communism and socialism as a slur without understanding what those words mean.
But all three terms have actual meanings and you can measure for any political movement how well it matches any of the three definitions ...
Mamdami is member of Democratic Socialists of America. There are other prominent self-proclaimed socialists. There are no self-proclaimed fascists.
As the socialists were on winning side in world War, unlike fascists, the term socialist/communist isn't quite a slur.
I asked ChatGPT: "Define fascism in three concise bullet points"
* **Authoritarian ultranationalism:** A political ideology centered on dictatorial power, intense nationalism, and the suppression of dissent.
* **State control and unity:** Prioritizes the interests of the nation or race over individual rights, often merging state and corporate power.
* **Militarism and propaganda:** Glorifies violence, obedience, and loyalty to the leader, using mass propaganda to maintain control and mobilize society.
I then asked: "Is fascism compatible with democracy?"
No — **fascism is fundamentally incompatible with democracy.**
Here’s why:
* **Authoritarian rule:** Fascism rejects pluralism and democratic decision-making, concentrating power in a single leader or party.
* **Suppression of opposition:** It eliminates free elections, independent media, and political dissent — all core elements of democracy.
* **Rejection of individual rights:** Fascism prioritizes the state or nation above personal freedoms and minority protections, which democracy seeks to safeguard.
In essence, fascism replaces democratic governance with totalitarian control.
I fully agree with the definition provided by ChatGPT.
I also made basically the same query, albeit to both ChatGPT and Claude, and asking for 10 points rather than 3. They mostly agreed with the 3 you got, and mostly with each other. Some of the 10 points sort of fall within one of the 3 you have, e.g.
- one-party state under Il Duce: the state above the individual; pluralism abolished; power concentrated in the leader and party organs (Leggi fascistissime; Grand Council of Fascism).
is sort-of implied by "the suppression of dissent"
One point that looks additional to the 3 you have:
- Traditionalism and social hierarchy - Emphasis on traditional gender roles, family, and Church (after the Lateran Treaty), combined with belief in natural social hierarchies.
All these three points mark communist states.
I think this all comes down to a problem of type inference. If there is genuine ambiguity as to who is fascist, then you cannot do legitimate violence against fascism. Even if you are not, and do not want to be, a fascist, someone might infer that you are a fascist and beat you up. This fear will repulse all normal people from anti-fascism. Normal people do not and should not want to sacrifice their personal safety for "the cause", especially when "the cause" involves quasi-randomly beating people up.
If there is a clear consensus on fascism--that is, you have a group of people who proudly proclaim, "we are fascists and we believe evil things, and here is our fascist army and here are our fifth-columns working towards your demise"--then great, go violence against fascists. But this very rarely happens, for obvious game-theoretic reasons. WWII was historically pretty weird. A lot of leftist discourse in the last decade has been about trying to wishcast WWII back into reality.
I'm pretty bummed about all this. I think Miller really is unambiguously a fascist. But the argument can't be "therefore violence". It has to be about persuasion. We need to try to get back to a consensus on what is morally good and bad and what should be done about it.
> I'm pretty bummed about all this. I think Miller really is unambiguously a fascist. But the argument can't be "therefore violence". It has to be about persuasion. We need to try to get back to a consensus on what is morally good and bad and what should be done about it.
You're going to have to kill a lot of people if you want moral consensus. Is compromise based on the leverage different parties have not good enough?
I personally reject #2 not because it's morally or logically incorrect but because it's counterproductive. Violence ALWAYS benefits the fascist. It's why the Charlie Kirk assassination was the best possible thing that could have happened for people who support his politics and the worst possible thing that could have happened for the rest of us. It's why Trump is trying so hard to instigate violence against the NG in the cities he's occupying. The point of fascism is to trigger violence because then it justifies retaliation. Creating a world where political violence is acceptable moves the struggle to an arena where fascists hold the upper hand.
As far as "Make Fascists Afraid Again"...afraid of what? They're already afraid of everything. Immigrants, queer people, muslims, cities, history textbooks, comedians, tylenol. Their entire ideology is based on being afraid of everything. It's the only rhetorical move they have. And their path to power is making sure everyone is afraid of everything. The way you oppose fascists is to demonstrate an alternative. How about "make civil society compelling again"?
> "I personally reject #2 not because it's morally or logically incorrect but because it's counterproductive. Violence ALWAYS benefits the fascist."
I think this is false - if von Stauffenberg had succeeded in killing Hitler, I think this would have been bad for fascism, and not somehow made everything even more fascist than before.
Ok, maybe ALWAYS is hyperbole. But I think even the most alarmist among us (and to be fair I am probably in that camp) are claiming it's 1936, not 1944. And in 1936, the N@zi route to power absolutely relied on inciting antifascist violence, using it to justify reprisals, and making sure each round was bloodier and higher stakes than the one before. The only tactically sound antifascist response to that strategy is to not play the game.
>And in 1936, the N@zi route to power absolutely relied on inciting antifascist violence
Maybe you mean 32? By 34 Hitler was openly a dictator and needed no pretexts.
Yes. Sorry.
Matt Yglesias argues, fairly convincingly in my view, that Hitler is a very-nearly-unique special case and that assassinating any high-ranking Nazi other than Hitler would have been a bad idea. https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/against-assassinating-nazis
(Granted, he is mostly talking about during the period when Hitler was consolidating power but had not yet become absolute dictator. But even under the most pessimistic view, that's the stage we're in now, so the argument remains applicable.)
Reinhard Heydrich was successfully assassinated by Czechoslovak paratroopers.
Aside from a wave of killings of random Czech people, the effect on the war was approximately zero.
In Stauffenberg's case, it actually would probably have been good for fascism in the long run. The Allies were already in a position where they would have had to prosecute the war to an unconditional surrender anyway, meaning that although the war would probably have ended sooner due to the sheer chaos caused by the assassination/coup there would still have been a fight to the end and the postwar fascists would now have a powerful martyrdom/dolchstoss myth ("They could have still won it somehow but then the aristocrats betrayed the Fuhrer!") to organize around.
Let's think about this from a consequentialist lens. Instead of "does punching a N@zi give me good karma points or bad karma points," the question is "what is the likely result of me punching a N@zi? If I ratchet up the level of violence here, where is the end point?" And I think you have to assume that the end point is an increase in the amount of violence and in the number of opportunities for fascists to create radicalization and destabilization. Additional violence does not benefit the argument for the rule of law. In 1944, that's a moot point. There is no risk of a more violent world than 1944. I'd say 1944 is literally the bar when it comes to a violent world. If you ranked every year of human existence over the last 100,000 years by level of violence, 1944 takes top prize. FA time is over. You're in the FO phase. In 1936 the goal is not to get to 1944 in the first place.
>There is no risk of a more violent world than 1944. I'd say 1944 is literally the bar when it comes to a violent world. If you ranked every year of human existence over the last 100,000 years by level of violence, 1944 takes top prize.
Just to be sure I'm following you, I take it you mean year that actually occurred, not including plausible hypotheticals? A USA/USSR nuclear war, particularly at the maximum of the cold war nuke armories, could have been bloodier (ashier?).
Stauffenberg was a fascist himself. He started to oppose Hitler when it became apparent that his path would lead to disaster. Him being successfull might have actually helped fascism.
> Violence ALWAYS benefits the fascist
The second half of WWII disagrees.
Scott, you're twisting yourself into knots here to avoid acknowledging two simple things:
1. Nothing the Trump administration has done is "fascist", or particularly extreme by historical standards (you even list some salient examples!),
2. No one in the Trump administration, and no supporter of it minus some tiny epsilon, thinks well of fascism or describes ourselves as "fascist"
Hypotheticals like "What if Trump cancels elections?" are... I don't even have a word for it. The adoption by intelligent, mainstream public intellectuals of talking points on the level of the Clinton murder list. Trump is not going to cancel elections. There is no political movement in America to cancel elections, or to adopt the tenets of National Socialism. It simply does not exist. Weird as it is when people try to invent one, it's weirder when smart guys like you give them the time of day, and write long think pieces about absurd hypotheticals.
I don't think "not cancelling elections" is a valuable signal anymore. There are technically elections in Russia and North Korea. The smart move now is to seize enough power that elections happen but are technically fake.
I agree there is basically no chance that Trump gets as bad as Hitler or even Mussolini. I do think it's useful to consider the possibility that he's fascist in the same weak analogical sense that Bernie Sanders is socialist, even though there is no chance Sanders would turn us into the USSR.
Trump also is not going to turn American elections into shams like North Korea's. That hypothetical is every bit as absurd.
You're trying to salvage something out of absurdity here, when you should just say: "That's absurd, they aren't fascists."
If it helps, I will stipulate that it's absurd to conflate Bernie's democratic socialism with the USSR.
I think there is a gradation of election integrity, that we're already slightly lower on that gradation than I would like, and I can see him going further. For example, I think there's a 10% chance he gets as bad as Hungary, which is not as bad as Russia, which is itself not as bad as North Korea - but still bad!
See https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/defining-defending-democracy-contra and https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/dictator-book-club-orban
I am not accusing you of believing Bernie is exactly as bad as the USSR, I'm saying that Bernie would still be bad in various ways and it's not unfair to describe this as related to socialism being bad, even though Bernie's weak analogical socialism is not as bad as worse and more serious socialisms.
I don't think the Bernie comparison works. The salient characteristics of fascism that Trumpism arguably exhibits, albeit in much weaker form than Hitler and Mussolini, are actively evil characteristics -- bigotry, cruelty, desire to maintain personal power. In contrast, Sanders-style socialism has none of the evil characteristics of Soviet-style communism -- he doesn't want a dictatorship of the proletariat, or think it's a good idea to send people to reeducation camps. You may think socialism would lead to bad economic outcomes for the country, but that's just "bad" in the normal-politics way that bad economic theory is bad. The comparison with the 'extreme' form of the ideology becomes irrelevant.
tl;dr, Sanders is not to Stalin-style commnism as Trump is to Hitler-style fascism, because Sanders supports "a weaker version of the morally neutral bits of communism, with the evil bits removed" whereas Trump (arguably) supports "a weaker version of fascism as a package deal, evil bits included".
What's the difference between "evil" and "bad"?
Well, I mean, [insert philosophical treatise here]. No one in the last three thousand years have ever agreed on the *exact* answer to this question. But there's still an intuitively relevant difference. When we say Candidate Alice who wants to maximize the suffering of orphans is "evil", this is clearly a different axis than when we say that Candidate Bob who wants to help orphans but believes shipping unmarked boxes full of venomous snakes to them will cheer them up is "bad".
Relevantly, I think Scott's own moral beliefs recognize this difference in the case of Sanders vs Stalin. To grasp at another overlapping dichotomy, I think Scott's disagreements with Sanders are mistake-theory-based, while his disagreements with Stalin or indeed Trump are conflict-theory based. I think when we say "Trump is a fascist, like Hitler" we are saying "like Hitler, Trump plays in conflict-theory mode, and moreover he plays dirty". And this is not a valid statement about Sanders/Stalin. (Although this isn't to say it's never valid about any modern leftists!)
Evil hurts people on purpose. Bad hurts people accidentally or through misunderstanding what they're doing.
Evil is a value judgement. Bad is an argument about practicalities - will this actually work?
> I think there is a gradation of election integrity, that we're already slightly lower on that gradation than I would like
Specifically what factors put us lower than you would like here?
Must say I’d like to see this too. If Scott has something I don’t know of that would sway me, I desire to be swayed.
I don’t want to think it’s the same old tired stuff I hear from others about how January 6 was an insurrection attempting to overturn a legitimate election.
(I suspect it was as legitimate as it needed to be, but I can still sympathize with those who disagree, still claim that if it *were* illegitimate then petitioning Congress to overturn it would be a legitimate thing to do, and still suspect that the worst excesses of the petitioners were instigated by Feds or Antifa, of which there were apparently plenty in place. If those admissions are enough to convince Scott I can’t be swayed, I’ll have to live with that.)
You’re uncharacteristically exhibiting some pretty heavy biases here, Scott. What’s your epistemic foundation for believing Trump to be fascist? Does he hate other races? Does he want companies to be subservient to the interest of the state? Does he no longer believe in free trade?
Seems like you’ve been hit by the virus, pal.
I don't think these three specific criteria are necessary for fascism; ideologies evolve over time, and neofascism can have a very different presentation to 20th century fascism whilst still having similar outcomes.
However: if we suppose that these criteria *are* necessary - haven't all three basically been met?
1) Persecuting other races: The persecution of immigrants (which hasn't been restricted to illegal immigrants), detentions without trial or access to solicitors, imprisonment in squalid conditions, the state-supported masked gangs who round them up, and the use of deportation as a political threat even at fairly high levels of government.
2) Making private companies subject to the state: Controlling the output of media (including social media/tech) companies using financial incentives and cronyism (for friendly ones) and a level of threats, attacks, political pressure, and litigation against the press never before seen in a democracy (for unfriendly ones).
3) Cessation of free trade: Imposition of massive sweeping unilateral tarrifs and trade barriers across pretty much the entire world, and pursuing a strict policy of US trade isolationism.
[Disclaimer: I'm not an American and don't know much about USA politics beyond what I read on ACX and what gets reported in the press - albeit both left and right wing press - in my own country.]
However - even if I'm mistaken about all three of these points, I don't think that is sufficient for refuting the claim of (neo)fascism, since (as per. the above) I don't think neofascism need be defined as dependent on these particular three points specifically, but rather on a far-right authoritarian demagogic circumvention of the checks and balances of a healthy balanced democracy; the tools used for circumvention can be different to the tools used by 20th century fascism whilst achieving the same outcomes.
I appreciate the thoughtful reply! I actually think that all tracks with authoritarianism. There’s no need to call it «fascist», or «neofascist» for that matter.
Moreover, you could easily make the case that the Biden administration was overtly racist (DEI) and authoritarian (imprisoned and censored political opponents, including journalists), but I wouldn’t call them fascist (or communist) for that matter.
It’s just lazy, inflammatory language which worsens the dialogue.
But he already tried to gin up people to overthrow a free and fair election in 2020 and constantly talks about being president past 2028. How is this an absurd hypothetical?
Trump 2028 is a joke. I know you guys don't get his sense of humor, so you'll just have to trust me on that one.
I have numerous criticisms of the conduct of both Trump and some of my fellow Trump supporters -- mainly the latter -- on 1/6. However, I don't think it's at all fair to say "he tried to gin up people to overthrow a free and fair election". He, and they, didn't believe the election had been free and fair. You're free to disagree with that (and so am I), but you should have an accurate theory of mind for them. Their logic was exactly what Scott is laying out in this piece -- and a great example of why it's so dangerous.
It's always worth pointing out that Trump never called for violence on 1/6.
Sorry, I don't think I will trust that this is all just a joke. You should read the Eastman memos, which clearly details the attempts to overturn an election that people in the administration knew they lost. Even if you manage to wave away the conduct of the rank and file j6 rioters, the administration had their hands knowingly covered in filth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_memos?wprov=sfla1
The basic plan was to ignore/throw out votes from states that didn't vote for Trump. There was an extremely tortured legal fig leaf, one that no one agreed with and everyone stated was incorrect, including Trump's team that continued to accidentally use terms like "fake electors" in their private communication.
I've read the Eastman memos. It's an absolutely spurious legal theory, but doesn't change the fact that Trump and his supporters believed they were rectifying a stolen election result.
Disputed elections with dodgy outcomes are not all that unusual in American politics. Read about 1877 sometime.
Many people are saying that everyone including many people within his administration (Barr, Stepien, Ivanka, Donoghue, Oczkowski, Cannon, etc) told Trump in 2020 that fraud hadn’t been committed, so he’s either lying about believing the election wasn’t free and fair, or so delusional (as in refusing to listen to anyone but himself) that it’s uniquely dangerous for him to be this powerful.
I'll have to hard disagree that a president refusing to listen to his advisors automatically qualifies as "delusional".
I think he's delusional. The time to steal an election is before an election happens, but he was convinced he was going to win and refuses to listen to people who tell him what he doesn't want to hear.
If he's able to convince himself that the 2020 election was so wrong that it neccessated a coup, how is it absurd to think that he can convince himself that the democrats and the deep state are going to try to steal the election in 2028 and the only way to stop them is to steal it better or not have it at all?
Yes he never explicitly called for violence on 1/6. But if you tell people the election has been stolen and they need to fight for thier country, it definitely makes it seem like a reasonable course. Which is why demagoguing that it was is so dangerous. Like I said, I empathize with the 1/6 people, If I genuinely thought the election had been stolen in 2020, I might have been right there with them.
It wasn't a coup because it didn't involve the security services https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/01/one-or-two-simple-points.html It was instead a riot, and it's a terrible stain on Trump that he permitted a riot to go on for so long and pardoned so many participants.
It is very hard to believe it is a "joke" when many of his campaign promises were also labelled "jokes". In reality it turned out he was deadly serious about them.
It's not a joke, it's a probe. He's testing the waters to see if he could get away with it. I don't think anyone should feel confident in saying, "oh, the Supreme Court would *never* allow that" considering how they have ruled recently.
Haha, just joking, unless...? Nahhh... Unless...?
Jokes are how people test the waters. It is not acceptable for the president to joke about subverting democracy.
Some of his jokes start at "triggering the libs," advance to "seriously, not literally," and end at "promises made, promises kept," so I can see why some people get jumpy.
It's always a joke until it's not a joke. That's called plausible deniability, and Trump knows all about it.
Berlusconi used to be the convenient yard stick to measure Trump against.
Perhaps Mussolini might be the next rung up that ladder.
We call Bernie Sanders a socialist because he calls himself that!
And that's a mistake.
Why?
Because having a political ideology is not about self-perception. Hell, not even most religions work like that.
Do you mean like how having a Jewish mother makes one legally Jewish, and having a Muslim father makes one legally Muslims? Because profession of faith is still a fundamental tenet of Islam.
Sanders calls himself socialist and famously vacationed in the USSR, calling it a "strange honeymoon": https://archive.is/lpIPW
He's vastly more socialist than Trump is fascist.
It's interesting to me that you are always just debating Trump, and how bad he might turn. He is a senile old egotistical man who won't live for much longer. A decade at best.
If I was from the US, I would be much more concerned about whoever will be his successor. Especially if said successor wouldn't need an election to come to power. At this time it would be JD Vance ...
I just... man. I can't help laughing at these comments.
How do you see Vance coming to power without an election? Specifically? (Other than if, God forbid, Trump dies or is killed in office.) There is no support in the American body politic for scrapping our Constitution and replacing it with a dictator. Literally none, zero, zilch. Ask me to imagine a contingency in which that MIGHT happen, and it's something like... the aftermath of WWIII? Maybe? When 90 percent of us are dead? Probably not even then.
I get that you probably see a distorted picture of American politics from overseas, but... I live in the deepest, reddest part of hillbilly MAGA country, and any of my neighbors would laugh in your face if you suggested J. D. Vance should cancel elections and appoint himself Reichsfuhrer. We practically WORSHIP the Constitution in these parts.
Trump dying was specifically what I had in mind though. He isn't exactly healthy and more than three years is quite a long time.
I don't think for a second that J.D. Vance would cancel elections and appoint himself. But republicans are already working on ensuring that the next election is even more rigged than the last one. And republicans are cheering those changes on.
You most definitely don't actually WORSHIP the Constitution. If you would, you would have spoken up when Trump declared that all constitutional amendments are at the whim of the president. When he tried to abolish the 14th through Executive Order 14160, he essentially said that all amendments, in his opinion are only valid for as long as the president doesn't issue a presidential order saying otherwise. Which essentially means that your first and second amendment are valid for as long as the president says so. And you guys didn't even flinch at that ...
I know I'm gonna regret asking, but how was the 2024 election rigged? Never heard that one before.
I don't agree with EO 14160, the courts (so far) haven't either, and I find it highly unlikely it will stand. That's how the system works. It's how multiple previous EOs from multiple presidents have been declared unconstitutional. If issuing controversial EOs is synonymous with declaring the Constitution is at the whim of the president, then Truman beat Trump to it by about seventy-five years.
I'm not even specifically blaming the republicans. Just the fact that Gerrymandering is a thing, from both sides, makes your elections less democratic. The way your voter registers seem to be forgetful at times also doesn't really boost confidence. I wouldn't even be confident to claim that at the national level it changed the election, or that it benefitted Trump. But on the local level these shenanigans happen and are turning US democracy into a joke. It would take some serious research I'm not qualified to provide to quantify which side profited more from the BS. But that it's still legal and done openly in the US is really awful.
> I don't agree with EO 14160, the courts (so far) haven't either, and I find it highly unlikely it will stand.
That's not the point. Your argument boils down to "it isn't an attempt at eroding the rule of law because it ultimately probably wasn't successful". That's not how that works. At best that proves that there is still hope for the US when resistance to authocratic tendencies succeeds ...
> It's how multiple previous EOs from multiple presidents have been declared unconstitutional.
An EO being declared unconstitutional isn't that same thing as an EO outright trying to reframe or anul an amendment to the constitution.
Also I didn't claim that Trump was the first president in US history with authocratic tendencies. Though the seizure of a steel mill doesn't really strike me as being on the same level of authoritarianism as challenging the constitutions validity directly ...
>How do you see Vance coming to power without an election? Specifically? (Other than if, God forbid, Trump dies or is killed in office.)
A president can resign, passing the office to the vice-president.
Suppose Trump just falls ill, but not mortally ill, in 2027, for instance.
Now, whether Vance could plausibly manage to cancel elections in 2028 is _much_ more of a stretch. ( Though AGI may be coming around at that point, and might flip over the table entirely in a variety of ways. )
"Fascism" aside there are lots of things that the Trump administration has done that are extreme by historical standards, in terms of consolidating power in the executive:
* firing people in the executive branch when it's illegal to do so. This one is most obvious because the supreme court has signalled they're going to overturn 100-year old precedent in order to allow it. If they're breaking 100 year old supreme court precedent, clearly they're going farther than people in the past.
* Arresting/detaining people based on the Alien Enemies Act and declaring that their presence in the US is against the US's interests based on political speech. Again, their description of what they're doing, not mine.
* Withholding funding from various programs they don't like, against the anti-impoundment act
* Allowing or blocking mergers depending on whether the parties settle a lawsuit that Trump filed against them.
* The FCC demanding critics of the administration be taken off the air (and actually succeeding temporarily).
* Pushing the DOJ to arrest/indict political enemies when the career prosecutors in the DOJ didn't think the charges were justifiable.
* threatening law firms unless they provide them with "pro bono" legal services
* accepting a billion dollar plane from Qatar in exchange for diplomatic favors
Honestly there's a lot more, those are just what come to mind.
"If they're breaking 100 year old supreme court precedent, clearly they're going farther than people in the past."
Well, not farther than the people 100 years in the past. SCOTUS has overturned long-held precedents before. Anyway, fascism is when the president arrests the judiciary, not when they rule in his favor!
"Arresting/detaining people based on the Alien Enemies Act and declaring that their presence in the US is against the US's interests based on political speech. Again, their description of what they're doing, not mine."
Not American citizens. Again, the president has abided by court decisions on these issues. Not fascism. Not particularly extreme.
"Withholding funding from various programs they don't like, against the anti-impoundment act"
All presidents play these games. Is it bending the rules, sure. So was declaring a "police action" in Vietnam. So was the "Dear Colleague" letter. I don't hyperventilate every time the president gets in a pissing contest with Congress.
"Allowing or blocking mergers depending on whether the parties settle a lawsuit that Trump filed against them."
No evidence of this.
"The FCC demanding critics of the administration be taken off the air (and actually succeeding temporarily)."
The FCC probably had nothing to do with it, it's a poor species of fascism that can't even cancel its critics for more than a week, and it's nothing compared to what the Biden admin did to its social-media critics.
"Pushing the DOJ to arrest/indict political enemies when the career prosecutors in the DOJ didn't think the charges were justifiable."
This one is hilarious, given that Letitia James literally campaigned on "getting Trump". I guess that didn't strike you as abuse of power. Anyway, presidents pressuring DOJ to arrest/indict is nothing new. Every president in my lifetime has done this. James will get her day in court.
"threatening law firms unless they provide them with "pro bono" legal services"
Haven't heard of this one. Got a link?
"accepting a billion dollar plane from Qatar in exchange for diplomatic favors"
Show me the quid pro quo.
> The FCC probably had nothing to do with it, it's a poor species of fascism that can't even cancel its critics for more than a week
That point is fair enough.
> and it's nothing compared to what the Biden admin did to its social-media critics.
This point is not. Social media is small beans and the government doesn't actually have authority over it. The FCC actually does have authority over broadcast TV, which reaches huge numbers of people.
These days, it's the broadcast media that's small beans. There are tons of YouTubers with much more influence and larger audiences than Kimmel.
The government exercising authority it doesn't have is worse than the government exercising authority it has, even if it shouldn't have that authority.
I agree in the case of Trump enacting tariffs by dictatorial fiat: he has no such Constitutional authority. But "jawboning" is a different matter: if a company is led by someone with spine (like Rupert Murdoch, who's not backing down from Trump's lawsuit on the Epstein letter) they can persist in its face.
“Dictatorial fiat” begs the question here. There are several Congressional acts that grant the President the power to set tariffs. Trump even cited some of them in his EO. It’s not clear to me that those acts are themselves constitutional, to the extent that they hand off Congressional purviews to the Executive. But if you argue that way, you throw the whole Administrative State up for grabs.
The highest rated TV programs reach maybe 4 million people. That's peanuts. Broadcast is almost, but not quite, irrelevant. Social media gets 10s of millions of unique views every single days.
Who on social media gets that?
I'm just seeing aggregate views, not views per day, but, in my feed, an example with 19 million views is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FijCtWjcRR4
Social media is much bigger beans than Jimmy Kimmel and all the legacy broadcast networks put together. You know what's really small beans? Libraries and what books are in them.
> Well, not farther than the people 100 years in the past.
Before 100 years in the past, the executive branch mostly didn't do the types of things now done by people insulated from being fired. It's less that SCOTUS switched 100 years ago, more that it was a pretty new situation. Also ... in US history there's a lot of things from 100 years ago we really don't want to bring back.
> fascism is when the president arrests the judiciary, not when they rule in his favor!
I didn't say they were being fascist, I said they are going farther than previous admins. The supreme Court being on their side doesn't change that.
> Anyway, fascism is when the president arrests the judiciary, not when they rule in his favor!
Don't have to arrest the judiciary when they almost always rule in your favor! Plus most people will agree, autocrats in this day and age like to keep the trappings of a democratic system, e.g. elections even if they're rigged.
> Not American citizens.
This isn't an argument that they aren't going farther than others, just that you think it's fine.
> the president has abided by court decisions
Releasing the person you arrested when the court says you violated their rights, doesn't mean that you didn't violate their rights.
But even so ICE has repeatedly detained US citizens with no provocation and ignored them saying so and offering up ID.
> All presidents play these games.
This isn't a rebuttal to the claim that this administration has gone further than others. It's like responding to "the president just shot someone" with "hey, all presidents bend the rules".
Also Congress overwhelmingly approved the Vietnam War, the "police action" thing wasn't executive aggrandizement.
> No evidence of this.
The merger approval came a few weeks after the settlement, and both the merger and the lawsuit had been outstanding for awhile prior; the chairman of the FCC said that the merger was based on promises about media coverage; and Trump himself linked the settlement to the merger in a Truth Social post: https://trumpstruth.org/statuses/32150
Do you actually believe that they are not linked?
> The FCC probably had nothing to do with it
The chairman of the FCC said about it, "These companies can find ways to change conduct to take action on Kimmel or, you know, there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead".
And again, Trump saying that they discussed directly with the White House, and threatening them over un-cancelling: https://trumpstruth.org/statuses/33072
> Anyway, presidents pressuring DOJ to arrest/indict is nothing new.
Do you have any examples of a different president telling DOJ to indict someone when the career prosecutors thought it wasn't justified? Trump directly told Pam Bondi to indict Comey in a public post and they fired the prosecutors who said there's no basis.
As for Tish James, whatever you think of her, it isn't an example of the executive branch aggrandizing power.
> Haven't heard of this one. Got a link?
Several, here was one: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/20/white-house-law-firm-sanctions-026866
Other law firms have fought against the sanctions and I believe all of them have won, nobody thinks they're legal.
> Show me the quid pro quo.
I don't have access to private government communications, but does anyone seriously believe Qatar gave Trump a $1 billion dollar gift out of the goodness of their hearts?
I really can't argue with you if you think having the Supreme Court on Trump's side doesn't matter. They're the supreme legal body of the United States. Whose opinion of the legality of his conduct could be more dispositive?
I myself believe the president should have full and absolute discretion over the personnel of the executive branch. The first sentence of Article II is quite clear, and Congress' usurpation of the president's prerogatives in this regard hasn't (in my view) gone well.
If you regard that view as extreme or authoritarian, we'll just have to disagree. At least you don't think it's fascist.
Most of what you're writing here is just throwing shade, of the "do you really think..." variety. I rarely find that convincing, and never when it's about Donald Trump, who has been the target of more baseless smears than I can count.
> if you think having the Supreme Court on Trump's side doesn't matter
The way you appoint judges is so heavily politicised that the Supreme court isn't really indicative of anything in the US anymore. That's another part of your political system that you should improve. Not even because of Trump. It isn't any better when democrats are stacking the court either ...
> I really can't argue with you if you think having the Supreme Court on Trump's side doesn't matter.
Again what I originally argued is that Trump went farther than previous presidents, which is true, whether or not SCOTUS is "on his side".
Though he did of course repeatedly violate supreme Court precedent *before* they signaled they're likely to change it; and in many cases where the supreme Court is giving him what he wants, they aren't even agreeing that what he did is OK but finding a lack of jurisdiction/standing/etc.
Anyway, I'd say that defying the supreme Court is worse than *not* doing so, but that doesn't somehow mean that nothing he can do is problematic so long as the supreme Court acquiesces.
> I myself believe the president should have full and absolute discretion over the personnel of the executive branch. The first sentence of Article II is quite clear, and Congress' usurpation of the president's prerogatives in this regard hasn't (in my view) gone well.
Not only is the first sentence of Article II not clear on that, but it conflicts with the rest of the article. On a basic level executive personnel is specifically covered in the article, and the president is *not* given absolute discretion. Some personnel must be approved by the Senate, and Congress may decide for the others that their appointments can be vested in some other places.
Not to mention a bunch of other stuff in Article II that's totally superfluous with a maximal interpretation of the "vesting clause".
> If you regard that view as extreme or authoritarian, we'll just have to disagree. At least you don't think it's fascist.
I don't think a "unitary executive" is necessarily authoritarian. But that, combined with accepting an executive branch of the size we have, and no other checks on the president's use of the powers this would grant him, or even an idea that the president should be reluctant to use the power, necessarily is. The traditional conservative view would be a unitary but weak executive, the trump view is a unitary and strong executive.
> Most of what you're writing here is just throwing shade, of the "do you really think..."
The reason I'm saying it is because I think it's pretty obvious what's happening in those situations. I haven't actually heard anyone say that they *don't* think that, e.g., Qatar's "gift" was intended as a bribe, and I'm not even sure what the alternative explanation is supposed to be.
Seems to me like you aren't answering because the only realistic answer is that you *do* think it's a bribe - which you didn't even deny thinking in your previous comment.
No, the answer is I don't think it's a bribe, and I would need to see direct evidence of a quid pro quo to believe it is. Qatar didn't give anything to Trump personally. The airplane is not his, it's the US government's. The Biden administration also signed off on it!
Looks like yet another ginned-up controversy to me.
> it's a poor species of fascism that can't even cancel its critics for more than a week
Your argument here essentially boils down to: "they haven't secured enough power yet to actually always get what they want when they attempt it" ...
Surely that was what the Founders intended to accomplish?
So far the checks and balances seem to provide some push-back. Yes.
"He's not a fascist, he's following Court directives." Has it every occurred to you that courts can be fascist, too? I seem to recall that the Austrian painter was cozy with some friendly judges.
Technically Plessy was never overruled, but it was 60 years old when Brown substantially weakened it and it's basically been uncited since. There are times old precedent is just bad!
Wickard v Filburn is 83 years old and desperately bad precedent.
>The FCC demanding critics of the administration be taken off the air (and actually succeeding temporarily)
Yeah not really what happened. The FFC chair was kind of indirectly jawboning, Kimmel's a hateful unpopular trashbag, but apparently popular enough for people to shoot at an ABC station to bring him back.
What I said is that Trump is doing things that are more extreme than other presidents in terms of consolidating power in the executive. The fact that some supreme court precedents are bad doesn't change that.
But the fact that they overturned an old precedent to allow it does show that he is, in fact, doing more than other presidents did.
Re the current situation - the real principled conservative view on this is that not only should the president be able to essentially fire anyone in the executive branch, but there shouldn't be all these people in the executive branch with all these powers anyway. The traditional conservative view has not been that the president should personally have the power of every person who's currently in the executive branch, most would agree that is too much power for the president (up until that president was trump).
EDIT: re FCC - he directly threatened them, it's funny how trump and his minions can directly admit to doing the bad thing and people will still make excuses for them, and in many cases also claim that the other side did the same thing based on attenuated evidence and some leaps in reasoning.
Do you believe the 2020 election was stolen and that Trump would have won it if it were fair?
If you believe Trump did NOT win the election, how do you reconcile supporting him post-Jan6 if he's mentally unable to see that he lost an election?
If you believe Trump DID win the election, what do you think are the mechanisms that kept him from rightfully being declared the winner?
"Do you believe the 2020 election was stolen and that Trump would have won it if it were fair?"
No.
"If you believe Trump did NOT win the election, how do you reconcile supporting him post-Jan6 if he's mentally unable to see that he lost an election?"
Because supporting a president doesn't mean believing he is, and always has been, right about everything. I'm certain a moment's reflection will reveal some profound disagreements with presidents you've supported. We have a two-party system; as Biden so astutely put it, "Don't compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the other guys."
Fair points and thank you for the response. I will tack on that I don't think I've ever really supported a president, just viewed some as having less-bad policies than others. I've voted third party multiple times, including 2016, but will confess to have voted D in 2020 and 2024 in what I perceived as damage mitigation, but not enthusiasm.
Technically, I didn't vote for Trump, either. I always do some pie-in-the-sky write-in, because I live in a deep red state (WV) where the outcome is never in doubt. But I would have voted for him if I lived 20 miles away in Pennsylvania.
>"Don't compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the other guys."
You've mangled it. The expression ends "… the alternative."
Fascism/nazi (and Hitler) is bound to continue being used in frivolous and absurd circumstances because there's few other labels left that inspire the intended extreme reaction.
In a post religious West where accusations of heresy/blasphemy/being the devil no longer hold any sway, there needed to be an accusation to fill the gap and this is it. The vagueness of the definition is a feature not a bug, that way it doesn't take much effort to slap that label onto someone, if you squint hard enough you can make anything fascist.
When determining hard lines and limits it's alot more useful to use actual descriptive terms and come to conclusions based on those
There is, of course, still a secular, not-directly-ideological accusation used copiously on both sides: treason, flung around rather carelessly even though it indicates participation in a real, serious crime. Corruption, too, to a lesser degree.
There was a guy on Twitter who said it was treasonous too critique the F-35 project as an overrated, expensive flop. I've heard of ranking officers calling it treason to not support their own pet funding project.
I see someone’s read Dominion! 👍
Agreed, in the same way that Republicans call everyone communists so they can make people think about the USSR and death camps, even though none of the self-described socialists today want to do anything remotely similar.
The fascism term is a bit useless (if you are trying to be honest) among low-information voters because they just think of Nazis. So as long as Trump isn't putting Jewish people in concentration camps, they won't think it makes sense as a description. Among more informed people, who know about the entire history of fascism, it is a useful descriptor.
I don't think we should take "this person is a fascist" as a literal statement of "this person ought to be killed," *even if* the speaker would in general consider fascists an acceptable target for violence.
Like, the Nazis were unambiguously fascist, but I don't think we should interpret Woody Guthrie's statement as calling for genocide against Germany. After the war, a great many Nazis did not get killed, and I think that was a good and correct way to handle the end of the war.
This also is why I don't think it's worthwhile to split hairs over "is Stephen Miller a fascist or merely an I-can't-believe-it's-not-fascism authoritarian." Whether Stephen Miller should be jailed, executed, or assassinated, does not depend on the exact details of what he believes in his heart of hearts, but rather on the utilitarian calculation of how many atrocities he's commanding and how likely your violence is to stop them from happening. Once violence is on the table, there are other factors in play besides merely "is the violence against a good person or a bad person?"
(I think this is technically giving up option 2 in your list, but I think it's a pretty minor modification. Fascists may be an acceptable target, but not every acceptable target is a practical one. As you once said, be nice until you can coordinate meanness.)
James J. Heaney wrote a surprisingly similar, and imo arguably more fleshed out and well written, article on this topic in 2019 (which he reposted in the wake of the kirk shooting): https://decivitate.jamesjheaney.com/p/one-reason-to-punch-nazis
It's also from a wildly different perspective - a conservative catholic christian never-trumper - but it's definitely worth checking out.
>arguably more fleshed out and well written
He doesn't even begin to grapple with the question of - at what point political violence starts to make sense, something of a hole one might say.
C Bradley Thompson’s “America’s Revolutionary Mind” is a fascinating exploration of the philosophy (née the Scottish Enlightenment) that led to the revolution. One part that struck me was the argument that when George III began to impose unacceptable laws (unacceptable because the colonists had no representation or other recourse, and because of their notion that rights adhered to men because they were men, not as a grant from a ruler), the colonists had not only the right, but also *the duty* to rebel.
Compared to the depredations of modern government on its citizens, the laws imposed by George III were astonishingly minor, but the lack of recourse convinced them that (as the Declaration said) the only logical goal must be utter tyranny.
I don’t think we’re there. But I probably wouldn’t have thought we were there then either. Americans a couple of centuries ago probably felt like they had a lot more say in how their federal government intruded into their lives, but also it certainly intruded into their lives a couple of orders of magnitude less.
Maybe things are different here in the suburban Midwest, but I didn't think there was a major constituency for number 2.
Regardless of how bad an ideology is, if it's held by (approximately) the majority of the population, the right response is to vote with your feet and leave. If a person eliminates the ability of the people to change thier leader by voting in a free and fair election (a reasonable barometer would be that it is stated as such in mainstream newspapers of non-crazy allied countries), then only less peaceful ways remain to change leadership... Avoiding that seems like basically the reason we invented elections. Although in that case I personally would still probably choose to vote with my feet.
Similar to probably wrong, among people who say the 2020 election was stolen, I actually have a lot of empathy for the ones who showed up on January 6th, and have trouble believing people honestly believe themselves when they lazily maintain that it was stolen without acting like it's a five alarm fire.
I should add that if people start getting tortured or disappeared before an election that seems to have to qualify too. Wasn't thinking darkly enough...
?
I think you need to differentiate your premises:
American fascists who are using violence break the social contract that political violence is not ok, and therefore can become valid targets themselves (rules of thee are rules of me). Obviously, this creates a feedback loop - so breaking this cycle is the real challenge.
I think if this is your distinction, then you should say "it's acceptable to use violence against people who have started the violence themselves", and the concept of fascism isn't doing any work.
Well, that’s the point. The concept of fascism is a constructed one, so we can look at it’s qualities and criticize their implementation independently, allowing one to skip fruitless debates on whether a current regime is or isn’t fascist.
As a matter of pragmatism, may I suggest voting with your feet before resorting to political violence.
That is difficult when the United States holds an enormous arsenal of incredibly powerful weapons. Sadly what happens there impacts everyone.
Why, are they using these weapons to stop you from leaving?
If this all results in an ultranationalist faction gaining power and starting wars of conquest, then being outside current US borders doesn't exactly guarantee safety.
Pick a country they are unlikely to invade. Like Switzerland or Singapore.
avoid Canada, Gaza, Greenland, Mexico, Panama, Venezuela...
As many folks I know have stated... if the mid-terms are stolen (in a meaningful way) then that's time for mass protest. If the mass protest is violently repressed, then it's time to answer violence with violence.
Yeah, you'll show them!
The fun part is that these things could equally well be said by either side.
I hope your reaction to the same words coming from the other side would be the same, whichever side we are talking about.
To be honest, I don't think either side of the political divide has the ability to steal an election. So it's mainly hot air. If the election is so close that getting 10 people in that key voting district to not show up and vote, then it was a coin toss anyway.
"I think people should reject premise (2) above and stop talking about fascists as if it’s okay to kill them." That's probably prudent, but 'talk' is the operative word here. Woody Guthrie killed zero fascists, and I suspect the same can be said for his guitar.
What is true historically?
a) German and Italian fascists did wonderfully after the war, outside a handful of exceptions. In fact, after a few years of very half-hearted accountability ('denazification'), German fascists (suddenly "former Nazis", at worst, and "partners for democracy" or "successful businessman", more commonly) were downright subsidized and favored by the occupying authorities - the entire matter became tiring, and of course you don't want to hand central Europe to socialists or Communists. This is a fact of which most Americans are probably half-aware.
b) Much of American folk song has the Spanish civil war as a referent. There, fascists were met mainly in the battlefield, where it was unambiguously acceptable to shoot at them. (There was some shooting elsewhere, some of it between antifascists factions; to put it a bit callously (towards the POUM and so forth), that's an error term in comparison.) That was the first stage of WWII - a stage the fascists won. So, none of the complicated task of what to do the day after.
One might then suspect that, when people talk about fascists as if it's OK to kill them, they are really... talking about talking about them as if it's OK to kill them? Talking about taking some down while they are shooting at you, and killing your friends in Granada? There's really not a lot of precedent for killing fascists in peace-time. Some hangings of collaborationists, and that's about it.
What became of ex Nazis in East Germany? Or did they mostly all manage to escape to the West before the fall of Berlin?
It seems that a lot of those who were lucky enough to be alive and free by 1948 could live lives like any other citizens of the sovjet zone, later GDR. Sometimes they were recruited by the internal secret service (Staatssicherheitsdienst aka Stasi).
German language article about this: https://www.mdr.de/geschichte/ddr/politik-gesellschaft/entnazifizierung-nazis-in-der-ddr-100.html
Interesting. Not what I would have expected, to put it mildly.
Most were quietly rehabilitated - East Germany was *far* worse than West at denazification, and the general position was that the leaders had misled the people and now that they had been toppled, little needed to be done.
> That was the first stage of WWII
Spain wasn't a battlefield in WW2, they stayed neutral. The Battles of Khalkhin Gol weren't stages of WW2 either, that was a border conflict between the USSR and Japan, after which there was a non-aggression treaty which lasted for most of WW2.
Either statement is only technically true. In terms of ideologies, which is what we are talking about, the Spanish Civil War was the first major literal battleground between fascism and antifascism, and a prelude to the rest. Franco stayed out of WWII in part because his country was in ruins and possibly also out of prudence.
The Soviet Union was helping out Nazi Germany early in WW2, mutually planning the division of eastern Europe & Poland (which had previously stopped the westward advance of the Red Army) specifically. The UK drew up plans to bomb Soviet oilfields to stop them supplying Germany. The fact that the USSR had previously supported the opposite side in Spain as the Germans & Italians was irrelevant to that. After Operation Barbarossa, Finland was a co-belligerent with Germany against the USSR. This wasn't because they were fighting for an ideology, they instead saw themselves as in a Continuation War to the recent Winter War.
Ethiopia, unlike Spain, actually was a battleground in WW2. That was because Mussolini tried to attack Britain's holdings in east Africa. There have thus been (incorrect) arguments that WW2 can be dated to begin with the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, but in that case Nazi Germany was one of the few countries to provide any military support to Ethiopia.
Hum... I could have sworn that Ethiopia was an independent country, not a Commonwealth minor country.
You would have sworn correctly and I said nothing to the contrary. Italy had already conquered Ethiopia, but their attack on British East Africa resulted in British forces retaliating and kicking them out of Ethiopia, thus restoring Ethiopia's pre-invasion ruler.
Two points here.
First, let me needlessly defend Stephen Miller: calling people "Fascist" is hardly a sign of Fascism; and suggesting that somebody should be arrested for what one understands to be a threat of physical violence is not Fascism at all, but rather an expression of law-abidingness: American law, following law everywhere, considers threats of violence a crime or at least a felony.
Second: this post is in need of a definition of Fascism. It can be, in the modern style, "shit I don't like" and it can't conflate hardcore Communists like Pol Pot with real Fascists like Franco. Whatever Communism is, it's not Fascism.
Some time ago, I proposed this definition: "If you know your Fascist states, you know that their defining characteristics are single-party rule, nationalism, anti-feminism (women are expected to take a place as mothers and wives only, as a rule) and government control of the economy in partnership with the private sector." Happy to discuss and adjust if needed. We do require a clear definition here.
Is it fair to call Chinese Communism "Fascism" or does everything hinge on that women thing?
Communism: not Fascism
How so?
You're free to call them Communists: that's what they call themselves.
You said the defining traits of fascism were single-party rule, nationalism, anti-feminism, and government control of industry. "What they call themselves" was not on the list. Besides the name, China meets three of the four criteria you listed.
You're dodging the question.
Thing with China is that it meets 100% of the conditions for Communism, so that's what they are: they call themselves Communists, use a Communist flag, walk around with pictures of Marx and Lenin, and have a constitution that describe the country as Communist. It's a slam dunk. I know a lot of people (like, almost certainly, you) feel bad because they want Communism to be a good, aspirational thing and not what Mao and Pol Pot did, and they want Fascism to be the thing they don't like and they can send their army to fight against (China) but that's not my problem.
I'm reminded of the distinction between "enemy" as a casual word for someone you don't like, the legal term of art for the target of a formal declaration of war (or a similar equivalent), and the foreign policy assessment that lies somewhere in between. The US has very few enemies, because they tend to die ugly deaths in short order. But there are quite a few *adverseries* to contend with on the grand stage of geopolitics.
Eliding the distinction is unfortunate, and goes hand in hand with a sloppy approach for when the extreme violence the US is capable of ought to be used.
>The US has very few enemies, because they tend to die ugly deaths in short order.
Even if they happen to reside in nuclear-armed countries?
There are few cases when an individual would meet the criteria of being a geopolitical enemy. Arguably bin Laden counted, so... yes.
I guess I don't understand what do you mean by "ugly deaths" then. But yes, Osama's certainly qualifies.
Agree with most of what you say, and I don't usually call people "fascists" because it seems too loosely defined. Couple of reactions:
* Whether political violence is acceptable isn't just a question of how bad the target is, but the political situation. Are there times where it would be OK to assassinate the president? Most people would say yes, e.g. if he announces "ok guys I'm a dictator now, kill the opposition". But if that same guy is a lone Congressman with 0 national constituency, then no.
* It's hard to say that people shouldn't "talk about fascists as if it's OK to kill them" because one of the biggest and most defining events in US history, was basically us killing fascists for 4 years. But even though it was OK to summarily kill a nazi on Omaha Beach, it isn't OK to machinegun a neo-nazi rally.
* It's not the case that the left is more likely to talk up political violence. The right is constantly calling the left "fascist" and even more commonly "communist" (while also saying the two should be seen as morally equivalent); Trump personally constantly calling for people to be executed, etc; posts AI videos wishcasting violence against enemies; people always talking about civil war; etc.
* For Woodie Guthrie specifically, I take it as meaning more like this machine kills fascism. Makes more sense, he isn't saying his rad tunes are going to facemelt Nazis like in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but that they'll spread cool anti-fascist vibes and make their ideology go away.
* Is it "political violence" that we are blowing up boats in the Caribbean on basically nonexistent pretexts, and Stephen Miller according to media reports wants to do it purely for political/demagogic reasons? There's an asymmetry about how we talk about this with violence *by* the state vs by others. I think you can defend it but it should be pointed out.
> I think you can defend it
Of course, you can just reuse the stock phrases developed for explaining why taxation isn't theft. Something like "the price you pay for living in a civilized society," and "but who will build the roads?"
It sounds like when I say "you can defend it", you think the defenses are bad. If so, do you agree that Miller is engaged in political violence?
Precisely in the sense that any wielding of state power is political violence.
It seems to me very clear that fascism, like most things, is a sliding scale and is an analogous term. German Nazi fascists were a different level of evil from Italian fascists, who were much worse than Franco's Spanish fascists. I would react to a Nazi with utter revulsion and horror, but I do understand why someone might support Franco. And, of course, if you want to be extremely strict with your definitions you could define fascism so narrowly as to only include Mussolini, or broadly enough to include the Malibu Police Chief.
Stay out of Malibu, Lebowski!
At least it's an ethos
After all, Tolkien supported Franco, but despised Hitler.
"I don’t think this implies support for fascism, any more than saying that you shouldn’t kill communists implies support for communism. They’re both evil ideologies which are bad and which we should work hard to keep out of America"
Cany you clarify what you mean here, this doesn't seem like a fair equivocation to me as written.
I'm guessing it's supposed to mean that some forms of Communism can be as objectionable as some forms of fascism. E.g. a violent tyrannical Communist regime might be as evil or more evil than a mild kind of fascism that's only marginally ethno-centric and anti-democratic, just enough to warrant the label.
But communism isn't inherently a violent or undemocratic ideology the way fascism is.
Maybe the most central member of the "communism" cluster is a violent tyranny for historical reasons. But it seems perfectly coherent to be a communist who's against private property but other wise pro-democracy and pro-liberalism, in a way that it's not coherent to say "I'm fascist but pro-democracy and against ethno-nationalism."
Just being against private property doesn't strike me as the kind of view that needs to be "kept out of America" unlike almost anything that really could be described as fascism.
So it doesn't seem fair to equate them in abstract terms, especially given the post is about not applying terms too broadly.
Communism always leads to a single-party dictatorship because communists don't recognize bourgeois electoral competition as legitimate.
If someone said "I recognize the legitimacy of bourgeoise elections but I'm still opposed to private property" wouldn't that still count as communist?
"Property is theft" is a quote from the anarchist Proudhon, rather than any communist.
Soviet Communism was, in theory, democratic via the soviets. But the logic of Communism is totalizing: you can't have a partial revolution. Parties that are opposed to the revolution are ipso facto opposed to the state. So "opposed to the revolution" becomes the go-to accusation for eliminating one's enemies.
And when it doesn't work despite supposedly being perfect, you *know* it must be because of saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries, who must now be hunted down. Weirdly, that never helps, but presumably that just means you have to keep going forever.
Possibly communist, definitely not Marxist.
When people say "communism" they typically mean Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, Maosim, or something else along those general lines, not the people max called Utopian Communists.
For instance, if you want to retreat into a propertyless community with other hippy leftists, that's small-c communism (you have no private property, which is kinda the definition), but not what people typically understand by capital-C Communism.
I can accept that there might be a democratic non-violent version of Communism, but could there not be a democratic non-violent version of Fascism too?
It is hard to be sure (my impression is the Mussolini himself was not the most consistent ideologue...) but I thought the glorification of war was fairly central to Fascism??? If this is correct (and I may well be mistaken), then a democratic Fascism might be possible but a non-violent Fascism seems more self-contradictory.
It's not internally violent. That's what "violent" means in this context. Nobody considers the US to be a violent country because of its military escapades.
Many Thanks! Yes, that is a good point. An internationally aggressive, but internally peaceful version might be possible. I'm still a bit skeptical. I thought that using violence internally as well as externally was at least typical of Fascism, though I don't know whether this was embedded in its ideology to the point where removing it would create something that really needs a different name.
>Maybe the most central member of the "communism" cluster is a violent tyranny for historical reasons. But it seems perfectly coherent to be a communist who's against private property but other wise pro-democracy and pro-liberalism, in a way that it's not coherent to say "I'm fascist but pro-democracy and against ethno-nationalism."
It seems possible to have coherent partial agreement with either ideologies.
To pick two other facets of fascism, someone could be
fascist but pro-democracy and against ethno-nationalism and for corporatism (aka private-public partnerships - in some form these are pretty pervasive) and pro-war and pro non-ethno-but-pro-otherwise-nationalism
Private property is basically the single most important political institution in human history. Being against private property should be just as socially unacceptable as being a fascist (that is, either both or neither should be acceptable).
- The sort of equality pursued by communism is inherently evil.
- For this and other reasons, communism is an inherently evil ideology.
- Communism is an inherently violent ideology because there is no non-violent way to realistically pursue and achieve its aims.
- "Democracy" as such is not an inherent moral good.
- Undemocratic political systems are not inherently morally bad because they are undemocratic.
- Ethno-nationalism is not inherently morally bad.
Also in practice communism and socialism have caused vastly more human misery than fascism and its variants.
I'm interested specifically in what Scott considers the boundaries of acceptable politics. This seems like a very different view to Scott's and I can't imagine he would accept these arguments.
I mainly asked because the broad way he used the term "communism" sounded like he was taking an uncharacteristically illiberal position that I don't think he actually holds, so I wanted some clarity.
>Also in practice communism and socialism have caused vastly more human misery than fascism and its variants.
More, but I wouldn't say "vastly" - more like 2-3X, depending on how the blame for WWII is allocated. Hitler was not a rounding error.
>Private property is basically the single most important political institution in human history. Being against private property should be just as socially unacceptable as being a fascist (that is, either both or neither should be acceptable).
_Mostly_ agreed, but there are a _lot_ of edge cases. Should rights to portions of the electromagnetic spectrum be fully saleable and tradeable like other property? How about airspace over one's property - and, how high? Patents get traded as property - is it legitimate that their term is set by legislation? And on and on and on and on...
Greg Lukianoff said this in a recent article, making a distinction between fascism and RW authoritarianism:
"fascism was a weird melding of left-wing and right-wing ideas, combining nationalism, racism, and socialism in a way that won more adherents than it ever should have — especially among intellectuals and, distressingly, on German campuses. Meanwhile, right-wing authoritarianism is basically the story of the human race prior to the 20th century, when left-wing authoritarianism started to become more prominent."
This is the first time I can recall that Scott talking about stochastic terrorism, and he seems to frame it very negatively. Is there more detail about the reasoning for that thinking?
The entire concept is meant to mute your opponents.
Isn't some muting good in certain cases? For example, if I advocate that everyone named David is an intrinsically evil person who should be forced to wear a scarlet letter in public and it's responsible for all evil, and a lot of other people also started saying that and spreading it, it seems like that social influence can eventually lead to violence, albeit indirectly. That's my understanding of the concept, is that just a bullet we bite for free speech?
Your premises sort of assume your conclusion. The problem with the world you posit is that lots of people believe the calumnies. You are positing the bad outcome. People are more likely to believe Im morally abominable if I actually am. Therefore, it’s best to let the marketplace of ideas adjudicate my moral worth. That’s basically what reputation in a free society is.
Well, to get into concrete details, what about Kirk? It seems like a lot of people hated his ideas, talked about how bad he was, and enough people believed it that one of them eventually killed him. I posit the bad outcome because it seems like it happened. If I'm correct that stochastic terrorism accurately describes the people who said that Kirk was evil and should be punished, why is that concept bad? Is it an accurate concept but still one that should be rejected? Why?
Yup, either Scott or someone else will need to expand on exactly what in that concept-space is "wrongheaded". I expect I mostly agree with him on what downstream scholarship, etc. is wrong here, but the top-level diagnosis clearly has some explanatory power re: the July 2024 Trump and September 2025 Kirk assassination attempts, and denying that will not lead anywhere good.
Equating saying that someone is bad with terrorism I think is problematic. Terrorism's kind of a loaded term to begin with, but to equate it with the expression of an opinion or statement of belief is a) over the top and b) ripe for abuse, because nobody wants to be associated with the word "terrorism."
How does physical violence against medical practitioners and administrative staff of places which offer abortions, figure into this? Because there are clergy(various faiths) and pundits who continually rail against abortion, equating it to evils which need violent opposition including illegal means, and then behave all surprised and innocent when a member of their congregation/audience carries out a shooting or bombing. "I said they were the enemies of God and called on righteous warriors to rise up and smite them, but you can't blame ME for what happened"; I've heard the term "stochastic terrorism" used in those situations. Was that inaccurate?
As David says, it's a term that can be used to mute your opponents, but the catch here is that it's based on a real phenomenon: if you tell enough people X, then a few of them will believe X. This ought to be self-evident, from the fact that textbooks exist. The stronger, less evident form is that if X is hard to believe, but you tell enough people X for long enough, then a few of them will believe X, and act on it.
The catch _there_ is that no one knows exactly how long you have to tell people X, or which people you have to tell X, or how farfetched X can be, but everyone seems to agree that these are factors in computing whatever P(belief) is. And when the action has a payoff in the neighborhood of highly influential people being assassinated, people have a high interest in knowing more about that function, and in getting it as low as they can, at least for themselves.
So there are movements to clamp down on any of those three, or all of them, but mostly the third one. The problem there is that everyone disagrees on how farfetched any given X is.
I've seen it discussed recently how more people these days are saying that political violence is acceptable in response to survey questions on the topic, and I always wonder how the question is phrased, because as you note, I think almost everybody would agree that political violence is justified *in certain circumstances.* Like if you were in the Soviet Union in 1939 and saw a drunken Stalin wandering alone down the Moskva River, I think it'd be unethical not to push him in.
On the other hand, you have to consider that a lot of the people who are willing to engage in political violence are not at all motivated by pro-social instincts and instead find violence useful for their own narrow interests, or perhaps are just driven by tribalist antipathy; they don't have any motivating principles other than "my ingroup is not wielding what I deem to be sufficient power at the moment." We seem to have a lot of people these days motivated by tribalist antipathy. This should probably raise your bar re: what circumstances need to exist before political violence becomes acceptable.
I agree with your conclusion that 2 is the obvious part of the chain that has to break. You can't use political violence simply because you've decided on a label. But the way you approached this makes me concerned for the political culture in SF/among rationalists which seems to have normalized violence far more than it realizes.
As an intuition pump, communism is a violent expansionary ideology that has killed tens of millions at a minimum and likely well over a hundred million. Further, communists control the second most powerful state in the world today and a few other states. Support for communism (not socialism, communism) in the US has tripled recently and it's fully acceptable to be Ezra Klein and say communism is his goal jokingly. None of this is true for fascism.
The right is expected to live in that world, and in a world where it has suffered multiple disproportionate assassination attempts (some successful), and not commit political violence. The left is expected to live in a world where fascism has low single digit approvals and where almost everyone who supports Trump will at least explicitly disavow fascism. And this has caused it to seriously reconsider its commitment to avoiding political violence.
Now my actual thought is that reactionaries are generally reacting to something and so you generally see the rise in fascism after the rise in communist violence. So this fits the pattern. But my point is this piece basically doesn't grapple with the idea that these tools could ever be turned on the left or the fact that avoiding political violence and mutual tolerance is not a polite concession by the civilized left but detente against the right doing the same.
Also, I think it's particularly foolish for the left to indulge it. Because when the knives come out the right tends to win.
I really don't think the right is the "faction of peace" that you're making it out to be. There have been multiple terrorist attacks in this country committed by right-wing individuals with right-wing grievances. And there have been assassinations and assassination attempts against left-wing figures by right-wing assassins.
It seems to me that the right-wingers who say that they're completely innocent and the left are the real baddies are just rationalizing away any guilt on the part of their side for all the attacks committed by people on the right while being as uncharitable as possible whenever an attack is committed by a person on the left. I don't know why I have to take their concerns very seriously when this is the mental process they're using to arrive at them.
I don't know who has a bigger violence problem; it's clear to me that there are violent people on both sides. And quite frankly, I don't really care that much who's worse. It exists in big enough numbers in the right and the left that I see it as more useful to place the blame on the individuals rather than collectivizing it to the entire political sides.
I'm not making the right out to be the faction of peace. Simply the side that lives in a world where communism is far more normalized and globally powerful than fascism. Usually people don't even bother to dispute that and skip to explaining why communism isn't like fascism or it didn't kill as many people as it did because denialism is far more normalized around communism than fascism.
My point is under these facts the right is still expected to be peaceful while under a much less harsh set of facts we get this piece of Decker being lionized for a Secret Service investigation. Is there an equivalent to that among rationalists? If so I'm unaware of it. I make, and need not make, any claim about right wing peacefulness.
There have also been rightwing attacks on Democratic politicians (two were killed in Minnesota, for example), even if you aren't aware of them.
I am aware of them. However, no equivalent of Charlie Kirk or the two attempts on Trump that almost succeeded. Thus "disproportionate" which implies both sides have some proportion.
This is a common form of defensive thinking: you subtly change the claim from a true one to an untrue one, drop the harder to debunk points, and then debunk that. It's a mix between a non-sequitur and a strawman.
Actually murdering two politicians, which I believe was enough to tip the balance in the legislature, had more actual impact than attempts on Trump that didn't even result in any serious injuries. You could add the attempted assassination of a SCOTUS judge, which again didn't amount to anything (though I think it's terrible another judge is reducing his sentence because he's now claiming to be trans). If you discount state-level politicians, I could add that somebody broke into Nancy Pelosi's home and attacked her husband with a hammer.
I assume you're not talking about the attempted assassination of Kavanaugh where there were actually shots fired. It's sad there's so many. But if you count up the total number of successful assassinations/killings against federal politicians the majority are by left wingers. Though there's not that many so it's a small sample size. And some of the victims are Democrats.
If you want to tally what it comes down to is how you define left or right wing violence. Generally speaking, it depends on who a couple of specific groups (like Islamists) get defined as. One study that showed right wing violence was overwhelming defined being pro-Palestine as right wing, for example, because it's a religious and nationalist cause.
None of which changes that you're avoiding engaging with my substantial point.
They mean the Roske attempt: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/03/kavanaugh-assassin-sentencing-00593998
Weird case. Flew out, geared up, saw the guards, turned back, called their sister, called local PD to turn themself in.
Edit:
>Generally speaking, it depends on who a couple of specific groups (like Islamists) get defined as.
A lot of the data is just badly coded too. The Prosecution Project (https://data.theprosecutionproject.org/?tab=General¤tPage=1&numShown=10) has one of the better public data sets, but I don't think they do that much followup.
Some very confusing cases, like one where a group of black guys beat up an older white lady and her disabled son for not paying "the white tax" is coded right-wing. Which... you can argue it's not left-wing, but it's not meaningfully right-wing either. And that's downstream of different charging standards too.
Yeah, a lot of these people are nutty. That doesn't mean it's not a political act though. And yeah a lot of the studies are bad. That's without getting into the GIGANTIC incentives to "miscode" to get a headline.
Corey Comperatore.
I admit I forgot about the person who actually died there.
Agree about the short-term situation in the US.
However, although he didn't do his dirty deeds in the US, Breivik makes me reject broader claims about right-aligned (defined w.r.t. recent Western political coalitions, e.g. Islam-inspired violence counts as left-aligned for this purpose) political violence being less of a problem than left-aligned political violence.
Yeah, I think right aligned violence is a problem. As I said elsewhere, I want defenses of Stalin and Hitler (or Castro and Saddam) to both be seen as unacceptable. The difference is that one of those is FAR more close to mainstream acceptability than the other.
"no equivalent of Charlie Kirk"
--ok, but it's just dumb luck (and the dumbness of the guy who tried it for not knowing that she wasn't there) that Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House, didn't have her skull fatally bashed in by an intruder. I think that would have been worse, although less dramatically caught on video, than a podcaster.
I'm not sure I agree it would be worse. Charlie Kirk is not just a podcaster. He's a major political actor who had White House access and directly advised Trump. He runs a major Republican organization and had roles in the party. He doesn't have an office. But he is the equivalent of say a famous and influential Biden advisor who runs a major branch of the Democrat Party. To be clear, my point is not "Nancy Pelosi wouldn't have been bad" but "Charlie Kirk was really, really bad."
As to it being dumb luck: I think that's a bit dismissive over the violence of the past five years.
>two were killed in Minnesota, for example
Right-wingers famously take orders from Tim Walz, indeed (to be clear, the imagined Tim Walz that phoned their schizophrenic brain, not the actual goofball)
Boelter was known to be right-wing.
The CCP cannot reasonably be described as communists, regardless of what they call themselves. China is not a communist country.
Xi Jinping is a credentialed Marxist theoretician who has produced significant works of Marxist scholarship. As are several people in leadership. China is not only highly communist under Xi it's gotten more thoroughly ideological.
> Xi Jinping is a credentialed Marxist theoretician who has produced significant works of Marxist scholarship
I know, but so what? The actual policies enacted by the CCP cannot reasonably be described as communist.
> China is not only highly communist under Xi it's gotten more thoroughly ideological.
How so?
I suspect you have a strange definition of communism which would probably get you arrested in any formally communist country. That's fine as a personal matter. But I don't really let people who think the current Pope is illegitimate own the word Catholic. And I'm not interested in letting a few leftists ignore the definition of communism used by most of the world and which hundreds of millions of people have pledged themselves to.
If you are interested in reading about how Xi has changed communist ideology then Xi Jinping thought is extremely available for reading. The 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party is a good starting point.
I think you think I'm a left-winger attacking Chinese "communism" from the left, on the basis that it is not pure enough to be real communism. In fact I am a right-winger who thinks it is too capitalistic, market-friendly, respectful of property rights, and unconcerned with equality to be real communism. Clearly Chinese "communism" is not the same as what happened in Cuba, the USSR, Maoist China, Venezuela, East Germany, etc.
Regardless, I suspect you have a strange definition of communism that is not the definition used by most people and which hundreds of millions of people have pledged themselves too.
China is a socialist market economy which is a very old communist tradition. It is not respectful of property rights. And communism is not all that concerned with equality. Marxism has a long lineage of ideological arguments that welfare is characteristic of fascism.
Genuine curiosity: the Chinese government owns the means of production, or can legally seize it at will with no real judicial oversire or compensation. Doesn't this make them communist by definition, regardless of whatever other oddities exist in the Chinese system (and there are many)?
> the Chinese government owns the means of production, or can legally seize it at will with no real judicial oversire or compensation.
So can the American government, if the Supreme Court declares it so. The fact that the Court would be extremely unlikely to do so is not categorically different as a constraint from whatever stops the Chinese state from expropriating everyone.
I think what matters is what actually happens on the ground, not the nominal rules. Are there free, liquid, efficient markets? Is entrepreneurship allowed? How much is private property respected, regardless of what the law says? Is the private accumulation of vast sums of wealth and capital permitted?
I don’t think “limited government” exists. The US government is sovereign. The sovereign is—by definition—that power which is unlimited. The fact that the US government *chooses* not to take certain actions does not mean that it lacks the capacity to do so, should it want to.
I find it somewhat mind-boggling anytime someone accuses the Trump administration of authoritarianism. An Administration that seeks to actively reduce the size of government and remove 10 rules for every one that is issued is incredibly libertarian and freedom minded compared to anything else we've had in the last four decades.
https://natlawreview.com/article/president-trump-issues-new-10-1-deregulation-order
Forget authoritarianism, this is better than anything the libertarian party could have ever reasonably hoped to achieve.
Yes, see my comment just above. Until Congress does their job, we get rule by executive order, which keeps power overly centralized, causes a lot of flip flopping and policy making, and makes everybody freak out about who is president.
As a single example of the cost of policy flip flop, we did a homeschool tour of a coal-fired power plant about a week and a half ago. The plant manager made it very clear that they spent millions of dollars between 2020 and 2024 doing design work to convert both generation units to Natural Gas based on who was in power. When Trump was re-elected, they dropped all that and decided to stick with the two existing coal units and instead add a third unit running on natural gas. This is in a grid sector that is apparently five gigawatts short in capacity and having to import power... but they could not plan on simply adding natural gas and keeping coal due to which butt was in one chair half a country away.
Currently, I think the path to getting Congress to do their job is going to run through the Supreme Court. If enough unconstitutional agencies and rules are abolished, the people's Representatives will be forced to actually pass real laws if they care about XYZ rule or restriction.
I do not consider my self a political optimist. I find the quote about the dark night of fascism always descending on America yet always landing in Europe to be sadly accurate.
Not mind-boggling in the slightest. He's not reducing the size of government, he's exploding the deficit (which Elon Musk has called him out on). He's claiming the authority to place tariffs even though only Congress has the Constitutional power to set taxes.
The Trump administration is largely focused on exerting power *without* creating fixed rules. Did they make a rule to bomb Venezuelan fishing boats? Did they make a rule to extract bribes in exchange for tariff exemptions? Of course not.
Also, I don't believe that any agency is actually doing this "cancel 10 rules" thing. While I don't have hard proof it isn't happening, I don't remember seeing any "10 rules eliminated" press releases in the past 6 months.
And hopefully they aren't! "We have blindly to eliminate rules" is a stupid way to run a country ... unless your goal is "abolish the concept of limited government, and instead have a dictator rule by whim and bribe".
There are plenty of comparisons out there about the volume of federal regulations now versus 20 or 50 years ago. Somehow, the country survived and was reasonably prosperous despite the lack of lots of rules and reporting requirements.
I don't recall Obama seeking authorization or rules to conduct drone strikes on American citizens in Yemen, or any of the other many warlike actions he took in other countries without Congressional consent. You could say the same about Bush, so it isnt specific to any party (although so far Donald Trump's record as a peacemaker instead of someone who starts wars is stellar). The amount of power Congress has delegated to the executive branch via letting agencies make rules which carry the force of law instead of passing laws like Congress is supposed to do is ridiculous. It's also not a problem unique to any presidential administration this century. The best way to sustainably constrain the power of the President is to defang and depower the administrative agencies. No regulation without adequately involved representation!
These days, it seems like people are only against unchecked Presidential power when it is the other side in office. Then it goes to the courts, and disputes over power fall into the hands of a pretty small set of people, who mostly all went to the same set of schools and share similar backgrounds as lawyers and judges.
We probably agree that too much concentrated power is a big problem, but have different solutions, and perhaps different opinions about who should be holding the power. Fixing the problem seems to rely primarily on Congress, and I have very little confidence in it becoming a respectable and functional body again at any point in the near future. Anybody with a high school diploma can balance a budget, and yet...
There's this charming American tendency (on both sides) to associate fascism with jackbooted restrictions on liberty rather than the cluster of beliefs around racial/sexual/national/cultural purity alongside strength-based hierarchy and corresponding economic arrangements.
As both a moral and practical matter, it might be useful to consider what levels of minority oppression and inequality make political violence acceptable, instead of milestones of speech restriction and defiance of institutions.
Alternatively, if one is trying to load the deck in one's favor the other way, one might instead consider what level of taxation or regulation makes violence morally acceptable.
So there is some level of inequality that justifies political violence? Sounds like one could use this as justification for all sorts of behavior.
So what, would you start killing people just because a democratically elected government repealed the Civil Rights Act?
There is no level of inequality that in and of itself makes political violence morally acceptable.
Be careful what you wish for.
<evidenceFromFiction> (but not _that_ far from some cases in the past... )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiEAz1TDm1c&list=RDSiEAz1TDm1c&start_radio=1
</evidenceFromFiction>
It's interesting that during the Bush years the word "fascist" was thrown around quite cavalierly as well, but without the accompanying threat of real violence. It's unfortunate that the bad behavior of a few people can have so much power over our language
I mean, it still gets cavalierly thrown around today without accompanying threat of actual violence. Compare e.g. the internet drama exploding on the Framework forums right now: https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-right-racists/75986
Seems obviously true, but maybe it's only obvious because didn't we already do this recently?
1. Everyone is at least a little bit racist through unconscious bias.
2. Racism is an unforgivable crime that disqualifies you from participating in society.
3. We want broad participation in society.
The correct answer is to reject #2. Racism is bad and a moral failing, but not cause for ostracism.
You have omitted the very important item 4 - it's impossible to be racist against whites, and likely impossible for anyone non-white to be racist.
I think the Woke creed also expanded this to "white-adjacent" being disqualified to be upset with bigotry against them too...
> Everyone is at least a little bit racist through unconscious bias.
🎵 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXnM1uHhsOI 🎵
If your only options are "do nothing" and "kill the fascists" you'll find yourself in a concentration camp or laying down tracks in siberian permafrost before you manage to actually kill anybody. It's all about gradual escalation. (NATO, during the cold war, had an escalation ladder with dozens of rungs!) Government tries to boil the frog, it escalates a bit, the civic society escalates as well. You can publicly complain, join a demonstration, refuse to pay your taxes etc. before you get to the level of violent pushback. It's a quick and finely graded feedback machanism. And from afar, it looks like it works pretty well in the US. Compare to Russia: In the 90's they've had an actual democracy. But when it started slipping, there was close to no escalation from the civic society and here they are in the deep shit.
aren't we just reframing (or like revisiting) the paradox of tolerance? Like isn't that the whole point of the paradox --- that endless tolerance undermines tolerance so at some point those that value tolerance have to be intolerant
We have to be intolerant of violence specifically, and the government can legitimately use violence in response to violence.
I think a lot of popular discourse around fascism, violence, and so on, is very confused because so many of the concepts are derived from the punk and hardcore scenes, especially in the 1980s and 1990s.
There was a large contingent of skinhead punks that people wanted to keep away from their scenes, and a certain amount of young men fighting each other was already normal.
In the United States, most of the slogans about punching Nazis, antifa imagery, debates over free speech vs. hate speech, that you see used by members of the general public traces back to some situation like this.
For example: the famous "Nazi bar" analogy which you hear constantly repeated. How many people have ever been to a bar where it's even possible for a Nazi to show up and a leftist bartender to threaten him with a baseball bat? I've never had that experience. In the story it's specifically a "shitty crustpunk bar".
I think it may be bad that these weird and famously dysfunctional subcultures have been given some kind of ownership over the concept of organizing politically to oppose fascism.
I think in that Nazi bar story, the bartender isn't even necessarily leftist. I can see the bartender of any cheap dive bar not wanting their bar to become a Nazi bar. But yeah, that's a good observation.
This is an extremely incisive comment. Good for you. As a "primitive" or 19th century style leftist, I concur that (hardcore) punk culture and anarchism have done untold damage to the reputation of the left. Great music, shitty subculture. Their promotion of lawlessness and violence drives me bonkers. A "solution" to fascism that is roughly as bad as the original problem.
Regarding the definition of Fascist, it's kind of like the problem of defining Socialist in that there are colloquial definitions and absolute definitions. If you try to use the colloquial one, a defender will No True Scotsman you with the absolute definition. If you use the absolute definition, such as nationalizing industry or having workers control means of production, you run the risk of your point being lost and a defender can still contradict you by pointing out a slight variation in the rather complex definitions and saying "So, what I'm proposing is not really socialism/fascism because it SLIGHTLY differs from the definition you gave" even if the spirit is 99% there.
Regarding when violence becomes "okay", that's a pretty difficult question. As a kid growing up in a conservative rural area, a lot of people were edging pretty close to calling for violence against Clinton and the FBI after Waco and Ruby Ridge. Years later however, a lot of these same people were cheering for local law enforcement shooting unarmed black guys (I'm ignoring the protests here, they were outright cheering and making racist comments about the shooting victims, even people like Walter Scott or Ahmaud Arbury). Ultimately, people are willing to overlook stuff from their preferred side, either cheering it, ignoring it, or possibly saying "Well, it was bad but...". People are also willing to get pretty jumpy when their non-preferred side does the same. As for where the line is, it's different for many people. I hate to take the Justice Potter approach, but sometimes you can just say you'd know it if you see it, but can't pre-define an existing line, just evaluate on a case-by-case basis.
> I think I land somewhere between Orban and Hitler, but I can’t say for sure, nor can I operationalize the distinction.
Orban is on track to lose re-election. The supreme virtue of democracy, no matter its multitude of defects, is that it removes the need to actually fight a civil war for political power, as you can instead just count up how many people would be on each side and skip the war to its presumed outcome without all the deaths & destruction.
Well, unless some court annuls the election and/or disqualifies political opponents from running.
Unless somebody blames Russian interference, in which case not disqualifying opponents would be undemocratic!
that's why the line is after Orban
This is part of how the distinction is operationalized.
little carve out of the right to bear arms for "bad people", a little bit of troop deployment, a few targeted arrests of political enemies, a little strong arming of American corporations, a few restrictions on who can receive emergency assistance, a few boons provided to loyal rich capitalists, a few Americans detained and beaten, a few lies about the status of American cities justifying more federal control, a few targeted arrests of political rivals, a few more pundits getting kicked off of mainstream media, a few loyalists getting put in charge of mainstream media outlets, more insistence that people must carry around their citizenship papers and normalizing that those papers are checked frequently, more restrictions on web access for the common good, more restrictions on travel for certain types of disfavored activity (or punishment of those who aid such disfavored travel). Slowly normalizing the idea that non-citizens should have fewer rights than they do. Normalizing that military action isn't accountable to legal process. Normalizing that it is ok to harm Americans who are peacefully protesting.
Soon:
Normalizing that taunting counts as violence and thus deadly force is a legitimate response. Normalizing that non-citizens don't have first or second amendment rights. Normalizing ignoring courts other than SCOTUS. Normalizing military presence at voting centers. Normalizing carefully and intimidatingly verifying the citizenship every person who votes. Normalizing refusing to let people through to the polls, even if they meet state voting requirements. Normalizing that it's no big deal that illegal immigrants die in custody. Normalizing that citizens shouldn't protest alongside non-citizens, because any reasonable person would know they might get shot if they do that. Normalizing further restrictions on the right to bear arms without proof of citizenship. Normalizing that it's normal for federal agents to maintain a list of who is buying weapons, even if state law prohibits it. Normalizing the rescinding of federal pensions for people who leave the country. Normalizing the FCC restricting the licenses of media companies, unless they are owned by allies of the government. Normalizing that all social media participation requires proof of citizenship.
Finally: arresting a bunch of rival thought leaders and seizing their passports since they are flight risks. Coincidentally, ICE picks up a bunch of people who don't have proof of citizenship, and immediately put them in a boat to CECOT. Coincidentally, hours later,the military destroys a boat that they claim was transporting drugs. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
There's no society-wude white line here, just the careful erosion of rights in the name of "common sense safety"
We submit that guns are the easiest metric: if the NRA protests a "minor" gun restriction and the government does it anyway, you need to start buying an AR 15 (start at $500) with cash, and/or start stocking up on 5.56mm ammo.
Hopefully you'll never have to use it.
> Normalizing carefully and intimidatingly verifying the citizenship every person who votes.
What reasonable argument is there against this? Why would it be bad to verify the citizenship of voters when only citizens are allowed to vote and any foreigner that votes is committing election fraud (in federal elections)?
Behold! As you approach the polling place, you must walk through a gauntlet of masked, heavily armed federal agents. A sign at the entrance to this gauntlet reads: “Pursuant to the voter fraud act of 2026, any discrepancy in your voting paperwork, no matter how minor, is grounds for summary execution.”
As you approach the line, you hear a man’s voice at the front of the line screaming “It’s just a pound sign in the apartment number!” A shot rings out, and the screaming stops. Several people in line immediately start to shriek. A man on a loudspeaker shouts out “ATTENTION! Abandoning the voting process is considered evidence of voter fraud, and is punishable by summary execution. Do not leave the line once you have entered.”
You are confident in your paperwork, so you step forward. A few moments later, a woman shrieks “It’s my maiden name, I haven’t updated m-”. Another shot rings out. People in line are actively sobbing. You wish you lived in one of the “safe” voting districts, whose populace support the current President. They don’t have to go through this gauntlet.
I think this is much ado about nothing. Fascism is no worse than other forms of non-democratic forced collectivism (democratic forced collectivism being better). Incitement should not be a crime. People should take responsibility for their own actions. Sticks and stones...
Democracy is a set of rules by which everyone abides and that limits how much you can hurt your politicial opponent while your side is in power, lest they do the same to you when the pendulum swings and they are back in power. Fascists reject these rules because they accept no limits on how much they can hurt their opponents. They willingly position themselves outside of the protections of the liberal-democratic ruleset. Therefore, they absolutely are legitimate targets of political violence, up to and including deadly violence, because they intend to do the same, given the chance.
So if fascists are a legitimate target, when is the legitimate time? It is wrong to say that everyone has a different "red line" after which they resort to violence. The very notion of a red line is illusory; that's how computers function, but not humans. Humans are able to endure abuse, rationally inexplicable amounts of it, because they know that violence creates irreversible consequences, and they want to be really sure that the time is right. More often than not, the "right time" is a singular event, completely insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but around which all that resentment crystallizes into very real consequences that reach much further than could ever be justified by the event itself. Basically every culture on Earth and in History has experienced this; think Rodney King and the LA riots, Franz Ferdinand and WW1, Mohamed Bouazizi and the Arab Spring. Maybe the same will happen again in the USA; perhaps one ICE raid too many, a National Guard accidentally killing a protester, Ghislaine Maxwell pardoned and given a celebratory White House reception.
There is also no "trivialization of violence", some simple reward system of "Oh I killed this guy and life got marginally better, let's do that again!". Violence is a safety valve. It is the "ultima ratio regis", but also the "ultima ratio populi", and whether or not you believe that since WW2 or so we suddenly made a moral quantum leap and now live in a more enlightened age (I don't), then our proven history of violence was at least no obstacle to this current state of affairs.
>Fascists reject these rules because they accept no limits on how much they can hurt their opponents.
What about communists?
<mildSnark>
Woke reject these rules because they have trouble imagining being out of power.
</mildSnark>
No. There's a sleight of hand here: #1 (Many Americans are fascists) is a factual claim that you want people to be able to say *even if it isn't true now*. But #3 is "Political violence in America is morally unacceptable (*at the current time*)". Notice the problem here? The latter applies to the current time, and the former explicitly doesn't.
Your position should be:
Political violence in America is morally unacceptable (at the current time)
We should not say "many Americans are fascists" at the current time (because it isn't true at the current time).
Political violence in America may be acceptable in some other situation, but not now
We can say "many Americans are fascists" in some other situation (when it's actually true), but not now.
I guess what Scott meant is:
The following are simultaneously untenable.
1. Many americans are fascist *at time t*
2. Fascists are an acceptable target for political violence
3. Political violence in America is morally unacceptable under political conditions which are satisfied *at time t*
That may be what he meant, but it isn't what he said. And that's not a trivial difference. Because if that's what he meant, the answer is "if time t means now, #1 is false". And Scott doesn't dare say that #1 is false. First of all, his leftwing allies will all reject him if he does, and second, he probably doesn't want to admit it to himself. The whole song and dance about how #1 at least has the "potential to be true in the future" is there to keep him from having to admit that #1 is false today.
So of course sometimes by fascist we mean "person pushing policies we don't like" but sometimes by fascist we mean "person pushing policies that seem like they might lead to a genocide."
Seems like neither definition warrants violence when they are not a threat (I'm thinking of my youth when every neo-nazi movement in America just seemed pathetic and completely unthreatening).
but if we're talking about the latter, and it seems like they have a decent shot of taking over (or worse, already have) violent resistance seems almost compelled to me at that point.
I'm not attempting to locating trump/maga anywhere on this spectrum more just sort of sketching out how I would think about it.
What genocide are you talking about?
Fascism is neither sufficient nor necessary for genocide.
What do you call Trumpian movement that uses tariffs and other levers to compel the compliance of private industry with political efforts? Corporatist(by the way used in the article, not the correct usage by the way) typically seek to strengthen Corporate power, this government seeks to saddle it to their political enterprise. The correct term is indeed fascism, but that I've never subscribed to the theory that violence is acceptable towards fascists. Revolution is an entirely different political phase where violence is the means utilized to reform. As you said, we're not at that phase.
This is well below Scott's usual standard. There have been reams of books and articles on the question of when, if ever, political violence is acceptable.* Scott could have summarized and critiqued that literature, as he often does. Instead, we get this?
*eg:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/how-terrorism-is-wrong-virginia-held/1101399360?ean=9780190454227
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/when-all-else-fails-jason-brennan/1128553882?ean=9780691211503#
An important distinction wrt political violence being justified: There are circumstances (which I hope to never see in my country) that would justify a civil war to overthrow the evil regime and replace it with something else. It's not at all clear how to define those circumstances, since civil wars are very destructive and there may not always be a bright line that the government has crossed that makes it clear that they're that bad.
But this applies to civil war. It doesn't apply to freelance political violence.
Consider some kinds of political violence that don't have much to do with civil war:
a. Street violence (showing up at a political rally you dislike with some friends and busting some heads)
b. Targeted violence (catching up with someone whose expressed ideas you dislike and beating him up or terrorizing him)
c. Rioting/looting/burning during a political protest.
These are all kinds of political violence that aren't anywhere close to civil war, have no chance of overturning an oppressive regime, but are often cheered on by some folks (mostly on the left) in the modern US. I guess (a-b) would be the "punch a fascist" idea.
ISTM that we can condemn those without risking giving up on the possibility that there can be justification for trying to overthrow an oppressive government. Similarly for stuff like targeted kidnappings, bombings, and assassinations that exist to spread terror to the other side, but have no hope of changing the regime or anything.
Exactly this.
There's a lot of relevant context that's often elided in discussions of this kind. I'm going to use the first part of this comment to make it explicit.
1. The government is the organization that can do violence in some territory so effectively that nobody can stop them. (So: Microsoft is bigger, with more people, economic influence, technological prowess, organizational capacity, institutional memory & procedure, etc than the governments of many countries. It is nevertheless not a government, because there is no territory where it can do arbitrary violence with impunity.)
2. Governments come into existence when some organization does political violence effectively enough that it can no longer be resisted by anybody within the territory; it becomes the new government. (This is how the US government was created; it was originally a rebellion, committing political violence against the officers of Great Britain. It won, seized the whole territory, and now it's the government.)
3. The US Constitution is very smart, in creating various processes to change how the government works without having to violently overthrow and replace it every time; and in having elections to facilitate peaceful political transitions. It's much, much better to get a bunch of people together to vote and change the government, than to get a bunch of people together to fight the government and replace it. This abstraction (from mass violence to mass voting) is the fundamental principle of democracy.
And here's what I'm going to assert. The following isn't general principles everybody should know, but rather my own opinion:
The people of the US are fundamentally a democratic people. The terms "communist" and "fascist" are offensive to us because they're accusations that somebody has betrayed the US Constitution and the voting > office > law abstraction that we use to alter the government without violence. Those terms don't just mean "very far left" or "very far right". The Communists sent spies and saboteurs to subvert the American democratic process; the Fascists had private armies of brownshirts doing extrajudicial political violence. When you put those terms on someone, you mean that they'd be willing to, for instance, bribe officials, subvert election procedures, falsify evidence, etc, all the different ways that the democratic process can be corrupted, up to assassinating politicians and terrorizing the population. You're basically calling them an enemy of the democracy.
That's the reasoning behind the "violence against fascists is okay" idea. It's like marking somebody as an outlaw. Since they've betrayed the fundamental democratic abstraction, they shouldn't benefit from it anymore. (This is crazy and bad; both sides think the other side has betrayed the Constitution; so all you're doing when you yourself betray it is to prove the other side right.)
Anyway, it's not as simple as "political violence is evil", that way lies anarchy. The government creates itself with political violence, and maintains its existence by using violence to overcome smaller competitors (the mafia, rioters, extremist groups, drug cartels, etc) for control of its territory. When you talk about a government, you're talking about historical political violence crystallized over time into habits of thought, laws and institutions.
Hum, About the constitution, note that (cribbing from Naval Gazing) that when we rewrote the Japanese constitution after WW2 we did not make it near as labyrinthic as ours.
In some respects we got stuck with the buggy prototype version.
Orwell observed in the 1940s that "fascist" was so loosened in meaning as to simply mean "something undesirable". So I think that people who care about truth and precision should find a more precise word to use.
The only suitable answer is : arguments vs arguments, political proposal/program vs political proposal/program. All the rest is commentary.
(Edit : as long as we are not in a war or civil war context)
The rule is just the breaking of the silver rule: don’t do to others what you don’t want done to you. If a party normalizes state violence against their citizens / political enemies, they remove themselves from the civil rules of engagement.
So I would say that at the base level, fascists should not be considered acceptable targets of violence. But historically, the fascist parties did inflict violence on their citizens / political enemies, which is why the latent feelings are that fascists are ok targets of violence. So you can call a new party fascist (in the definitional sense) without thinking that violence should be incurred against them (latent feelings). But you should be worried about this party due to historical context.
So Newsom calling Miller a fascist is more meaning “you are the type of person who commits political violence against your own citizens” (verifiably true, see all the American citizens hurt and shot in ICE raids recently). And Stephen miller calling for Newsom to be arrested for saying such a thing is self proving that he is the type of person who condones weaponization of the state against political enemies.
>But historically, the fascist parties did inflict violence on their citizens / political enemies
True of many other groups that did not become the go-to political slur.
"Fascism views forms of violence – including political violence, imperialist violence, and war – as means to national rejuvenation."
All of the violence and rioters and human trafficking and drug poisonings of our nation is coming 99% from the extreme left Antifa wing. It is why California is bringing back mask mandates, to give Antifa an excuse to hide their faces while they carry out violent operations by their fascist militarized civilians. Obama's Antifa brown shirts are the modern day fascists. Period. Full stop.
Human trafficking & drug smuggling is done for money, not political motives. And a whole lot of rioting is "for fun & profit", as Banfield put it in The Unheavenly City. There is political rioting, but January 6 would be an example of that, and it wasn't antifa.
Obama hasn't been president for over 8 years. He isn't in charge.
Jan 6 was a very peaceful riot. The only people killed were killed by the government, and there was barely even any property damage. Compare the George Floyd riots, which caused over $2bn of property damage across the country over the course of several weeks.
Comparing one riot to multiple riots is a bit apples & oranges.
That's kind of the point, though -- there's just no right-wing equivalent to the sort of rioting the left does.
January 6 could be compared to a single riot.
Right, so the right has a single not very destructive riot to its name, whereas the left has a whole series of much more destructive riots.
> And a whole lot of rioting is "for fun & profit"
While this may be true, the agents of the state that refuse to put the people rioting in jail _are_ doing so for political motives. In that sense rioting is political violence because it is being enabled for political motives.
Two thoughts:
I didn't understand your argument defending #1. It's completely consistent to say "there are only a few fascists right now, meaning violence is unacceptable, but if I was in pre-WW2 Germany and could stop the Nazi movement through violence, I should".
Second: it seems like all three can be true if you interpret the second statement to "fascists are sometimes an acceptable target for political violence" rather than "fascism implies acceptable target". And it seems like most antifascists who endorse violence are implicitly referring to the former; they're not going around asking everyone their political beliefs, they're punching protestors who they see as actively spreading those beliefs.
I am less completely married to the non-aggression principle than I was in the past but it still seems like a good guide in this case. Fascists marching through the streets, shouting "Jews will not replace us!" are not legitimate targets for violence. Fascists pulling a weapon and pointing it at someone are. As are fascists who say "On Monday, June 14, at 2:00 PM we are going to go kill this left-wing politician." All this is in accordance with existing law, and I find it sufficient - you can do violence to someone who poses a current, active, identifiable threat to you. Otherwise you cannot. Their ideology is irrelevant. There are border issues here (the first is an implied threat but imo not specific enough to make a reasonable person afraid of imminent violence) but the general principle is sound.
When it comes to actual government operatives, we have a harder case. We legitimize some violence from governments - for example, police can forcibly restrain someone committing a crime and most agree if they're convicted in court, government workers can then put them in a prison and forcibly keep them there.
So the question becomes "is the violence legitimate" but I and every other person on earth will disagree to some extent on what is legitimate use of state violence. So the bar must be higher than "I personally don't think the government should be permitted to levy an income tax so I can shoot anyone who tries to collect."
The actual answer is "when the breakdown of state legitimacy and social cohesion is less costly than enduring the current status quo" but on a meta level we should agree on this, because it's costly not to have shared values around these principles. As much as I've thought about this question (even pre-Trump, just reading history), I suspect my answer will always, forever, be "not quite yet." That said, I do truly believe we have non-violent, legitimate chances to pull things back. There's no sign yet that we're cancelling 2026 elections, and that might be a decent bright line. I would welcome some clarity on how other thoughtful people think about this.
Do you feel obligated to wait until the 2026 elections are canceled to take action? If there are ICE agents and red-state national guard outside every purple-county polling station on election day, do we still refrane from violence because the 2026 election was allowed to proceed? If we are only allowed to act against threats, does my status as a straight white dude prohibit my participation in the uprising?
Like I get you are trying to be fair minded, but the explicit plain-language position of the administration is that they will use state violence against political opponents and ethnically cleanse America. This is not a euphemism, words have meaning, etc. The executive branch is literally promising to use the state power, including the military and the judiciary, to imprison or kill their political opponents, and they appear to have the ability to do so, and are proceeding in that direction.
At this point it's like if a news agency interviewed a member of the NAACP, then brought on a Grand Dragon of the klan in order to get a balanced perspective and consider both sides.
It did occur to me after making this comment that elections are not likely to be cancelled. In the most likely case, they will instead by restricted, and voters intimidated. I still do think we have to be cautious about advocating political violence.
Other than that statement, my comment wasn't meant to be fair-minded about the present, it was meant to use extreme hypotheticals to point out issues with various justifications for violence. I'd agree that the stated position of the administration is that they intend to attempt a fascist takeover of the United States government. The question (to me, at least) is whether that attempt has literally any hope of success at all, whether a violent intervention would be helpful, and whether other means of stopping it can still be successful. And that's a moral position. I think you should only harm others when you have to.
The soviet union had elections in the middle of the 1930s purge. Imperial Japan had elections in '37 and '42, Obviously elections won't be cancelled. Russia has regular elections. So does Iran. I think even north Korea does. "Has elections" is necessary (but not sufficient) to have a democracy.
I think there's basically no chance of the 2026 elections being cancelled, making it senseless to talk of "waiting" for that.
> the explicit plain-language position of the administration is that they will use state violence against political opponents and ethnically cleanse America
No, it isn't.
> to imprison or kill their political opponents, and they appear to have the ability to do so, and are proceeding in that direction
Who have they imprisoned & killed?
"No, it isn't."
Ok, which part would you like to critique? State violence against political opponents? We've got the targeting of the judiciary, arresting congresspeople, and forcing the DOJ to arrest the former director of the FBI (Explicitly stating it was because of trump's indictment), stripping security clearance and secret service protection from enemies.
Ethnic cleansing seem a stretch to you? The admin as declared they will end birthright citizenship and deport 1 million "illegals" per year. "Illegal" has been redefined to mean asylum seekers, individuals with green cards and student visas who are hostile to the Administration. Miller believes there should only be 100 million Americans. Trump describes people crossing the border as "animals" that "poison the blood of their country". If you replace "illegal immigrants" with "Jews", that is literally Hitler's policy as of 1933.
Re: killing/imprisoning opponents, do you consider people killed in ICE custody or killed after being deported to foreign countries to be supporters of Trump? Or do you think they might fairly be characterized as neutral or even negative vis a vis the president.
He also said "We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they're the big — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can't let that happen." He defines the entire democrat party as radical left fascist communists. And after that, he deployed the military to a bunch of blue state capitals.
Do you think this somehow doesn't count as "promising to use the state power, including the military and the judiciary, to imprison or kill their political opponents, and they appear to have the ability to do so, and are proceeding in that direction. "
If that doesn't count, what the hell do you think would qualify? Do you LITERALLY need masked government agents arresting citizens without cause before you admit MAYBE the admin is a bit fascist? Because we've crossed that line too. Do you need them to start building concentration camps? Because they've done that as well.
Is it just an aesthetic problem, because there's not enough skulls and hugo boss on display? Seriously, what are you even arguing here?
> We've got the targeting of the judiciary
What are you referring to? Abe Lincoln had Judge Richard B. Carmichael arrested for opposing the military arrests of civilians and the suspension of habeas corpus. Judge William Matthew Merrick was placed under house arrest. Trump has judges ruling against him quite often, and as far as I can tell his response is to tweet angrily and appeal.
> arresting congresspeople
The only one I'm aware of was arrested at a protest, and released.
> forcing the DOJ to arrest the former director of the FBI
Seems like a terrible idea, but not a threat to democracy.
> stripping security clearance and secret service protection from enemies
Removing clearances has nothing to do with engaging in violence. Removing protection could be if there was violence against them.
> Ethnic cleansing seem a stretch to you?
Worthy of Mr. Fantastic. The US is an extremely diverse country.
> The admin as declared they will end birthright citizenship
It's not something they'd be capable of doing, and doing it wouldn't suffice to ethnically cleanse the US.
> If you replace "illegal immigrants" with "Jews", that is literally Hitler's policy as of 1933.
"Illegal immigrant" is not an ethnic/religious category, it is a legal one.
> do you consider people killed in ICE custody
Are you referring to the recent shooting in Dallas?
> killed after being deported to foreign countries to be supporters of Trump?
They can't legally vote.
> And after that, he deployed the military to a bunch of blue state capitals.
What did the military do there? I've only read an account from Matthew Yglesias, who said they picked up litter from the streets and by their presence made the area somewhat safer, which he regarded as inefficient since DC is already safer than many of the places they were deploying from.
> Do you think this somehow doesn't count as "promising to use the state power, including the military and the judiciary, to imprison or kill their political opponents, and they appear to have the ability to do so, and are proceeding in that direction."
Indeed it doesn't count. The "lock her up" chant was a command to imprison a political opponent (although that never happened), deploying the National Guard is a matter of appearing tough on crime, especially rioting. It's not a good use of the NG, but it doesn't actually impede his political opponents.
> If that doesn't count, what the hell do you think would qualify?
Putin actually did lock up someone who ran against him.
> Do you need them to start building concentration camps? Because they've done that as well.
We did that with Japanese internment.
> Is it just an aesthetic problem, because there's not enough skulls and hugo boss on display
No, the Italian fascists didn't have Germany's aesthetic.
>the explicit plain-language position of the administration is that they will use state violence against political opponents and ethnically cleanse America
Narrator: "It was not."
My reply to you would be the same to the one I made above, I am open to how you'd argue the point beyond "nuh uh".
> and ethnically cleanse America.
Their goal is to deport all illegal immigrants and maybe some legal immigrants too. How is this "ethnic cleansing"? The criterion for deportation is being or not being a citizen. This is completely compatible with the civic multi-ethnic nation that America is understood to be.
If the administration immediately deported every single legal and illegal immigrant from America tomorrow they would still not be engaging in ethnic cleansing.
Scott, I have always appreciated your deep commitment to fairness and epistemic humility. Unfortunately, politics, morality and power are not objective sciences. Not withstanding that political violence is often a bad TACTIC, the moral case isn't hard to make.
The apparent contradiction in your 3 points can be reconciled by the following: the level of violence justified against facists is directly proportional to how much power they have.
Newsome defining far-right nationalism as anything patriotic political moderates and conservatives want is the reason why we can't have a discussion about politics any more.
There may well be a lot of fascists in America, but I'm pressing X to doubt that it is the ones who are being so called.
Did you notice that in “far-right nationalist authoritarian corporatist” you just have to swap two words then you can abbreviate it with FRANC? Just need a couple more attributes and you arrive at “Francoist”.
Excellent article. However, we already know the threshold for when mass political violence becomes legitimate:
It's when a Black fetanyl-addicted petty criminal with a heart condition dies in police custody after being restrained by a White police officer using standard methods
And political arson! Don't forget arson!
Is there no other way to overturn fascism than by violence?
People have been talking about Franco, and that didn't end via violence.
I had Franco in mind
50-200k dead from execution and prison labour doesn't count as violence? What the hell dude.
Those deaths didn't cause the end of Franco's regime. Can you read, dude? Do you know what "via" means?
Via: "going through it stopping at a place on a way to another place". Shitload of violence happened on the way to the end of fascism in Spain. Why are you trying so hard to ignore it?
Those deaths were concentrated near the beginning, not the end of Franco's regime. That's way longer than it would make to attribute causality, and we have an entirely separate reason why it ended: he died of natural causes at an advanced age.
This subsubthread was about the _end_ of Franco's rule, which, after Franco's death from natural causes, was handed over to King Juan Carlos I, who reigned over the transition to a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament.
I am well aware that Francoists like to pretend that the hundreds of thousands of deaths he caused don't count, because his dictatorship didn't end with a second civil war.
If your inclination is to look at Franco and say "hey, I guess fascism doesn't always end badly, and we don't need to violently oppose dictators", I sure hope you apply that charitable perspective to Stalin, Mao, Castro, etc. They didn't need to be violently overthrown, they passed on power naturally and left a much more liberal system behind! Nothing to complain about, right?
Every
Many Thanks! You have missed the whole _point_ of this subsubthread. It started with
>Is there no other way to _overturn_ fascism than by violence?
[emphasis added]
If you want to discuss overall body counts of various forms of government, fine, but that _isn't_ the topic being discussed very locally here.
Answer: there is no way to overturn facism except by violence. Either violence committed, violence suffered, or more typically both.
Pinochet is typically considered a fascist, and he stepped down voluntarily.
If fascists are an acceptable target for political violence, then so are communists.
If fascists are an acceptable target for political violence *merely for holding their beliefs*, then so is everyone everywhere at all times.
Surely the entire point of democracy is that if the government annoys enough people to cause a successful revolution, the revolution doesn't have to happen because you can just vote it out.
As a very wise man once said, the entire point of the law is to get whatever would have happened anyway to happen without bloodshed.
So you shouldn't resort to violence until it's become impossible to get rid of the government by voting.
If you don't even have enough support to vote out the government you don't like, starting a civil war is likely to be quite counter-productive. Civil wars are usually very very bad.
If you're just talking about taking random pot-shots at your political enemies then all that will do is inspire them.
I don't think I've heard that wise man's quote before. Who was it?
I think possibly the hero of one of Bernard Cornwell's viking novels, when discussing the anglo-saxon system of counting up oaths for and against, where a lord's oath counted for ten.
"If you're just talking about taking random pot-shots at your political enemies then all that will do is inspire them."
Incredibly important point! The plan of "fascists" becoming fearful and timid after you shoot a few of them didn't even work on the ACTUAL FASCISTS. They made a very famous song about Horst Wessel! And it definitely isn't going to work on people who don't consider OURSELVES fascists -- we'll just think you are an evil terrorist who must be opposed at all costs.
To this discussion one must add the mindset behind the name calling. It is one thing to discuss the authoritarian impulses of one side and whether the term fascist applies. You then really need to look into what actually motivates people and what divergent positions you might be lumping together.
It is another if the cultural climate itself has been hyper charged with emotional and black and white thinking. Then the other side becomes automatically evil and othered, and one is free to straw man and misrepresent divergent positions.
IMO what the authoritarian and conformity inducing impulses on the left contributed to young minds going through the left dominated education establishments, was an out of control negativity bias against Western societies in general and the US in particular. Introduced into susceptible minds, this was soul destroying and convinced them that “there was never anything good about America, it was evil from the start” (from a leftist discussion forum) and that the only path is to live in constant opposition. Neither a happy or safe place. As FIRE has demonstrated, the acceptance of various kinds of violence against speech is increasing disproportionately on the left, and this is a consequence of this catastrophic mindset, that can then move from one topic to another in order to find an outlet.
Let me offer a couple of clarifying examples:
FIRE addressed the following mandate to teachers within California’s community college system:
Professors were required to acknowledge that “cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid and intersectional” and to develop “knowledge of the intersectionality of social identities and the multiple axes of oppression that people from different racial, ethnic and other minoritized (sic) groups face” Professors were informed that "persons that think they are not racists are in denial" and that the drive towards color blindness in society "perpetuates existing racial inequalities". They were warned not to “weaponize academic freedom” to “inflict curricular trauma on our students” (FIRE Quarterly, Fall 2023)
FIRE successfully sued for this. They stated: "These regulations are a totalitarian triple whammy. The government is forcing professors to teach and preach politicized viewpoints they do not share, imposing incomprehensible guidelines, and threatening to punish professors when they cross an arbitrary indiscernible line."
This affected 54,000 professors, but FIRE was able to take action only because a few professors were willing to stand up as litigants in this case. Otherwise it would just have continued without resistance from within the left bubble, that apparently had no antibodies for bad ideas on its own side or expelled them from their system, because the mindset was widespread:
An example of institutionalized catastrophic thinking:
From guidances implemented first at Mount Sinai Medical School , then adopted at other major medical schools (Academic Medicine 95(12S):p S44-S50, December 2020) :
“There is no priority in medical education that is more important than addressing and eliminating racism and bias”… "It is impossible to embark upon this journey, especially for people who are White, without making an active effort to leave behind who we think we are, what we think we have accomplished, the titles and publications—all of it. These are meaningless in the face of what our colleagues and students of color face every waking moment of their lives. Worse than meaningless, they are unearned, and we have achieved them primarily because every day we are given advantages that others are not based solely on the color of our skin".
Credit to Rikki Schlott for finding this.
Much of what people object to on the right would not have happened but for this (and other examples of censorship or mandates, such as during covid). It caused many to go into full cultural self defense mode.
Quote from a neighbor: She asked what her son had learned in school that day. He summarized: "I learned that all white people are evil and that borders are racist" She added: "If someone messes with the gender of my child...."
Oh, I am following the documentation all right. And it is so easy to do! Trump is the most covered, commented upon and reacted to phenomenon in the world right now, and he can get push back from his own side, which is actually a pretty thrown together coalition and much more heterodox than the left. Indeed he often changes course, and is blamed for that also. And it is all out there, in the open, and often his attempts are clumsy and self defeating. I get the "what about Trump" point, but what I am looking at is how we got there. Here the left needs to look inward.
Left authoritarianism proceeded not by the behavior of a single person, who can be impeached and not elected, but collectively. Censorship and message control was achieved by institutional mandates, conformity and the hidden 'censorship industrial complex' now amply documented and admitted to. Much of it could be kept out of view, particularly by media denying that anything was really happening, but the overt manifestation was cancel culture, which FIRE has documented extensively, and found to be toxic wherever it entered, namely in all institutions controlled by the left as well as beyond, by cultural pressure. This would all be different if the ideas and solutions introduced were amazing, but a sufficient number of people found them fringe activist and crazy and lost even more faith in institutions than they already had - and looked for the exit. There was only one on offer.
One pattern I have noted (not alone) is a liberal tendency to go straight for the most catastrophic interpretation of reality (it is built into intersectional ideology), and great difficulty steelmanning an opposing view. From there we already had narratives of the US being the worst of all worlds, and an inability to see what those who wish to 'conserve' find worth conserving.
I have for years explained to my illiberal friends that if the left continued on that path, it would get a backlash they would not like and could not control. They did not like to hear it. Many economical and cultural concerns motivated Trump voters and they felt justified in their concerns and not listened to. The list of topics where greater communal consensus could have prevented bad outcomes are many and include covid, border control, and all the identity stuff which people actually care about. Particularly if they have kids. A friend of mine asked her kid what he learned in school that day. His response; "I learnt that all white people are evil and that borders are racist" She continued that if someone messed with her child's gender behind her back, she would kill them.
In stead of a hearing, dissenting voices were given some variant of a derogatory label picked from the most extreme end of the spectrum. The name calling continues as does the unwillingness to connect with what actually drives people, or that in some way they may actually have a point.
This is what got us Trump. I have no thanks to offer.
Now where we are, is in the next phase of reactivity, politically motivated killings. As FIRE and other have documented the acceptance of violent measures to control speech has already been increasing on the left for quite a while, now there is also action to react to. Or overreact to. Wouldn't it have been nice to avoid all this?
Thanks for your comment.
> The list of topics where greater communal consensus could have prevented bad outcomes are many and include covid, border control, and all the identity stuff which people actually care about. Particularly if they have kids. A friend of mine asked her kid what he learned in school that day. His response; "I learnt that all white people are evil and that borders are racist" She continued that if someone messed with her child's gender behind her back, she would kill them.
I appreciate readings these points of view. But as a self-identifying "liberal" myself, I can't help but feel this is a Motte and Bailey description of the culture war.
I largely agree with you on anti-white racism, intersectionality, collective guilt, "systems of oppression", and probably affirmative action and similar things. that is the Motte.
The Bailey... imo... is extending those defensible topics to "covid, border control, and transgender identity". Covid, its destructiveness, and the importance of the vaccine are scientifically validated topics (and have nothing to do with the "Motte" topics). "Border Control" is extremely aggravating to informed liberal ears, considering that Trump deliberately torpedoed a bipartisan border bill under the Biden Administration so that Trump would have something to run on (and again has nothing to do with the Motte topics). And alas, "Transgender identity" is once again a scientifically valid concept and not something that "gets messed with" by grade-school teachers. And I'm sure you can find many such people (Transgender people, who developed that way naturally and weren't "messed with" by their teachers) literally in the ACX comment section,
And while I'm not saying Transgender people's suffering is "worse" (because for chrissake, "Comparative Suffering Olympics" is the worst thing ever), Right Wing Media every day is spewing ridiculous hate and shame on people who are genuinely different and don't deserve it. White People (myself included) can and do deserve to have their suffering and problems acknowledged. And we can acknowledge one people's pain at the same that we acknowledge the suffering of another. So once, again, you've left the Motte and gone full Bailey.
But still, I agree with the Motte.
Thank you very much for the comment. You are forcing me to become verbose. "The list of topics where greater communal consensus could have prevented bad outcomes are many and include covid, border control, and all the identity stuff" It is about achieving communal consensus.
During covid, numerous government and intelligence agencies, the white house itself and new NGOs created for the purpose, set up an “industrial censorship complex”. This was discovered only because Musk made the twitter files available to some journalists, such as Matt Taibbi (of Racket) and Michael Shellenberger, who were very surprised by what they found and provided ample receipts, viewable by all, on how the jawboning of public platforms took place. After the fact, Facebook and Google have confirmed this.
The stated purpose was to remove disinformation before it hit the public. Problem being that they soon removed information that was true, and mission creep made other politicized issues targets as well. This system has now continued in Europe, particularly England and Germany, imprisoning citizens for so called “hate speech”, as defined by one political side. The fear for conservatives was that this is where we were headed to. And of course liberals have now rediscovered the importance of free speech.
The result during covid is one of the tragedies of our time. In stead of being informed by real time data easily available, a panicky kind of groupthink (temporarily resolved during protests) set in on the left, combined with authoritarianism. A then Stanford MD, PHD professor, Ray Bhattacharya, pointed out that measures of covid exposure already in the population indicated that it was not going to be controlled with lock downs, and for the same reason that death rates were exaggerated (more cases to relate to death counts). There was no interest in pursuing this. Plus the massive age differential was underplayed. He and others pointed out that children in Sweden were never kept out of school. In most European countries children were quickly back in school, generally with no masks under 12, and no amazing wind tunnels installed. And the needle did not move a whiff.
For their efforts they were called out by Fauci and Collins for cancellation. Children are apparently not as susceptible to SARS type viruses, known, but Sweden based its practices on data from China, also available.
But there was no conversation here informing public policy. The priority on the left was message uniformity and behavioral conformity. And it has had costs.
Kids were left with the idea that their breath was deadly - and to themselves and their computers for up to 18 months in liberal enclaves, and extending beyond if we are talking full return to normalcy.
Choosing to give vaccines to the healthy young, particularly mandating them as was done, required establishing that there was a benefits to them, particularly if side effect, even if rare, were major, which some of them were.
In stead there was a concerted effort to suppress any sharing of information about side effects, even if true. Check he documentary "Follow the Silenced". Better to hear and judge real people.
As a result, a massive mistrust resulted. Compare Scandinavia, where people simply trusted that the government would keep them informed and continue to adjust practices according to the best data. They have not recommend vaccines for healthy people under 50 for a while now.
I followed all of this real time (originally from Scandinavia), but the book "An Abundance of Caution" by D. Zweig is a good reference.
The problems that people who have problems with with gender ideology have:
1. Giving a reported inner state social priority over the reproduction based distinctions that in fact keep civilizations going, and make one sex more vulnerable than the other. Educational institutions apparently received a “Dear Colleague” letter from Obamas education secretary, and suddenly gender theory was in schools, colleges and bath rooms. No public discourse, not run by congress. In stead the questioning were informed that they were transphobic. Senators were informed by a Biden appointee that misgendering a man in the hospital having a baby was improper and dangerous. And the witch hunt was on.
2. Gender ideology’s claim is that not acknowledging a reported inner state is a form of violence. This is a catastrophic notion, removing power from even the most knowledgeable and closest people observing that person, and also resulting in catastrophic perceptions of "extinction", "erasure", and the sense of being in a life and death struggle. You are now seeing trans issue related political violence.
Social transition in schools became justified, and likewise the practice of not notifying parents. Some states allowed minors to travel there for therapy questioned by their parents.
It popularized a “girl inside boy” (etc.) and “they know who they are” narrative, which replaced previous research of a much more complex and variable cluster of phenomena. Which I absolutely agree with anyone requires compassionate care exactly tailored to the problem at hand. Which absolutely has to be identified at the highest level of competency. Which can only be determined in an atmosphere of open discourse.
As an aside, I offer another example where inner states were considered absolute evidence. The drug epidemic. As a heath care worker myself I can absolutely report that the idea that pain was what the patient said it was, that pain was the 5th vital sign and that narcotics given for pain were not habit forming, was absolutely hammered into us from education onwards, and compliance was punitively enforced, from regulatory agencies down.
3. However, Scandinavian authorities found that the research and follow-up procedures underlying the “affirmative care” model had disqualifying methodological defects. Ideological capture? They are starting over, not ruling anything out though, including surgery. A professional review in the UK has come to the same conclusion. Please note that Scandinavians care as much about different gender manifestations as anyone. They just want to do the right thing.
4. Not only is a very invasive practice promoted, the opposite practice, speech therapy, which is fully reversible and does no harm at all, has in many liberal states been labelled as “conversion therapy” and outlawed. This creates an atmosphere of fear of questioning for health care providers and councilors, and interferes with free exploration. The logic here on display, is that the least invasive practice is harmful because of preventing someone from receiving the most invasive one.
A climate where only affirming evidence is accepted has no inner shut off valve, and had to drive itself into the wall that is Trump. Who benefited from that?
For some reference there has been much in the Free Press, which has provided whistle blower accounts, and also a powerful statement from the Finnish chief psychiatrist: https://www.thefp.com/p/gender-affirming-care-dangerous-finland-doctor
To the border issue I will just say that the notion that an open border is defensible is strange to me as a legal immigrant fully expecting to be deportable if I were dishonest or broke the law during the process.
Also not defensible IMO is leaving the management of the border to Mexican cartels and having a de facto permanent caste of vulnerable and exploitable workers. While I am not myself affected by any of this, I can see that some people might be, and would appreciate if someone listened to them.
I am not interested in referencing everything to Trump, and just point out that the lack of discussion and compromise on these issues got us where we are.
and this is why I view sanctimonious anti-white and anti-asian racism as the core of Woke.
Thanks for the comment. Observably validated. I would only partly in jest call the underlying mindset something like "out of control social negativity bias" and suggest it as a DSM entry. Largely education induced, but amplified by a disposition for black vs. white and emotional thinking.
Many Thanks!
Scattered thoughts:
1) every discussion for whether someone is or isn’t “fascist” that I have ever seen has ultimately been an unhelpful exercise in semantics. Debates about whether Stephen Miller or Donald Trump are fascist (even in 2025) are no exception. I personally try to use some combination of “authoritarian” and “bigot” as appropriate, which usually capture what people actually dislike about fascism
2) Made the mistake of looking at the DSL thread for this article. See a bunch of idiots who are tying themselves in knots refusing to admit that maaaaaaybe the guy who threatened his critics with prosecution (something you cited in the article), whose tried to jawbone CBS into firing Jimmy Kimmel, who has deployed the national guard to cities to deal with disorder which, as near as I can tell, doesn’t actually exist, could POSSIBLY be regarded as authoritarian. Why a man who already tried to stage a coup once could possibly not be trusted to simply step aside when his term is done
Let's test our intuitions on what we mean by "morally acceptable" here.
A thought experiment - if you could painlessly assassinate a political figure and you somehow knew for certain that it would be seen by everyone as an accident or natural death (don't fight the hypothetical), at what stage would it be okay to do so?
This is basically asking (if you're a utilitarian): "at what point is the harm caused by this person existing (or acting politically) greater to the harm caused by killing this person?"
I think I'd have a relatively low bar for that - many of the actions you've mentioned in the article are harmful enough to justify the consequences for the fascist in question, and this "invisible assassination" would therefore be morally acceptable.
But the *actual* question of moral acceptability for political violence *that is viewed as political violence* is more like: "at what point is the harm caused by this person existing (or acting politically) greater to the harm caused by killing this person, and all the political backlash, revenge attacks, increase in polarisation, loss of national stability etc. that follows?"
For obvious reasons, I'd have a much, much higher bar for this.
> A thought experiment - if you could painlessly assassinate a political figure and you somehow knew for certain that it would be seen by everyone as an accident or natural death (don't fight the hypothetical), at what stage would it be okay to do so?
Isn't this the classic case of Prisoner's Dilemma ? If everyone gets their own "kill politician" button, and everyone chooses Defect and spams that button, then you don't end up in political utopia -- but rather a land of ghosts. Thus the correct move is to destroy the button instead, even though by doing so you suffer a temporary loss.
Or you end up in a world where all the defectors kill each other, leaving an optimally cooperative utopia...
But my hypothetical was trying to tease out "morally unacceptable" because it's wrong to use violence against people for their political opinions/actions, vs. "morally unacceptable" because of the second-order consequences.
My sense is that arguments that don't make that distinction seem confused.
Defect/Defect results in both Defectors losing. Defect/Cooperate results in just the Cooperator losing, and the Defector getting a large payout. That's why people choose Defect to begin with; and that's why Defect/Defect quite often ends up being the metastable equilibrium, a.k.a. land of ghosts. That's the problem with Cooperate: it requires constant work.
As for morality, honestly I don't believe there to be any such thing as separate from consequences. There's no grand Platonic realm where morals come from -- only incentives.
I think the logic for a stable cooperative equilibrium would be that the "politically engaged" people all kill each other from Defect/Defect games, and the people left behind are the politically disengaged, who don't have anyone to push the button on.
There's no magic shield that prevents those politically disengaged people from being targeted.
I'd assumed the fact that it was a "kill politician" button meant that you'd at least have to be partly politically engaged to be eligible
Jefferson said, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of *patriots and* tyrants."
Great read as always.
I wish Scott covered the fashionable slogans such as Punch a Nazi and how they fit into this framework. What does it mean to punch a nazi? Sure, that's a form of political violence, but allegedly a softer on. I assume it means you want to punch the nazi, not kill the nazi, you just hurt them enough to stop being nazis. At least that's my read. What happens if they punch back, though? How many times to we punch them again? Do we punch them until they die? In which case, why isn't the slogan Kill a Nazi?
My initial reaction to this article was that the real statement to reject was (1), because while "many Americans are fascists" might be true, everyone disagrees on which ones. Everyone disagrees, because the definition is vague. And when the definition is vague, all the energy goes into pulling it into whatever shape will fit over whatever someone doesn't like. As many have noted in the comments already: Orwell anticipated this decades ago.
Reject claim (1); if you have the luxury to make a formal, widely acceptable case for why someone is a fascist, then you have the luxury for a trial, and the US already has a system for that.
Leaving alone the fact that fascism is an empty word, I would be careful about using it, lest it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I think that those fascinated with the idea of civil war - on the Left and the Right - should be sentenced to ten years of reviewing of the historical documentation about the American Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, the War in Yugoslavia and other, and to write every day an essay about 'what happened to my wife and children after the other faction broke into my home and tortured and murdered me'
I dunno, a lot of veterans of war seem pretty satisfied with it, including that one guy who reviewed the war in Ukraine...
Remember, the dead can't suffer.
> So I think the natural conclusion is to abandon 2. Fascists, although evil, aren’t automatically a legitimate target for political violence.
There's a weaker version of 2 which is "Fascist _leaders_ are a legitimate target for political violence" which is not considered here and I think deserves consideration.
I think most people distinguish between movement leaders and followers. It would have certainly been acceptable to kill Hitler and Himmler, but the carpet bombing of Dresden (although I'm sure it killed many fascists) is much harder to defend.
The latter was much more effective though. A leader is much more replaceable than his army.
I appreciate your attempt to address a difficult topic and I personally found it useful in clarifying my thinking.
One note about fascist synonyms: I've definitely heard "Nazi" used, which carries a similar negative connotation to "fascist." I've also heard "dictator" (specific to the leader, eg Trump in USA), and "authoritarian" (which admittedly doesn't carry the same degree of negative connotation).
I also still hear "racist", "sexist," "white nationalist", "KKK", and similar used in basically the same way to describe MAGA folks. In context they often make sense by themselves, but sometimes only really make sense as a makeshift synonym for "fascist."
"Many Americans are fascists
...And I don’t want to abandon 1, because it seems like a factual claim that might be true - even if you don’t think it’s true now, it obviously has the potential to be true in the future - and we shouldn’t ban people from asserting true claims."
How many is "many"? A hundred thousand? A million? Out of a population of 340 million, how many Americans are real, genuine, actual Fascist as in "Heil mein Führer" type and not the "if you don't agree with me 100% on every tiny thing then you are a fascist" type of fascist?
"I think it’s probably bad practice to demand that reasonable people not use the word “fascist”. "
On the contrary, I think reasonable people should not use this word until they really do mean, and really can provide evidence to back up their claim, that those they are calling fascist are fascists. I presume we are meant to think the Phoenix Project lady is unreasonable, but that's what we're getting when "fascist" has lost all meaning beyond "this labels you as a bad person".
I'm not going to call Gavin Newsom a Communist or socialist, because he's not. He's a socially progressive liberal. I think it's stupid and counter-productive to call everyone "lefties" or Communists when they're not, and I think it's stupid and counter-productive to call everyone a fascist ditto.
So does this post mean you'll be voting for Katie Porter for governor of California? 😁 She seems to agree about the "many Americans" bit, what with the "How would I need them in order to win, Ma'am?" query (as an aside, this interview is comedy gold for the sheer entitlement on display: I don't need to give a flying fig about 40% of the electorate of California and as for the other 60% of course they are gonna vote for me and nobody else, it is a divine law inscribed on tablets of stone that the Democratic vote goes to the one anointed candidate which will be me, me, glorious me!)
https://www.imightbewrong.org/p/some-constructive-criticism-for-katie
"But the bigger problem is that you seem to believe that you’re entitled to people’s votes on account of being a Democrat. You’re all but daring people to vote for someone else. You may think that you’re making a factual point about electoral math, but you really just told voters: “We’re a one party state, dickheads. You’re gonna vote Republican? Fine: Good luck making eye contact with the wine moms in your neighborhood association after that. That ‘D’ next to my name stands for ‘Don’t you dare downgrade your social standing by voting for someone else,’ or ‘Deez nuts are available for sucking if you even think about not voting Democrat, because it’s California, bitches, and I’m gonna be governor whether you like it or not.’” And — unless I dramatically misunderstand your campaign — those impressions are off-message."
Thanks for the link. I knew Katie had fucked up from the few clips I listened to on X, but I hadn't realized that the entire interview was her driving her campaign off the edge of a cliff. OTOH, the same qualities that made her abrasive in this interview made her an excellent congressional interrogator when she was in Congress. I'd probably vote for her if she were to make it to the final ballot. If two Dems ended up on the ballot, though, I might consider voting for the other Dem. (For those of you who are non-Californians, we have open primaries and the top two vote-getters end up on the final ballot no matter what the party affiliation). I'd never ever vote for a Republican, though, because all the Republicans in California are bat-shit crazy (except for Arnold Schwarzenegger). ;-)
I saw references to it and thought "Oh come on, it can't be that bad" and then I watched it and whoops.
That's the entire point: she's not going to be running against a Republican, but against a fellow Democrat. Right now there are a lot of people tossing their hats into the ring for nominations, and a few more allegedly considering it. She has to get through all those, and a couple of the names are bigger than her. So there's no guarantee she will be in the final three or however many on the ballot.
Even if she does make it to be Porter (D), Other (D), No-hoper (R) then those 60% votes will be split between her and the other Democrat. People may well prefer her party opponent. In which case, she does need to coax some of the 40% deplorables to vote for her, and right now she's ensured they'll vote for the Devil in Hell first. If it's a case of Rehoboam and "My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions", then 40% may well decide to vote for the lesser of two evils which would be Anyone But Porter.
All that her rivals need to do is run an ad playing that clip over and over again. No need even to say anything more than "vote for Y". It'll be the equivalent of "Kamala is for they/them" which seemingly played well for Trump.
It's also a bad look because she seems to be "to Hell with those who aren't part of the True Right Side, their interests are of no concern to me and if in power, indeed I will actively work against them". You have to at least *pretend* to be even-handed when ruling the state before you get your mitts on the levers of power.
> You have to at least pretend to be even-handed when ruling the state before you get your mitts on the levers of power.
Is that really true anymore?
"OTOH, the same qualities that made her abrasive in this interview made her an excellent congressional interrogator when she was in Congress"
Did she wear the Batgirl costume while conducting those interrogations? 😁
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPtXWXzEZQt/
According to ChatGPT (for what it's worth), this was on halloween, and she changed into regular clothes before her finance committee meeting. She kept the mask on, though, and Republicans were outraged, OUTRAGED, for her disrespect for the institution (not sure which institution we're talking about).
I never heard about this incident, so the Rethuglicans evidently didn't get as much mileage out of their outrage as they did with Obama's tan suit or Fetterman's hoodie.
>https://www.imightbewrong.org/p/some-constructive-criticism-for-katie
Oh god, that was amazing. What a train-wreck. I loved the "But wait, there's more!" format
Motte: “fascist” is a useful technical term for a specific intersection of politics and aesthetics. It’s on par with “communist,” “libertarian,” or even “liberal.” The categories were made for man. We’re far enough from WWII that *Brown v. Oklahoma* is more relevant than *Chaplinsky v. NH.*
Bailey: whatever this is. https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/dewaffling_tech
I feel a little guilty linking it, a little complicit in nutpicking. But since we’re talking about perceived threats, I think it’s worth giving an example. This is not an argument about prevalence or accuracy of such attitudes. It’s an observation that if you’re looking, you *will* find people who make Newsom look careful and conciliatory.
I’d like to keep using the practical, clinical definition. I’d prefer not to give the most shameless partisans more legitimacy.
> Your threshold may differ from mine, but you must have one.
I don't think this is a good approach. It makes it easy for fascism to divide-and-conquer its opposition.
Your red line was crossed today, so you revolt - but I don't join you because my red line is a little farther down the road and was not crossed yet. Decker won't join you either - his red line was crossed last week, he revolted alone, and now he's in jail. So today you too are alone in your revolution, which is therefore bound to fail and tomorrow you'll be Decker's cell-neighbor.
The threshold cannot be individual. It needs to be unified. It need to be a Fire Alarm.
Is there a distinction to be made regarding where the fascism is happening?
We acknowledge that violence against fascists abroad has been ok in the past (I don't know many reasonable people arguing against fighting Germany in WWII and there are many other examples) which presumes it would be ok in the future as well.
But if those same people were in our country it would not be ok? Like, using the WWII example, it was ok for Britain to fight Germany but not for Germans to do violence against Nazi Party beforehand? That seems silly.
Now, maybe this gets back to your question of line drawing and crossing. Germany crossed a line by declaring was on Poland. But the responding nations, fighting fascism, we not declared upon, they made that first step.
In any event, this means that intra-nation violence against fascism is basically never ok, because there isn't really a person-to-person or group-to-group declaration of war function (aside, I guess, from starting to do violence).
So under this framework, anti-Nazi Germans would not have been in the "right" to use violence against fellow citizens on the Nazi side.
And again, that kinda seems wrong to me. Maybe I'm nuts here.
Interesting article. I branched off your chain of reasoning in a slightly different direction: in law, we uphold an evidentiary standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt" before saddling someone with a label that can be punished with the death penalty. The probability of being killed because people are calling you a fascist (or socialist or whatever else the case may be) is drastically lower than the death penalty being applied once you're labeled a serial killer or whatever, but it still seems reasonable to have a high burden of proof for deciding someone can be fairly stuck with a label many people will connotate with "ought to be killed."
1) Nicholas Decker is a ridiculous engagement-optimized caricature and an embarrassment to anyone that claims to be a sane utilitarian.'
2) Gonna make some popcorn now, I'm sure the most obnoxious of your commentariat will be out in force.
I don’t think you could say my work is optimized for engagement — just the bits you see. Cf. Alchian (1950)
I think that, at the bare minimum, we should strive to maintain the norm that mere words are responded to with words, not bullets (as Scott had pointed out in his earlier days). So if there's some truly odious blogger out there preaching about how gingers have no souls to his massive audience, and his screeds set your ginger blood boiling... then calling for violence against that person should still be met with gasps of outrage, not approval.
Quote "And I don’t want to abandon 1, because it seems like a factual claim that might be true - even if you don’t think it’s true now, it obviously has the potential to be true in the future - and we shouldn’t ban people from asserting true claims."
Okay, but if you redefine the first statement from "Many Americans are fascist" to "Many Americans are fascist or might become fascist in the future" then there is no longer any logical contradiction in the three statements and your entire argument falls apart.
Forget fascism for a second. Clearly political violence is legitimate against political ideologies or systems that are sufficiently hostile to human rights, even if those ideologies are followed by a significant percentage of the population. That's an extremely uncontroversial claim to make. To deny this is to claim that abolition was wrong, that the US civil war was fundamentally unjust. In fact the very independence war that established the US would be unjust. And of course we'd also have to call the entirety of the fight against the original Nazis, both from within Germany and from outside, as illegitimate.
And having established that political violence is justified against some ideologies, even if followed by a large percentage of the population, the only questions left to answer is if fascism is such an ideology, and if the ideology of the a significant fraction of Americans can legitimately be described as fascism. In fact we can cut out the middle man and just immediately ask if a significant fraction of Americans follow an ideology against which violence is acceptable, without having to nitpick over the definition of fascism.
I think there's a pretty simple solution in that fascists are morally legitimate targets for political violence, but that you still have to do the utilitarian calculation of what the consequences of jumping off that slippery slope are.
>"I think it’s probably bad practice to demand that reasonable people not use the word “fascist”. It risks giving unreasonable people a heckler’s veto over every useful term"
In what way is "fascist" a useful term in any 21st-century context? It basically only means "right-wing plus the speaker wants you to instinctively hate the target and favor otherwise-taboo methods to silence them". Which, OK, is useful for someone who wants to convey that message, but we should understand that this is the only way the word is ever really used. If someone means to say "right wing but I don't mean to say we should start punching them", then it's just as informative to say "right wing" and much easier than saying "fascist" and trying to clarify that you're referring to some exotic class of non-punchable fascists.
It's at least possible that someone might want to argue that [contemporary political figure X] is practicing a brand of authoritarianism that is a closer match to that of Mussolini and Franco and you-know-who than to any of the other horrid forms of authoritarianism we've had to describe over the centuries. Not sure how useful that would be; I don't think there are any specifically anti-fascist techniques we would bring to bear that are any different than we would use against any other sort of authoritarian. But more importantly, aside from a few pedantic history nerds, almost nobody ever does that without meaning to invoke "...and we all agreed that we hate Mussolini and we're glad he wound up on that meathook". And the pedantic history nerds are going to have to spend many thousands of words explaining exactly what they do mean, so there's no real advantage to leading with "fascist".
Anybody who uses the term "fascism" today, in any non-meta and non-historical context, should be understood as saying "right wing" plus "unthinking hatred" plus "commence with the punching". This will not change. Once the historic meaning of a word has been this badly perverted, it is Literally Impossible to undo the damage. Canute would have had as much chance of holding back the tide, as Alexander would of convincing people that it is unacceptable to use violence against people labeled by the term that means "acceptable to use violence against".
We do need a language for discussing political violence, and when political violence is appropriate and who it might be appropriate to use such violence against. But we don't need that language to be couched in stealth and misdirection. So anyone saying "[X] is a fascist", should get at *least* the response they'd get for saying "we should punch [X], and everyone knows we should punch [X] so I don't need to justify that". Whether that means heckling or shunning or banning, will depend on the forum and the context.
And if we are ever so careless as to let e.g. "environmentalist" become *nigh-universally understood* to mean "person that we should punch because of their environmental views", then it will become necessary to similarly taboo "environmentalist" anywhere we want to have a productive discussion. We'll need a new term, maybe "conservationist" for someone whose pro-environmental policies don't rise to the level of punchability. But we haven't got to that point yet, and Scott's "some moron says it's OK..." doesn't come close to rising to that level, so there is still legitimate use for "environmentalist". Let's try to keep it that way, because "fascist" is a lost cause.
Hear hear. Actually the word has been useful to me as a kind of anti-shibboleth: anyone who uses it on social media almost certainly has nothing useful to say and can be blocked immediately. (I may be unfairly blocking some interesting historians discussing the 1930s but it's a price I pay gladly.)
I agree with Scott’s sentiment here, but the headline seems to have summarized the argument incorrectly…
“Facism” can’t be both a vague term that gets applied to almost everything, and a legitimate target.
It feels something like a Motte and Bailey argument. In the Second World War, the allies did use armed force against regimes described as fascist (Benito Mussolini). It would seem to not follow as an argument that this justifies force against the many other things that get called fascist.
I also think that the Woodie Guthrie quote and many like it were understood to not be serious.
What is different right now is it feels like the US is sliding into major political violence. Ands it’s not really because people are suddenly getting called fascist. Everyone’s been called a “Fascist” since the 1980’s, at least.
The 1980’s, which gave us
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta
No one suggests that being a fascist should grant one immunity from violence. The allies did not attack Italy because Mussolini decided to name his movement "fascism". They did it because Italy was part of the axis coalition who waged war on other countries in order to conquer them.
Violence is only acceptable as protective force when there is no better alternative. If we had an effective and well-resourced justice system, we would never need violence for anything. On the other hand, if anyone, fascist or not, breaks into your house and corners you with a weapon, you're practically obligated to hurt them.
People are in fact being cornered with weapons and the justice system is not effectively protecting them. Self-defense wouldn't be political violence in this case, but what is a victim to do after surviving such an encounter, finding themselves no better protected or resourced than before, and meeting another person spouting the same views that nearly got them killed? Take the high road? They can if they have the resources to believe they can.
It comes down to a judgment of whether you think you can protect yourself and those you care about with the tools at your disposal. Can we blog our way out of this? Or vote? Or peacefully protest? Or accept the consequences of inaction? Violence is a function of losing faith in available alternatives.
I once watched ducks being fed in a chain link enclosure with an open gate. When the food was dropped inside, most of the roaming ducks successfully found the entrance, but the last stragglers found themselves on the other side of a rapidly diminishing pile of food - able to see it but not reach it. Confused, hungry, and being approached by more hungry ducks of a different species, a fight broke out. It would have been simple to just go around the fence, but they couldn't find this or any other solution, so violence became nature's last resort.
I feel like there are lots of ways to diffuse this trilemma at every point, but I'll give some of my primary reactions:
>2. Fascists are an acceptable target for political violence
Possible response: killing a fascist isn't *political;* violence, it's self-defense.
If a foreign army invades your nation with troops on the ground, is it *political* violence to shoot back? Or is it just the normal sort of retaliatory/defensive violence we have laws to protect and justify?
Fascists today are already pulling citizens into vans and sending people to foreign torture camps and shooting peaceful protestors in the face, and there's every reason to think they'll do worse in the future. Opposing them with violence now isn't a *political statement*, it's just trying to oppose tyranny and bloodshed before it becomes too entrenched to stop.
>3. Political violence in America is morally unacceptable (at the current time)
What does it mean for something to be 'morally unacceptable'? Do you mean in terms of deontology, utilitarianism, or virtue ethics?
There are many times when we might want to say that something is deonotlogoically wrong, but utilitarian correct.
Yes, these systems should all converge on the same answer under *normal* circumstances, but we're currently in precisely the type of extreme circumstances where you should expect the tails to come apart.
So there may be nothing inconsistent with believing 'yes, w should have a generic rule of thumb that political violence is wrong' while also believing 'yes, these specific limited instances of political violence are justified/necessary because of how much is at stake', if you are vacillating between deontology and utilitarianism, or etc.
More generally: a big part of the reason to *have* utilitarianism is to recognize when broad vague binary rules are failing to capture a specific unusual scenario. Finding a single utilitarian exception doesn't disprove or contradict the broad general rule, it's just a form of exception-handling.
>1. Many Americans are fascists
This may be conflating across different uses of the word 'fascist'. primarily, between fascist leaders/officials who are actually implementing fascist policies and doing fascist things in the world, vs. people who support/vote for those officials, or who just have abstract ideological or aesthetic preferences that overlap with fascism in major ways.
It's not unusual for words to have different meanings like this is different contexts; it's useful to be able to use the word 'fascist' to describe both a dictator and a writer, but you should only use violence against the dictator.
I think most people using the term understand this; that a fascist movement (like any movement) is made up of many passive members with only a vague association, as well as a few leaders and actors who actually do the violence.
And, then, again - those leaders and actors are the only ones who are legitimate targets for violence, but not *because* they are fascists, rather *because* they are hurting people and will hurt more if not stopped.
being a fascist is *strong evidence that they will keep hurting people* and will get worse over time, since that's how the history of fascist movements has always gone. But, still, it is the evidence of the harm they have/will cause that justifies violence, not their politics.
>3. Political violence in America is morally unacceptable (at the current time)
Whether or not it's acceptable. it's always, always and forever, been a part of American politics.
You can believe the morally correct thing would be for both sides to put down their guns and talk peacefully. That doesn't mean either side has a moral obligation to put their gun down *first*, and start talking rationally while the other side is still gleefully shooting them.
It's *bad* that we're in a world where political violence is used to suppress your opponents, but we've never *not* been in that world, and suddenly starting from zero and saying 'but why is political violence against *fascists* tolerated?' is an isolated demand for rigor.
Fascists are already committing political violence, *today*, and their opponents will commit political violence, too; yes this is all morally wrong, but that doesn't mean anyone will or *should* stop, and give their opponent an asymmetric advantage.
The asymmetry doesn't come from ideology. It comes from the state's monopoly on violence.
Regardless of whether you think Trump (or any official) is legitimate, you need to reckon with the fact that a majority of the country thinks they are, and will regard an attack on them not as "anti-fascism", but simply as an attack on the state, i.e. terrorism or insurrection. The reaction will not be, oh dear, we'd better elect the other party next time. It will be massive support for state violence against your movement.
It's a very bad idea to launch an insurrection when you can't even win an election. And when you CAN win an election, you don't need the insurrection. This is the secret sauce for why democracies are so stable, and political violence so comparatively rare.
I remember antifa (who define fascists as anybody agin them) turning up to beat up on some TERFs back in the day. One was a 70 plus year old woman. By the logic of applying fascist to anything not leftist enough for antifa, political violence would be acceptable there. As in killing the 70 year old.
ICE are a different story, although they seem to be acting within constitutional limits right now, they are a quite dubious bunch. Antifa aren’t going to turn up to that battle though, not when there are old ladies to terrorise. Nor I imagine are you. In any case you wouldn’t win.
Most civil wars aren’t masses of pitchfork-wielding folk storming the capital; they’re organised struggles between factions that already have command structures, weapons, and logistics — often splinters of the same state’s own army or political elite.
In the English Civil War both sides had trained troops, nobles, and officers; in the American Civil War both sides had armies, uniforms, bureaucracy, the whole lot. Even in the Spanish Civil War, where there was some popular mobilisation, the real fighting power came from formalised military units and foreign backers. Russia had the Bolsheviks take over the old czarist army, fighting against them were other members of the once czarist army
In America that would be state police or national guardsmen, fighting ICE or loyal Trump regiments. It isn’t going to be you. The civil war scenario - which is unlikely but not impossible - would be, therefore, conservatives vs ultra conservatives.
By the way one of things radical groups should never do is engage in actions that an agent provocateur would want them to do, to either discredit the organisation to push ordinary people into supporting more authoritarian responses.
But is this term useful? One can, after all, use Fascist to mean the original party.
I think using an "identity" (in the adjective sense, not the identitarian sense) like fascist (or any other) as carte blanche for political violence is a massive mistake. Once you've done that, all you have to do is decide who the shoe fits, and none of these shoes appear to have very strong, well-defined boundaries (that's a feature, not a bug). Even CRIMINALS are not valid targets for violence outside of a rather prescribed and adjudicated set of processes that we have encoded in law and legal procedure.
What justifies political violence is political circumstances, and not who the target is or what the target believes.
I’d like to abandon #1.
The term “fascist” has not only emotional but also *historical* baggage, enough that I would say it doesn’t make sense to use it to describe *anyone* in the modern era. There are approximately no “fascists” today any more than there are “whigs”. Or “nazis”. These three terms all described people with some set of views *in a specific historical period* and we have no continuity with that period. So if the underlying concept is still useful, due to the passage of time we’d need to make a *new* term for it, preferably one acceptable to the group as a self-description.
“neofascist” might still be an option but “fascist” is Right Out.
(To the extent the term “fascist” has a modern definition it seems to be either “person who opposes socialism” or “person I don’t like”.)
80 years ago Orwell said "fascist" basically meant a bully, and "fascism" simply meant something undesirable. I don't think we've gotten beyond that in public discourse.
Good post, one of your best in recent times.
People on the right aren't fascists in the political sense of the word either though. In general, the American Right is significantly less authoritarian than the American Left, and my understanding is that this goes way way back historically.
Examples: the American Right is generally anti regulation, and in favour of greater state independence, and a smaller government.
In general, the American Right is conservative (wanting to preserve tradition / precident rather than change) and in the context of America that means the constitution / founding father's vision, which is quite a decentralised anti-fascist view.
Ofc, you can have sub factions that are fascist, but in general, the American Right is not. I would argue the American Left is far far more authoritarian, more into censorship, more into centralised government and more into political violence (e.g., see recent YouGov poll data, where young 'liberals' where 4!! times more likely to endorse political violence).
In general, I see the use of the term as part of the currently standard left strategy of demonizing, otherizing and dehumanising anyone they disagree with. E.g., have views on immigration -> racist, have concerns about women's spaces -> transphobic, disagree with them politically -> fascist. Didn't vote for Hilary and Kamala -> sexist. Honestly, this is the way the regular democrat seems to use these words. They don't even have a mote, they are all bailey.
I don't love the linking of facism to a polical flank, left or right.
Fascism, at its core, is the idea that the nation should function like a single corporation, where business, labor, and citizens are all organized under centralized state control to serve a common purpose. It replaces both free markets and democracy with managed unity directed from the top. Violence and censorship were tools, not the essence; the real principle was obedience, the merging of private and public life into one state-run machine.
Mussolini’s vision was less about chaos or brutality, and more about building a tightly controlled, hierarchical order where the state acted as CEO and the people as employees. The thug part is sort of an add on.
In this context it becomes a lot easier to say the Trump style of government is fascist. I don't love saying that but he has a very corportist flair to his policy.
It's hard to call a person a fascist. Because a person is not state control.
The violence part is just an adjunct of any political belief.
Singapore Inc might be a more benevolent example of facism provide you don't do drugs.
If someone believes in corportist central economic nationalist control of economy then they are by definition a fascist.
If they like beating people up and putting them in prison they are a bad person who may also be a fascist.
The sleight of hand between "right-wing person I don't like" and "person it's justified to kill" ***is the point***. This is why we see the exact same dynamic with "Nazi" which is typically a lot less accurate of a term.
People wanted to say "Charlie Kirk should be hurt" but couldn't, so they said "Charlie Kirk is a fascist" and then made sure everyone knew how morally justified it is to "punch" fascists/nazis.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ToiletPaperUSA/search?q=fascist&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all
I honestly don't even know what Scott or the NYT mean when they write "fascist" but I know it's a completely different meaning than how I see that word used every day. In practice all you're doing by using that word "correctly" is providing more plausible deniability to the people who want to see blood (at least those that are on the left).
Good point. I think 99% of the times the left uses the word, it should not even apply in the political sense (i.e.they labelled person is not actually authoritarian).
"Fascist" just means "evil" to most people. And calling people "evil" is just a way of directing violence at them. There is no evil in reality. It's a human fiction that we use (essentially) to direct violence. So, if you call the other side "fascist", you are essentially declaring civil war. Fine, but then don't be surprised if other side uses violence against you.
Am I wrong for not thinking any of this discourse is in good faith? The issue is not even being framed as "when is it okay to violently overthrow an oppressive government?" but "when is it okay to kill people who we've managed to make an ideological label stick to?"
Left-wingers are leveraging the facts that: (1) WWII still looms large in the American imagination (2) People today seem to think we went to war with Germany because they were racist and fascist.
Therefore it's justified to kill anyone who we can call fascist. We already went to war about this after all! Reddit told me my great-grandad who fought on the beaches of Normandy was Antifa. What a convenient pretext to snipe the right winger coming to my school.
Obviously Trump hasn't done anything close to what left-wing idols like Lincoln and FDR did, and obviously they've called every Republican president in my lifetime a Nazi. Are people like KoopaKing in your comment section, who openly advocate for violence against the President and his tens of millions of voters, really so committed to the rule of law and the separation of powers? Or are they mentally unbalanced people who find it a convenient excuse?
To answer your question in good faith, in a liberal system you should not kill people for simply believing in any political system. Premise 2 is false.
In the case they organize and gain political power, there is still no workable bright line because overthrowing a leviathan is practically guaranteed to be extremely deadly and chaotic. Especially when you're overthrowing one that was popularly elected like a year ago.
It's fun to chat online, but is a president flouting a Supreme Court order by illegally deploying the National Guard (as an example of a possible bright line) seriously worth a bloody revolution? What if the National Guard leaves after a few months and nothing really comes of it? Would it still have been worth the mountain of skulls to prevent that fascistic act?
People are just not thinking seriously about what a violent revolution means, and what level of oppression is preferable to it. Probably because it's their opponent in power, and they're more fantasizing and LARPing than thinking.
Astral Codex Ten has been bullied by the wokeists, probably more than once, and now he's afraid to say what he really thinks. Moreover, he's afraid to think what he really thinks. The wokeists have successfully intimidated him.
Fascism is arbitrary and unfettered government intervention in every aspect of citizens' lives. This is closest to Mussolini's definition. Leftists who regulate everything are fascists, while Republicans, including Trump, are actually anti-fascists because they deregulate everything. Even to the point of abolishing the Department of Education. There have never been any fascists in history who abolished the Department of Education, or who would even think of such a thing. On the contrary, true fascists are always deeply concerned about what and how children are taught. Fascists always impose their ideologies through the education system.
Right, I think it's worth remembering that the set of people who would cheer the assassination of Charlie Kirk have a significant subset who would cheer the assassination of Scott Alexander.
*sigh* Can you guys really not come to terms with the reality that Scott is, in fact, a hopeless liberal? Nobody is coercing him. He's a coward of his own volition.
He's not a coward. These are his views and values, and I don't think we get anywhere by insulting him when he's generous enough to host we deplorables on here.
When ACX gets to Bluesky levels of "banned, blocked and reported for insufficient loyalty to the Party and the Party line", then call him hard names, but we're nowhere near that yet.
The man is entitled to state what he thinks and how he feels, for the love of God! It's his own Substack! Free speech includes "I think you're a wuss but go ahead and share your wussy opinions"! Even if we think he's wrong, even if he *is* wrong, "This is Liberty-hall, gentlemen. You may do just as you please here."
And another quote from "She Stoops To Conquer", which seems apposite for a political discussion:
"HARDCASTLE. No, sir, I have long given that work over. Since our betters have hit upon the expedient of electing each other, there is no business “for us that sell ale.”
HASTINGS. So, then, you have no turn for politics, I find.
HARDCASTLE. Not in the least. There was a time, indeed, I fretted myself about the mistakes of government, like other people; but finding myself every day grow more angry, and the government growing no better, I left it to mend itself. Since that, I no more trouble my head about Hyder Ally, or Ally Cawn, than about Ally Croker. Sir, my service to you."
Okay then, maybe "horribly misguided" is a better description. He's not willing to come to terms with what's necessary to get the changes he wants. Doesn't he realize he's getting almost everything he's asked for? And yet, he's letting perfect be the enemy of good.
Everyone has their own opinions on the state of the world. I think we have indeed gone to hell in a handbasket, and I am grimly and cynically resigned to the current state of affairs. Trying to reverse social changes is like Canute telling the tide not to come in, and I get the lesson he was trying to teach there.
But the pendulum swings, the see-saw tilts, the wheel of fortune turns, and who is winning versus who is losing changes with the tides and the moon.
That is a great play!
He used to be strongly antifeminist. So strongly that I suspect he's still antifeminist and just chooses not to write about it, which would match Dan's diagnosis fairly well. But I don't think Dan is right about this particular issue.
> Astral Codex Ten has been bullied by the wokeists, probably more than once, and now he's afraid to say what he really thinks. Moreover, he's afraid to think what he really thinks. The wokeists have successfully intimidated him.
I don't think you have the mechanism right. I think it's more likely that he lives in Berkeley and he's accidentally absorbed a lot of beliefs from Berkeley without subjecting them to much in the way of critical thought. Somebody says something ridiculous, everybody nods along, and the nodding along is evidence that the thing actually wasn't ridiculous.
A while ago he wrote about how experiencing a lot of ambient noise at home is just an unavoidable part of living in a city. That's not a woke opinion or one that anyone is likely to intimidate anyone else into avowing. It's not a true opinion either, but that's neither here nor there.
> There have never been any fascists in history who abolished the Department of Education, or who would even think of such a thing.
Well, in this case the department was 100% captured by sworn ideological enemies. If Trump was able to control it, he might feel differently about abolishing it too.
Don't use political violence until democracy has so badly failed that it's easier to win a civil war than an election. And also, don't expect it to only catch on on your side. If people keep assassinating for right targets, they'll eventually start assassinating people on the left. They're the ones with all the guns.
It is probably important here to distinguish between "fascist" meaning a person who subscribes to or submits to a certain far-right ideology and "fascist" meaning a person devoted enough to that ideology that they are actively trying to coordinate mass violence. I think a lot of leftists are way too fast to put someone in that second category, but I do think it exists and is a category of people who it is reasonable to discuss committing violence against. "Reasonable to discuss" does not imply I currently think someone should do it, only that it makes sense to have a debate about when violence becomes acceptable against such a person.
(I am inclined to think it has a lot to do with how likely they are to actually succeed in their campaign, and how likely killing them or committing some other violent act against them is to actually end the campaign or reduce its effectiveness.)
The left is way more happy to use violence to bully their opponents. Examples: BLM riots, attempt to assassinate the president, assassination of Charlie Kirk, survey data showing left identifiers were 4x more likely to endorse violence. It's clear cut.
I would argue a lot of it, is less about recent violence, but more about the perception of which side is winning. And, if I remember correctly, the result held also for a similarly survey taken before Charlie Kirk's assassination, so it isn't just an immediate spike in response to that violent act.
With Trump in power, and seemingly popular, the left is thinking it needs to resort to violence and intimidation, while in the wake of January 6th, Trump had just lost, and the Democrats were in power, and hence had no need for violence or intimidation (but similarly the Right felt wronged and impotent, etc...).
I think that it is a matter of options.
By far the best way to get rid of Trump is to wait for him (or Vance) to finish the term, then vote him (or his successor) out of office. So far, he does not have committed any human rights violations which would justify ending the American democracy experiment and rise up against his regime.
My threshold for "fuck the will of the people, this must be stopped now" is actually rather high. If he sends death squads to kill Hispanic-looking people in the streets, or nukes Oslo, that would be sufficient cause, but I am very hopeful that he will keep at roughly his current level of performative cruelty, which seems vastly better than civil war. I also have high hopes that democratic institutions will prevent him from using his office to improperly influence the elections too much.
The situation with Hitler was different. It was very clear that the Germans were not willing or able to vote him out. The humanitarian costs he was inflicting were also much too high to justify giving the Nazis a few generations in the hopes that they would become more moderate on their own.
Personally, I think there are not one but two thresholds for political violence. The lower one is for purposeful political violence -- instrumental violence committed while pursuing some legitimate, achievable goal. There are generally cost-benefit calculations to decide if a particular action is acceptable, especially as far as non-combatants are concerned.
The higher threshold is for violence which serves no purpose except to inflict costs on the enemy. This makes sense under some schools of decision theory -- the purpose is not to make your timeline better, but to lower the probability that you will end up in that timeline. Killing enemy adults is a legitimate objective above that threshold. For example, it might be ok to respond with nuclear attacks on your cities by nuking the enemy's cities, even if such attacks serve little strategic purpose. Or it is totally acceptable to start an uprising instead of quietly getting on the train to Auschwitz, even if everyone knows beforehand that the uprising will be crushed.
Of course, the distance between the present situation in the USA and that 2nd threshold is ridiculously large (unless you are one of the ones getting deported to an El Salvador megaprison without a trial, perhaps).
Hitler wasn't even voted IN; he was appointed Chancellor by Hindenburg. It wasn't an elected position in Weimar.
Hindenburg actually loathed him and the Nazis, and seems to have believed that giving them an overdue shot at the big chair (after exhausting every other viable candidate) would permanently discredit them. As indeed it did.
This comment section is probably already long and dreary enough, but I would suggest a simple litmus test for whether someone is a fascist.
Ask them "Are you a fascist?" If they say yes, then feel free to assume they're a fascist. If they say "No, I'm a [something else]" then go along with that, and if you think [something else] is stupid then feel free to argue with that. Similarly, don't go around calling people "communists" unless they claim to be communists.
Forestalling an obvious objection, this rule doesn't apply to words with actual robust definitions.
"Similarly, don't go around calling people "communists" unless they claim to be communists."
Agreed. Don't confuse "old-fashioned trade union leftist", "Socialist" and "Communist", please!
Most hardline leftists and progressives are *cladistically* communist, even if they don't think of themselves as communists.
Words are symbols and we have individual phenomenological responses to symbols exacerbated/mediated by social mores that occur at practically light speed. Good for those who can slow down enough to think/ration through the use of these words and symbols and for those who slow down enough to listen/consider. It takes courage to participate in imagination (following the logic) at any level without caving to fear. It changes the atmosphere for all of us.
It seems to me that the best solution is to push back on people using the term "fascist" (or racist, communist, whatever) on too wide a group of people. Obviously the connotation is meant to imply that the people being called fascist are like people who were called fascist in the past, and to remind people that we have previously agreed it was not just okay but good to kill such people.
But the reason we were willing to kill those people was not because they were right wing, or even right wing authoritarian dictators. It was because they started multiple wars and killed millions of people. If Steven Miller starts WW3 while trying to wipe out multiple ethnic groups, I will agree that he should be stopped by just about any means necessary, up to including armed revolution. But it seems that instead most of what he's saying has been within the Overton Window sometime within the last 50 years and is much closer to American norms than Nazi ones.
Calling him a fascist is inaccurate, and more so intentionally misleading in order to try to make him and his beliefs anathema in the political discourse. It lowers the value of discourse and cheapens us all. Similarly when Obama was called a Communist as an attack. At worst he was a free market socialist, well within the Overton Window. Likely not even that. Which means calling him a Communist is wrong and misleading in the same way that calling Miller a fascist is.
This seems like a good place to link to Performative Bafflement's essay in which he points out that collectivism has a far worse historical track record than fascism:
https://substack.com/@performativebafflement/p-162945544.
I also think it's relevant to point out that collectivism is far more damaging to political institutions than authoritarianism is. The fascist Axis powers all recovered relatively gracefully after the war, whereas Russia is still floundering 30 years after the fall of communism. Obviously there are confounding factors there, but the general principle still makes intuitive sense to me. Fascists don't destroy political institutions so much as subvert them to their will, whereas collectivism is a top-down reorganization of the basic principles that make society function, and in my view that's much harder to recover from. A metaphor would be a child who misbehaves vs a child who has metastatic cancer. The misbehaving child can be easily course-corrected without much worry but the cancer sufferer is going to need risky surgery and might never be the same.
The point is I think democracies can get much closer to fascism without risking long-term harm than they can to communism. I think political centrists intuitively understand that, I think 2020 shocked people into an awareness of just how close our institutions were to tipping over into a hard-to-dislodge collectivism (with identity groups playing the role of the proletariat), and I think that means that they're willing to tolerate a fairly significant jump towards authoritarianism as a corrective. That's certainly my view. It's not ideal but desperate times call for desperate measures. The only real risk of unrecoverable harm lies in the potential for Trump to disrupt the electoral process and I really don't think that's plausible. If he refuses to leave office in 2028, or suspends elections or otherwise makes it impossible to vote his party out then I think people would immediately revolt and I think they would be justified in doing so. But I would put the odds of that happening at far less than 1%.
I think the practice goes back to Adorno and Horkheimer's The Authoritarian Personality (1950), in which they developed 'F-scales' to assess someone's tendency towards fascism; they were concerned that there were Americans who were susceptible to fascist thought (although none of their findings, across the voluminous work, gave evidence which supported this). Variants of the scale (especially of the version by Bob Altemeyer) continue to be used in political psychology. Here you go, Are You a Right-Wing Authoritarian? Find out here!
https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/RWAS/
It seems clear to me that calling someone fascist is supposed to mean "you're acting like a fascist, which means we should have grounds to hurt you; please stop acting like a fascist so we don't have to". But the people being called fascists aren't capable of introspection, and the people calling them fascists aren't capable of enforcing it, so the whole thing has become a farce. Nevertheless these modern fascists are wrong, and they're certainly capable of understanding why they're being called that, and ought to stop acting like fascists just because it's right to stop. It seems like they are so set on sticking it to liberals that it just makes them be more fascist instead, which is very pathetic and sad to see.
Charlie Kirk's main job was going to meet people who disagreed with him and engaging in civil debates, that's about as far from "acting like a fascist" as it's possible to get.
That is not normal behaviour for a fascist, and it's certainly not what people mean when they accuse someone of "acting like a fascist".
You're pretending to not know why people call him that. Why?
Why did people call him that? What is your view, Alex?
You know the answer---it's because of the views he espoused. What's the point of the rhetorical trickery? If you're confused about why people find him so reprehensible, there's a huge internet full of them telling you why; you don't need to ask me.
What specific views? I'm asking you. If you make the claim he has views that justify labelling him as a fascist, I think the onus is one you to provide evidence for that claim
This style of argument is super disingenuous and bad faith. You're pretending like there is no ambient culture around this--like this is the first time you've heard of Kirk being called fascist. It's a distraction: you don't have to engage with the claim if you keep interrogating what it even is. The onus is on you to not pretend like you haven't heard of Google (or LLMs, if that's more your thing).
For example, here are some of the tops for "Charlie Kirk Fascist" are a bunch youtube videos, essays, etc about the ways in which he espouses fascist ideology (="is a fascist"). Maybe there's a miniscule chance that your filter bubble makes you unaware these exist? Here's a random link that I found that gives a pretty good list of the arguments:
https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalScience/comments/1ngiiv6/what_definition_of_fascism_justifies_labeling/
Although now that I'm checking, the Google results are quite polluted now with discussions about the assassin's fascism. I've ambiently exposed to many (many) reasons over the past few years, most of them in videos / social media. If you haven't, maybe that's why you don't know?
Also, I think many people are quite sure that Trump's whole administration is definitely fascist (don't tell me you don't know the arguments! Shutting down liberal departments of the government? Banning research that involves words tangentially connected to a particular ideology? Sending the military to liberal cities? Framing opponents as false flags, foreign agents, or pedophiles?) and Kirk is his supporter than therefore is fascist via that route.
I'm not saying you have to agree with the arguments--just don't pretend like you haven't heard them! It doesn't score you any internet points, it just makes you sound like an idiot Personally I'm not really one of these people who has such a confident definition of fascism that I'm comfortably defending "Kirk = fascist" at length. It doesn't really matter to me, because "Kirk = deplorable monster with dangerous/authoritarian views" is sufficient reason to condemn him.
My point is: it's a anti-intellectual farce to pretend like the discourse exist when you could easily just engage with it instead. It seems clear that when you do this, either (a) you literally know it exists (in which case, get out of your bubble) or (b) you're pretending not to know, in which case we have to infer that you can't defend him on merit so you're doing rhetorical tricks instead.
(There's also (c), you're some kind of astroturfing/political operative that's trying to poison the discourse to keep every mad at each other. I doubt this and I recognize that it's certainly bad faith to speculate about. But also it certainly comes to mind sometimes with how intentionally anti-intellectual people posting on here seem to be, since there's not much way to tell without interrogating someone's posting history at length.)
Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, there's also a (d) which I broadly subscribe to. I'm curious if this applies to you. I think often people have a "gut moral instinct" that somebody like Kirk needs to be defended, because despite his (on paper) despicable view, Kirk does speak to people's moral needs in a way that makes him resonate. (Clearly, since he has a lot of supporters). I've noticed that when people have this gut-feeling that someone is right, they will warp their rational stances quite a bit to justify defending them--often so far that the stances stop really making sense at all. For example a person might selectively not register any of the accusations against Kirk, because to register them would mean engaging with them, which might threaten Kirk's validity---and since Kirk is speaking to something important to them, his validity can't really be threatened. I think a lot of people's support of Trump is like this. He's disgusting, yeah, but he is able to stand up against an "abstract" threat--of domineering progressive morality, of a nation ruled by a ruling/intellectual class that is pretending like the economic foundations aren't totally eroded; of a narrative around racism that turns around and justifies racism against white people of a sort; etc--and that means that he must be _right_, and therefore gets defended by people who even 10-20 years ago would have found him despicable.
I don't fault people for doing this really; I think of it as more a skill issue: people should be better at figuring out what they really need, because I doubt it's actually fascism, and then better at separating that out and rejecting the fascist part. In particular we ought to have leaders in society who speak to those moral issues in a respectable way, without compromising other morals. I'm basically not aware of anyone managing to do this (although I have high hopes for the growing wave of millennial democrats, since they seem to be much less beholden to the creepy boomer-era backroom manipulation that has characterized politics my whole life. But who knows, maybe that will all get sold out in time).
>that's about as far from "acting like a fascist" as it's possible to get.
Well said! Kirk's discussions (and I disagree with many of his view) are _exactly_ the kind of civil discourse we need more of. He was doing Democracy _right_ .
"But the people being called fascists aren't capable of introspection"
Citation very much needed. I think you have a myopically narrow view of who all has been called "fascist" over the past decade or so.
This. Let us not pretend that “fascist” has been a label reserved for actual extremist in the recent past.
Well, I'm at risk of sounding like I'm cheating: I'm talking about the people who are using the word correctly, not the people throwing it around for anyone who they dislike. There's a reason it has 'gone mainstream' in the last few years. If you pretend like there's not, of course nothing makes any sense to you.
It's also evidently not the case that that's something one can cite. It's obviously an opinion, not a fact.
Political arguing in this comment section would really have a much higher chance of being productive if people would argue in good faith.
I'm skeptical that you, Alex, are arguing in good faith.
Your last few comments have all centered on insinuations of unspecified behaviors that you call
>acting like a fascist
I don't trust you.
You have chosen to _not_ say what specific behaviors _you_ classify as "acting like a fascist".
_What are they??? Name them._
You have been hiding behind statements including:
>You're pretending to not know why people call him that. Why?
Which sound profoundly dishonest, as if you knew that everyone secretly agreed with your faction's position. In point of fact, most people probably don't agree.
So tell us, straightforwardly and honestly: If you consider Kirk to be a fascist, _why_ do _you_ consider him that? Stop hiding and insinuating.
My earlier comment was less "I (Alex) think the people they are calling fascists are acting like fascists". My comment was: "if you (not Alex) are confused about why they are calling people fascists, it's obvious (to Alex) that it's because they think they're talking about are fascists". People in here are acting *confused* about why other people are using that language. What is there to be confused about? They're *telling* you why. It's not a trick. They think that, and they have tons of reasons, which they're listing.
e.g. "Which sound profoundly dishonest, as if you knew that everyone secretly agreed with your faction's position. In point of fact, most people probably don't agree." You don't even know what faction I'm in. It's really not about factions. The person I was responding to was motte-and-baileying, hard: "all Charlie kirk did was talk to people" (one definition of fascism, conveniently limited for the purposes of defending Kirk). Whereas we are obviously talking about a different definition that involves their ideological stances and what they are a supporter of, rather than what they do---since that is how literally everyone uses the word, always. "Fascist" does not mean "is in the streets with guns", it means "a supporter of fascism". Like, obviously.
edit: I forgot what part of my first comment said cause it was a few days ago so removed the second part here.
I don't really care if Kirk is a called a fascist or not. If he minded the fact that people found what he did despicable he would have stopped. Same for a lot of the other people who are intentionally screwing things up right now. I would love to live in a world where if a person was being called fascist they would stop to think "huh, maybe I should not upset these people so much". Obviously that matters very much who is calling you fascist and whether you have power, of course: if lots of mainstream respectable people are doing it, you're probably wrong or at least being a shit; if random fringe idiots are doing it, who cares. (I will readily agree that there are plenty of liberals who were called fascist and, while that branding was almost certainly wrong as a matter of fact, they probably *were* in the wrong and needed to cut it out, and they did not.) Personally I have a political ideology where if you're really upsetting the other party you ought to attend to their needs/desires as well; I felt this way when the democrats were in charge and I especially feel this way now. (This is not a stance I see many other people holding.) But I have a lot more condemnation for Trump and co. because of their overt willingness (to the point of bragging) to do things out of spite, greed, and corruption. By and large I see the democrats as attempting to be good (but often blinded by their self-righteousness). I'll take that over intentional evil / "might makes right" / overt fascism any day.
Many Thanks for your comment. This is much better. It will take me a while to digest all you wrote. I do, mostly agree with your:
>Personally I have a political ideology where if you're really upsetting the other party you ought to attend to their needs/desires as well;
A caveat on that though: There are debates, notably the interminable abortion debate, where the two sides deeply upset each other, and this is probably unavoidable.
Edit:
>I don't really care if Kirk is a called a fascist or not.
This looks quite strange in a comment on a post which centers on who counts as a fascist, and what is a sane response to them. It is also strange in the context of your own words that:
>"Fascist" does not mean "is in the streets with guns", it means "a supporter of fascism". Like, obviously.
and your words:
>But the people being called fascists aren't capable of introspection, and the people calling them fascists aren't capable of enforcing it, so the whole thing has become a farce. Nevertheless these modern fascists are wrong, and they're certainly capable of understanding why they're being called that, and ought to stop acting like fascists just because it's right to stop.
If you don't really care whether Kirk was called a fascist, then why are you writing about that here?
>If he minded the fact that people found what he did despicable he would have stopped.
My best guess is that the Kirk's murderer considered Kirk speaking his mind to be despicable.
Do _you_ find Kirk speaking his mind despicable, and, if so, why _specifically_?
( Is there a point in discussing whether Kirk's views met any of the criteria for fascist, or are you uninterested in that? If your (?) objection to Kirk is independent of fascism, that's fine, but I _do_ want to hear whether _you_ objected to him, and, if so, _specifically_ why. )
Part of the context for this is that the left (and, to a lesser extent, the right) have spent the last two decades making the construction of outrage a cottage industry. They may actually feel the outrage they voice - but if we give in to that, they get a hecklers' veto over even discussing any viewpoint that they have worked themselves into a lather about. I do not accept that state of affairs.
The people who are using the word to mean "highly punchable right wing extremist I don't like, and I don't want you to stop and think too much before joining the hate", *are* using the word correctly. That's what the word means, and outside of some purely historical contexts that's pretty much the only thing the word means. There was a time when that usage would have been incorrect. There was a time when it would be controversial and disruptive. But that time is over; they've won.
If there are people who still use it to mean "this person's political philosophy is a much closer match to that of Mussolini and Franco than to any of history's other sorts of odious authoritarian", then they are now using the word wrong. Really, I suspect very few people use it that way(*) except in a Motte-Bailey sort of way where they mean both the political-history thing and the commence-punching thing but want to dance between the two for maximum effect.
But if there is someone who wants to convey just the political-history version along with "...and that doesn't mean that we should hate or punch them, at least not without thinking this through and talking it over", then they are using the word incorrectly. Because "fascist" *will* be understood to mean "hate on; commence punching", and using words that will convey a message dangerously different than you intended is the very essence of using language incorrectly.
* Outside of purely historic/academic discussions decoupled from any contemporary politics.
So, how did it go mainstream to justify calling the Mayor a fascist, as in Scott's example?
I don't know what you're talking about? what mayor?
The part of the original post where he links the SF progressive journalist:
"But I don’t think the answer can be “violence is permissible when you can classify someone with a loaded term so vague that people regularly use it to describe expedited restaurant permitting”.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DPkN4CSgV5Z/
"San Francisco’s “pragmatic” politics aren’t moderate. They’re rehearsing authoritarian techniques that could scale nationally.
When billionaire-funded groups rebrand emergency powers as efficiency and dissent as disorder, we’re not solving crises, we’re surrendering democratic safeguards.
If we can’t name these fascistic tendencies in a liberal city, we won’t stop them anywhere."
If San Francisco, of all places, is now becoming an authoritarian wasteland ruled over by those of fascistic tendencies, then what hope for the rest of us?
Trump called the Democrats "fascists," and they didn't change their actions at all. Are they also incapable of introspection?
Really, Alex? "Stop making me hit you"? That's the argument of an abuser, not a kind compassionate person who only wants to have a civilised discussion of differences.
Apparently I'm a fascist since I'm not on board with the slew of modern social liberalisation programmes. Fine by me, I don't give a damn. It is funny, in a black humour way, to see the former heroes of social liberalism now being called fascists for not moving with the Overton window (see Graham Linehan).
But truly, I have no interior life, am incapable of introspection, and will never be able to be improved by the kindly instruction of my betters, so I get the bullet, right? Not *your* fault, I *made* you do it because I didn't change how I behaved!
"It seems clear to me that calling someone fascist is supposed to mean "you're acting like a fascist, which means we should have grounds to hurt you; please stop acting like a fascist so we don't have to"."
No, I think - hmm, better use a less inflammatory metaphor here - it's to accuse your opponent of pig-wrasslin' and (best result for you) get them to splutter outraged denials of ever having been near a pig; see the LBJ anecdote:
https://www.thestanduplawyer.com/make-the-sonofabitch-deny-it-the-rise-of-pig-fucker-politics/
The result you are hoping for is to get it out into the public consciousness that "A is a pig-wrassler", especially to those who may never have heard of A before. Now, the first thing that comes to mind in the context of A, is "They're a pig-wrassler" and A has to waste time and resources dealing with that, before they can get on to whatever topic they really want to discuss.
And most people won't even take the time to find out "but is it *true* that A is a pig-wrassler?", they'll just take it as truth because they read it somewhere on the Internet. And the Usual Suspects, the very online very activist set, will promulgate it as Gospel that A is indeed a pig-wrassler, no more need be said, even querying is it true leaves the enquirer open to accusations of pig-wrasslin' themselves.
"It seems like they are so set on sticking it to liberals that it just makes them be more fascist instead, which is very pathetic and sad to see."
The only way to succeed is to not give a thundering damn if your rivals call you a pig-wrassler (all supposing, of course, that you are indeed not wrasslin' pigs). The accusation is beneath contempt, you're not going to dignify it with an answer. Indeed, it may even be mischievous fun to double-down on "so common-sense opinion B makes me a pig-wrassler? well then, let's get into the pig-pen!" and stick it to the libs, as it were.
I am sure somebody else has already made this point, but eels are not fish!!!1!!1!
Why not? I think sharks are much closer to most people's mental prototype of a "fish" than eels are.
So?
> i bet if I surveyed people at least some of them wouldn't think that sharks are fish.
I'll note that (a) that is the weakest possible claim you could make without stating that sharks are fish; and (b) it still might not be true.
Try it out. Ask ten people to identify which of a set of pictures are fish. Include a shark, a turtle, a grasshopper, a cat, a crab, and 3-5 "real fish". See what they say.
(It's necessary to include obvious non-fish in the poll so that the fact that you're asking the question doesn't reveal to the pollees that you want them to mark the shark as "not fish".)
What point is that? Wikipedia leads off by noting that "[True e]els are ray-finned fish", putting them in the same class as things like catfish or salmon.
Yep, turns out I was just wrong about this. I grew up doing a lot of fishing in the UK, where we learn that eels are not fish. I got it into my head that this was taxonomically correct, something due to the fact that eels in Europe only reproduce in the Caribbean(!), can live for three days out of water, et cetera. Basically, they don’t seem like regular fish. And I thought it followed that they actually were not fish. Turns out “fish“ covers a hell of a lot more kind of animals than I realised
The word used to be a lot broader than it is now. Think of starfish.
I think the animals generally accepted as "fish" today need to be a little more similar to each other, but they fail to form a clade. However, eels are one of the kinds of animals that we still consider fish.
Update: according to wikipedia again, fish are now "all vertebrates other than the tetrapods".
Indeed. One of those cases of getting something stuck in my head as a kid, and then just assuming it’s true until one day realising… It isn’t!
Whales aren't fish either, but that doesn't stop people from reading Jonah and the whale and ignoring that the Bible says it's a fish (to be fair, I don't think the Bible says it's a whale either, just that it's a big fish; later translations called it a whale) 😁 Now I have to make the allotted joke:
If the fish eyes are small
And they've nearly no fins at all
That's a moray
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moray_eel
https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/144115256795594067/
I think that 1 and 3 are obviously good, that 2 is obviously wrong at present but has been true in the past (e.g. under Hitler), and similarly I have every sympathy with e.g. slave revolts, so I think the interesting and important question is "under what circumstances does political violence become acceptable?"
Roughly speaking, I think that my answer is that a little violence around the edges is never justifiable. There are situations when an entire system of rule has gone bad, and challenging it by force is legitimate, but that if things have not gone that far then violence is not acceptable.
I think a corollary is that violence is only ever acceptable if it's being conducted a) by agents of a government, in accordance with the rule of law, or b) against supporters of a regime (or other powerful group) sufficiently bad to justify overthrowing it by force.
To justify violence outside a legal framework it's not enough that the target be evil, they must also be powerful (in some context - self-defence is justified if/because the target has the power to injure you, even if they're not politically powerful).
I agree in principle, but the “no political violence” norm depends on institutions still holding. Once they start to slip, that premise rides on sand. I’m not sure the logic would travel quite as well off the page.
Some commenters have lately noted that "fascist" seems to be a way to mark people as acceptable targets for stochastic terrorist violence. As some put it: "They don't attack you for being a fascist. They call you a fascist so they can attack you." If this seems true, it may be time to add "fascist" to the short list of accusations that count as "per se" defamation, meaning you'd better be able to back up your words in court.
Funnily enough, "saying that someone is acceptable to murder" is not what defamation is, so your point seems irrelevant to mine.
Who the heck are "they"?? I live in San Francisco, supposedly an Antifa hotbed. Sure, we have "Antifa" here, they appeared during the political protests of the first Trump administration. They amount to about 6 kids on skateboards, who get overwrought during protests and do things like set fire to garbage cans and break car windows. Same think happens at sport events, by the same people. Stochastic? Hardly. (They're probably stock traders now.) There is no terrorist Antifa. However, there is growing fascism, and in my opinion, all those who love democracy should be anti-fascist, not cowardly little authoritarians with their prissy language policing.
You fundamentally misunderstand the type of people who join Antifa vs those who become "stock traders". But your overall point is correct.
I think the slipperiest part of this is the equivalence of saying that one's political opponents are an acceptable target of political violence and the actual belief or action that they are. People say a lot of shit and the internet (where most of this speech takes place) is particularly irony poisoned, but language is fundamentally figurative; reef of dead metaphor and all that. "Go to hell" isn't a threat of eternal damnation, "die in a fire" isn't a death threat, etc. The legal requirement of a true threat is much harder to meet, and includes basically none of the speech in question.
Also, if you think political violence can be justified, then threats of politcal violence are probably also justified, and presumably at a lower threshold. It would be a bit absurd to have a response function with a cliff, where if a leader has rigged x% of vote everyone is politely protesting, but they if they rig 1.01x% of the vote people start a hot civil war. If political violence is a constraint on regime policy, it makes sense to start signaling that well in advance of when violence is actually justified. You can think that threats of political violence aren't currently justified, but I think it requires a different argument.
> When Woodie Guthrie famously wrote on his guitar that “This machine kills fascists” - a sentiment imitated and snowcloned by later generations of musicians and commentators - nobody worried this was a bad thing. Nobody demanded that somebody stop the machine before it killed again.
My understanding is that Guthrie pasted the "this machine kills fascists" after Japan attacked us and war was declared. Then we were at war with three countries, one run by Nazis, one run by fascists, and one run by a nationalist military junta. Of the three, only Mussolini called himself a fascist, but Americans called them all fascists, and it was our duty to kill them.
Of course, Guthrie was a communist, and cheerleader for the war effort after Germany invaded the USSR. No one (except the American Nazi Party) thought it a bad thing for him to have articulated his animus towards fascists through his music. I grew up listening to Woody. Times were different then, but no one was horrified by his sticker or ditties such as this one...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHKjOl9ocR0
And in retrospect, it was a good thing. Of course, very few people living today have memories of the threat that fascism held in the 30s and 40s. So, it may be easy for the younger generations to just shrug their shoulders when masked men drag people off the streets. The people doing the dragging may not call themselves fascists, but they definitely qualify as thugs.
Note that the rise of fascism coincides with the demise of those who fought on the Allied side in World War II. Only the sociopaths were thrilled about killing others but the enormous sacrifice of going to war was deemed necessary by the very great evil of fascism. Apparently fascism is wearing a more pleasant face now, with the usual promise of riches in exchange for human rights, and the younger generations think it's going to be different this time. Our parents and grandparents would be horrified by this moment. I, personally, and very sad that I will have to face the fact that many Americans are fascists. They want to see society maximally controlled, and do not much care about the violence wreaked on others as long as it's not them. They also dream of the riches that the sociopathic bandits who have taken control are collecting. Despite the fantasies of ease, this cannot end well for most of us.
> Note that the rise of fascism coincides with the demise of those who fought on the Allied side in World War II.
If you're implying that there was a cause and effect, just about every country that holds elections seems to have a fascist party. So, I don't think it follows that "the rise of fascism coincides with the demise of those who fought on Allied side." But maybe I'm misunderstanding your point.
However, I agree with the rest of your post.
> grew up listening to Woody. Times were different then, but no one was horrified by his sticker or ditties such as this one...
I don't think Scott's analysis of the sticker is on point. If Woody Guthrie had put the same sticker on a rifle he liked to display, the reception would have been different. It would also have been different if he had bludgeoned someone to death with his guitar.
In Woody Guthrie's time, violence against fascism was held to be justified because fascism was an exceptionally evil movement, inimicable to human rights. But I guess now fascism is just a lifestyle choice? If you have enough money, who needs human rights, amIright?
Prediction markets track odds for the 2026 Midterms and the 2028 Presidential Elections. In theory, if the president committed himself to actions that enabled his party to consolidate power, this would cause shifts in these market prices. In theory someone could build a model that tracked 'net probability points won due to anti-democratic actions' on behalf of the ruling party, where anything over 10 or 15 probability points added would be called 'anti-democratic'. This would require some modeling expertise to pull off but I am sure someone could do it.
This is a fantastic idea.
I'm not sure that claim #3 is useful. Whether you view political violence as morally acceptable or not, it always exists. When someone is arrested for murder, that is political violence. The political will of the state to limit the killing of people to certain theaters by certain actors is maintained by detaining someone against their will. But I also don't think it is useful to label someone a fascist. Fascism is an ideology, and one cannot know the intent of another person. Rather, people's actions can be fascistic whether or not the person doing those actions is a fascist. People are not arrested for the ideology of murder, they are arrested for doing murder.
The question, then, comes down to what actions are fascistic and whether you support the use of political violence to suppress people who do fascistic things. Of course, unlike with murder, the state apparatus of the United States will not intervene in most fascistic action, because most fascistic actions align with the current interests of the state.
>When someone is arrested for murder, that is political violence.
No, it's not. "Political violence" means the unlawful use of force in furtherance of political ends. Arresting a murder suspect is lawful because the State has a constitutionally-derived right to enforce the law.
That's circular reasoning. The state determines what is lawful, and therefore the state would never be capable of committing political violence. Political violence is the use of force for the furtherance of political ends.
No, that's just a definition. Sure, the state can't commit political violence. But political violence is only one of the many types of violence (legitimate or not).
Trying to widen the definition is one of the big problems I see with discourse today--by widening the definitions of things, you can make unjust things seem more justified by sweeping in other stuff.
Per my response below, definitions are not particularly useful concepts. You say that people are widening the definitions of things, but concepts naturally undergo semantic bleaching and shift. Railing against these changes is just like complaining that nobody uses "whom" anymore. It's a prescriptivist approach. I understand political violence to be any kind of violence that serves a political goal. We can try to narrow that meaning by saying whether it can be lawful or unlawful, state or non-state, but that's just an attempt to give a strict definition to a broad semantic category.
Anon, if debate was music you would be J S Bach. That was a pleasure to read, thank you.
It's not circular, it's definitional. My point is purely semantic. The State is technically incapable of committing political violence. However, elected officials can commit political violence if they exceed their lawful authority in the exercise of their power. Of course in that case they're no longer considered lawful representatives of State power and therefore bear the responsibility for that violence themselves. Just like a lawful execution cannot be properly described as murder (because murder is unlawful killing and lawful execution is ... well, lawful) the State itself can't be ever be said to have committed political violence.
If your point is purely semantic, then there isn't any reason to discuss it. As a descriptivist, I believe words mean what people use them to mean in a given context. And I believe most people understand political violence to refer to violence meant to achieve a political goal. If most people think such violence becomes unpolitical when the state does it, then I concede your point. In that case, though, I'd argue that political violence becomes even more necessary. Otherwise, how are we to protect ourselves from the unpolitical violence of the state?
>The State is technically incapable of committing political violence. However, elected officials can commit political violence if they exceed their lawful authority in the exercise of their power.
Hmm... Given your second sentence, I'm going to take your first as intended to mean: "The State, when acting lawfully, is technically incapable of committing political violence."
But the law is a huge accumulation, starting with the Constitution (writing from the USA), plus amendments, plus thousands of statutes, plus precedents - many of which are vague, many of which conflict with each other. A huge volume of State action is in a gray area, not clearly lawful or unlawful (e.g. all of the disputed actions on immigration law by the current and previous administrations.) So enforcement of a disputed law (which often has political ramifications) might plausibly be viewed as political violence.
I think a State can be considered to commit political violence in certain circumstances; when the agents of the State detain a murderer against the murderer's will, that is not political violence (nor, I would contend, violence); if the agents of the State are detaining members of a certain political party or other minority group based on political reasons, that is political violence (e.g. Erdogan dealing with the coup attempt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Turkish_coup_attempt; he extended the reaction of the State to the Gülenists and this was plainly in order to get rid of political opposition).
Is there a set of words you'd accept that includes the things that Scott meant by "political violence" and excludes the things that he didn't mean by "political violence"?
It's not entirely clear to me from Scott's post what things he doesn't mean when he says political violence. I bring up the example of state-initiated political violence to point out that the notion of objecting to political violence is naïve.
The state enacts violence to maintain itself, and even if you determine that this state-initiated violence does not count as political, that violence still occurs. Scott himself articulates that, at some point, political violence becomes a viable option, "between Orban and Hitler" for Scott. In other words, at some point the violence of the state must be countered with violence, and I'm not sure it's meaningful to say that one of these is political and the other isn't. Rather, the assumption seems to be that the violence of the state is tolerable or good until it sufficiently diverges from one's values. For me, the clearest way to articulate that is to say that people support political violence that furthers their material goals, and oppose political violence that harms their material goals.
If more people agree that the state's violence isn't political, then I am happy to acknowledge that consensus. Though it does seem convenient that the daily violence we tolerate does not count as political violence, whereas the violence that we must avoid except in the most extreme circumstances is political.
Explain to me what is political about "I don't want to be murdered, so I depute the authority to representatives of the government of the people to arrest murderers"?
Okay, we can quibble about "governments are politics" but in general how do we deal with "some people are going around murdering"? Do we say "everyone should have the right to engage in violence, the State gets no power to limit the right of killing certain people to certain actors"? Do we say "it's okay if the State never kills anyone in war or peace, they just arrest murderers but never use force against them, the cops don't get to shoot anyone even in self-defence, and there is no capital punishment"? Where is the line drawn?
I think maybe you misunderstand my point. I believe murderers should be detained. When state officers detain a person because they broke a law of the state, in order to subject them to a court of the state, with consequences determined by the law of the state, I do understand that to be political.
Just because I support it, does not make it non-violent or non-political. We all have a (fuzzy) line where political violence goes from being good or necessary to dangerous and destabilizing. Scott says as much when he states that his is probably "somewhere between Orban and Hitler." He is talking about non-state political violence, but I would argue that he is implying the existence of state political violence. The political violence of Hitler justified a politically violent response. I would rather not mask the political violence of the state as apolitical in order to easily legitimize it.
"The political will of the state to limit the killing of people to certain theaters by certain actors is maintained by detaining someone against their will."
And most people would be very happy that someone running around stabbing people in the neck is detained against their will, given that their will is "I want to run around stabbing people in the neck".
Calling that "political violence" will make nine out of ten cats switch off from listening to whatever point you want to make.
I'm going to stake my own personal line in the sand here.
As a private individual not participating as an official member of an armed military engaged in hostile actions under a regularized command,
the utmost outer bounds of legitimate violence lie where I could usually get away with a self-defense defense to a charge of assault or murder/manslaughter/etc. That is, *imminent* defense of *self, others directly near me, or other sentient beings* against *significant* *physical* threat. And then only to the degree necessary to stop the threat and no further. And in most cases, the moral line lies INSIDE the legal line--there are legally-valid actions that are not morally justified but not the reverse.
Words, beliefs, and political actions (voting, etc) **never**, under any circumstances, pose a significant physical threat to my life or those around me. Thus, political violence is *never* justified. Yes, that includes all cases. No, I would never be justified in assassinating Hitler, unless I were a member of an active, violent revolution against the state and this was part of my military mission, ie an act of war rather than a personal attack.
That said, there are cases where *taking part in a violent revolution* may not only be justified but morally required. But even then, it's only justified *to the degree that you're acting as a military member*. Even for the Allies in WWII, walking into random Germans' homes and shooting them because they were members of the Nazi party *would be unjustified*.
So no. Someone being a "fascist" *or even a dictator* may, possibly, justify *armed revolt*. It will never justify *individual vigilante-style attacks*. Against anyone. And violence by a private individual against a private individual, acting in their personal capacity, other than direct self defense against an imminent, significant physical threat to life or health is NEVER justified.
I think there's a fallacy in how you're handling the trilemma here. (This is the kind of thing that would be tedious to point out on most blogs, but this is ACX, so...)
My read of the blog's position: We can grant that #1 may be true, since it's an empirical question (and see e.g. twitter.) #3 is moral rather than empirical, but you say that it's true that "political violence against fascists is impermissibile" on the weight of political violence being very bad. And therefore, since the trilemma requires one falsehood, #2 is false.
But we've conflated two senses of "bad" in the handling of #3! It's readily apparent (if you take a history course) that political violence is bad in practical terms; it is destructive and generally leads to overall lower utility for all concerned than the modal peaceful situation. It does not follow however that political violence is *morally* bad, in a way which would make it "impermissible" and therefore show that #3 is true.
At best, we could say that #3 being false would be bad in practical terms, because therefore #1 and #2 could be true . And, like, yeah; if there are fascists in America and people are going around shooting them, that's really bad for rule of law and other (practically) important things. But this state of affairs could still be moral, in that we haven't shown that there aren't people who it is moral to do violence to.
In the final analysis, of course, it's a wash; given basically any plausible utilitarian theory, and/or basic acceptance of political liberalism, political violence is pretty clearly morally bad in anything resembling the modern scenario (either because it results in lower-utility outcomes, or because it violates human rights to political expression or rule of law, or whatever.) But the trick that was used to try to get around the necessity of that kind of analysis fails, I think.
That makes sense, and I see where our disagreement lies. I'm a descriptivist with regard to linguistics, so I don't believe that definitions are meaningful. Cognitive linguistics shows that people conceptualize ideas as broad semantic categories, with those categories having fuzzy edges. Any argument that attempts to strictly define political violence (lawful or unlawful, state or non-state, etc.) is not compelling from a cognitive linguistics perspective. Rather, I understand political violence to be anything within the semantic category that includes violence meant to achieve a political end.
"I'm a descriptivist with regard to linguistics, so I don't believe that definitions are meaningful."
Okay, but if "fascist" means "I don't think six year olds should be put on puberty blockers*", then what damn meaning do words have at all? We may as well just grunt and point and jump up and down, because that's what such usage of terms has degraded to.
*Please note! This is rhetorical exaggeration and not meant to be a genuine description of any demands!
As you point out, your example is a rhetorical exaggeration. Descriptivism doesn't mean that words don't have meaning, it means that words don't have *inherent* meaning. If most people agreed that that's what fascism means, then that's what fascism would mean. But because nobody thinks that's what fascism means, it isn't what fascism means.
In any case, I actually agree with Scott's point that we should be careful about overusing the term fascism. Because there is very little consensus on what fascism means (Scott himself points out that attempts to define fascism only get you in the ballpark of its meaning), you might say the word with one semantic context in mind, but the person that you are talking to might bring an entirely different semantic context to the conversation. That doesn't mean that either of our usages is incorrect, in the same way that if I am speaking to a Brit and they call fries "chips," they are not incorrect.
It's best to clarify what one means when one refers to fascism. I could say, "I think this is a fascistic policy in that it is ultra-nationalistic." The other person might say, "I usually think of fascism as having more to do with a cult of personality surrounding a leader or party, but I understand what you mean by calling this policy ultra-nationalistic."
>We may as well just grunt and point and jump up and down
Hey! No invoking Greta Thunberg!
>But against this, most people who say “communist” would be happy enough to replace it with some applicable superset/subset/near-synonym, like Marxist, socialist, anticapitalist, far-leftist, Maoist, etc - and people seem to argue against communism just fine.
I think the analogy holds: people use fascist, authoritarian, far-right and Nazi fairly interchangeably.
Note that Woodie Guthrie performed for the USO during WW2 - to a small but real sense, his machine participated in utterly legitimate fascist-killing. Without this crucial aspect, it would just have been silly and bombastic, but considering the situation, I think it was earned.
The question about in which circumstances is poltical violence warranted can be answered by thinking about the escalation ladder. The escalation ladder refers to usually don't escalate all the way to nuclear weapons (for example) right away. Participants usually limit themselves. It's always dengerous to escalate in a conflict because there's a risk that escalating will give your opponent an advantage, but if you think that you will gain an advantage by escalating, you might do so anyway to get that advantage. Most of the time though, you want to avoid excalating but to do that you have to confinve your opponent that it isn't worth escalating aagainst you. This is why countries spend so much money and resources on big armyies and things like nuclear weapons even if they don't intend to ever go to war. It's because being prepared for war and showing your enemies that you're prepared for war makes war less likely.
The same is true with politics. The question isn't "when do we start killing people?" It's "how do we improve the odds that we will come out on top if and when we get to the killing people stage of political breakdown?" The solution isn't "punch a fascist", it's prepare so that when a fascist tries to punch you he's the one that ends up on his face.
“Francoist”
It might be worth mentioning that many theorists don't consider Franco a fascist, but "merely" fascism-adjacent. The actual fascists were the Falangists, and while they became influential, they weren't the ones in actual charge. The Franco regime was in many ways "just" a regular military dictatorship.
Of course, if this was what you intended by "Francoist", then it's particularly precise.
Was anyone non-Italian a fascist?
Importantly, were the Nazis fascists?
Sure, there were plenty of fascist parties about across much of the globe (including the extremely "soft" Brazilian Integralists, for instance), and several of them came into power during WW2. Franco might not have been a fascist, but the Spanish Falange certainly was. The Iron Guard regime in Romania was (it was so fascist that other fascists thought it was a bit excessive). The Ustasha in Croatia was. And so on.
The Nazis were a weird and somewhat unrepresentative subset, I would say (for one thing, fascism is almost always Christian and frequently Catholic, and the Nazis ditched this bit). Calling the Nazis Nazis is therefore more precise and useful - it doesn't mean they weren't fascists.
And while not typically called that, Putin is a fascist by any reasonable definition.
Xi too?
No, he’s a socialist.
And a nationalist. A National Socialist, perhaps?
"Lictor, unbind the fasces." Learned about that in sixth grade, I think. Along with plebians and patricians and Latins and Etruscans.
This discussion is reminiscent of the controversy over the SPLC's "hate group" designations that led to a guy shooting up the offices of Focus on the Family years ago.
There is something odd about defining fascism as "a type of far-right nationalism". Isn’t "far-right" a place- and time-specific term, making it completely useless for the purpose of clear and lasting definitions? A person in 2045 India will have a completely different understanding from us, or from someone in 1960s Argentina.
People often say words like "nazi" have lost all meaning and just became another term for "asshole", but here it is literally true. "Far right" does not even make a claim at being a useful descriptive term.
Sorry to make a tangential comment, but that X user's framing Julie Pitta's actions as "robbing" a cafe feel like they're meant to mislead. I have no particular horse in this race- I don't, and never have, lived anywhere near the Bay Area. This is my first time hearing of Julie Pitta or the current political situation in San Francisco. But based on a Google search, it seems like Pitta just removed a sign from a political candidate she did not like that was posted in the cafe. I do not condone this, but I disagree that that should be described as "robbing" the cafe. So it appears that @kane is using connotation in order to mislead here.
"it seems like Pitta just removed a sign from a political candidate she did not like that was posted in the cafe."
Ha, here's an opportunity for me to plume myself on superior virtue/be excoriated for not being sufficiently pro-the struggle of truth versus evil.
Way, way back when I was eighteen, there were signs up in the third-level institution I attended that were pro-contraception (this of course was the edgy Student Union stuff about the latest referenda in the Irish culture wars). I disagreed with this, and was tempted to tear them down. But then I reminded myself that no, even if I thought a position was wrong and indeed harmful, the other side had the right to express their views in the public square.
So - was I a stalwart defender of free speech, or a disappointment to Julie Pitta? 😁
> even if we disagree with him it’s poor practice to hold a debate where it’s impermissible to assert one side
It's poor epistemological practice. It's a pretty important political practice. If you stop doing that, people start disagreeing.
> I think it’s probably bad practice to demand that reasonable people not use the word “fascist”. It risks giving unreasonable people a heckler’s veto over every useful term - if some moron says it’s okay to kill environmentalists, we can’t ban the term “environmentalist”
But "fascist" isn't a useful term. If it was one, that hasn't been the case for many, many decades. Today it means "person who is disliked by the speaker". It makes sense to ask people not to use it in arguments for the same reason it makes sense to ask people not to use the word "shithead" in arguments.
We don't need to ban it, we can just restrict ourselves to using it for people who identify as such.
If you're talking about someone who identifies as a fascist then it's reasonable to call them one, otherwise it's not reasonable.
The same goes for, say, Satan-worshippers.
"The same goes for, say, Satan-worshippers."
Except the Satanic Temple types are all "we don't really worship Satan, we don't believe in a literal Devil, we're just using the trappings to wind up the Fundies" (which is why I think they should be ignored, because they're smug idiots and rather pathetic dress-up, not worth giving them publicity by getting publicly outraged at their stunts. Yes, I would like to smack 'em in the face for the tastelessness of some of their crap*, but better to ignore them and let them pretend they're being so edgy with statues of Baphomet** and Petrine crosses).
Anyway, I agree that "fascist" should be restricted to "really is a fascist" but the term has gone the way of "racist", "transphobe", etc. that it is now functionally meaningless apart from indicating "I think you're a big meanie!"
* https://thesatanictemple.com/pages/samuel-alitos-moms-satanic-abortion-clinic?srsltid=AfmBOorIObZK-SINRxhVvaAANhEELjN9TuSlQI0_rj43fNK4SwfHmPwA "Samuel Alito's Mom's Satanic Abortion Clinic™ is an online clinic that provides religious medication abortion care. The clinic provides abortion medication via mail to those in New Mexico who wish to perform The Satanic Temple's Religious Abortion Ritual." Ha, ha, so witty: Alito's mom! Because he was a Catholic! Geddit?
** Poor Éliphas Lévi, good job he didn't live to see the uses that would be made of his symbology.
There is, in fact, a fair amount of more actual-Satan-oriented Satan worshippers than the Satanic Temple.
Oh, I'm sure there are genuine "yes really the Devil" Satanists out there, but the ones grabbing publicity are the likes of the Satanic Temple.
So I think they're dumb (and playing with fire because yeah I believe in the Devil) but that doesn't mean they should be oppressed by force. I might *like* to drag them all off to a dungeon on grounds of being annoying edgelords who are terminally uncool, but nope. Can't do that, shouldn't do that.
The Satanic Temple seem be about taunting the religious, which, in the US, is 1A protected speech.
On the other hand, it seems there are actual genuine satanists, doing a bunch of stuff that is very bad and very very illegal.
Now, what would be funny is if the Devil shuns them on grounds of their being annoying edgelords who are terminally uncool... :-)
( Come to think of it, is "edgelord" an epithet? Would yelling "uncool edgelord" as someone count as "fighting words"? )
How so?
If we take "Satan" to be defined by the teachings of the Catholic Church, it's essentially impossible for anyone to worship him sincerely, since he is opposed to the welfare of humanity in general and of each human individually.
You could have a group worshiping a deity that they believe the church has unfairly mislabeled "Satan", but... so what?
> Except the Satanic Temple types are all "we don't really worship Satan, we don't believe in a literal Devil, we're just using the trappings to wind up the Fundies" (which is why I think they should be ignored, because they're smug idiots and rather pathetic dress-up, not worth giving them publicity by getting publicly outraged at their stunts. Yes, I would like to smack 'em in the face for the tastelessness of some of their crap*, but better to ignore them and let them pretend they're being so edgy with statues of Baphomet** and Petrine crosses).
Well sure, that's the way I feel about neo-Nazis too.
America's government routinely engages in murderous violence abroad or social murder of its own people, and its political system is impervious to changing that and if anything becoming more closed
I think 3 is an increasingly untenable position - although the one caveat I'd add is that violence should target power-brokers making decisions to i.e. blow up Venezuelan fishing boats or aid genocide in Gaza, and not some guy with a swastika tattoo.
I've been called Nice Hitler on here so obviously I don't believe “violence is permissible when you can classify someone with a loaded term so vague that people regularly use it to describe expedited restaurant permitting”. But sheer devil's advocate: consider the French resistance. They (obviously) believed there were lots of fascists in France, that it was acceptable to use violence against them, but on the other hand killing the first guy in a Nazi uniform you see would not be worth the information you reveal about your modus operandi.
I think the problem with 2 is that it implicitly assumes that whether somebody is legitimate target of violence is purely a moral question and does not depend on empirical factors like the prevalence of the ideology. If an evil ideology is only supported by one percent of the population and they are indeed extremely bad by the standards of their society, it might be okay to kill them, but not if they are a third of the country. In that case, even if they are super evil attacking them will just provoke retaliation on a comparable scale, which is a losers game, much better to cooperate in the prisoner’s dilemma, even though both of you reasonably prefer to defect, if the other would cooperate.
Honestly, even Scott falls into this a little because he thinks that whether revolution is justified is purely a matter of what the government has done and not dependent on things like how likely the revolution is actually to succeed. If you could overthrow Stalin you obviously should, but the most likely consequence of rebellion is red army brutally putting it down and Stalin potentially responding with even more tyranny. Now granted, sometimes it’s worth rebelling, even if you would not win, because for example, if you rebelled against Hitler during World War II, it would weaken him as he would have to pull resources from the war effort. Still, my main point is that you have to look at factors like the prevalence of the ideology, the likelihood of success and the broader effects instead of just looking at the moral character and actions of the government and the ideology.
Also, while it’s true that you can miss use stochastic terrorism the same way you can miss use incitement to murder that doesn’t mean it’s a useless concept. You should be able to call people very bad, but if you go around celebrating someone’s murder or even don’t make it clear that your audience understands that murder is bad, you are in fact being irresponsible in the present political climate. Insisting that no moral responsibility should attached to your actions because a bad actor is insisting on a completely ridiculous level of responsibility. Regardless of what level of responsibility you grant doesn’t make any sense. It’s not like you being okay with irresponsibility. Will change the opinion on the Trump administration. Some level of risk of provoking murder is acceptable for communicating valuable ideas, but there is such a thing as being too willing to take such risks. You can acknowledge that calling people bad is fine while admitting that there are actors in the public sphere who are frankly reckless with their speech, including the Trump administration.
> Many Americans are fascists.
Really? Many Americans hate other races, want the state to control the economy, and want to abolish individual rights?
That seems like something Nikole Hannah-Jones would write. Shameful, Scott.
> Many Americans hate other races, want the state to control the economy, and want to abolish individual rights?
They transparently do. If you don't see them, you might be looking in the wrong direction.
They might phrase things slightly differently though. For example, they might say things like "Whiteness is a disease" so still deny they hate a race because "race isn't real"; or say they only want "common-sense restrictions" on some individual rights.
The Italian fascists did their best to -protect- Jewish people, and other "undesirables", from the Nazis, even after the Germans occupied Italy.
Fascist != racist.
And yeah, lots of Americans want the state to control the economy. "Abolish the fed" is a pretty extreme position very few people adhere to, and yet it's basically the position that people who don't want the state controlling the economy must support.
And everybody disagrees about what individual rights should be abolished, but outside the most principled libertarians, pretty much everybody wants some of them abolished.
One fairly obvious test is that fascists (Italian Blackshirts, German Brownshirts, Romanian Iron Guard, Spanish Falange, Brazilian Integralists, American Silvershirts, Irish Blueshirts*, Hungarian Arrow-Cross) engage in political violence, and therefore violence against them is justified.
[*To be fair, the Blueshirts were formed to defend Cumann na nGaedheal party rallies from by IRA goon squads.]
I haven't seen any "MAGA" or "Trumpist" or Republican street fighters attacking anyone.
Scott, this is…beyond disappointing. You are very smart, an excellent writer and have displayed both a high level of integrity and a strong moral compass, on top of which you (for obvious reasons) have a very strong stake in the integrity and livability of the U.S. as a nation. So when I say that this piece is staggeringly counterproductive–counterproductive towards its own stated goal of keeping people peaceful and restrained–I hope you will understand that in doing so I am desperately trying to help and that my sole and only interest here is keeping all of this from getting even worse.
You got one thing partially right: nonviolence is fundamental to any sane and correct response to the things the U.S. government is doing. But “partially." It will continue to be the only sane and correct response even if Trump ignores judicial orders, cancels elections or wipes his ass with the U.S. Constitution on live TV. “Nonviolent” most certainly does not mean “compliant,” mind you. It just means “nonviolent.” No bombs, no bullets, no bricks, no fists[1]. I hope I don’t have to remind you of all people of the power of nonviolence; I directly credit “In Favor of Niceness, Community and Civilization” for helping shift my views in that direction.
Unfortunately, I think you got pretty much everything else wrong. Starting with how fundamentally silly it is to write a piece splitting hairs over whether to call the jackbooted thugs “fascist” or not. Yes, people are scared and angry and ready to lash out. But the notion that the reason they lash out will be because somebody call the goon squads running around kidnapping and shooting people “fascist” is the galaxy-brained take to end all galaxy-brained takes. If people DO lash out with violence–and I will say again that they absolutely SHOULD NOT–it will be not be because somebody called the thugs too many mean words. It will either be because of the trauma of experiencing their communities and neighborhoods being invaded and brutalized or from the fear of seeing it happen to others. Fear and trauma make people stupid and violent, and masked men with guns are quite a lot better at inflicting those things than any seven-letter word.
Which brings me to the next point: political violence. Of course I understand who you were talking to and why, but nevertheless talking about “avoiding it” and it being "unacceptable" as if it were not CURRENTLY HAPPENING is not just tone deaf in the extreme, it’s also directly aiding the I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-fascist administration’s goals of painting their extraordinary actions as “business as usual.” Let’s make this clear:
1. Political violence is currently happening in significantly more extreme, more visible ways than usual[2]. The amount of it that ISN’T coming from the right is a rounding error.
2. The primary dealer of political violence right now is the U.S. Government. It has thus far been keeping a veneer of lawfulness over this violence, but the veneer is often paper thin.[3]
3. The violence is being actively cheered on by most of the same people who have been steadfastly supporting Trump all along. Nobody with even rudimentary pattern-recognition should expect that very many of these people will stop cheering if and when the veneer of lawfulness is discarded.
4. This means that “political violence in America is morally unacceptable (at this time)” this is egregiously wrong. It SHOULD be unacceptable. It is to you and many others. But it is perfectly acceptable to millions of your countrymen. They quite clearly want lots more of it. This should be staggeringly obvious to anyone who’s been paying ANY attention the past few months.
5. The violence is not being done at random, or merely because I-can’t-believe-they’re-not-fascists like violence (though of course they do). It’s being done for the purpose of consolidating power.
Which brings us to the topic of civil war, the point where I feel you go the most egregiously wrong. Of course civil war is terrible and no sane person wants it. But speaking about it as if that were a choice that was in their hands is preposterous. The U.S. left cannot possibly start a civil war right now. Nor the U.S. right, for that matter, if we’re talking only of the general populace. It’s not 1776 anymore: nobody is starting a “war” with a world-class superpower with small arms. When Tolkien wrote “so might a child threaten a mail-clad knight with a bow of string and green willow,” he was still imagining a far closer contest than that. At worst you could have an(other) insurrection or two, certainly nothing that could be called a “war.”
No, the only entity in the United States of America that is CAPABLE of starting a war against the citizens of the United States of America is the U.S. Federal Government. That’s it. That’s the whole list. Despite that very short list, it’s terrifyingly plausible. Because it’s not really “the U.S. Federal Government,” an entity that has a history of generally sober (if often ruthless) judgement in the sphere of geopolitics. No, instead it’s the commander-in-chief of the U.S. military, a man who a year ago was ranting about immigrants in Ohio eating cats and dogs on live T.V. That’s right, the only person who can say “yes” to a U.S. civil war right now is one Donald J Trump. Everyone else’s choices are about how easy to make it for him, if he chooses to do that.
And that, ultimately, is what it is ALL about. How easy it is for Trump to wield force against the people of the U.S. He’s already doing so more than any president in our lifetimes. And anyone even half paying attention to the words and actions coming out of the White House should have zero doubt that he’s eager to do much more than that. You talk about the dichotomy between frog-boiling and “revolution;” the correct choice is neither. Both of them give the White House much more ability to wield political violence, one slowly and one quickly. You must reject both.
And that is why I so ardently believe both that open opposition to this government is vitally important but that it MUST be visibly and unquestionably peaceful. You must push back EVERY time they try to escalate the violence and coercion, but you must do so without EVER giving them anything that looks like an excuse. You can see just how slaveringly eager they are for an excuse by the ever more ridiculous firehose of lies coming out of the White House: everyday urban crime is an emergency that requires the national guard, Portland is a battleground, and left-wing terrorists lurk in every shadow. But even those baseless lies are accompanied by real, serious escalations, and need to be opposed. Court battles need to be fought. People need to show up and be as simultaneously highly-visible and undeniably-non-threatening as possible every time they send out the goon squads: those Portlanders in the inflatable costumes have exactly the right idea. And of course the lies and violence and corruption and above all the staggering incompetence all need to be exposed, need to be shown as far as possible as often as possible. It needs to be crystal clear who is doing the violence, who is doing the escalation, who is telling the lies and above all what the objective is.
And all of that requires a clarity and resolution that is totally incompatible with this sort of asinine pearl-clutching. YES, they’re fascists YES, we should call them fascists. YES we should be talking about ways in which they are doing fascist stuff[4]. I very much doubt it will bias people toward violence in any way their actual actions haven’t already, but if you’re worried, finding the right rhetorical flourishes to point out their incompetence and absurdity will be FAR more helpful than quibbling over the word. And definitely a better use of your time and talents than these trite and ridiculous false equivalencies about how social media moderation or accurately describing people’s political view or enforcing basic accountability on the powerful are basically the same as a strongman using the single most powerful political entity in the history of the world to torment people he doesn’t like. That is not being fair and equitable and seeing multiple perspectives. It is being a stooge.
I don’t want to end this with an insult, even in the name of calling a fish a fish. So I’ll say again that as deeply as this piece dismayed me, I do still like and respect your intelligence, talent and integrity. Having taken several pages to write all that out, maybe it was not-so-obvious why this was a counterproductive thing to write (though millions of people HAVE been getting it right). And certainly fear and stress don’t help with clear thinking; as strident as I am, my deepest and sincerest sympathies go to you and everyone else living through this (even having long-since left the U.S., it’s a significant source of both for me as well). So I absolutely trust that you will be trying your best to help keep the world from shattering. But a wise man once said “reality doesn’t grade on a curve.” Outcomes are what matters. Let’s produce some better outcomes.
[1] Sandwiches are perfectly OK though: sane adults can understand the difference between throwing a brick and throwing a footlong.
[2] Which is still much, much less extreme and visible than it could be, or than it has been in other times and places. But mostly humans are calibrated based on their own experiences, not based on some absolute scale or abstract sense of history.
[3] And of course “lawful” has never been incompatible with “horrifying and unjust.”
[4] If you would like a more precise discussion of what that means, I refer you to this excellent piece. Written, you’ll note, before the election and quite predictive.
https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-definition-of-fascism/
Is it 'legitimate political violence' if I agree with it, and 'dangerous domestic terrorism' if I don't?
Definitions matter. I remember having a discussion with an otherwise intelligent person while living in the US who dropped the line 'Feelings are facts.' without irony. If people use 'fascist' as a label for someone they strongly disagree with, then it doesn't legitimise political violence. I think the right approach is to leave aside the terminological debate and lay out clear red lines which would justify violence - Scott more-or-less does this; but the talk about fascism is mostly orthogonal to that. Ultimately it comes back to the debate over prescriptive vs normative use of language: do words mean what the dictionaries say, or what people intend?
So... why does it even matter whether violence is "justified" or not? The real question is, does it even make sense? You have utilitarian sympathies, don't you? What do you think you're actually accomplishing even by just attacking the administration on this blog? If they have the means to seize federal power, they really don't care what a small group of west coast libertarians think of them. I doubt it would even convince your own readers (specifically the ones who support the administration), seeing as you spent the last decade inadvertently making the case for why such extreme measures were necessary in the first place. "Don't fight battles where you don't have a good chance of accomplishing something" is warfare 101.
I hope you'll reconsider when you inevitably get your own visit from the Secret Service. None of us wants to see anything happen to you or your blog.
"And fascism is a type of far-right nationalism. "
No, no, no, why does this zombie myth never die?? Fascism is so patently obviously socialist/Left wing that it beggars belief that any on the Left still bother to pretend to argue the proposition.
If one replaced "Jew" with "Israeli" in Mein Kampf, we would have a modern leftist academic textbook! It's why China morphed from Maoist communism to post-Mao fascism in a few short years - they were so close in spirit and practice, with the major difference being moving from ownership of the means of production (communism) to control of the means of production by introducing free-market efficiencies that were ruthlessly beholden to the State (fascism). All the other governmental sociopathies stayed intact, such as hypernationalism, racial preferencing for Han Chinese over other minorities, complete control of the press, and the rest.
Fascism (National Socialism, the European variety as commonly understood) is a sub-branch of socialism that arose as a direct ideological mimic of Russian fascism (aka International Socialism, or communism) after 1917 except with property rights intact (it was evolutionary socialism not revolutionary socialism) and Jews substituted for capitalist/bourgeois (much early Russian propaganda had both). A gigantic state apparatus in Germany that controlled the means of production and the direction of resources into creating an empire is an exact description of the Soviet Union, which had an empire stretching across Asia.
Many German and Soviet official speeches can be mirrored without issue by swapping Jew for Capitalist in the text. NB – there is Left wing racism (state sponsored, all encompassing, institutionalized eg Nazi Germany, Stalin’s oppression of minorities including (guess who!) Jews, the UN decades long demonization of (guess who!) Israel and Jews) and Right wing racism (individuals being racist to other individuals). Of the two, the Left-Fascist version is by far the most dangerous.
Think up a new name for Right wing racism if you like, just don’t pretend it is Fascism. Left, take ownership of your blood-soaked past and your current ideological sociopathies, it’s the first step to a cure.
So your belief is that one might find, for instance, the text "But an Israeli can never be rescued from his fixed notions. It was then simple enough to attempt to show them the absurdity of their teaching. Within my small circle I talked to them until my throat ached and my voice grew hoarse. I believed that I could finally convince them of the danger inherent in the Marxist follies. But I only achieved the contrary result. It seemed to me that immediately the disastrous effects of the Marxist Theory and its application in practice became evident, the stronger became their obstinacy" from a modern leftist academic textbook?
If you also swap out "Marxist" for "Zionist," quite plausibly.
And if you replace enough words in it you get a cookbook.
It seems to me you are using a weak definition of fascism and a strong definition of political violence. When defined that way, of course there is an inherent issue - if 30-50% of the country falls into the weak definition of fascist, the only end result of justifying political violence is civil war. However, a more strong definition of fascism and weaker definition of political violence results in much less of an issue. The slogan I heard most often in leftist spaces was "punch a nazi" and not "kill a fascist", although to be fair I don't know how much that has changed in recent years given the state of twitter.
Personally, I don't know where my "line" is. I don't think even minor forms are justifiable (or effective, although that's a different conversation) until a person hits somewhere near the "wants an ethnostate" area of right-leaning authoritarianism. My line for anything more extreme than that is far beyond my line for just leaving the country out of disgust.
PS: Maybe a hot take but I think the deportation (successful or not) of non-citizens for political speech also falls under a weak definition of political violence. It has the exact same goal of discouraging political expression through punishment.
I'm not sure I'm familiar with the car attack you're talking about, is this the James Alex Fields one or a different one? The James one is the only one I know of, and afaik that was a pretty clear case of the guy being both mentally unstable/schizophrenic *and* a nazi/white supremacist. Agreed that guns have no place whatsoever near protests, I remember there being a pretty recent case where that caused injuries/deaths.
I'm generally in agreement with it being better to just let people show their true colors and "hoist their own petard", but I think some exceptions can be made for community gatekeeping.
Government throughout the West has been taking away our rights for more than a century. AJP Taylor wrote, "Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman… He could travel abroad or leave his country forever without a passport or any sort of official permission."
Now we can’t build on our own property without government approval, we are charged 30% for the privilege of having a job, and we have to know whether the legal way to clean a greasy machine part is to pour solvent on the part and wipe it or to pour solvent on the rag and wipe it. The overwhelming intrusiveness of government in our every-freaking-day life is such that it strikes at least half the country as crucial to their survival which clown gets elected as President.
The fact that we are even having conversations like this is symptomatic of the fact that Our Democracy effectively died decades ago.
I find the project of trying to find an axiomatic / coherent moral framework to be inherently flawed.
I think it's hard to define violence, or understand its effects. There is actual violence and threats of violence, and various amounts of credibility to those threats. Threats of violence can have chilling effects and can shape society in really fundamental ways.
Overall, society is a complex dynamical system https://dlants.me/climbing-ed-cla.html . While we are learning to understand these sorts of systems better, and characterize them through concepts like attractors and phase transitions, I think we are still far from being able to tell what the actual consequences of any particular action might be.
Even if you could predict the outcome of a particular action with some certainty, I think there's the question of defining morality. From my perspective, our sense of morality is built upon our evolutionary history, and as such is something that is fundamentally built upon local heuristics (in Kahneman's terms, morality primarily resides in system 1, rather than system 2). Attempts to extrapolate our moral heuristics via logic or formal systems will ultimately lead one to discover contradictions, or to arrive at conclusions that are absurd and no longer feel human.
Which still leaves one with a question, which I think you are exploring in this post Scott, of what is one to do? How does one make decisions and act if one accepts these things?
I guess I have two ideas.
One was expressed to me by a friend when we were discussing things recently, and I think it's a really useful parable: Imagine you're trapped in a mine. There is no hope for escape. No one will ever find you, or know the actions you take. I think in a situation like this, you're still going to comfort the children.
The other is something from the existentialist tradition. You might accept that from a logical / formal / mathematical frame, all of this is absurd. However, we are not experiencing the world through that frame. We are all fixed in a human frame. As such you might as well embrace your human frame. I think we can choose what feels moral and meaningful for us to do. We can understand that ultimately this choice is arbitrary, but choose it nonetheless, without seeking to appeal to something outside of ourselves (some set of axioms or universal consistency or some knowledge that we are right).
Appreciate your writing! I think a lot of us are grappling with these questions currently.
The only problem here is a binary thinking: you either are A fascist or you are NOT a fascist. Some might see some potential difference between shooting Hitler and shooting a young mother who voted for him
(And also: what if political violence is unacceptable, but can become necessary if other conditions become unacceptable)
There's a kind of "if you pose me a direct paradox, my brain will begin to emit smoke while I repeat DOES NOT COMPUTE" energy to this particular format of "these three things, without any nuance whatsoever, cannot technically logically be true propositions simultaneously"
I think basically every modern first world country is fascist, we just don't use that term anymore in anything like a meaningful way.
Nationalism should properly be seen in contradiction, not to the other modern ideologies, but the context in which it arose: An emphasis of national identity over local identity. Texas and Michigan are the only states with strong identities anymore; New York City and New Orleans are cities with strong identities. But mostly people identify first and foremost as "American"; this is nationalism, from the context that gave rise to it, where it was about forging a national identity out of a large disparate group of more local identities.
Likewise, basically every first world country operates, economically, as some degree of indirect command economy, the unholy merger of government and corporate powers; the federal government establishes priorities that corporations follow, and in turn the corporations exercise considerable control over government priorities. See the rise and fall of DEI for one way this operates, and the revolving door of government jobs to corporate sinecures for those who toe the corporate line for the other.
The emphasis on national interests over individual rights is basically how modern taxation operates. Again, from a historical context, the idea that the government would take a quarter or more of your income - two out of every eight hours worked is worked for the government, or four out of eight for many European nations - would seem frankly insanely tilted in favor of the national interests over individual rights.
Large standing armies are the norm; militarized police are, likewise, increasingly the norm. From a historical perspective, our societies are incredibly militarized.
The US is unique in how -little- we suppress the political opposition, and yet every administration has engaged in it for the past century, whether targeting anarchists and communists or right-wing people or people who disagreed too loudly with the government about anything the government currently cares a lot about.
So I kind of laugh at the accusations of "fascism" flying around. We're not arguing over whether or not we should be fascist, we're arguing over which exact flavor of fascism we're going to live under.
Well said!
>Likewise, basically every first world country operates, economically, as some degree of indirect command economy, the unholy merger of government and corporate powers; the federal government establishes priorities that corporations follow, and in turn the corporations exercise considerable control over government priorities. See the rise and fall of DEI for one way this operates, and the revolving door of government jobs to corporate sinecures for those who toe the corporate line for the other.
It's funny. In one of the other threads people were talking about whether democratic forms of Communism and Fascism were possible. I suggested that partial versions of both were possible, and, as part of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/fascism-cant-mean-both-a-specific/comment/165183895 suggested that part of such a thing might contain
>corporatism (aka private-public partnerships - in some form these are pretty pervasive)
Yeah, as far as I know, _that_ part of Fascism, at least, is in every nation in the West (and elsewhere as well), much as you describe in the paragraph I quoted.
“ But it wouldn’t serve Gavin Newsom’s purpose to call Stephen Miller a far-right nationalist authoritarian corporatist, because Gavin Newsom specifically cares about the negative connotation of “fascist”, rather than its meaning. I trust he’s relying on some sort of weaker negative connotation, like “far-right nationalist etc “ . This is probably the crux of the issue . I would prefer ethnonationalist Christian fuckamentalist. But it’s an important point what we call people and what connotations we attach to words - I would ask is fascism evil - as you stated. Most fascist (maybe all) have been murderous , brutal , torture and often on a large scale and against their own citizens ( when they disobey or don’t get with the message ) (the same goes for many Marxist or Marxist like regimes ) . Interestingly some might say USA has already slipped into the brutal category , in terms how it’s dealing with citizens and murderous ( blowing up boats in the Caribbean - and who knows who they were Maybe some MAGA fishermen in a day trip) . Just some thoughts.
Probably worth mentioning that communists generally, but the Soviets specifically had a habit of accusing random political enemies of being fascists to engender WW2 jingoism in support of suppressing, expropriating, and eventually killing them.
Poles, Ukrainians, random farmers and generally the inconvenient group du jour were labelled fascists. If you read first hand sources from the era, the verbiage and tactics were essentially the same. Hard to believe there wasn't a direct transmission of propaganda style from the Soviets to the American left
Right, no one in Ukraine cares about the Germans. They know fascist means counterrevolutionary / reactionary, both then and now, and identify as such.
Which, imo, is the most succinct way to describe the term in its American application. A fascist is a counterrevolutionary and vice versa. Which is how you get "looser zoning == fascist"
Homosexuality was banned because it was fascistic.
Just to note that I was mentally humming Manic Street Preachers' "If You Tolerate This, Then Your Children Will Be Next" even before I got to Scott's link in the piece 😁
Might disagree with some of the politics, but they made some great songs!
It would be nice if we saw fewer ad hominem attacks
You're only saying that because you're stupid.
touché
Communism isn't evil, authoritarian dictatorship is. And you can have communism without it. You can't have fascism without it, because it is what fascism is, when it was a corruption of what communism wanted to be.
>Communism isn't evil, authoritarian dictatorship is. _And you can have communism without it_.
[emphasis added]
Other than the tiny little nation of San Marino, which basically playacts at having sovereignty, any examples?
>1. Many Americans are fascists
> 2. Fascists are an acceptable target for political violence
> 3. Political violence in America is morally unacceptable (at the current time)
Logically, only the last two are in actual conflict, and I could rephrase the 2nd one as "[designated group] are an acceptable target for political violence". So it seems obvious that the 2nd one must be wrong.
Of course, if no such person in [designated group] exists, then the whole thing is irrelevant, since no one is actually an acceptable target.
For clarity: state violence physihcal violence performed by state agents, as well as coersion or threats by the state. It is not automatically bad (most people prefer criminals be arrested and incarcerated). When I say "state violence against political opponents" I am being very specific: using the state to target people/groups based on their politics. There is a reason the NG arent being deployed to Red State cities.
Otherwise, I don't know how to react to your positions. It seems to fall into a few buckets: it's not totally unique to trump, he doesn't really mean it, he failed to do the bad thing he promised to do.
Like, just because America built concentration camps in WW2 doesn't make it good that we are doing it now? Just because he didn't "lock her up" doesn't make threatening to jail your opponents acceptable? Just because his promised use of violence on Democrats hasn't happened doesn't mean it's not a threat? Just because illegal immigrants are a political category rather than an ethnic one doesn't make purging them acceptable (especially given the overlap of the political category and ethnic/racial categories align so closely).
It's bad, and I don't know why you are ok with it.
I'm not going to play your game and pretend chanting 'lock her up' at a rally was just a primal desire for non-partisan anti-corruption. That's disingenuous and you should know better.
But even if it WAS a reasonable interpretation, it would still be bad. It is bad when the head of state decides who to investigate and prosecute. Do you WANT a return of the Star Chamber?
The problem with the Star Chamber was that it had not only the power to investigate and prosecute, but the power to judge and declare punishments, and was only notionally constrained to actual laws. AND that it was secret. IE it arrogated to itself all the facets of government.
If all they can do is prosecute before an independent judge and jury, using laws that were passed by someone else...well...yeah. That's the executive's *job*. And the only one with independent power in the Executive IS the head of state (in the US system). There is no such thing as an independent DOJ/prosecutor--that's a constitutional abomination. Congress can't carve off some of the president's authority and give it to someone else; the president can delegate it, but it can't be taken from him.
I'd say that Article II courts (ie administrative courts) are actually closer to the Star Chamber than anything the president is doing now.
* Judge and prosecutor tightly linked? Yup.
* Unfair, arcane proceedings that don't give proper due process (by normal court standards)? Yup.
* Making up their own laws (even if they call them regulations)? Check.
* Secret? Mostly check. They don't have to publish their findings, their actions are not precedental, etc.
* Violation of separation of powers? Check check check.
But those are "non-controversial" (among academics and fans of government power generally) unless they take a position those academics don't like.
They also, er, are civil courts without imprisonment power.
To be clear I'm not going to argue that the administrative state isn't a problem, it's just not capable of locking people up without buy-in from the judicial branch.
So they can't imprison you. But they can put an non-dischargeable (in bankruptcy) judgement of ludicrous size and then play silly games like claim it's not a final judgement and you need to appeal within the system, which will take until the heat death of the universe...yeah. That's lots better. /sarcasm
I don't think your interpretation of fascism works.
(a) George Orwell, long ago, wrote that "fascism" had ceased to mean anything except an expression of disapproval. (Just as "democracy" has ceased to mean anything except an expression of approval.) That remains true currently.
(b) The common tendency is to call anyone "right wing" a fascist. But "right wing" itself is not a well defined category. It can refer to anarchocapitalists; constitutionalist libertarians; classical liberals; American-style conservatives who believe in an originalist interpretation of the Constitution; European-style king/land/army/established Church conservatives; nationalists generally; racists; theocrats, provided they aren't Muslim theocrats . . . There just are no positive traits shared by all of these; only the negative trait of being targets for leftist hostility. Note, for example, that Javier Milei, a self-identified anarchocapitalist (and in practice a pragmatic free market libertarian), gets called a "fascist."
(c) I think that saying that "fascist" should not be used to mean "people it's okay to kill" is too late. That ship sailed back in the 1930s.
(d) There is a line of verse that says "To kill in war is not murder" (it might be from Robinson Jeffers), and you can argue for doing violence in war. But then there is a body of thought about what constitutes a just war or a legitimate casus belli. And there is also the question of whether you think it's prudent to take up war. In any case, if it's not war, turning to violence is a matter for the criminal law. There isn't a "they were fascists" or "they were on the wrong side politically" defense for charges of murder, and I think it's best that there shouldn't be.
Fascists just need to get over themselves and embrace the label. Communism was approximately as bad as fascism and yet today's communist sympathisers don't typically get all defensive when their opponents literally call them communists.
The problem they both share is authoritarianism, which I'd roughly define as when somebody wins an election with a deviation from independent estimates of more than 10%p. Or if there is no election, obviously.
Do they need to own it, or are they really self-blind enough to not know they are fascist? Like with free speech, it was super important to the Right, but now they are suppressing it more than Democrats ever did. Orders of magnitude different. But do they realize it? It seems like a lot of issues important to the 'Right' during a campaign, go out the window when in power. They don't care about free speech at all, but do they make the connection and have any internal self reflection on that? To realize they are the baddies?
I'm not trying to say whether politicians in power now are fascist or not. I'm saying there are plenty of people in America, where if you described fascism to them, would support it. But the label itself has far more taboo associated to it than the label "communist".
I agree with that.
<mildSnark>
Trump is the POTUS, and I'm not sure that _he_ has any self reflection. On most anything he says (particularly lacking on any statement containing "worst", "best" or other extremal adjectives).
</mildSnark>
There are plenty of people being called communists by their opponents, such as, well, basically all Democrats by Republicans, who do in fact get defensive about it. Zohran Mamdani, for instance, basically the leftmost prominent Democrat at the moment, denies the label here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEMo_D2S8G0
Perhaps he denied being a communist because he isn't one. For example, I'd deny being a furry because I'm not one, that doesn't mean the label "furry" is taboo, or that being a furry is completely unacceptable.
It's instructive that Mamdani doesn't say something like "it's unacceptable to call someone a communist" or "it's unacceptable to believe communism is good". He just says 'I'm not a communist' and moves on.
>I’m not trying to normalize fascism
I mean, you very directly are. You are saying that non-violent fascists shouldn't be considered exceptional enough - should be considered too normal - to warrant measures such as "murdering them in the streets".
To be clear, I agree with this! I think fascists *shouldn't* be considered exceptional enough, at this time, to warrant arbitrarily exterminating the lot of them. I think that SJ has gone *way too far* in de-normalising fascists - e.g., you actually have to make this post. But as a simple matter of fact: yes, you are "trying to normalize fascism", and it'd be better to defend that than to deny it.
Your post makes no sense, since you yourself haven’t defined fascism.
Scott did ("far-right nationalist authoritarian corporatist"). Why do I have to define it again when responding to him?
> political violence will always be inconvenient; it will always be tempting to put it off until some further red line is crossed. But if we always give into that impulse, nobody will ever resist dictatorship or start a revolution against an unjust government.
I would like to note that resistance against an unjust government doesn't necessarily have to involve political violence. Mass non-violent civil disobedience is also a method to dismantle oppressive institutions.
There is another re-branding that happens.
Political Violence has been happening for awhile by the Right towards the Left. But the other re-framing that happens is "its a mental health issue". Every time someone on the Left is killed, suddenly the Right is "this was a mental health issue".
Take a look at all the mass killings in last decade, and large percentage is from the Right.
But as soon as it is a Right on Left killing, everyone on the Right is suddenly very concerned and deeply touched by the need for better help for the "mentally ill'. Totally ignoring that it is mostly the Right leaning that are in the basement soaking up hate while polishing their guns.
The Left kills one guy, and suddenly there is outrage. There was no outrage for everyone dying on the Left, there was actual cheering. The Right has been cheering on political violence for awhile now.
The Right cheered and celebrated when environmentalist were killed. And at numerous rallies, called for killing Hillary and wanting her dead.
1142nd comment: Words to describe Trump as least as good (resp. badly) as 'fascist': 1. Despot 2. Dictator 3. Coupist 4. Autocrat 5. Tyrant - Though he "jokingly" wished to be "dictator for one day" https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_slFT6lw_l8 (i.e. usurping all needed powers on that one day, to be for all following days the 'real ruler' without 'silly' constraints - else there would be zero sense in being dictator for "one day" or as he said before: "day one" - otoh, it seems Trump does not even know the meaning of the term "dictator" - and surely not what 'fascist' means.), I 'd prefer despot or autocrat. But, as those sound Greek to most: "king" as in "NO KINGS" is fine, too.
But what to call Trumpists?! Oh, 'Trumpist' is actually excellent. As Peronist was or Francoist/Maoist/Stalinist etc.. Glad, we so easily can stop insulting fellow citizens who never read the wikipedia entry about corporatism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism
To clarify: I do call Trump neither a fascist nor a despot, because I do not think he is the one or aspires to be the other - I do admit he could be called that way, depending on definitions and exegesis. I agree that calling people 'fascists' who do not call themselves that way is pretty much always counter-productive - and in most cases: plain wrong.
The real problem with "fascist" is exactly its too vague definition. Unlike "environmentalists", where many self-identify as such, basically none of the political targets who are called fascist self-identify as that.
Therefore it should become a slander (spoken) or libel, after Congress specifies what the characteristics of a fascist are. Franco, Mussolini, Hitler; Xi in China now.
The evil of Hitler is different, and far worse, than the fascism of Mussolini or Franco, and in the Spanish Civil War, there would have been greater evil done had the Stalinists won.
Fascists have some 3-6 specific characteristics, which no elected Americans have all of -- tho exactly what characteristics are required to be honestly labeled a fascist remain unclear. "Almost fascist" is the kind of far weaker rhetoric that we should strive for, because it implicitly argues against justifying violence.
Does the same apply to "communist"?
See reply.
Scott Alexander asks if it is ok to kill fascists. Well...
...before drawing the knife, the non-fascist should consider: “maybe the fascists are better at this than me.”
Fascism, unlike left-wing ideologies, is one of the voluntaristic ideologies. As opposed to intellectual ideologies.
That is, it is one of the ideologies that glorifies will & ability to act, and looks down on intellectual hair-splitting debates of what the founding ideological fathers really meant.
If you try to kill them, they will cheer you along. Since that’s the triumph-of-the-will, I-dominate-you-or-you-dominate-me, game their ideology commits them to. And they tend to be rather good at it.
The German communists of the 1930s learned this the hard way. One of the reasons the Nazis won, was that the SA was better at beating up communists than the communists were at beating up Nazis. The communists beat up Nazis for historic-materialistic reasons. The Nazis beat up communists because beating up opponents is fun and what power is about.
A slight segway: The Economist interviewed one of the founders of the New Right many years ago. He was a lot of fun, and among other things he remarked that in his youth he had attended Antifa-like gatherings where English-major hippie-and emo-types talked about the necessity of the revolution. He broke in at some point and said: “Say, do any of you own a gun?” Of course no-one did. “Well, I own a gun. And most of my friends own a gun”.
I would not vote for the guy, but it was hard not to chuckle.
It could but mostly doesn’t because so many college professors & other high status folk support socialism of some sort, which is so close to communism.
All those celebrating the murder of C Kirk are saying he was so evil it was good for him to be murdered. Not merely killed in some risky protest, but targeted. Based on the lie that was a fascist, thus ok to be murdered.
This made me think of Orwell. In Homage to Catalonia Orwell summed up his attitude towards the Spanish civil war as, “If each person killed one fascist then the war would be over, how hard can it be?” He of course learned that it wasn’t that simple. Being anti-fascist and killing them wasn’t sufficient to be on the side of good. His experiences in that war led directly to his thoughts in 1984.
Once again with this piece Scott demonstrates why he is one of the few intelligent center-leftists around.
And yet, he “cheats” by refusing to state clearly that point 1 (“Many Americans are fascists“) is almost certainly false today, by leaning on “well, it might not be false in the future” and the largely irrelevant here “people should be allowed to claim untrue things”.
Just because in a country that still has a First Amendment (despite the clear preferences of the majority of Scott’s fellow leftists) one has a right to say something doesn’t make it true, or quite possibly true. Nor is it a reason to ignore whether or not it is true!
And the fact that something *might* be true in the future doesn’t change the fact that it is false now.
This is just how political discourse works in the current year. The firehose of flasehood is just a special case of the Firehose, writ large. Set loose 79 ideologically potent memes. If #4, #27 and #80 conquer the arena, and together imply that every conceivable atrocity you might visit upon your enemy is their fault and they had it coming, then you've won. It doesn't matter if #12 utterly contradicts #14, or if #20 and #31 together imply it would be moral to eradicate the entire human race. The sort of people fluent in the 'art of the hose' find these logical complaints hilarious.
A lengthy commentary: "This machine agonizes about killing fascists" https://mtraven23.substack.com/p/this-machine-agonizes-about-killing
The conclusion:
I too dislike the use of "fascist" as a cudgel, and try not to use it that way. But as a term, it is analytically accurate and powerful and I’m not going to give that up. If I say that the Trump regime is fascist, it’s not because I hate them and want to hurt them. It’s because I believe that is the most salient term for what they are doing, and to the extent I hate them and want to hurt them, it’s downstream from that. They are fascists, they want to hurt me, I want them to go away but it’s clear some hurting will be involved.
So. While I admire Scott’s willingness to think clearly about hard issues, he is missing what is really going on. Fascists are already hurting people (most obviously immigrants but also scientists, government workers, trans people, and so many others); the question is how to respond. Violence may not be a good tactic but it is most definitely morally acceptable, we are already under a regime of violence, don’t kid yourself about that.
"person who it is acceptable to hurt because of their politics" I think that already crosses my red lines. Once someone has a "[category of] person who it is acceptable to hurt", that already restricts the part of belief-space they live in. "because of their politics" seems to be often tacked on as a justification for feeling good about wanting to hurt people in the first place.
Yes, if you take your moral philosophy examples far enough, it's ok to lie to an axe-murderer and Ukraine gets an exemption.
At the moment, the first guy to put on a frog costume probably did more for the cause than all the violent-leaning people on the left gathered together.
It seems to me the root problem is the extremely widespread belief that it's OK to kill "bad guys".
Who counts as a bad guy depends on what the speaker wants to justify.
Curious whether anyone here has read Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg. When it was published, in 2008, I think it was considered a troll job -- a right-wing pundit's "I know you are but what am I" defense. I read the book a couple of years ago, and I found persuasive the argument that American progressives of the early 20th century envied the power and organization of European authoritarian but rewrote history when those authoritarians committed atrocities.
I'm no historian, and I haven't read enough to confirm or deny Goldberg's account. But I do think he was making a serious argument (even if his tone was snarky here and there).
What do you all think of the notion that fascism is actually (or at least can be characterized as) a phenomenon of the far left?
>"Still, I found myself able to see things from both perspectives."
Miller isn't expressing a perspective. Miller is waging step one of a deliberate coordinated campaign to make it effectively illegal or impossible to warn about fascism or to criticize his agenda.
His goal is to pretend "using your first amendment rights to criticize us" = "criminal incitement to violence and supporting a terrorist organization." This has nothing to do with sincere discourse.
But yes, it is illegal to murder fascists, and should be illegal (as all murder should be), and murdering them is also a bad idea to boot. Creating Reichstag Fires won't stop fascism, it just gives them an excuse to clamp down.
In my experience many times the word fascist is a way to vent emotions about a thing that people find upsetting or controlling of a situations innaproprietly
So its a vibe word
It's a discussion about definitions. Statements should be looked at as a whole, not just their constituent parts
It's very unclear to me why Scott thinks the problem is with the word "fascist" or any connotation thereof. The problem he's addressing seems to be a much more general question about how we want our societies to work.
Scott writes, "it’s important to protect the right to accuse people of being very bad, since people are often in fact very bad".
Ok, so let's just replace "fascist" with "very bad person" in Scott's internally inconsistent triptych.
1. Many Americans are, in fact, very bad.
2. Very bad people are an acceptable target for political violence
3. Political violence in America is unacceptable (at the current time)
If 1 is (or were, in the future) true, and we'd still like to hang on to 3, what do we do about 2 in that case? The question has nothing at all to do with "fascism".
It's obvious that in a well-functioning society -- a society in which there are other ways of getting rid of very bad people, like elections and prison -- we should dispense with 2, just like Scott argues. But everyone agrees with that already.
The hard question is what to do in a not-well-functioning society. What should responsible, civic-minded German citizens have done when it was clear that there was no legal or civilized way to get rid of Hitler? Was political violence acceptable *then*? If yes, how do we tell when we've reached that point? If no, isn't there some point where the line of "protecting civility" crosses over with the line of "if you don't use violence now, there'll be no civility left to protect?" I don't know what the answer is, but at least the Founders clearly thought political violence could be a good idea under some circumstances, and explicitly motivated the 2nd amendment with that reasoning.
If there is one thing I do not want in the world, it's a bunch of rationalists who have decided that based on the precautionary principle, they need to engage in violence ranging from bullying of free speech to murder.
If this means we have to suppress consequentialism for the good of society, so be it. (I don't think that's exactly hypocrisy - I'm OK with the state doing the minimum damage to civil society in order to protect its citizens.)
Fair enough, but this isn't just some niche topic for rationalists to be technocratic about. This is pretty much just the Big Hard Question underlying all post-holocaust thought. The best post-holocaust thinkers (Arendt, Frankl, Weisel) grappled with pretty much the same thing. Lots of holocaust movies, including the recent Oscar winner "Zone of Interest", pose similar questions. I don't think anyone has come up with an entirely satisfying answer or prescription that everyone agrees is the right thing to do when a particular line is crossed, but not before.
True that.
I've been thinking on this more, and I think the "kill Hitler" analogy just fails. It's just too hard to recognize Hitler, so the number of people you have to kill in order to get Hitler is unacceptable.
Doesn’t sound like the analogy fails for you, but rather that you think the answer is just “political violence is never acceptable”. Ok, but then you have to argue that killing the number of false-positive Hitlers you’d have to kill to get to the real Hitler is a bigger number (or at least makes for a worse society) than the actual number of people who died because of Hitler, and that’s a tough row to hoe.
I think the precautionary principle leads to disaster. I haven't worked out the math, but just by observation, there's something wrong about the way people put it into practice.
I'd be ok with killing 2 or 3 innocents to kill Hitler. 5.9 million innocents is way too many, even if it saves 6 million lives. 25 is probably too many for me.
In circumstances of democracy, the rule of law and some basic degree of freedom of speech and political organising, political violence is bad. In a war, violence against the enemy military is legitimate even if a particular soldier is by most definitions good.
The question isn't about the target, it's about the situation; premise two is false.
The reason it because fashionable to be in favor of violence against fascists is because fascists attempted a genocide. So, in the wake of WWII, it was just like saying "I am violently against genocide." Which is surely justified.
The problem is that genocide turns out not to be a necessary characteristic of fascists. It's almost like they learned from history or something. I am a proud anti-fascist (and not just of the genocidal kind - I am against authoritarianism of all sorts). However:
There is one, and only one, legitimate excuse for violence. And that is to protect someone from even greater violence. There is protection of life, and there is being an assh*le, and not much gray area in between. Remember the famous words: "Violence is the first refuge of the incompetent." (I know that the actual quote is "last refuge", but that's demonstrably wrong).
So reserve your threats of violence for the violent. Smart fascists can better be resisted in smarter ways. We are rational people, are we not?
"Few people use fascism in a purely innocent denotative way; if they did, it would serve their purposes equally well to replace it with a synonym (like “far-right nationalist authoritarian corporatist”)"
This seems wrong? My assumption when people says Fascism is exactly 'far-right nationalist authoritarian corporatist' (typically with some white nationalism mixed in)
I think Fascism is a truly badly abused word. Its original Italian version was largely theatrics and spinelessly opportunistic politics, and the only really remarkable thing about it was their fondness for using political violence.
This is why they have a bad name, "Our political programme is breaking the bones of people like you" said Mussolini, and if one thing moderate leftists, liberals and conservatives agree with is that this is not acceptable, we have to settle things by law, not violence. Even monarchists believe in a kings lawful right to to rule. This was simply barbarism. This is why Orwell wrote that "fascist" means largely "bully".
But Fascism did not have a monopoly on political violence - they mostly learned political violence from Communists... and just about any ideology can result in political violence if the tensions are high, think the American Civil War...
Besides, Mosley's British Fascism was not even violent. I have read up on that man and he is best described as a kind of an social democrat with soldierly theatrics... mostly interested in reforming capitalism without abolishing it. He was anti-war and pro-EU.
So we should better avoid this word. For most common purposes, just "barbarism" will suffice.
I’m getting to this five days late, but feels safe to say that part of the reason there are so many comments on this post that it can barely load (>1300 at this point) is because hundreds of people logged in to post (as I was about to do just now) about how “people absolutely use “fascist” as a synonym for “person who it is acceptable to hurt because of their politics”” is not “obviously true” to them.
Something to note- By descriptive linguistics, "fascism" has multiple definitions and people using the same definitions to mean different things is not only common but is a typical if unconscious political strategy/ I.e., terrorism, racism, etc. There is the narrow historical meaning of a specific ideology, things that share a lot of voerlap with that, then the looser meanings which mean totalitarian, often especially in the case of racist or nationalist views. The negative descrition of MAGA would be more akin to authoritarian populism.
It feels to me like the obvious conclusion of your essay is that civil war is sometimes going to be the only thing that will solve a particular problem a populace has with an authoritarian leader (I'll not weigh in on whether that makes it "acceptable") but that interpersonal violence against "this guy who [I claim is] fascist" is never acceptable and is just as unacceptable as any other call for political violence.
Note also that assassinating your enemies is not necessarily even a great way to empower your cause, given 2nd-order effects and martyrdom etc, and things can be unacceptable for being *stupid, shortsighted, and counterproductive to your own goals* in addition to in fact also being unacceptable for being destructive to this nice commons we share.
In other words, killing *fascists* (the people, as individuals) is likely to empower *fascism*, the ideology, by making it seem (to people who already sympathize with it) more necessary to have authoritarian rule to stop the wanton violence. And it's actually fine if there are lots of fascists around as long as fascism has little power! Whereas if fascism is in charge, then even if everybody thinks that's bad (but has to pretend to like it to not get shot) then this is really bad!
Humanity is just barely beginning to grapple with the relationship between physical warfare and memetic warfare.
“Evil is never intended as evil. Indeed, the contradiction inherent in all evil is that it originates in the desire to eliminate evil”
— James Carse, Finite & Infinite Games
I think Miller is probably the most onerous of the MAGA circle and what most people see as the worst of that lot ideologically so I think that was the framework Newsome was using that term in. And Miller really is awful.
Wile I am certainly not advocating for any actual violence (which would be doubleplusungood and verboten), it does warm my soft, over-empathetic heart to know that, while they may never face any semblance of actual justice for their crimes, people like Stephen Miller will have to live out the rest of their lives knowing that, among the people around them - from complete strangers to friends and family, including their own children - many secretly believe that their [Homer slide] would not only be morally permissible, but virtuous and worthy of celebration, and that mere inertia and some rapidly shifting pragmatic calculus (lack of opportunity, personal safety concerns, etc) is all that has so far prevented them from acting on this. I therefore heartily encourage making this fact common knowledge.
I'm not that familiar with the case against Stephen Miller. I assume it's something more than "he wants to enforce US immigration law," but I'm not sure what it is. Did he kill Trotsky with an ice pick or something?
That goes both ways, you know. And when the situation is looking like it is right now... why wouldn't you shoot first?
The right has an army. All you have are terrorists. We know how this ends.
Sure, and the situation is perfectly symmetric between flat earthers and woke globalists in the sense that both sides have opinions on the shape of the earth and think that the other side is wrong, but the symmetry quickly collapses once you look beyond either side's genuine or purported self-image, and also take actual reality into account.
(Which, sadly, not every side of every argument is equally good at. No amount of rational argument will convince someone who has already drowned to get out of the water and come back to life - which sucks for them, but shouldn't convince those of us who haven't drowned that maybe drowning is great because no one who has actually done it has later changed their mind and un-drowned)
I'm late to the party, but I think the idea of violence to fascists is stealing a base. Communists are at least as bad as fascists worldwide and historically. Is Zoran Mamdani a communist? Is Bernie Sanders? They're as communist as most "fascists" are fascist, IMHO. I'm opposed to killing them.
The comparison is IMHO instructive. What we're saying is that because there's a slightly higher risk that Mamdani or Sanders *might* liquidate the kulaks *someday*, we should commit violence against them *now* when they advocate rent control or demonize capital, because it might be too late later. That seems pretty clearly immoral to me in either case.
When trying to show that three propositions can’t be true at the same time, it would be really helpful and instructive to use deductive logic. Derive a statement from one or two propositions that is the negation of a statement derived from the remaining proposition. This way it’s actually clear there’s a real contradiction and not just “tension.”
It is offtopic, but I think perspective of a person from inside of Russia on how slowly dictatorship creeps may be useful.
Dictatorship tends to creep slowly. I remember what was the first thing Putin done in his first first term. No pressure on journalist, no sudden election tampering, no. Just every TV channel in Russia praised Putin to no end. Putin songs, Putin icons, Putin paintings. Seriously, I was like ten, and I felt cringe even back then.
Then it's "voluntary-compulsory" photos of Putin everywhere. If there's no photo, then school director (principal?) will be fired for any reason except for no photos. Any official, really.
Major TV channels and newspapers where not persecuted, just bought out by "people close to administration [of the President]". Those people bought a lot of independent media and large enough private companies those days, with nobody paying attentions.
Then, in second phase, there was "war with corruption". You know, when you are not corrupt enough to pay for protection from FSS (aka FSB and not KGB goddamn it!) nor are you close enough to Putin and friends, you declared corrupt and your property is confiscated. Since almost all rich people got rich without one crime of another, nobody blink an eye.
Only after that second phase, there was political pressure. At first, its target was "non-system opposition" aka "not obviously clown opposition". Around that time, web pages began to be blocked. It was torrent portals at first, than "information, dangerous for the children" and so on. Only from 2020 to 2025 "prison time for likes and reposts" became common enough (they were before, but it was rare). About 20 to 25 from first first Putin term. I missed a lot, but that's not really important.
Now compare this slow and careful frog boiling to Trump's brazen speedrun for autocracy. People on high position are afraid to say something out of line. ICE as a common scare. Political pressure for large business, and much more. Yeah, Trump is building a dictatorship. I'm not sure how impeachment works, but it sure as hell time to write senators to start the procedure
These Trump comment sections start out fun but they have such little staying power. They become so repetitive about 1/3 of the way through. We are just rephrasing the same tired old arguments over and over and hoping for a breakthrough. But it never comes.
Generally the question on #3 is “do you think the state is engaged in political violence?” This is what tends to justify popular revolutionary political violence. I don’t think this post really makes much sense as it lacks consideration of that.
With black masked ICE men in unmarked vans on the street this is a very reasonable question to ask right now, and it is why the possibility of popular political violence is rising. “When ICE comes to our neighborhood should we throw Molotov cocktails?” is a rather different question than “should we storm the Supreme Court for ruling against roe v wade?”
I wonder if Americans would think political violence in other developed democracies is acceptable because speech is criminalised and political opponents can be jailed?
My view is that violence is acceptable - when the benefits, estimated with wide error bars, outweigh the costs of violating the taboo against political violence. This restricts the circumstances dramatically.
Leaving cases of idiosyncratic tyrants who are particularly bent on a particular course of evil action that would be unlikely to be continued by their replacement.
Isn’t this just the paradox of tolerance
Relevant old essay by George Orwell:
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/