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
-----------------------------------
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.
on the Supreme Court, for a start. The overturning of Roe v Wade, and Trump v United States' doctrine of absolute presidential immunity are good examples. There are plenty of less eminent judges as well
>entryists
Well, the entire Trump insurgency in the Republican Party looks like the wildest dreams of a Trotskyist-style entryism campaign. They've overturned the party and re-made it on their own lines. Groups like Turning Point USA have certainly acted like entryists in this sense.
>True Believers
I'm not going to address this because it's a vague category, but c'mon, plenty of people at a Trump Rally, a Proud Boys meeting, a TPUSA or College Republican chapter
>censors
Moms for Liberty, for instance, are doing their damndest to stake out this space
>propaganda
Several entire television channels, numerous online outlets from Drudge to Fox to Infowars to Truth Social
>riots
January 6th, yes, but Charlottesville for instance as well. Besides a few nights at the peak of BLM there hasn't been much "left" rioting that meets your standards either. Jan 6 2016 is about the biggest that comes to mind, and that was a couple of hundred black bloc anarchists kicking over a few bins before being kettled and neutralised.
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.
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.
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.
>Where are—say—the 𝘙𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵'𝘴 activist judges? The Right's entryists, academics, True Believers, censors, propaganda, riots...?
>activist judges
on the Supreme Court, for a start. The overturning of Roe v Wade, and Trump v United States' doctrine of absolute presidential immunity are good examples. There are plenty of less eminent judges as well
>entryists
Well, the entire Trump insurgency in the Republican Party looks like the wildest dreams of a Trotskyist-style entryism campaign. They've overturned the party and re-made it on their own lines. Groups like Turning Point USA have certainly acted like entryists in this sense.
>True Believers
I'm not going to address this because it's a vague category, but c'mon, plenty of people at a Trump Rally, a Proud Boys meeting, a TPUSA or College Republican chapter
>censors
Moms for Liberty, for instance, are doing their damndest to stake out this space
>propaganda
Several entire television channels, numerous online outlets from Drudge to Fox to Infowars to Truth Social
>riots
January 6th, yes, but Charlottesville for instance as well. Besides a few nights at the peak of BLM there hasn't been much "left" rioting that meets your standards either. Jan 6 2016 is about the biggest that comes to mind, and that was a couple of hundred black bloc anarchists kicking over a few bins before being kettled and neutralised.
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 ;-)
---
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.