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.
It sounds like you are saying that we ought not to commit political violence, while torture is being committed in our name, torture of lawfully elected democratic officials.
Perhaps I talk to too many South Americans. Unless you are willing to say that political violence would have been justified in this situation...?
In this situation, we are still able to change our own government democratically, but we are very definitely harming other democratic polities.
(This is a deliberately hard and thorny question, designed to ellicit some deeper thinking. Apologies if it causes mental distress.)
"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."
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.
mmm.... do you still apply this to world war III? To actions that cause the US kill switch to get triggered? (let us say, in this hypothetical, that you still will retain a political process afterwards).
It seems... remarkably selfish to say "it's okay if we murder an entire country" -- say, blowing up 3gorges dam. So long as we remain okay! (I'm not saying you're wrong, just giving a gut reaction).
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.
Ah! I take your point. Having faith in your democratic citizens is well and good.
(It's remarkably easy to envision a hypothetical where we blow up the 3 gorges. Given that China deliberately spread a plague (via closing internal airplane flights, and leaving open external ones) of unknown severity, we can envision a ~100 million dead Americans, as opposed to the initial estimates of ~20 million. Given that, AND a blockade on antibiotics (China produces 90% of the world's supply), I could see us sending one missile. It's a kill switch after all. -- not that I consider this at all likely, but we're at, say, 1 in 10,000 not several trillion.)
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?)
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.
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?
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 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.
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)
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 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.
Most of what was done with regards to Jan 6th was wrong, both in principle and effectivity as a tool. After all, the Left wanted to pare off the Moderate Republicans from the Trump coalition. They failed, and failed hard.
(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.<
I think you're probably right about that, come to think of it. 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" & similar efforts, the social-media-co. pressure (see, e.g., ol' Zuck's testimony), university admissions, "Sanctuary Cities", selective enforcement of the law, selective flouting of the same, the proliferation of "Grievance Studies" departments, the...
I'd like to say it's because "well, we are opposed to such things on principle"; but—the asymmetry makes one uneasy. 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 even that 𝗳𝗼𝗻𝗱 of the Right, personally; Trump has done some good, but also a lot of bad—and the Right as a whole has, largely & for many years, seemed to me to have been an alliance between greedy Affluenza cases & anti-intellectual social Luddites²—but the alternative seems to be even worse. I still remember when, over ten years ago now, I found leftists mocking the notions 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! Before then, I felt—my perception was—that both sides could agree upon ideals such as "we should strive to ensure that speech is as free as possible" or "we shouldn't support stripping freedoms away from enemies—shouldn't support policies that can be turned against us later—even if we think it's in a good cause now" or "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 drugs (albeit had to quit anyway: turns out they actually 𝘤𝘢𝘯 be addictive, after all; but the War on 'em is misguided, at 𝘣𝘦𝘴𝘵)...—but the progress of society since ~2010(?) has recently made me wonder if perhaps "slippery slope" arguments didn't have more validity than that with which I have, heretofore, credited them, heh.
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.
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.
Freitkorps says there was already a lot of violence before Hitler did a damn thing (civilians in tanks. open war on the streets). Weimar republic repeatedly called in the "civilians" (militias).
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.
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 are saying there's a problem with America? When people in Germany are getting arrested for saying things about government officials online? When the banning of AfD is an "on the table" sort of thing?
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 ...
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 ;-)
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.
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.
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.
Where were you when Abo children were being set upon by dogs, for escaping from the camps? Along with more time in camp for "trying to escape"? (which puts the lie to why they were put in the camp in the first place).
It actually is very easy to settle this, it's just that Republicans are schizophrenic and operate on an "If I can be made to believe it, regardless of the facts on the ground, it's true" principle. For example, is Trump's trade policy good? Republicans say yes because we're tarrifing other countries for what they already tariff us and tariffs are good because foreign countries pay us the tariff. They are not just opposed by Democrats, but by the entire rest of the world that tells them "That's not how tariffs work retards" and that are engaging in freer trade agreements with Russia and China.
The same way, it's not justified to use political violence against Decker because he's not deploying the US military against red counties to intimidate Republicans and telling them red counties will be used for military training because they're the enemy within. If he did, I would support killing him, because it's bad to have the country in a state like that even if your party is the one that benefits, because nothing would stop him from using the military against dissenters in his own party next or the next President from abusing his power even more. Now, do you support killing Hegseth and Trump for this same exact behavior I would kill Decker for?
Yes, Vietnam doesn't actually charge us a 50% tariff. The discount "reciprocal" tariffs were calculated by dividing the countries' trade deficits by the countries' exports to the US. The penguins on the Heard and McDonald islands also don't charge us tariffs.
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.)
>I meant to suggest that it sort of seems as if the rest of the world does not actually oppose tariffs, 𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘳.
Sure, and the rest of the world does not actually oppose wars because they sometimes partake in them. Tariffs are a protectionist tool countries use for energy or food so they're not totally reliant on importing those things from other countries. 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, because it's nonsensical. Yet this is what Trump's messaging and actions lead one to conclude, and it's just wrong that anything about the strategy is reciprocal or coherent in any way. 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.
>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–).
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.
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.
If Joe Biden really had stolen the 2020 election, the people who stormed Congress were LATE and FOOLHARDY (really, what does standing in front of Congress do? Nada that's effective -- and it furthers China/Russia goals). The folks who took the preservation of democratic governance seriously created a flippin' clown show to distract the Democrats, and took the real case up to the Supreme Court (straight, no appeal). And you're ignoring the people who committed an act of war against Germany... (if you choose to believe such a thing happened at all).
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.
... I'm going to need to look that up. I might have the date wrong, but these were pre-election comments, presumably regarding Global Dominion bribing Carr to put in all new machines (that were easily hackable).
Global Dominion doesn't come near my city, because our universities start grinning at the idea of looking into their source code.
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.
The "Biden stole the election" claims I've heard come from people who actually got an American Election overturned, and subsequently sent people to prison for trying to rig American elections.
These are your law-abiding types. Not the people who'd use violence to overturn elections.
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.
The GOP is happy to lie this is the case and try to use the ensuing chaos they caused to steal an election. They didn't do it by mistake. There are of course stupid people but the Dominion Fox News lawsuit basically shows everybody at Fox from the executives to the showhosts saying Sidney Powell was a lying bitch they caught lying multiple times but they still broadcast election fraud lies. It's really not that hard to be right - even the Fox News hosts were right there was no election fraud. I don't think Democrats should lie about election fraud but they really shouldn't be worried about being wrong - all their actions are out in the open.
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.
“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 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.
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.
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.
When you say violence, I hear "don't murder people." Is it useful to mention that a lot of the antifascists are talking about punching a fascist? (Murder is probably bad at all times, except under very extenuating circumstances).
I think our laws put "punched a loudmouth in a bar" as "slightly criminal." Can we say that slightly criminal actions are okay, for political reasons? Occupy Wall Street was doing misdemeanors, but they generally did a good job of "being a good protest movement."
Any "anti-fascist" actually discussing murder, explosions or mass killings ought to be condemned, of course.
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.)
I broadly agree to this "equality under the law" but I do want to carve out an exception for "terroristic actions." (as opposed to the daft "hate crimes" laws that require looking inside people's heads). If you're doing an action, clearly and provably, to terrorize people, you deserve to have a bigger punishment than the person who does the same action "in the heat of the moment."
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 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.
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.
"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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
>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.
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.
>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.
> 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 of I time travel to that point. Imagine asking an original American colonist whether the current American government is good or not.
I think the argument "concerning trend lines don't tend to 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 windows on pyres if the social consensus is that it's fine).
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).
You're assuming we don't have people in government whose job is information suppression? We documented a lot of "no you can't say this" with regards to "vaccine passports" (a particularly egregious form of "no talkee until the wonks build it").
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.
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.
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.
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).
I don't believe in much of what you said, but you've earned the right to call this Administration fascist (by knowing what the word means, per Mussolini, and being willing to draw lines and parallels).
Would that everyone who used the F-word would actually know what they're talking about, instead of using it as a slur.
>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.
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.
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 .
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.
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.
Ah, the ban cut off the bottom part with the neurosyphilis comment. I had to click reply to get the full comment to display on mobile. That makes it more justified.
Now all I have left is this classic parable driven by my commitment to free speech and not personal benefit. First Scott came for Wuffles because he violated comment section norms. Then Scott came for me because I violated comment section norms. And then there was no one left for Scott to content moderate because he solved all of the problems.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Socialist was "polite code" for communist, which has become a very propagandized term (aka think 1950's, and what America said/wrote about communists).
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 process.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
So you are okay with torture, even torture of democratic officials, so long as you can throw the bastards out? How about when the bastards start removing democracy in other countries?
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.
Yes, I do agree to this, however, I'm not certain that I want to say we should "keep going and keep a stiff upper lip" if we're committing genocide or torture.
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.
1980's was the last time that constitutional amendment was floated (for Ronald Reagan, apparently HW Bush was enough of a "nah" that Republicans would rather keep Ronnie).
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.
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 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.
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!)
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 interesting to me that you are always just debating Trump, and how bad he might turn. He is a senile old egotistical man who won't live for much longer. A decade at best.
If I was from the US, I would be much more concerned about whoever will be his successor. Especially if said successor wouldn't need an election to come to power. At this time it would be JD Vance ...
I just... man. I can't help laughing at these comments.
How do you see Vance coming to power without an election? Specifically? (Other than if, God forbid, Trump dies or is killed in office.) There is no support in the American body politic for scrapping our Constitution and replacing it with a dictator. Literally none, zero, zilch. Ask me to imagine a contingency in which that MIGHT happen, and it's something like... the aftermath of WWIII? Maybe? When 90 percent of us are dead? Probably not even then.
I get that you probably see a distorted picture of American politics from overseas, but... I live in the deepest, reddest part of hillbilly MAGA country, and any of my neighbors would laugh in your face if you suggested J. D. Vance should cancel elections and appoint himself Reichsfuhrer. We practically WORSHIP the Constitution in these parts.
Trump dying was specifically what I had in mind though. He isn't exactly healthy and more than three years is quite a long time.
I don't think for a second that J.D. Vance would cancel elections and appoint himself. But republicans are already working on ensuring that the next election is even more rigged than the last one. And republicans are cheering those changes on.
You most definitely don't actually WORSHIP the Constitution. If you would, you would have spoken up when Trump declared that all constitutional amendments are at the whim of the president. When he tried to abolish the 14th through Executive Order 14160, he essentially said that all amendments, in his opinion are only valid for as long as the president doesn't issue a presidential order saying otherwise. Which essentially means that your first and second amendment are valid for as long as the president says so. And you guys didn't even flinch at that ...
I know I'm gonna regret asking, but how was the 2024 election rigged? Never heard that one before.
I don't agree with EO 14160, the courts (so far) haven't either, and I find it highly unlikely it will stand. That's how the system works. It's how multiple previous EOs from multiple presidents have been declared unconstitutional. If issuing controversial EOs is synonymous with declaring the Constitution is at the whim of the president, then Truman beat Trump to it by about seventy-five years.
I'm not even specifically blaming the republicans. Just the fact that Gerrymandering is a thing, from both sides, makes your elections less democratic. The way your voter registers seem to be forgetful at times also doesn't really boost confidence. I wouldn't even be confident to claim that at the national level it changed the election, or that it benefitted Trump. But on the local level these shenanigans happen and are turning US democracy into a joke. It would take some serious research I'm not qualified to provide to quantify which side profited more from the BS. But that it's still legal and done openly in the US is really awful.
> I don't agree with EO 14160, the courts (so far) haven't either, and I find it highly unlikely it will stand.
That's not the point. Your argument boils down to "it isn't an attempt at eroding the rule of law because it ultimately probably wasn't successful". That's not how that works. At best that proves that there is still hope for the US when resistance to authocratic tendencies succeeds ...
> It's how multiple previous EOs from multiple presidents have been declared unconstitutional.
An EO being declared unconstitutional isn't that same thing as an EO outright trying to reframe or anul an amendment to the constitution.
Also I didn't claim that Trump was the first president in US history with authocratic tendencies. Though the seizure of a steel mill doesn't really strike me as being on the same level of authoritarianism as challenging the constitutions validity directly ...
"Fascism" aside there are lots of things that the Trump administration has done that are extreme by historical standards, in terms of consolidating power in the executive:
* firing people in the executive branch when it's illegal to do so. This one is most obvious because the supreme court has signalled they're going to overturn 100-year old precedent in order to allow it. If they're breaking 100 year old supreme court precedent, clearly they're going farther than people in the past.
* Arresting/detaining people based on the Alien Enemies Act and declaring that their presence in the US is against the US's interests based on political speech. Again, their description of what they're doing, not mine.
* Withholding funding from various programs they don't like, against the anti-impoundment act
* Allowing or blocking mergers depending on whether the parties settle a lawsuit that Trump filed against them.
* The FCC demanding critics of the administration be taken off the air (and actually succeeding temporarily).
* Pushing the DOJ to arrest/indict political enemies when the career prosecutors in the DOJ didn't think the charges were justifiable.
* threatening law firms unless they provide them with "pro bono" legal services
* accepting a billion dollar plane from Qatar in exchange for diplomatic favors
Honestly there's a lot more, those are just what come to mind.
"If they're breaking 100 year old supreme court precedent, clearly they're going farther than people in the past."
Well, not farther than the people 100 years in the past. SCOTUS has overturned long-held precedents before. Anyway, fascism is when the president arrests the judiciary, not when they rule in his favor!
"Arresting/detaining people based on the Alien Enemies Act and declaring that their presence in the US is against the US's interests based on political speech. Again, their description of what they're doing, not mine."
Not American citizens. Again, the president has abided by court decisions on these issues. Not fascism. Not particularly extreme.
"Withholding funding from various programs they don't like, against the anti-impoundment act"
All presidents play these games. Is it bending the rules, sure. So was declaring a "police action" in Vietnam. So was the "Dear Colleague" letter. I don't hyperventilate every time the president gets in a pissing contest with Congress.
"Allowing or blocking mergers depending on whether the parties settle a lawsuit that Trump filed against them."
No evidence of this.
"The FCC demanding critics of the administration be taken off the air (and actually succeeding temporarily)."
The FCC probably had nothing to do with it, it's a poor species of fascism that can't even cancel its critics for more than a week, and it's nothing compared to what the Biden admin did to its social-media critics.
"Pushing the DOJ to arrest/indict political enemies when the career prosecutors in the DOJ didn't think the charges were justifiable."
This one is hilarious, given that Letitia James literally campaigned on "getting Trump". I guess that didn't strike you as abuse of power. Anyway, presidents pressuring DOJ to arrest/indict is nothing new. Every president in my lifetime has done this. James will get her day in court.
"threatening law firms unless they provide them with "pro bono" legal services"
Haven't heard of this one. Got a link?
"accepting a billion dollar plane from Qatar in exchange for diplomatic favors"
> The FCC probably had nothing to do with it, it's a poor species of fascism that can't even cancel its critics for more than a week
That point is fair enough.
> and it's nothing compared to what the Biden admin did to its social-media critics.
This point is not. Social media is small beans and the government doesn't actually have authority over it. The FCC actually does have authority over broadcast TV, which reaches huge numbers of people.
The government exercising authority it doesn't have is worse than the government exercising authority it has, even if it shouldn't have that authority.
I agree in the case of Trump enacting tariffs by dictatorial fiat: he has no such Constitutional authority. But "jawboning" is a different matter: if a company is led by someone with spine (like Rupert Murdoch, who's not backing down from Trump's lawsuit on the Epstein letter) they can persist in its face.
The highest rated TV programs reach maybe 4 million people. That's peanuts. Broadcast is almost, but not quite, irrelevant. Social media gets 10s of millions of unique views every single days.
> Well, not farther than the people 100 years in the past.
Before 100 years in the past, the executive branch mostly didn't do the types of things now done by people insulated from being fired. It's less that SCOTUS switched 100 years ago, more that it was a pretty new situation. Also ... in US history there's a lot of things from 100 years ago we really don't want to bring back.
> fascism is when the president arrests the judiciary, not when they rule in his favor!
I didn't say they were being fascist, I said they are going farther than previous admins. The supreme Court being on their side doesn't change that.
> Anyway, fascism is when the president arrests the judiciary, not when they rule in his favor!
Don't have to arrest the judiciary when they almost always rule in your favor! Plus most people will agree, autocrats in this day and age like to keep the trappings of a democratic system, e.g. elections even if they're rigged.
> Not American citizens.
This isn't an argument that they aren't going farther than others, just that you think it's fine.
> the president has abided by court decisions
Releasing the person you arrested when the court says you violated their rights, doesn't mean that you didn't violate their rights.
But even so ICE has repeatedly detained US citizens with no provocation and ignored them saying so and offering up ID.
> All presidents play these games.
This isn't a rebuttal to the claim that this administration has gone further than others. It's like responding to "the president just shot someone" with "hey, all presidents bend the rules".
Also Congress overwhelmingly approved the Vietnam War, the "police action" thing wasn't executive aggrandizement.
> No evidence of this.
The merger approval came a few weeks after the settlement, and both the merger and the lawsuit had been outstanding for awhile prior; the chairman of the FCC said that the merger was based on promises about media coverage; and Trump himself linked the settlement to the merger in a Truth Social post: https://trumpstruth.org/statuses/32150
Do you actually believe that they are not linked?
> The FCC probably had nothing to do with it
The chairman of the FCC said about it, "These companies can find ways to change conduct to take action on Kimmel or, you know, there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead".
And again, Trump saying that they discussed directly with the White House, and threatening them over un-cancelling: https://trumpstruth.org/statuses/33072
> Anyway, presidents pressuring DOJ to arrest/indict is nothing new.
Do you have any examples of a different president telling DOJ to indict someone when the career prosecutors thought it wasn't justified? Trump directly told Pam Bondi to indict Comey in a public post and they fired the prosecutors who said there's no basis.
As for Tish James, whatever you think of her, it isn't an example of the executive branch aggrandizing power.
Other law firms have fought against the sanctions and I believe all of them have won, nobody thinks they're legal.
> Show me the quid pro quo.
I don't have access to private government communications, but does anyone seriously believe Qatar gave Trump a $1 billion dollar gift out of the goodness of their hearts?
I really can't argue with you if you think having the Supreme Court on Trump's side doesn't matter. They're the supreme legal body of the United States. Whose opinion of the legality of his conduct could be more dispositive?
I myself believe the president should have full and absolute discretion over the personnel of the executive branch. The first sentence of Article II is quite clear, and Congress' usurpation of the president's prerogatives in this regard hasn't (in my view) gone well.
If you regard that view as extreme or authoritarian, we'll just have to disagree. At least you don't think it's fascist.
Most of what you're writing here is just throwing shade, of the "do you really think..." variety. I rarely find that convincing, and never when it's about Donald Trump, who has been the target of more baseless smears than I can count.
> if you think having the Supreme Court on Trump's side doesn't matter
The way you appoint judges is so heavily politicised that the Supreme court isn't really indicative of anything in the US anymore. That's another part of your political system that you should improve. Not even because of Trump. It isn't any better when democrats are stacking the court either ...
> I really can't argue with you if you think having the Supreme Court on Trump's side doesn't matter.
Again what I originally argued is that Trump went farther than previous presidents, which is true, whether or not SCOTUS is "on his side".
Though he did of course repeatedly violate supreme Court precedent *before* they signaled they're likely to change it; and in many cases where the supreme Court is giving him what he wants, they aren't even agreeing that what he did is OK but finding a lack of jurisdiction/standing/etc.
Anyway, I'd say that defying the supreme Court is worse than *not* doing so, but that doesn't somehow mean that nothing he can do is problematic so long as the supreme Court acquiesces.
> I myself believe the president should have full and absolute discretion over the personnel of the executive branch. The first sentence of Article II is quite clear, and Congress' usurpation of the president's prerogatives in this regard hasn't (in my view) gone well.
Not only is the first sentence of Article II not clear on that, but it conflicts with the rest of the article. On a basic level executive personnel is specifically covered in the article, and the president is *not* given absolute discretion. Some personnel must be approved by the Senate, and Congress may decide for the others that their appointments can be vested in some other places.
Not to mention a bunch of other stuff in Article II that's totally superfluous with a maximal interpretation of the "vesting clause".
> If you regard that view as extreme or authoritarian, we'll just have to disagree. At least you don't think it's fascist.
I don't think a "unitary executive" is necessarily authoritarian. But that, combined with accepting an executive branch of the size we have, and no other checks on the president's use of the powers this would grant him, or even an idea that the president should be reluctant to use the power, necessarily is. The traditional conservative view would be a unitary but weak executive, the trump view is a unitary and strong executive.
> Most of what you're writing here is just throwing shade, of the "do you really think..."
The reason I'm saying it is because I think it's pretty obvious what's happening in those situations. I haven't actually heard anyone say that they *don't* think that, e.g., Qatar's "gift" was intended as a bribe, and I'm not even sure what the alternative explanation is supposed to be.
Seems to me like you aren't answering because the only realistic answer is that you *do* think it's a bribe - which you didn't even deny thinking in your previous comment.
No, the answer is I don't think it's a bribe, and I would need to see direct evidence of a quid pro quo to believe it is. Qatar didn't give anything to Trump personally. The airplane is not his, it's the US government's. The Biden administration also signed off on it!
Looks like yet another ginned-up controversy to me.
Technically Plessy was never overruled, but it was 60 years old when Brown substantially weakened it and it's basically been uncited since. There are times old precedent is just bad!
Wickard v Filburn is 83 years old and desperately bad precedent.
>The FCC demanding critics of the administration be taken off the air (and actually succeeding temporarily)
Yeah not really what happened. The FFC chair was kind of indirectly jawboning, Kimmel's a hateful unpopular trashbag, but apparently popular enough for people to shoot at an ABC station to bring him back.
What I said is that Trump is doing things that are more extreme than other presidents in terms of consolidating power in the executive. The fact that some supreme court precedents are bad doesn't change that.
But the fact that they overturned an old precedent to allow it does show that he is, in fact, doing more than other presidents did.
Re the current situation - the real principled conservative view on this is that not only should the president be able to essentially fire anyone in the executive branch, but there shouldn't be all these people in the executive branch with all these powers anyway. The traditional conservative view has not been that the president should personally have the power of every person who's currently in the executive branch, most would agree that is too much power for the president (up until that president was trump).
EDIT: re FCC - he directly threatened them, it's funny how trump and his minions can directly admit to doing the bad thing and people will still make excuses for them, and in many cases also claim that the other side did the same thing based on attenuated evidence and some leaps in reasoning.
"Do you believe the 2020 election was stolen and that Trump would have won it if it were fair?"
No.
"If you believe Trump did NOT win the election, how do you reconcile supporting him post-Jan6 if he's mentally unable to see that he lost an election?"
Because supporting a president doesn't mean believing he is, and always has been, right about everything. I'm certain a moment's reflection will reveal some profound disagreements with presidents you've supported. We have a two-party system; as Biden so astutely put it, "Don't compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the other guys."
Fair points and thank you for the response. I will tack on that I don't think I've ever really supported a president, just viewed some as having less-bad policies than others. I've voted third party multiple times, including 2016, but will confess to have voted D in 2020 and 2024 in what I perceived as damage mitigation, but not enthusiasm.
Technically, I didn't vote for Trump, either. I always do some pie-in-the-sky write-in, because I live in a deep red state (WV) where the outcome is never in doubt. But I would have voted for him if I lived 20 miles away in Pennsylvania.
Fascism/nazi (and Hitler) is bound to continue being used in frivolous and absurd circumstances because there's few other labels left that inspire the intended extreme reaction.
In a post religious West where accusations of heresy/blasphemy/being the devil no longer hold any sway, there needed to be an accusation to fill the gap and this is it. The vagueness of the definition is a feature not a bug, that way it doesn't take much effort to slap that label onto someone, if you squint hard enough you can make anything fascist.
When determining hard lines and limits it's alot more useful to use actual descriptive terms and come to conclusions based on those
There is, of course, still a secular, not-directly-ideological accusation used copiously on both sides: treason, flung around rather carelessly even though it indicates participation in a real, serious crime. Corruption, too, to a lesser degree.
I don't think we should take "this person is a fascist" as a literal statement of "this person ought to be killed," *even if* the speaker would in general consider fascists an acceptable target for violence.
Like, the Nazis were unambiguously fascist, but I don't think we should interpret Woody Guthrie's statement as calling for genocide against Germany. After the war, a great many Nazis did not get killed, and I think that was a good and correct way to handle the end of the war.
This also is why I don't think it's worthwhile to split hairs over "is Stephen Miller a fascist or merely an I-can't-believe-it's-not-fascism authoritarian." Whether Stephen Miller should be jailed, executed, or assassinated, does not depend on the exact details of what he believes in his heart of hearts, but rather on the utilitarian calculation of how many atrocities he's commanding and how likely your violence is to stop them from happening. Once violence is on the table, there are other factors in play besides merely "is the violence against a good person or a bad person?"
(I think this is technically giving up option 2 in your list, but I think it's a pretty minor modification. Fascists may be an acceptable target, but not every acceptable target is a practical one. As you once said, be nice until you can coordinate meanness.)
Maybe things are different here in the suburban Midwest, but I didn't think there was a major constituency for number 2.
Regardless of how bad an ideology is, if it's held by (approximately) the majority of the population, the right response is to vote with your feet and leave. If a person eliminates the ability of the people to change thier leader by voting in a free and fair election (a reasonable barometer would be that it is stated as such in mainstream newspapers of non-crazy allied countries), then only less peaceful ways remain to change leadership... Avoiding that seems like basically the reason we invented elections. Although in that case I personally would still probably choose to vote with my feet.
Similar to probably wrong, among people who say the 2020 election was stolen, I actually have a lot of empathy for the ones who showed up on January 6th, and have trouble believing people honestly believe themselves when they lazily maintain that it was stolen without acting like it's a five alarm fire.
I should add that if people start getting tortured or disappeared before an election that seems to have to qualify too. Wasn't thinking darkly enough...
American fascists who are using violence break the social contract that political violence is not ok, and therefore can become valid targets themselves (rules of thee are rules of me). Obviously, this creates a feedback loop - so breaking this cycle is the real challenge.
I think if this is your distinction, then you should say "it's acceptable to use violence against people who have started the violence themselves", and the concept of fascism isn't doing any work.
Well, that’s the point. The concept of fascism is a constructed one, so we can look at it’s qualities and criticize their implementation independently, allowing one to skip fruitless debates on whether a current regime is or isn’t fascist.
As many folks I know have stated... if the mid-terms are stolen (in a meaningful way) then that's time for mass protest. If the mass protest is violently repressed, then it's time to answer violence with violence.
"I think people should reject premise (2) above and stop talking about fascists as if it’s okay to kill them." That's probably prudent, but 'talk' is the operative word here. Woody Guthrie killed zero fascists, and I suspect the same can be said for his guitar.
What is true historically?
a) German and Italian fascists did wonderfully after the war, outside a handful of exceptions. In fact, after a few years of very half-hearted accountability ('denazification'), German fascists (suddenly "former Nazis", at worst, and "partners for democracy" or "successful businessman", more commonly) were downright subsidized and favored by the occupying authorities - the entire matter became tiring, and of course you don't want to hand central Europe to socialists or Communists. This is a fact of which most Americans are probably half-aware.
b) Much of American folk song has the Spanish civil war as a referent. There, fascists were met mainly in the battlefield, where it was unambiguously acceptable to shoot at them. (There was some shooting elsewhere, some of it between antifascists factions; to put it a bit callously (towards the POUM and so forth), that's an error term in comparison.) That was the first stage of WWII - a stage the fascists won. So, none of the complicated task of what to do the day after.
One might then suspect that, when people talk about fascists as if it's OK to kill them, they are really... talking about talking about them as if it's OK to kill them? Talking about taking some down while they are shooting at you, and killing your friends in Granada? There's really not a lot of precedent for killing fascists in peace-time. Some hangings of collaborationists, and that's about it.
It seems that a lot of those who were lucky enough to be alive and free by 1948 could live lives like any other citizens of the sovjet zone, later GDR. Sometimes they were recruited by the internal secret service (Staatssicherheitsdienst aka Stasi).
Spain wasn't a battlefield in WW2, they stayed neutral. The Battles of Khalkhin Gol weren't stages of WW2 either, that was a border conflict between the USSR and Japan, after which there was a non-aggression treaty which lasted for most of WW2.
Either statement is only technically true. In terms of ideologies, which is what we are talking about, the Spanish Civil War was the first major literal battleground between fascism and antifascism, and a prelude to the rest. Franco stayed out of WWII in part because his country was in ruins and possibly also out of prudence.
The Soviet Union was helping out Nazi Germany early in WW2, mutually planning the division of eastern Europe & Poland (which had previously stopped the westward advance of the Red Army) specifically. The UK drew up plans to bomb Soviet oilfields to stop them supplying Germany. The fact that the USSR had previously supported the opposite side in Spain as the Germans & Italians was irrelevant to that. After Operation Barbarossa, Finland was a co-belligerent with Germany against the USSR. This wasn't because they were fighting for an ideology, they instead saw themselves as in a Continuation War to the recent Winter War.
Ethiopia, unlike Spain, actually was a battleground in WW2. That was because Mussolini tried to attack Britain's holdings in east Africa. There have thus been (incorrect) arguments that WW2 can be dated to begin with the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, but in that case Nazi Germany was one of the few countries to provide any military support to Ethiopia.
You would have sworn correctly and I said nothing to the contrary. Italy had already conquered Ethiopia, but their attack on British East Africa resulted in British forces retaliating and kicking them out of Ethiopia, thus restoring Ethiopia's pre-invasion ruler.
First, let me needlessly defend Stephen Miller: calling people "Fascist" is hardly a sign of Fascism; and suggesting that somebody should be arrested for what one understands to be a threat of physical violence is not Fascism at all, but rather an expression of law-abidingness: American law, following law everywhere, considers threats of violence a crime or at least a felony.
Second: this post is in need of a definition of Fascism. It can be, in the modern style, "shit I don't like" and it can't conflate hardcore Communists like Pol Pot with real Fascists like Franco. Whatever Communism is, it's not Fascism.
Some time ago, I proposed this definition: "If you know your Fascist states, you know that their defining characteristics are single-party rule, nationalism, anti-feminism (women are expected to take a place as mothers and wives only, as a rule) and government control of the economy in partnership with the private sector." Happy to discuss and adjust if needed. We do require a clear definition here.
There's an annoying right wing talking point where they say "Left wingers are the real Nazis." With these types of political messaging maneuvers highlighted, let's get them out of the way and plainly state: There are people on the left that support isolationism, want to use the military as a domestic police force to enforce communism and put capitalists into reeducation camps, and generally fulfill all the negative qualities associated with fascists that merits violent resistance to them. The reason it's not justified to kill these people is because they hold no power in America. Communists are one of the most hated political groups and they hold no Congressional seats and nobody in individual states elects them to power either. Bernie Sanders is the furthest left politician in Congress and while he has stupid policy positions like abolishing private healthcare, he is one of the least successful Congressmen in terms of passing legislation, and he's also one of the longest serving ones.
A better test for when it's justified to use violence against radicals is not when they meet some stipulated definition of being a radical. It's when they
1. Message on doing blatantly illegal things,
2. Are doing blatantly illegal things,
3. There is no non-violent recourse stopping them from escalating and doing more blatantly illegal things.
With Republicans we have #1 and #2 met. If you think they haven't met #3, they are increasingly encroaching on it. When Judge Immergut blocked the Trump admin from federalizing the National Guard because the conditions of 10 USC 12406 were not met in Oregon, the Trump admin issued another order federalizing the California National Guard to be sent to Portland. Then another order from Abbott where he volunteered the Texas National Guard to be sent to Oregon and Illinois. The judge within 24 hours called another hearing and asked the DoJ lawyer "Mr. Hamilton, you are an officer of the court. Aren’t the defendants simply circumventing my order?” https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/05/us/oregon-trump-california-national-guard after the DoJ lawyer defended the deployment by saying the troops were just being repositioned to Portland - because that would be a blatantly illegal "repositioning" that flouts the judge's original order. The reason she states he is an officer of the court is because it sure looks like he is not truthfully representing the second order to the court and not truthfully representing the first order to the federal government - that means she's hinting that he's engaged in contumacious behavior and there will likely be contempt proceedings or referral to the lawyer's Bar counsel for intentionally misrepresenting the legal situation in such a high stakes case.
There is nobody on the Republican side speaking out against this. Instead there is unanimous support for impeaching the judge, ignoring the judge's orders, and invoking the Insurrection Act to let the military perform law enforcement functions in blue states and cities. Trump addressed all of the military generals last week and told them they would be using blue cities as military training grounds, sending them after the enemy within, and swatting the Democrats like flies. This is all not just very bad, but it's not stopping, because there is nothing to stop them. Republicans aren't being stopped by the democratic objections of the majority of people in these blue states. The federal government being shut down isn't stopping them. Judges' initial orders are not stopping them, they have to call back DoJ lawyers on an emergency basis within 24 hours to draft another TRO to stop them. (A continuing pattern from the Abrego Garcia case where the appeals court denied another stay pending appeal after the Supreme Court already rebuked the federal government, or from the CECOT flights where Drew Engisn was lying to judge Boasberg about the flights not taking off, or from the myriad cases about foreign aid still being illegally frozen.) Did anybody predict things would get this bad at the start of Trump's second term? To anybody thinking violence isn't yet justified against Republicans, you better start mentally clarifying when it is, because they will stop at nothing, so we'll be there shortly.
I'm reminded of the distinction between "enemy" as a casual word for someone you don't like, the legal term of art for the target of a formal declaration of war (or a similar equivalent), and the foreign policy assessment that lies somewhere in between. The US has very few enemies, because they tend to die ugly deaths in short order. But there are quite a few *adverseries* to contend with on the grand stage of geopolitics.
Eliding the distinction is unfortunate, and goes hand in hand with a sloppy approach for when the extreme violence the US is capable of ought to be used.
Agree with most of what you say, and I don't usually call people "fascists" because it seems too loosely defined. Couple of reactions:
* Whether political violence is acceptable isn't just a question of how bad the target is, but the political situation. Are there times where it would be OK to assassinate the president? Most people would say yes, e.g. if he announces "ok guys I'm a dictator now, kill the opposition". But if that same guy is a lone Congressman with 0 national constituency, then no.
* It's hard to say that people shouldn't "talk about fascists as if it's OK to kill them" because one of the biggest and most defining events in US history, was basically us killing fascists for 4 years. But even though it was OK to summarily kill a nazi on Omaha Beach, it isn't OK to machinegun a neo-nazi rally.
* It's not the case that the left is more likely to talk up political violence. The right is constantly calling the left "fascist" and even more commonly "communist" (while also saying the two should be seen as morally equivalent); Trump personally constantly calling for people to be executed, etc; posts AI videos wishcasting violence against enemies; people always talking about civil war; etc.
* For Woodie Guthrie specifically, I take it as meaning more like this machine kills fascism. Makes more sense, he isn't saying his rad tunes are going to facemelt Nazis like in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but that they'll spread cool anti-fascist vibes and make their ideology go away.
* Is it "political violence" that we are blowing up boats in the Caribbean on basically nonexistent pretexts, and Stephen Miller according to media reports wants to do it purely for political/demagogic reasons? There's an asymmetry about how we talk about this with violence *by* the state vs by others. I think you can defend it but it should be pointed out.
Of course, you can just reuse the stock phrases developed for explaining why taxation isn't theft. Something like "the price you pay for living in a civilized society," and "but who will build the roads?"
It seems to me very clear that fascism, like most things, is a sliding scale and is an analogous term. German Nazi fascists were a different level of evil from Italian fascists, who were much worse than Franco's Spanish fascists. I would react to a Nazi with utter revulsion and horror, but I do understand why someone might support Franco. And, of course, if you want to be extremely strict with your definitions you could define fascism so narrowly as to only include Mussolini, or broadly enough to include the Malibu Police Chief.
"I don’t think this implies support for fascism, any more than saying that you shouldn’t kill communists implies support for communism. They’re both evil ideologies which are bad and which we should work hard to keep out of America"
Cany you clarify what you mean here, this doesn't seem like a fair equivocation to me as written.
I'm guessing it's supposed to mean that some forms of Communism can be as objectionable as some forms of fascism. E.g. a violent tyrannical Communist regime might be as evil or more evil than a mild kind of fascism that's only marginally ethno-centric and anti-democratic, just enough to warrant the label.
But communism isn't inherently a violent or undemocratic ideology the way fascism is.
Maybe the most central member of the "communism" cluster is a violent tyranny for historical reasons. But it seems perfectly coherent to be a communist who's against private property but other wise pro-democracy and pro-liberalism, in a way that it's not coherent to say "I'm fascist but pro-democracy and against ethno-nationalism."
Just being against private property doesn't strike me as the kind of view that needs to be "kept out of America" unlike almost anything that really could be described as fascism.
So it doesn't seem fair to equate them in abstract terms, especially given the post is about not applying terms too broadly.
Greg Lukianoff said this in a recent article, making a distinction between fascism and RW authoritarianism:
"fascism was a weird melding of left-wing and right-wing ideas, combining nationalism, racism, and socialism in a way that won more adherents than it ever should have — especially among intellectuals and, distressingly, on German campuses. Meanwhile, right-wing authoritarianism is basically the story of the human race prior to the 20th century, when left-wing authoritarianism started to become more prominent."
This is the first time I can recall that Scott talking about stochastic terrorism, and he seems to frame it very negatively. Is there more detail about the reasoning for that thinking?
Isn't some muting good in certain cases? For example, if I advocate that everyone named David is an intrinsically evil person who should be forced to wear a scarlet letter in public and it's responsible for all evil, and a lot of other people also started saying that and spreading it, it seems like that social influence can eventually lead to violence, albeit indirectly. That's my understanding of the concept, is that just a bullet we bite for free speech?
Your premises sort of assume your conclusion. The problem with the world you posit is that lots of people believe the calumnies. You are positing the bad outcome. People are more likely to believe Im morally abominable if I actually am. Therefore, it’s best to let the marketplace of ideas adjudicate my moral worth. That’s basically what reputation in a free society is.
Well, to get into concrete details, what about Kirk? It seems like a lot of people hated his ideas, talked about how bad he was, and enough people believed it that one of them eventually killed him. I posit the bad outcome because it seems like it happened. If I'm correct that stochastic terrorism accurately describes the people who said that Kirk was evil and should be punished, why is that concept bad? Is it an accurate concept but still one that should be rejected? Why?
Yup, either Scott or someone else will need to expand on exactly what in that concept-space is "wrongheaded". I expect I mostly agree with him on what downstream scholarship, etc. is wrong here, but the top-level diagnosis clearly has some explanatory power re: the July 2024 Trump and September 2025 Kirk assassination attempts, and denying that will not lead anywhere good.
Equating saying that someone is bad with terrorism I think is problematic. Terrorism's kind of a loaded term to begin with, but to equate it with the expression of an opinion or statement of belief is a) over the top and b) ripe for abuse, because nobody wants to be associated with the word "terrorism."
How does physical violence against medical practitioners and administrative staff of places which offer abortions, figure into this? Because there are clergy(various faiths) and pundits who continually rail against abortion, equating it to evils which need violent opposition including illegal means, and then behave all surprised and innocent when a member of their congregation/audience carries out a shooting or bombing. "I said they were the enemies of God and called on righteous warriors to rise up and smite them, but you can't blame ME for what happened"; I've heard the term "stochastic terrorism" used in those situations. Was that inaccurate?
As David says, it's a term that can be used to mute your opponents, but the catch here is that it's based on a real phenomenon: if you tell enough people X, then a few of them will believe X. This ought to be self-evident, from the fact that textbooks exist. The stronger, less evident form is that if X is hard to believe, but you tell enough people X for long enough, then a few of them will believe X, and act on it.
The catch _there_ is that no one knows exactly how long you have to tell people X, or which people you have to tell X, or how farfetched X can be, but everyone seems to agree that these are factors in computing whatever P(belief) is. And when the action has a payoff in the neighborhood of highly influential people being assassinated, people have a high interest in knowing more about that function, and in getting it as low as they can, at least for themselves.
So there are movements to clamp down on any of those three, or all of them, but mostly the third one. The problem there is that everyone disagrees on how farfetched any given X is.
I've seen it discussed recently how more people these days are saying that political violence is acceptable in response to survey questions on the topic, and I always wonder how the question is phrased, because as you note, I think almost everybody would agree that political violence is justified *in certain circumstances.* Like if you were in the Soviet Union in 1939 and saw a drunken Stalin wandering alone down the Moskva River, I think it'd be unethical not to push him in.
On the other hand, you have to consider that a lot of the people who are willing to engage in political violence are not at all motivated by pro-social instincts and instead find violence useful for their own narrow interests, or perhaps are just driven by tribalist antipathy; they don't have any motivating principles other than "my ingroup is not wielding what I deem to be sufficient power at the moment." We seem to have a lot of people these days motivated by tribalist antipathy. This should probably raise your bar re: what circumstances need to exist before political violence becomes acceptable.
I agree with your conclusion that 2 is the obvious part of the chain that has to break. You can't use political violence simply because you've decided on a label. But the way you approached this makes me concerned for the political culture in SF/among rationalists which seems to have normalized violence far more than it realizes.
As an intuition pump, communism is a violent expansionary ideology that has killed tens of millions at a minimum and likely well over a hundred million. Further, communists control the second most powerful state in the world today and a few other states. Support for communism (not socialism, communism) in the US has tripled recently and it's fully acceptable to be Ezra Klein and say communism is his goal jokingly. None of this is true for fascism.
The right is expected to live in that world, and in a world where it has suffered multiple disproportionate assassination attempts (some successful), and not commit political violence. The left is expected to live in a world where fascism has low single digit approvals and where almost everyone who supports Trump will at least explicitly disavow fascism. And this has caused it to seriously reconsider its commitment to avoiding political violence.
Now my actual thought is that reactionaries are generally reacting to something and so you generally see the rise in fascism after the rise in communist violence. So this fits the pattern. But my point is this piece basically doesn't grapple with the idea that these tools could ever be turned on the left or the fact that avoiding political violence and mutual tolerance is not a polite concession by the civilized left but detente against the right doing the same.
Also, I think it's particularly foolish for the left to indulge it. Because when the knives come out the right tends to win.
I really don't think the right is the "faction of peace" that you're making it out to be. There have been multiple terrorist attacks in this country committed by right-wing individuals with right-wing grievances. And there have been assassinations and assassination attempts against left-wing figures by right-wing assassins.
It seems to me that the right-wingers who say that they're completely innocent and the left are the real baddies are just rationalizing away any guilt on the part of their side for all the attacks committed by people on the right while being as uncharitable as possible whenever an attack is committed by a person on the left. I don't know why I have to take their concerns very seriously when this is the mental process they're using to arrive at them.
I don't know who has a bigger violence problem; it's clear to me that there are violent people on both sides. And quite frankly, I don't really care that much who's worse. It exists in big enough numbers in the right and the left that I see it as more useful to place the blame on the individuals rather than collectivizing it to the entire political sides.
I'm not making the right out to be the faction of peace. Simply the side that lives in a world where communism is far more normalized and globally powerful than fascism. Usually people don't even bother to dispute that and skip to explaining why communism isn't like fascism or it didn't kill as many people as it did because denialism is far more normalized around communism than fascism.
My point is under these facts the right is still expected to be peaceful while under a much less harsh set of facts we get this piece of Decker being lionized for a Secret Service investigation. Is there an equivalent to that among rationalists? If so I'm unaware of it. I make, and need not make, any claim about right wing peacefulness.
I am aware of them. However, no equivalent of Charlie Kirk or the two attempts on Trump that almost succeeded. Thus "disproportionate" which implies both sides have some proportion.
This is a common form of defensive thinking: you subtly change the claim from a true one to an untrue one, drop the harder to debunk points, and then debunk that. It's a mix between a non-sequitur and a strawman.
Actually murdering two politicians, which I believe was enough to tip the balance in the legislature, had more actual impact than attempts on Trump that didn't even result in any serious injuries. You could add the attempted assassination of a SCOTUS judge, which again didn't amount to anything (though I think it's terrible another judge is reducing his sentence because he's now claiming to be trans). If you discount state-level politicians, I could add that somebody broke into Nancy Pelosi's home and attacked her husband with a hammer.
I assume you're not talking about the attempted assassination of Kavanaugh where there were actually shots fired. It's sad there's so many. But if you count up the total number of successful assassinations/killings against federal politicians the majority are by left wingers. Though there's not that many so it's a small sample size. And some of the victims are Democrats.
If you want to tally what it comes down to is how you define left or right wing violence. Generally speaking, it depends on who a couple of specific groups (like Islamists) get defined as. One study that showed right wing violence was overwhelming defined being pro-Palestine as right wing, for example, because it's a religious and nationalist cause.
None of which changes that you're avoiding engaging with my substantial point.
Some very confusing cases, like one where a group of black guys beat up an older white lady and her disabled son for not paying "the white tax" is coded right-wing. Which... you can argue it's not left-wing, but it's not meaningfully right-wing either. And that's downstream of different charging standards too.
However, although he didn't do his dirty deeds in the US, Breivik makes me reject broader claims about right-aligned (defined w.r.t. recent Western political coalitions, e.g. Islam-inspired violence counts as left-aligned for this purpose) political violence being less of a problem than left-aligned political violence.
Yeah, I think right aligned violence is a problem. As I said elsewhere, I want defenses of Stalin and Hitler (or Castro and Saddam) to both be seen as unacceptable. The difference is that one of those is FAR more close to mainstream acceptability than the other.
--ok, but it's just dumb luck (and the dumbness of the guy who tried it for not knowing that she wasn't there) that Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House, didn't have her skull fatally bashed in by an intruder. I think that would have been worse, although less dramatically caught on video, than a podcaster.
Right-wingers famously take orders from Tim Walz, indeed (to be clear, the imagined Tim Walz that phoned their schizophrenic brain, not the actual goofball)
I find it somewhat mind-boggling anytime someone accuses the Trump administration of authoritarianism. An Administration that seeks to actively reduce the size of government and remove 10 rules for every one that is issued is incredibly libertarian and freedom minded compared to anything else we've had in the last four decades.
Not mind-boggling in the slightest. He's not reducing the size of government, he's exploding the deficit (which Elon Musk has called him out on). He's claiming the authority to place tariffs even though only Congress has the Constitutional power to set taxes.
The Trump administration is largely focused on exerting power *without* creating fixed rules. Did they make a rule to bomb Venezuelan fishing boats? Did they make a rule to extract bribes in exchange for tariff exemptions? Of course not.
Also, I don't believe that any agency is actually doing this "cancel 10 rules" thing. While I don't have hard proof it isn't happening, I don't remember seeing any "10 rules eliminated" press releases in the past 6 months.
And hopefully they aren't! "We have blindly to eliminate rules" is a stupid way to run a country ... unless your goal is "abolish the concept of limited government, and instead have a dictator rule by whim and bribe".
There's this charming American tendency (on both sides) to associate fascism with jackbooted restrictions on liberty rather than the cluster of beliefs around racial/sexual/national/cultural purity alongside strength-based hierarchy and corresponding economic arrangements.
As both a moral and practical matter, it might be useful to consider what levels of minority oppression and inequality make political violence acceptable, instead of milestones of speech restriction and defiance of institutions.
Alternatively, if one is trying to load the deck in one's favor the other way, one might instead consider what level of taxation or regulation makes violence morally acceptable.
It's interesting that during the Bush years the word "fascist" was thrown around quite cavalierly as well, but without the accompanying threat of real violence. It's unfortunate that the bad behavior of a few people can have so much power over our language
If your only options are "do nothing" and "kill the fascists" you'll find yourself in a concentration camp or laying down tracks in siberian permafrost before you manage to actually kill anybody. It's all about gradual escalation. (NATO, during the cold war, had an escalation ladder with dozens of rungs!) Government tries to boil the frog, it escalates a bit, the civic society escalates as well. You can publicly complain, join a demonstration, refuse to pay your taxes etc. before you get to the level of violent pushback. It's a quick and finely graded feedback machanism. And from afar, it looks like it works pretty well in the US. Compare to Russia: In the 90's they've had an actual democracy. But when it started slipping, there was close to no escalation from the civic society and here they are in the deep shit.
aren't we just reframing (or like revisiting) the paradox of tolerance? Like isn't that the whole point of the paradox --- that endless tolerance undermines tolerance so at some point those that value tolerance have to be intolerant
I think a lot of popular discourse around fascism, violence, and so on, is very confused because so many of the concepts are derived from the punk and hardcore scenes, especially in the 1980s and 1990s.
There was a large contingent of skinhead punks that people wanted to keep away from their scenes, and a certain amount of young men fighting each other was already normal.
In the United States, most of the slogans about punching Nazis, antifa imagery, debates over free speech vs. hate speech, that you see used by members of the general public traces back to some situation like this.
For example: the famous "Nazi bar" analogy which you hear constantly repeated. How many people have ever been to a bar where it's even possible for a Nazi to show up and a leftist bartender to threaten him with a baseball bat? I've never had that experience. In the story it's specifically a "shitty crustpunk bar".
I think it may be bad that these weird and famously dysfunctional subcultures have been given some kind of ownership over the concept of organizing politically to oppose fascism.
Regarding the definition of Fascist, it's kind of like the problem of defining Socialist in that there are colloquial definitions and absolute definitions. If you try to use the colloquial one, a defender will No True Scotsman you with the absolute definition. If you use the absolute definition, such as nationalizing industry or having workers control means of production, you run the risk of your point being lost and a defender can still contradict you by pointing out a slight variation in the rather complex definitions and saying "So, what I'm proposing is not really socialism/fascism because it SLIGHTLY differs from the definition you gave" even if the spirit is 99% there.
Regarding when violence becomes "okay", that's a pretty difficult question. As a kid growing up in a conservative rural area, a lot of people were edging pretty close to calling for violence against Clinton and the FBI after Waco and Ruby Ridge. Years later however, a lot of these same people were cheering for local law enforcement shooting unarmed black guys (I'm ignoring the protests here, they were outright cheering and making racist comments about the shooting victims, even people like Walter Scott or Ahmaud Arbury). Ultimately, people are willing to overlook stuff from their preferred side, either cheering it, ignoring it, or possibly saying "Well, it was bad but...". People are also willing to get pretty jumpy when their non-preferred side does the same. As for where the line is, it's different for many people. I hate to take the Justice Potter approach, but sometimes you can just say you'd know it if you see it, but can't pre-define an existing line, just evaluate on a case-by-case basis.
> I think I land somewhere between Orban and Hitler, but I can’t say for sure, nor can I operationalize the distinction.
Orban is on track to lose re-election. The supreme virtue of democracy, no matter its multitude of defects, is that it removes the need to actually fight a civil war for political power, as you can instead just count up how many people would be on each side and skip the war to its presumed outcome without all the deaths & destruction.
little carve out of the right to bear arms for "bad people", a little bit of troop deployment, a few targeted arrests of political enemies, a little strong arming of American corporations, a few restrictions on who can receive emergency assistance, a few boons provided to loyal rich capitalists, a few Americans detained and beaten, a few lies about the status of American cities justifying more federal control, a few targeted arrests of political rivals, a few more pundits getting kicked off of mainstream media, a few loyalists getting put in charge of mainstream media outlets, more insistence that people must carry around their citizenship papers and normalizing that those papers are checked frequently, more restrictions on web access for the common good, more restrictions on travel for certain types of disfavored activity (or punishment of those who aid such disfavored travel). Slowly normalizing the idea that non-citizens should have fewer rights than they do. Normalizing that military action isn't accountable to legal process. Normalizing that it is ok to harm Americans who are peacefully protesting.
Soon:
Normalizing that taunting counts as violence and thus deadly force is a legitimate response. Normalizing that non-citizens don't have first or second amendment rights. Normalizing ignoring courts other than SCOTUS. Normalizing military presence at voting centers. Normalizing carefully and intimidatingly verifying the citizenship every person who votes. Normalizing refusing to let people through to the polls, even if they meet state voting requirements. Normalizing that it's no big deal that illegal immigrants die in custody. Normalizing that citizens shouldn't protest alongside non-citizens, because any reasonable person would know they might get shot if they do that. Normalizing further restrictions on the right to bear arms without proof of citizenship. Normalizing that it's normal for federal agents to maintain a list of who is buying weapons, even if state law prohibits it. Normalizing the rescinding of federal pensions for people who leave the country. Normalizing the FCC restricting the licenses of media companies, unless they are owned by allies of the government. Normalizing that all social media participation requires proof of citizenship.
Finally: arresting a bunch of rival thought leaders and seizing their passports since they are flight risks. Coincidentally, ICE picks up a bunch of people who don't have proof of citizenship, and immediately put them in a boat to CECOT. Coincidentally, hours later,the military destroys a boat that they claim was transporting drugs. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
There's no society-wude white line here, just the careful erosion of rights in the name of "common sense safety"
We submit that guns are the easiest metric: if the NRA protests a "minor" gun restriction and the government does it anyway, you need to start buying an AR 15 (start at $500) with cash, and/or start stocking up on 5.56mm ammo.
I think this is much ado about nothing. Fascism is no worse than other forms of non-democratic forced collectivism (democratic forced collectivism being better). Incitement should not be a crime. People should take responsibility for their own actions. Sticks and stones...
Democracy is a set of rules by which everyone abides and that limits how much you can hurt your politicial opponent while your side is in power, lest they do the same to you when the pendulum swings and they are back in power. Fascists reject these rules because they accept no limits on how much they can hurt their opponents. They willingly position themselves outside of the protections of the liberal-democratic ruleset. Therefore, they absolutely are legitimate targets of political violence, up to and including deadly violence, because they intend to do the same, given the chance.
So if fascists are a legitimate target, when is the legitimate time? It is wrong to say that everyone has a different "red line" after which they resort to violence. The very notion of a red line is illusory; that's how computers function, but not humans. Humans are able to endure abuse, rationally inexplicable amounts of it, because they know that violence creates irreversible consequences, and they want to be really sure that the time is right. More often than not, the "right time" is a singular event, completely insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but around which all that resentment crystallizes into very real consequences that reach much further than could ever be justified by the event itself. Basically every culture on Earth and in History has experienced this; think Rodney King and the LA riots, Franz Ferdinand and WW1, Mohamed Bouazizi and the Arab Spring. Maybe the same will happen again in the USA; perhaps one ICE raid too many, a National Guard accidentally killing a protester, Ghislaine Maxwell pardoned and given a celebratory White House reception.
There is also no "trivialization of violence", some simple reward system of "Oh I killed this guy and life got marginally better, let's do that again!". Violence is a safety valve. It is the "ultimate ratio regis", but also the "ultimate ratio populi", and whether or not you believe that since WW2 or so we suddenly made a moral quantum leap and now live in a more enlightened age (I don't), then our proven history of violence was at least no obstacle to this current state of affairs.
No. There's a sleight of hand here: #1 (Many Americans are fascists) is a factual claim that you want people to be able to say *even if it isn't true now*. But #3 is "Political violence in America is morally unacceptable (*at the current time*)". Notice the problem here? The latter applies to the current time, and the former explicitly doesn't.
Your position should be:
Political violence in America is morally unacceptable (at the current time)
We should not say "many Americans are fascists" at the current time (because it isn't true at the current time).
Political violence in America may be acceptable in some other situation, but not now
We can say "many Americans are fascists" in some other situation (when it's actually true), but not now.
That may be what he meant, but it isn't what he said. And that's not a trivial difference. Because if that's what he meant, the answer is "if time t means now, #1 is false". And Scott doesn't dare say that #1 is false. First of all, his leftwing allies will all reject him if he does, and second, he probably doesn't want to admit it to himself. The whole song and dance about how #1 at least has the "potential to be true in the future" is there to keep him from having to admit that #1 is false today.
So of course sometimes by fascist we mean "person pushing policies we don't like" but sometimes by fascist we mean "person pushing policies that seem like they might lead to a genocide."
Seems like neither definition warrants violence when they are not a threat (I'm thinking of my youth when every neo-nazi movement in America just seemed pathetic and completely unthreatening).
but if we're talking about the latter, and it seems like they have a decent shot of taking over (or worse, already have) violent resistance seems almost compelled to me at that point.
I'm not attempting to locating trump/maga anywhere on this spectrum more just sort of sketching out how I would think about it.
What do you call Trumpian movement that uses tariffs and other levers to compel the compliance of private industry with political efforts? Corporatist(by the way used in the article, not the correct usage by the way) typically seek to strengthen Corporate power, this government seeks to saddle it to their political enterprise. The correct term is indeed fascism, but that I've never subscribed to the theory that violence is acceptable towards fascists. Revolution is an entirely different political phase where violence is the means utilized to reform. As you said, we're not at that phase.
This is well below Scott's usual standard. There have been reams of books and articles on the question of when, if ever, political violence is acceptable.* Scott could have summarized and critiqued that literature, as he often does. Instead, we get this?
An important distinction wrt political violence being justified: There are circumstances (which I hope to never see in my country) that would justify a civil war to overthrow the evil regime and replace it with something else. It's not at all clear how to define those circumstances, since civil wars are very destructive and there may not always be a bright line that the government has crossed that makes it clear that they're that bad.
But this applies to civil war. It doesn't apply to freelance political violence.
Consider some kinds of political violence that don't have much to do with civil war:
a. Street violence (showing up at a political rally you dislike with some friends and busting some heads)
b. Targeted violence (catching up with someone whose expressed ideas you dislike and beating him up or terrorizing him)
c. Rioting/looting/burning during a political protest.
These are all kinds of political violence that aren't anywhere close to civil war, have no chance of overturning an oppressive regime, but are often cheered on by some folks (mostly on the left) in the modern US. I guess (a-b) would be the "punch a fascist" idea.
ISTM that we can condemn those without risking giving up on the possibility that there can be justification for trying to overthrow an oppressive government. Similarly for stuff like targeted kidnappings, bombings, and assassinations that exist to spread terror to the other side, but have no hope of changing the regime or anything.
There's a lot of relevant context that's often elided in discussions of this kind. I'm going to use the first part of this comment to make it explicit.
1. The government is the organization that can do violence in some territory so effectively that nobody can stop them. (So: Microsoft is bigger, with more people, economic influence, technological prowess, organizational capacity, institutional memory & procedure, etc than the governments of many countries. It is nevertheless not a government, because there is no territory where it can do arbitrary violence with impunity.)
2. Governments come into existence when some organization does political violence effectively enough that it can no longer be resisted by anybody within the territory; it becomes the new government. (This is how the US government was created; it was originally a rebellion, committing political violence against the officers of Great Britain. It won, seized the whole territory, and now it's the government.)
3. The US Constitution is very smart, in creating various processes to change how the government works without having to violently overthrow and replace it every time; and in having elections to facilitate peaceful political transitions. It's much, much better to get a bunch of people together to vote and change the government, than to get a bunch of people together to fight the government and replace it. This abstraction (from mass violence to mass voting) is the fundamental principle of democracy.
And here's what I'm going to assert. The following isn't general principles everybody should know, but rather my own opinion:
The people of the US are fundamentally a democratic people. The terms "communist" and "fascist" are offensive to us because they're accusations that somebody has betrayed the US Constitution and the voting > office > law abstraction that we use to alter the government without violence. Those terms don't just mean "very far left" or "very far right". The Communists sent spies and saboteurs to subvert the American democratic process; the Fascists had private armies of brownshirts doing extrajudicial political violence. When you put those terms on someone, you mean that they'd be willing to, for instance, bribe officials, subvert election procedures, falsify evidence, etc, all the different ways that the democratic process can be corrupted, up to assassinating politicians and terrorizing the population. You're basically calling them an enemy of the democracy.
That's the reasoning behind the "violence against fascists is okay" idea. It's like marking somebody as an outlaw. Since they've betrayed the fundamental democratic abstraction, they shouldn't benefit from it anymore. (This is crazy and bad; both sides think the other side has betrayed the Constitution; so all you're doing when you yourself betray it is to prove the other side right.)
Anyway, it's not as simple as "political violence is evil", that way lies anarchy. The government creates itself with political violence, and maintains its existence by using violence to overcome smaller competitors (the mafia, rioters, extremist groups, drug cartels, etc) for control of its territory. When you talk about a government, you're talking about historical political violence crystallized over time into habits of thought, laws and institutions.
Hum, About the constitution, note that (cribbing from Naval Gazing) that when we rewrote the Japanese constitution after WW2 we did not make it near as labyrinthic as ours.
Orwell observed in the 1940s that "fascist" was so loosened in meaning as to simply mean "something undesirable". So I think that people who care about truth and precision should find a more precise word to use.
The rule is just the breaking of the silver rule: don’t do to others what you don’t want done to you. If a party normalizes state violence against their citizens / political enemies, they remove themselves from the civil rules of engagement.
So I would say that at the base level, fascists should not be considered acceptable targets of violence. But historically, the fascist parties did inflict violence on their citizens / political enemies, which is why the latent feelings are that fascists are ok targets of violence. So you can call a new party fascist (in the definitional sense) without thinking that violence should be incurred against them (latent feelings). But you should be worried about this party due to historical context.
So Newsom calling Miller a fascist is more meaning “you are the type of person who commits political violence against your own citizens” (verifiably true, see all the American citizens hurt and shot in ICE raids recently). And Stephen miller calling for Newsom to be arrested for saying such a thing is self proving that he is the type of person who condones weaponization of the state against political enemies.
"Fascism views forms of violence – including political violence, imperialist violence, and war – as means to national rejuvenation."
All of the violence and rioters and human trafficking and drug poisonings of our nation is coming 99% from the extreme left Antifa wing. It is why California is bringing back mask mandates, to give Antifa an excuse to hide their faces while they carry out violent operations by their fascist militarized civilians. Obama's Antifa brown shirts are the modern day fascists. Period. Full stop.
Human trafficking & drug smuggling is done for money, not political motives. And a whole lot of rioting is "for fun & profit", as Banfield put it in The Unheavenly City. There is political rioting, but January 6 would be an example of that, and it wasn't antifa.
Obama hasn't been president for over 8 years. He isn't in charge.
I didn't understand your argument defending #1. It's completely consistent to say "there are only a few fascists right now, meaning violence is unacceptable, but if I was in pre-WW2 Germany and could stop the Nazi movement through violence, I should".
Second: it seems like all three can be true if you interpret the second statement to "fascists are sometimes an acceptable target for political violence" rather than "fascism implies acceptable target". And it seems like most antifascists who endorse violence are implicitly referring to the former; they're not going around asking everyone their political beliefs, they're punching protestors who they see as actively spreading those beliefs.
I am less completely married to the non-aggression principle than I was in the past but it still seems like a good guide in this case. Fascists marching through the streets, shouting "Jews will not replace us!" are not legitimate targets for violence. Fascists pulling a weapon and pointing it at someone are. As are fascists who say "On Monday, June 14, at 2:00 PM we are going to go kill this left-wing politician." All this is in accordance with existing law, and I find it sufficient - you can do violence to someone who poses a current, active, identifiable threat to you. Otherwise you cannot. Their ideology is irrelevant. There are border issues here (the first is an implied threat but imo not specific enough to make a reasonable person afraid of imminent violence) but the general principle is sound.
When it comes to actual government operatives, we have a harder case. We legitimize some violence from governments - for example, police can forcibly restrain someone committing a crime and most agree if they're convicted in court, government workers can then put them in a prison and forcibly keep them there.
So the question becomes "is the violence legitimate" but I and every other person on earth will disagree to some extent on what is legitimate use of state violence. So the bar must be higher than "I personally don't think the government should be permitted to levy an income tax so I can shoot anyone who tries to collect."
The actual answer is "when the breakdown of state legitimacy and social cohesion is less costly than enduring the current status quo" but on a meta level we should agree on this, because it's costly not to have shared values around these principles. As much as I've thought about this question (even pre-Trump, just reading history), I suspect my answer will always, forever, be "not quite yet." That said, I do truly believe we have non-violent, legitimate chances to pull things back. There's no sign yet that we're cancelling 2026 elections, and that might be a decent bright line. I would welcome some clarity on how other thoughtful people think about this.
Do you feel obligated to wait until the 2026 elections are canceled to take action? If there are ICE agents and red-state national guard outside every purple-county polling station on election day, do we still refrane from violence because the 2026 election was allowed to proceed? If we are only allowed to act against threats, does my status as a straight white dude prohibit my participation in the uprising?
Like I get you are trying to be fair minded, but the explicit plain-language position of the administration is that they will use state violence against political opponents and ethnically cleanse America. This is not a euphemism, words have meaning, etc. The executive branch is literally promising to use the state power, including the military and the judiciary, to imprison or kill their political opponents, and they appear to have the ability to do so, and are proceeding in that direction.
At this point it's like if a news agency interviewed a member of the NAACP, then brought on a Grand Dragon of the klan in order to get a balanced perspective and consider both sides.
It did occur to me after making this comment that elections are not likely to be cancelled. In the most likely case, they will instead by restricted, and voters intimidated. I still do think we have to be cautious about advocating political violence.
Other than that statement, my comment wasn't meant to be fair-minded about the present, it was meant to use extreme hypotheticals to point out issues with various justifications for violence. I'd agree that the stated position of the administration is that they intend to attempt a fascist takeover of the United States government. The question (to me, at least) is whether that attempt has literally any hope of success at all, whether a violent intervention would be helpful, and whether other means of stopping it can still be successful. And that's a moral position. I think you should only harm others when you have to.
I think there's basically no chance of the 2026 elections being cancelled, making it senseless to talk of "waiting" for that.
> the explicit plain-language position of the administration is that they will use state violence against political opponents and ethnically cleanse America
No, it isn't.
> to imprison or kill their political opponents, and they appear to have the ability to do so, and are proceeding in that direction
>the explicit plain-language position of the administration is that they will use state violence against political opponents and ethnically cleanse America
Scott, I have always appreciated your deep commitment to fairness and epistemic humility. Unfortunately, politics, morality and power are not objective sciences. Not withstanding that political violence is often a bad TACTIC, the moral case isn't hard to make.
The apparent contradiction in your 3 points can be reconciled by the following: the level of violence justified against facists is directly proportional to how much power they have.
Newsome defining far-right nationalism as anything patriotic political moderates and conservatives want is the reason why we can't have a discussion about politics any more.
There may well be a lot of fascists in America, but I'm pressing X to doubt that it is the ones who are being so called.
Did you notice that in “far-right nationalist authoritarian corporatist” you just have to swap two words then you can abbreviate it with FRANC? Just need a couple more attributes and you arrive at “Francoist”.
Excellent article. However, we already know the threshold for when mass political violence becomes legitimate:
It's when a Black fetanyl-addicted petty criminal with a heart condition dies in police custody after being restrained by a White police officer using standard methods
Surely the entire point of democracy is that if the government annoys enough people to cause a successful revolution, the revolution doesn't have to happen because you can just vote it out.
As a very wise man once said, the entire point of the law is to get whatever would have happened anyway to happen without bloodshed.
So you shouldn't resort to violence until it's become impossible to get rid of the government by voting.
If you don't even have enough support to vote out the government you don't like, starting a civil war is likely to be quite counter-productive. Civil wars are usually very very bad.
If you're just talking about taking random pot-shots at your political enemies then all that will do is inspire them.
"If you're just talking about taking random pot-shots at your political enemies then all that will do is inspire them."
Incredibly important point! The plan of "fascists" becoming fearful and timid after you shoot a few of them didn't even work on the ACTUAL FASCISTS. They made a very famous song about Horst Wessel! And it definitely isn't going to work on people who don't consider OURSELVES fascists -- we'll just think you are an evil terrorist who must be opposed at all costs.
To this discussion one must add the mindset behind the name calling. It is one thing to discuss the authoritarian impulses of one side and whether the term fascist applies. You then really need to look into what actually motivates people and what divergent positions you might be lumping together.
It is another if the cultural climate itself has been hyper charged with emotional and black and white thinking. Then the other side becomes automatically evil and othered, and one is free to straw man and misrepresent divergent positions.
IMO what the authoritarian and conformity inducing impulses on the left contributed to young minds going through the left dominated education establishments, was an out of control negativity bias against Western societies in general and the US in particular. Introduced into susceptible minds, this was soul destroying and convinced them that “there was never anything good about America, it was evil from the start” (from a leftist discussion forum) and that the only path is to live in constant opposition. Neither a happy or safe place. As FIRE has demonstrated, the acceptance of various kinds of violence against speech is increasing disproportionately on the left, and this is a consequence of this catastrophic mindset, that can then move from one topic to another in order to find an outlet.
Let me offer a couple of clarifying examples:
FIRE addressed the following mandate to teachers within California’s community college system:
Professors were required to acknowledge that “cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid and intersectional” and to develop “knowledge of the intersectionality of social identities and the multiple axes of oppression that people from different racial, ethnic and other minoritized (sic) groups face” Professors were informed that "persons that think they are not racists are in denial" and that the drive towards color blindness in society "perpetuates existing racial inequalities". They were warned not to “weaponize academic freedom” to “inflict curricular trauma on our students” (FIRE Quarterly, Fall 2023)
FIRE successfully sued for this. They stated: "These regulations are a totalitarian triple whammy. The government is forcing professors to teach and preach politicized viewpoints they do not share, imposing incomprehensible guidelines, and threatening to punish professors when they cross an arbitrary indiscernible line."
This affected 54,000 professors, but FIRE was able to take action only because a few professors were willing to stand up as litigants in this case. Otherwise it would just have continued without resistance from within the left bubble, that apparently had no antibodies for bad ideas on its own side or expelled them from their system, because the mindset was widespread:
An example of institutionalized catastrophic thinking:
From guidances implemented first at Mount Sinai Medical School , then adopted at other major medical schools (Academic Medicine 95(12S):p S44-S50, December 2020) :
“There is no priority in medical education that is more important than addressing and eliminating racism and bias”… "It is impossible to embark upon this journey, especially for people who are White, without making an active effort to leave behind who we think we are, what we think we have accomplished, the titles and publications—all of it. These are meaningless in the face of what our colleagues and students of color face every waking moment of their lives. Worse than meaningless, they are unearned, and we have achieved them primarily because every day we are given advantages that others are not based solely on the color of our skin".
Credit to Rikki Schlott for finding this.
Much of what people object to on the right would not have happened but for this (and other examples of censorship or mandates, such as during covid). It caused many to go into full cultural self defense mode.
Quote from a neighbor: She asked what her son had learned in school that day. He summarized: "I learned that all white people are evil and that borders are racist" She added: "If someone messes with the gender of my child...."
While you're at it Scott, you should stop using the word 'evil' as well. It's not what you mean, and it's a weak moralistic cop out. You never use the word 'holy'. What you mean is that fascism (or communism) is *ineffective* - it both loses wars to liberal democracies and it lowers the standard of living as well.
1) every discussion for whether someone is or isn’t “fascist” that I have ever seen has ultimately been an unhelpful exercise in semantics. Debates about whether Stephen Miller or Donald Trump are fascist (even in 2025) are no exception. I personally try to use some combination of “authoritarian” and “bigot” as appropriate, which usually capture what people actually dislike about fascism
2) Made the mistake of looking at the DSL thread for this article. See a bunch of idiots who are tying themselves in knots refusing to admit that maaaaaaybe the guy who threatened his critics with prosecution (something you cited in the article), whose tried to jawbone CBS into firing Jimmy Kimmel, who has deployed the national guard to cities to deal with disorder which, as near as I can tell, doesn’t actually exist, could POSSIBLY be regarded as authoritarian. Why a man who already tried to stage a coup once could possibly not be trusted to simply step aside when his term is done
Let's test our intuitions on what we mean by "morally acceptable" here.
A thought experiment - if you could painlessly assassinate a political figure and you somehow knew for certain that it would be seen by everyone as an accident or natural death (don't fight the hypothetical), at what stage would it be okay to do so?
This is basically asking (if you're a utilitarian): "at what point is the harm caused by this person existing (or acting politically) greater to the harm caused by killing this person?"
I think I'd have a relatively low bar for that - many of the actions you've mentioned in the article are harmful enough to justify the consequences for the fascist in question, and this "invisible assassination" would therefore be morally acceptable.
But the *actual* question of moral acceptability for political violence *that is viewed as political violence* is more like: "at what point is the harm caused by this person existing (or acting politically) greater to the harm caused by killing this person, and all the political backlash, revenge attacks, increase in polarisation, loss of national stability etc. that follows?"
For obvious reasons, I'd have a much, much higher bar for this.
> A thought experiment - if you could painlessly assassinate a political figure and you somehow knew for certain that it would be seen by everyone as an accident or natural death (don't fight the hypothetical), at what stage would it be okay to do so?
Isn't this the classic case of Prisoner's Dilemma ? If everyone gets their own "kill politician" button, and everyone chooses Defect and spams that button, then you don't end up in political utopia -- but rather a land of ghosts. Thus the correct move is to destroy the button instead, even though by doing so you suffer a temporary loss.
I wish Scott covered the fashionable slogans such as Punch a Nazi and how they fit into this framework. What does it mean to punch a nazi? Sure, that's a form of political violence, but allegedly a softer on. I assume it means you want to punch the nazi, not kill the nazi, you just hurt them enough to stop being nazis. At least that's my read. What happens if they punch back, though? How many times to we punch them again? Do we punch them until they die? In which case, why isn't the slogan Kill a Nazi?
My initial reaction to this article was that the real statement to reject was (1), because while "many Americans are fascists" might be true, everyone disagrees on which ones. Everyone disagrees, because the definition is vague. And when the definition is vague, all the energy goes into pulling it into whatever shape will fit over whatever someone doesn't like. As many have noted in the comments already: Orwell anticipated this decades ago.
Reject claim (1); if you have the luxury to make a formal, widely acceptable case for why someone is a fascist, then you have the luxury for a trial, and the US already has a system for that.
Leaving alone the fact that fascism is an empty word, I would be careful about using it, lest it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I think that those fascinated with the idea of civil war - on the Left and the Right - should be sentenced to ten years of reviewing of the historical documentatio about the American Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, the War in Yugoslavia and other, and to write every day an essay about 'what happened to my wife and children after the other faction broke into my home and tortured and murdered me'
> So I think the natural conclusion is to abandon 2. Fascists, although evil, aren’t automatically a legitimate target for political violence.
There's a weaker version of 2 which is "Fascist _leaders_ are a legitimate target for political violence" which is not considered here and I think deserves consideration.
I think most people distinguish between movement leaders and followers. It would have certainly been acceptable to kill Hitler and Himmler, but the carpet bombing of Dresden (although I'm sure it killed many fascists) is much harder to defend.
I appreciate your attempt to address a difficult topic and I personally found it useful in clarifying my thinking.
One note about fascist synonyms: I've definitely heard "Nazi" used, which carries a similar negative connotation to "fascist." I've also heard "dictator" (specific to the leader, eg Trump in USA), and "authoritarian" (which admittedly doesn't carry the same degree of negative connotation).
I also still hear "racist", "sexist," "white nationalist", "KKK", and similar used in basically the same way to describe MAGA folks. In context they often make sense by themselves, but sometimes only really make sense as a makeshift synonym for "fascist."
...And I don’t want to abandon 1, because it seems like a factual claim that might be true - even if you don’t think it’s true now, it obviously has the potential to be true in the future - and we shouldn’t ban people from asserting true claims."
How many is "many"? A hundred thousand? A million? Out of a population of 340 million, how many Americans are real, genuine, actual Fascist as in "Heil mein Führer" type and not the "if you don't agree with me 100% on every tiny thing then you are a fascist" type of fascist?
"I think it’s probably bad practice to demand that reasonable people not use the word “fascist”. "
On the contrary, I think reasonable people should not use this word until they really do mean, and really can provide evidence to back up their claim, that those they are calling fascist are fascists. I presume we are meant to think the Phoenix Project lady is unreasonable, but that's what we're getting when "fascist" has lost all meaning beyond "this labels you as a bad person".
I'm not going to call Gavin Newsom a Communist or socialist, because he's not. He's a socially progressive liberal. I think it's stupid and counter-productive to call everyone "lefties" or Communists when they're not, and I think it's stupid and counter-productive to call everyone a fascist ditto.
So does this post mean you'll be voting for Katie Porter for governor of California? 😁 She seems to agree about the "many Americans" bit, what with the "How would I need them in order to win, Ma'am?" query (as an aside, this interview is comedy gold for the sheer entitlement on display: I don't need to give a flying fig about 40% of the electorate of California and as for the other 60% of course they are gonna vote for me and nobody else, it is a divine law inscribed on tablets of stone that the Democratic vote goes to the one anointed candidate which will be me, me, glorious me!)
"But the bigger problem is that you seem to believe that you’re entitled to people’s votes on account of being a Democrat. You’re all but daring people to vote for someone else. You may think that you’re making a factual point about electoral math, but you really just told voters: “We’re a one party state, dickheads. You’re gonna vote Republican? Fine: Good luck making eye contact with the wine moms in your neighborhood association after that. That ‘D’ next to my name stands for ‘Don’t you dare downgrade your social standing by voting for someone else,’ or ‘Deez nuts are available for sucking if you even think about not voting Democrat, because it’s California, bitches, and I’m gonna be governor whether you like it or not.’” And — unless I dramatically misunderstand your campaign — those impressions are off-message."
Motte: “fascist” is a useful technical term for a specific intersection of politics and aesthetics. It’s on par with “communist,” “libertarian,” or even “liberal.” The categories were made for man. We’re far enough from WWII that *Brown v. Oklahoma* is more relevant than *Chaplinsky v. NH.*
I feel a little guilty linking it, a little complicit in nutpicking. But since we’re talking about perceived threats, I think it’s worth giving an example. This is not an argument about prevalence or accuracy of such attitudes. It’s an observation that if you’re looking, you *will* find people who make Newsom look careful and conciliatory.
I’d like to keep using the practical, clinical definition. I’d prefer not to give the most shameless partisans more legitimacy.
> Your threshold may differ from mine, but you must have one.
I don't think this is a good approach. It makes it easy for fascism to divide-and-conquer its opposition.
Your red line was crossed today, so you revolt - but I don't join you because my red line is a little farther down the road and was not crossed yet. Decker won't join you either - his red line was crossed last week, he revolted alone, and now he's in jail. So today you too are alone in your revolution, which is therefore bound to fail and tomorrow you'll be Decker's cell-neighbor.
The threshold cannot be individual. It needs to be unified. It need to be a Fire Alarm.
Is there a distinction to be made regarding where the fascism is happening?
We acknowledge that violence against fascists abroad has been ok in the past (I don't know many reasonable people arguing against fighting Germany in WWII and there are many other examples) which presumes it would be ok in the future as well.
But if those same people were in our country it would not be ok? Like, using the WWII example, it was ok for Britain to fight Germany but not for Germans to do violence against Nazi Party beforehand? That seems silly.
Now, maybe this gets back to your question of line drawing and crossing. Germany crossed a line by declaring was on Poland. But the responding nations, fighting fascism, we not declared upon, they made that first step.
In any event, this means that intra-nation violence against fascism is basically never ok, because there isn't really a person-to-person or group-to-group declaration of war function (aside, I guess, from starting to do violence).
So under this framework, anti-Nazi Germans would not have been in the "right" to use violence against fellow citizens on the Nazi side.
And again, that kinda seems wrong to me. Maybe I'm nuts here.
Interesting article. I branched off your chain of reasoning in a slightly different direction: in law, we uphold an evidentiary standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt" before saddling someone with a label that can be punished with the death penalty. The probability of being killed because people are calling you a fascist (or socialist or whatever else the case may be) is drastically lower than the death penalty being applied once you're labeled a serial killer or whatever, but it still seems reasonable to have a high burden of proof for deciding someone can be fairly stuck with a label many people will connotate with "ought to be killed."
I think that, at the bare minimum, we should strive to maintain the norm that mere words are responded to with words, not bullets (as Scott had pointed out in his earlier days). So if there's some truly odious blogger out there preaching about how gingers have no souls to his massive audience, and his screeds set your ginger blood boiling... then calling for violence against that person should still be met with gasps of outrage, not approval.
Quote "And I don’t want to abandon 1, because it seems like a factual claim that might be true - even if you don’t think it’s true now, it obviously has the potential to be true in the future - and we shouldn’t ban people from asserting true claims."
Okay, but if you redefine the first statement from "Many Americans are fascist" to "Many Americans are fascist or might become fascist in the future" then there is no longer any logical contradiction in the three statements and your entire argument falls apart.
Forget fascism for a second. Clearly political violence is legitimate against political ideologies or systems that are sufficiently hostile to human rights, even if those ideologies are followed by a significant percentage of the population. That's an extremely uncontroversial claim to make. To deny this is to claim that abolition was wrong, that the US civil war was fundamentally unjust. In fact the very independence war that established the US would be unjust. And of course we'd also have to call the entirety of the fight against the original Nazis, both from within Germany and from outside, as illegitimate.
And having established that political violence is justified against some ideologies, even if followed by a large percentage of the population, the only questions left to answer is if fascism is such an ideology, and if the ideology of the a significant fraction of Americans can legitimately be described as fascism. In fact we can cut out the middle man and just immediately ask if a significant fraction of Americans follow an ideology against which violence is acceptable, without having to nitpick over the definition of fascism.
I think there's a pretty simple solution in that fascists are morally legitimate targets for political violence, but that you still have to do the utilitarian calculation of what the consequences of jumping off that slippery slope are.
>"I think it’s probably bad practice to demand that reasonable people not use the word “fascist”. It risks giving unreasonable people a heckler’s veto over every useful term"
In what way is "fascist" a useful term in any 21st-century context? It basically only means "right-wing plus the speaker wants you to instinctively hate the target and favor otherwise-taboo methods to silence them". Which, OK, is useful for someone who wants to convey that message, but we should understand that this is the only way the word is ever really used. If someone means to say "right wing but I don't mean to say we should start punching them", then it's just as informative to say "right wing" and much easier than saying "fascist" and trying to clarify that you're referring to some exotic class of non-punchable fascists.
It's at least possible that someone might want to argue that [contemporary political figure X] is practicing a brand of authoritarianism that is a closer match to that of Mussolini and Franco and you-know-who than to any of the other horrid forms of authoritarianism we've had to describe over the centuries. Not sure how useful that would be; I don't think there are any specifically anti-fascist techniques we would bring to bear that are any different than we would use against any other sort of authoritarian. But more importantly, aside from a few pedantic history nerds, almost nobody ever does that without meaning to invoke "...and we all agreed that we hate Mussolini and we're glad he wound up on that meathook". And the pedantic history nerds are going to have to spend many thousands of words explaining exactly what they do mean, so there's no real advantage to leading with "fascist".
Anybody who uses the term "fascism" today, in any non-meta and non-historical context, should be understood as saying "right wing" plus "unthinking hatred" plus "commence with the punching". This will not change. Once the historic meaning of a word has been this badly perverted, it is Literally Impossible to undo the damage. Canute would have had as much chance of holding back the tide, as Alexander would of convincing people that it is unacceptable to use violence against people labeled by the term that means "acceptable to use violence against".
We do need a language for discussing political violence, and when political violence is appropriate and who it might be appropriate to use such violence against. But we don't need that language to be couched in stealth and misdirection. So anyone saying "[X] is a fascist", should get at *least* the response they'd get for saying "we should punch [X], and everyone knows we should punch [X] so I don't need to justify that". Whether that means heckling or shunning or banning, will depend on the forum and the context.
And if we are ever so careless as to let e.g. "environmentalist" become *nigh-universally understood* to mean "person that we should punch because of their environmental views", then it will become necessary to similarly taboo "environmentalist" anywhere we want to have a productive discussion. We'll need a new term, maybe "conservationist" for someone whose pro-environmental policies don't rise to the level of punchability. But we haven't got to that point yet, and Scott's "some moron says it's OK..." doesn't come close to rising to that level, so there is still legitimate use for "environmentalist". Let's try to keep it that way, because "fascist" is a lost cause.
I agree with Scott’s sentiment here, but the headline seems to have summarized the argument incorrectly…
“Facism” can’t be both a vague term that gets applied to almost everything, and a legitimate target.
It feels something like a Motte and Bailey argument. In the Second World War, the allies did use armed force against regimes described as fascist (Benito Mussolini). It would seem to not follow as an argument that this justifies force against the many other things that get called fascist.
I also think that the Woodie Guthrie quote and many like it were understood to not be serious.
What is different right now is it feels like the US is sliding into major political violence. Ands it’s not really because people are suddenly getting called fascist. Everyone’s been called a “Fascist” since the 1980’s, at least.
Violence is only acceptable as protective force when there is no better alternative. If we had an effective and well-resourced justice system, we would never need violence for anything. On the other hand, if anyone, fascist or not, breaks into your house and corners you with a weapon, you're practically obligated to hurt them.
People are in fact being cornered with weapons and the justice system is not effectively protecting them. Self-defense wouldn't be political violence in this case, but what is a victim to do after surviving such an encounter, finding themselves no better protected or resourced than before, and meeting another person spouting the same views that nearly got them killed? Take the high road? They can if they have the resources to believe they can.
It comes down to a judgment of whether you think you can protect yourself and those you care about with the tools at your disposal. Can we blog our way out of this? Or vote? Or peacefully protest? Or accept the consequences of inaction? Violence is a function of losing faith in available alternatives.
I once watched ducks being fed in a chain link enclosure with an open gate. When the food was dropped inside, most of the roaming ducks successfully found the entrance, but the last stragglers found themselves on the other side of a rapidly diminishing pile of food - able to see it but not reach it. Confused, hungry, and being approached by more hungry ducks of a different species, a fight broke out. It would have been simple to just go around the fence, but they couldn't find this or any other solution, so violence became nature's last resort.
I feel like there are lots of ways to diffuse this trilemma at every point, but I'll give some of my primary reactions:
>2. Fascists are an acceptable target for political violence
Possible response: killing a fascist isn't *political;* violence, it's self-defense.
If a foreign army invades your nation with troops on the ground, is it *political* violence to shoot back? Or is it just the normal sort of retaliatory/defensive violence we have laws to protect and justify?
Fascists today are already pulling citizens into vans and sending people to foreign torture camps and shooting peaceful protestors in the face, and there's every reason to think they'll do worse in the future. Opposing them with violence now isn't a *political statement*, it's just trying to oppose tyranny and bloodshed before it becomes too entrenched to stop.
>3. Political violence in America is morally unacceptable (at the current time)
What does it mean for something to be 'morally unacceptable'? Do you mean in terms of deontology, utilitarianism, or virtue ethics?
There are many times when we might want to say that something is deonotlogoically wrong, but utilitarian correct.
Yes, these systems should all converge on the same answer under *normal* circumstances, but we're currently in precisely the type of extreme circumstances where you should expect the tails to come apart.
So there may be nothing inconsistent with believing 'yes, w should have a generic rule of thumb that political violence is wrong' while also believing 'yes, these specific limited instances of political violence are justified/necessary because of how much is at stake', if you are vacillating between deontology and utilitarianism, or etc.
More generally: a big part of the reason to *have* utilitarianism is to recognize when broad vague binary rules are failing to capture a specific unusual scenario. Finding a single utilitarian exception doesn't disprove or contradict the broad general rule, it's just a form of exception-handling.
>1. Many Americans are fascists
This may be conflating across different uses of the word 'fascist'. primarily, between fascist leaders/officials who are actually implementing fascist policies and doing fascist things in the world, vs. people who support/vote for those officials, or who just have abstract ideological or aesthetic preferences that overlap with fascism in major ways.
It's not unusual for words to have different meanings like this is different contexts; it's useful to be able to use the word 'fascist' to describe both a dictator and a writer, but you should only use violence against the dictator.
I think most people using the term understand this; that a fascist movement (like any movement) is made up of many passive members with only a vague association, as well as a few leaders and actors who actually do the violence.
And, then, again - those leaders and actors are the only ones who are legitimate targets for violence, but not *because* they are fascists, rather *because* they are hurting people and will hurt more if not stopped.
being a fascist is *strong evidence that they will keep hurting people* and will get worse over time, since that's how the history of fascist movements has always gone. But, still, it is the evidence of the harm they have/will cause that justifies violence, not their politics.
>3. Political violence in America is morally unacceptable (at the current time)
Whether or not it's acceptable. it's always, always and forever, been a part of American politics.
You can believe the morally correct thing would be for both sides to put down their guns and talk peacefully. That doesn't mean either side has a moral obligation to put their gun down *first*, and start talking rationally while the other side is still gleefully shooting them.
It's *bad* that we're in a world where political violence is used to suppress your opponents, but we've never *not* been in that world, and suddenly starting from zero and saying 'but why is political violence against *fascists* tolerated?' is an isolated demand for rigor.
Fascists are already committing political violence, *today*, and their opponents will commit political violence, too; yes this is all morally wrong, but that doesn't mean anyone will or *should* stop, and give their opponent an asymmetric advantage.
I think using an "identity" (in the adjective sense, not the identitarian sense) like fascist (or any other) as carte blanche for political violence is a massive mistake. Once you've done that, all you have to do is decide who the shoe fits, and none of these shoes appear to have very strong, well-defined boundaries (that's a feature, not a bug). Even CRIMINALS are not valid targets for violence outside of a rather prescribed and adjudicated set of processes that we have encoded in law and legal procedure.
What justifies political violence is political circumstances, and not who the target is or what the target believes.
The term “fascist” has not only emotional but also *historical* baggage, enough that I would say it doesn’t make sense to use it to describe *anyone* in the modern era. There are approximately no “fascists” today any more than there are “whigs”. Or “nazis”. These three terms all described people with some set of views *in a specific historical period* and we have no continuity with that period. So if the underlying concept is still useful, due to the passage of time we’d need to make a *new* term for it, preferably one acceptable to the group as a self-description.
“neofascist” might still be an option but “fascist” is Right Out.
(To the extent the term “fascist” has a modern definition it seems to be either “person who opposes socialism” or “person I don’t like”.)
80 years ago Orwell said "fascist" basically meant a bully, and "fascism" simply meant something undesirable. I don't think we've gotten beyond that in public discourse.
People on the right aren't fascists in the political sense of the word either though. In general, the American Right is significantly less authoritarian than the American Left, and my understanding is that this goes way way back historically.
Examples: the American Right is generally anti regulation, and in favour of greater state independence, and a smaller government.
In general, the American Right is conservative (wanting to preserve tradition / precident rather than change) and in the context of America that means the constitution / founding father's vision, which is quite a decentralised anti-fascist view.
Ofc, you can have sub factions that are fascist, but in general, the American Right is not. I would argue the American Left is far far more authoritarian, more into censorship, more into centralised government and more into political violence (e.g., see recent YouGov poll data, where young 'liberals' where 4!! times more likely to endorse political violence).
In general, I see the use of the term as part of the currently standard left strategy of demonizing, otherizing and dehumanising anyone they disagree with. E.g., have views on immigration -> racist, have concerns about women's spaces -> transphobic, disagree with them politically -> fascist. Didn't vote for Hilary and Kamala -> sexist. Honestly, this is the way the regular democrat seems to use these words. They don't even have a mote, they are all bailey.
I don't love the linking of facism to a polical flank, left or right.
Fascism, at its core, is the idea that the nation should function like a single corporation, where business, labor, and citizens are all organized under centralized state control to serve a common purpose. It replaces both free markets and democracy with managed unity directed from the top. Violence and censorship were tools, not the essence; the real principle was obedience, the merging of private and public life into one state-run machine.
Mussolini’s vision was less about chaos or brutality, and more about building a tightly controlled, hierarchical order where the state acted as CEO and the people as employees. The thug part is sort of an add on.
In this context it becomes a lot easier to say the Trump style of government is fascist. I don't love saying that but he has a very corportist flair to his policy.
It's hard to call a person a fascist. Because a person is not state control.
The violence part is just an adjunct of any political belief.
Singapore Inc might be a more benevolent example of facism provide you don't do drugs.
If someone believes in corportist central economic nationalist control of economy then they are by definition a fascist.
If they like beating people up and putting them in prison they are a bad person who may also be a fascist.
The sleight of hand between "right-wing person I don't like" and "person it's justified to kill" ***is the point***. This is why we see the exact same dynamic with "Nazi" which is typically a lot less accurate of a term.
People wanted to say "Charlie Kirk should be hurt" but couldn't, so they said "Charlie Kirk is a fascist" and then made sure everyone knew how morally justified it is to "punch" fascists/nazis.
I honestly don't even know what Scott or the NYT mean when they write "fascist" but I know it's a completely different meaning than how I see that word used every day. In practice all you're doing by using that word "correctly" is providing more plausible deniability to the people who want to see blood (at least those that are on the left).
"Fascist" just means "evil" to most people. And calling people "evil" is just a way of directing violence at them. There is no evil in reality. It's a human fiction that we use (essentially) to direct violence. So, if you call the other side "fascist", you are essentially declaring civil war. Fine, but then don't be surprised if other side uses violence against you.
Am I wrong for not thinking any of this discourse is in good faith? The issue is not even being framed as "when is it okay to violently overthrow an oppressive government?" but "when is it okay to kill people who we've managed to make an ideological label stick to?"
Left-wingers are leveraging the facts that: (1) WWII still looms large in the American imagination (2) People today seem to think we went to war with Germany because they were racist and fascist.
Therefore it's justified to kill anyone who we can call fascist. We already went to war about this after all! Reddit told me my great-grandad who fought on the beaches of Normandy was Antifa. What a convenient pretext to snipe the right winger coming to my school.
Obviously Trump hasn't done anything close to what left-wing idols like Lincoln and FDR did, and obviously they've called every Republican president in my lifetime a Nazi. Are people like KoopaKing in your comment section, who openly advocate for violence against the President and his tens of millions of voters, really so committed to the rule of law and the separation of powers? Or are they mentally unbalanced people who find it a convenient excuse?
To answer your question in good faith, in a liberal system you should not kill people for simply believing in any political system. Premise 2 is false.
In the case they organize and gain political power, there is still no workable bright line because overthrowing a leviathan is practically guaranteed to be extremely deadly and chaotic. Especially when you're overthrowing one that was popularly elected like a year ago.
It's fun to chat online, but is a president flouting a Supreme Court order by illegally deploying the National Guard (as an example of a possible bright line) seriously worth a bloody revolution? What if the National Guard leaves after a few months and nothing really comes of it? Would it still have been worth the mountain of skulls to prevent that fascistic act?
People are just not thinking seriously about what a violent revolution means, and what level of oppression is preferable to it. Probably because it's their opponent in power, and they're more fantasizing and LARPing than thinking.
Astral Codex Ten has been bullied by the wokeists, probably more than once, and now he's afraid to say what he really thinks. Moreover, he's afraid to think what he really thinks. The wokeists have successfully intimidated him.
Fascism is arbitrary and unfettered government intervention in every aspect of citizens' lives. This is closest to Mussolini's definition. Leftists who regulate everything are fascists, while Republicans, including Trump, are actually anti-fascists because they deregulate everything. Even to the point of abolishing the Department of Education. There have never been any fascists in history who abolished the Department of Education, or who would even think of such a thing. On the contrary, true fascists are always deeply concerned about what and how children are taught. Fascists always impose their ideologies through the education system.
Don't use political violence until democracy has so badly failed that it's easier to win a civil war than an election. And also, don't expect it to only catch on on your side. If people keep assassinating for right targets, they'll eventually start assassinating people on the left. They're the ones with all the guns.
It is probably important here to distinguish between "fascist" meaning a person who subscribes to or submits to a certain far-right ideology and "fascist" meaning a person devoted enough to that ideology that they are actively trying to coordinate mass violence. I think a lot of leftists are way too fast to put someone in that second category, but I do think it exists and is a category of people who it is reasonable to discuss committing violence against. "Reasonable to discuss" does not imply I currently think someone should do it, only that it makes sense to have a debate about when violence becomes acceptable against such a person.
(I am inclined to think it has a lot to do with how likely they are to actually succeed in their campaign, and how likely killing them or committing some other violent act against them is to actually end the campaign or reduce its effectiveness.)
By far the best way to get rid of Trump is to wait for him (or Vance) to finish the term, then vote him (or his successor) out of office. So far, he does not have committed any human rights violations which would justify ending the American democracy experiment and rise up against his regime.
My threshold for "fuck the will of the people, this must be stopped now" is actually rather high. If he sends death squads to kill Hispanic-looking people in the streets, or nukes Oslo, that would be sufficient cause, but I am very hopeful that he will keep at roughly his current level of performative cruelty, which seems vastly better than civil war. I also have high hopes that democratic institutions will prevent him from using his office to improperly influence the elections too much.
The situation with Hitler was different. It was very clear that the Germans were not willing or able to vote him out. The humanitarian costs he was inflicting were also much too high to justify giving the Nazis a few generations in the hopes that they would become more moderate on their own.
Personally, I think there are not one but two thresholds for political violence. The lower one is for purposeful political violence -- instrumental violence committed while pursuing some legitimate, achievable goal. There are generally cost-benefit calculations to decide if a particular action is acceptable, especially as far as non-combatants are concerned.
The higher threshold is for violence which serves no purpose except to inflict costs on the enemy. This makes sense under some schools of decision theory -- the purpose is not to make your timeline better, but to lower the probability that you will end up in that timeline. Killing enemy adults is a legitimate objective above that threshold. For example, it might be ok to respond with nuclear attacks on your cities by nuking the enemy's cities, even if such attacks serve little strategic purpose. Or it is totally acceptable to start an uprising instead of quietly getting on the train to Auschwitz, even if everyone knows beforehand that the uprising will be crushed.
Of course, the distance between the present situation in the USA and that 2nd threshold is ridiculously large (unless you are one of the ones getting deported to an El Salvador megaprison without a trial, perhaps).
This comment section is probably already long and dreary enough, but I would suggest a simple litmus test for whether someone is a fascist.
Ask them "Are you a fascist?" If they say yes, then feel free to assume they're a fascist. If they say "No, I'm a [something else]" then go along with that, and if you think [something else] is stupid then feel free to argue with that. Similarly, don't go around calling people "communists" unless they claim to be communists.
Forestalling an obvious objection, this rule doesn't apply to words with actual robust definitions.
Words are symbols and we have individual phenomenological responses to symbols exacerbated/mediated by social mores that occur at practically light speed. Good for those who can slow down enough to think/ration through the use of these words and symbols and for those who slow down enough to listen/consider. It takes courage to participate in imagination (following the logic) at any level without caving to fear. It changes the atmosphere for all of us.
It seems to me that the best solution is to push back on people using the term "fascist" (or racist, communist, whatever) on too wide a group of people. Obviously the connotation is meant to imply that the people being called fascist are like people who were called fascist in the past, and to remind people that we have previously agreed it was not just okay but good to kill such people.
But the reason we were willing to kill those people was not because they were right wing, or even right wing authoritarian dictators. It was because they started multiple wars and killed millions of people. If Steven Miller starts WW3 while trying to wipe out multiple ethnic groups, I will agree that he should be stopped by just about any means necessary, up to including armed revolution. But it seems that instead most of what he's saying has been within the Overton Window sometime within the last 50 years and is much closer to American norms than Nazi ones.
Calling him a fascist is inaccurate, and more so intentionally misleading in order to try to make him and his beliefs anathema in the political discourse. It lowers the value of discourse and cheapens us all. Similarly when Obama was called a Communist as an attack. At worst he was a free market socialist, well within the Overton Window. Likely not even that. Which means calling him a Communist is wrong and misleading in the same way that calling Miller a fascist is.
This seems like a good place to link to Performative Bafflement's essay in which he points out that collectivism has a far worse historical track record than fascism:
I also think it's relevant to point out that collectivism is far more damaging to political institutions than authoritarianism is. The fascist Axis powers all recovered relatively gracefully after the war, whereas Russia is still floundering 30 years after the fall of communism. Obviously there are confounding factors there, but the general principle still makes intuitive sense to me. Fascists don't destroy political institutions so much as subvert them to their will, whereas collectivism is a top-down reorganization of the basic principles that make society function, and in my view that's much harder to recover from. A metaphor would be a child who misbehaves vs a child who has metastatic cancer. The misbehaving child can be easily course-corrected without much worry but the cancer sufferer is going to need risky surgery and might never be the same.
The point is I think democracies can get much closer to fascism without risking long-term harm than they can to communism. I think political centrists intuitively understand that, I think 2020 shocked people into an awareness of just how close our institutions were to tipping over into a hard-to-dislodge collectivism (with identity groups playing the role of the proletariat), and I think that means that they're willing to tolerate a fairly significant jump towards authoritarianism as a corrective. That's certainly my view. It's not ideal but desperate times call for desperate measures. The only real risk of unrecoverable harm lies in the potential for Trump to disrupt the electoral process and I really don't think that's plausible. If he refuses to leave office in 2028, or suspends elections or otherwise makes it impossible to vote his party out then I think people would immediately revolt and I think they would be justified in doing so. But I would put the odds of that happening at far less than 1%.
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/
It sounds like you are saying that we ought not to commit political violence, while torture is being committed in our name, torture of lawfully elected democratic officials.
Perhaps I talk to too many South Americans. Unless you are willing to say that political violence would have been justified in this situation...?
In this situation, we are still able to change our own government democratically, but we are very definitely harming other democratic polities.
(This is a deliberately hard and thorny question, designed to ellicit some deeper thinking. Apologies if it causes mental distress.)
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."
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.
mmm.... do you still apply this to world war III? To actions that cause the US kill switch to get triggered? (let us say, in this hypothetical, that you still will retain a political process afterwards).
It seems... remarkably selfish to say "it's okay if we murder an entire country" -- say, blowing up 3gorges dam. So long as we remain okay! (I'm not saying you're wrong, just giving a gut reaction).
(I largely agree with your pragmatism argument).
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.
Ah! I take your point. Having faith in your democratic citizens is well and good.
(It's remarkably easy to envision a hypothetical where we blow up the 3 gorges. Given that China deliberately spread a plague (via closing internal airplane flights, and leaving open external ones) of unknown severity, we can envision a ~100 million dead Americans, as opposed to the initial estimates of ~20 million. Given that, AND a blockade on antibiotics (China produces 90% of the world's supply), I could see us sending one missile. It's a kill switch after all. -- not that I consider this at all likely, but we're at, say, 1 in 10,000 not several trillion.)
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?)
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.
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?
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?
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.
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)
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.
I fear the Left has been learning all of the right lessons from recent history.
The Right, of course, never seems to learn a goddamn 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.
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.
Most of what was done with regards to Jan 6th was wrong, both in principle and effectivity as a tool. After all, the Left wanted to pare off the Moderate Republicans from the Trump coalition. They failed, and failed hard.
(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.<
I think you're probably right about that, come to think of it. 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" & similar efforts, the social-media-co. pressure (see, e.g., ol' Zuck's testimony), university admissions, "Sanctuary Cities", selective enforcement of the law, selective flouting of the same, the proliferation of "Grievance Studies" departments, the...
I'd like to say it's because "well, we are opposed to such things on principle"; but—the asymmetry makes one uneasy. 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 even that 𝗳𝗼𝗻𝗱 of the Right, personally; Trump has done some good, but also a lot of bad—and the Right as a whole has, largely & for many years, seemed to me to have been an alliance between greedy Affluenza cases & anti-intellectual social Luddites²—but the alternative seems to be even worse. I still remember when, over ten years ago now, I found leftists mocking the notions 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! Before then, I felt—my perception was—that both sides could agree upon ideals such as "we should strive to ensure that speech is as free as possible" or "we shouldn't support stripping freedoms away from enemies—shouldn't support policies that can be turned against us later—even if we think it's in a good cause now" or "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 drugs (albeit had to quit anyway: turns out they actually 𝘤𝘢𝘯 be addictive, after all; but the War on 'em is misguided, at 𝘣𝘦𝘴𝘵)...—but the progress of society since ~2010(?) has recently made me wonder if perhaps "slippery slope" arguments didn't have more validity than that with which I have, heretofore, credited them, heh.
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.
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.
Freitkorps says there was already a lot of violence before Hitler did a damn thing (civilians in tanks. open war on the streets). Weimar republic repeatedly called in the "civilians" (militias).
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.
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 are saying there's a problem with America? When people in Germany are getting arrested for saying things about government officials online? When the banning of AfD is an "on the table" sort of thing?
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 ...
>"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 ;-)
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.
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.
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.
Where were you when Abo children were being set upon by dogs, for escaping from the camps? Along with more time in camp for "trying to escape"? (which puts the lie to why they were put in the camp in the first place).
It actually is very easy to settle this, it's just that Republicans are schizophrenic and operate on an "If I can be made to believe it, regardless of the facts on the ground, it's true" principle. For example, is Trump's trade policy good? Republicans say yes because we're tarrifing other countries for what they already tariff us and tariffs are good because foreign countries pay us the tariff. They are not just opposed by Democrats, but by the entire rest of the world that tells them "That's not how tariffs work retards" and that are engaging in freer trade agreements with Russia and China.
The same way, it's not justified to use political violence against Decker because he's not deploying the US military against red counties to intimidate Republicans and telling them red counties will be used for military training because they're the enemy within. If he did, I would support killing him, because it's bad to have the country in a state like that even if your party is the one that benefits, because nothing would stop him from using the military against dissenters in his own party next or the next President from abusing his power even more. Now, do you support killing Hegseth and Trump for this same exact behavior I would kill Decker for?
>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
🤔
Yes, Vietnam doesn't actually charge us a 50% tariff. The discount "reciprocal" tariffs were calculated by dividing the countries' trade deficits by the countries' exports to the US. The penguins on the Heard and McDonald islands also don't charge us tariffs.
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.)
>I meant to suggest that it sort of seems as if the rest of the world does not actually oppose tariffs, 𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘳.
Sure, and the rest of the world does not actually oppose wars because they sometimes partake in them. Tariffs are a protectionist tool countries use for energy or food so they're not totally reliant on importing those things from other countries. 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, because it's nonsensical. Yet this is what Trump's messaging and actions lead one to conclude, and it's just wrong that anything about the strategy is reciprocal or coherent in any way. 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.
>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–).
>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.
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.
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.
If Joe Biden really had stolen the 2020 election, the people who stormed Congress were LATE and FOOLHARDY (really, what does standing in front of Congress do? Nada that's effective -- and it furthers China/Russia goals). The folks who took the preservation of democratic governance seriously created a flippin' clown show to distract the Democrats, and took the real case up to the Supreme Court (straight, no appeal). And you're ignoring the people who committed an act of war against Germany... (if you choose to believe such a thing happened at all).
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.
"Rigged" is a loaded word. If someone says the JFK election was "rigged" they mean something different than the Gore non-election was "rigged."
Georgian Democrats in april 2020 were also making noises about the "stolen election." Right up until their side won.
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.
... I'm going to need to look that up. I might have the date wrong, but these were pre-election comments, presumably regarding Global Dominion bribing Carr to put in all new machines (that were easily hackable).
Global Dominion doesn't come near my city, because our universities start grinning at the idea of looking into their source code.
https://technical.ly/civic-news/pennsylvania-election-security-allegheny-county/
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.
The "Biden stole the election" claims I've heard come from people who actually got an American Election overturned, and subsequently sent people to prison for trying to rig American elections.
These are your law-abiding types. Not the people who'd use violence to overturn elections.
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.
> But I disagree because I could be super wrong.
The GOP is happy to lie this is the case and try to use the ensuing chaos they caused to steal an election. They didn't do it by mistake. There are of course stupid people but the Dominion Fox News lawsuit basically shows everybody at Fox from the executives to the showhosts saying Sidney Powell was a lying bitch they caught lying multiple times but they still broadcast election fraud lies. It's really not that hard to be right - even the Fox News hosts were right there was no election fraud. I don't think Democrats should lie about election fraud but they really shouldn't be worried about being wrong - all their actions are out in the open.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When you say violence, I hear "don't murder people." Is it useful to mention that a lot of the antifascists are talking about punching a fascist? (Murder is probably bad at all times, except under very extenuating circumstances).
I think our laws put "punched a loudmouth in a bar" as "slightly criminal." Can we say that slightly criminal actions are okay, for political reasons? Occupy Wall Street was doing misdemeanors, but they generally did a good job of "being a good protest movement."
Any "anti-fascist" actually discussing murder, explosions or mass killings ought to be condemned, of course.
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.)
I broadly agree to this "equality under the law" but I do want to carve out an exception for "terroristic actions." (as opposed to the daft "hate crimes" laws that require looking inside people's heads). If you're doing an action, clearly and provably, to terrorize people, you deserve to have a bigger punishment than the person who does the same action "in the heat of the moment."
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.
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.
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.
"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.)
I remember when dailyKos was posting complimentary takes on the "American System" (with, yes, tariffs).
"The Right" is gone in the United States, and has been overtaken by "90's Democrats" like Trump and conserva-dems like Gabbard.
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.
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 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.
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.
>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
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.
>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.
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
>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.
> 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 of I time travel to that point. Imagine asking an original American colonist whether the current American government is good or not.
I think the argument "concerning trend lines don't tend to 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 windows on pyres if the social consensus is that it's fine).
I feel like this is the take that should have been everywhere right before the election.
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).
You're assuming we don't have people in government whose job is information suppression? We documented a lot of "no you can't say this" with regards to "vaccine passports" (a particularly egregious form of "no talkee until the wonks build it").
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.
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/
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.
You ever express any concern about Douglass Mackey being prosecuted?
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?
I don't believe in much of what you said, but you've earned the right to call this Administration fascist (by knowing what the word means, per Mussolini, and being willing to draw lines and parallels).
Would that everyone who used the F-word would actually know what they're talking about, instead of using it as a slur.
>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.
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.
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 .
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.
User banned for this comment.
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 think his comment was fine, it's what 95%+ of Republicans believe with respect to political unfairness in America.
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.
Ah, the ban cut off the bottom part with the neurosyphilis comment. I had to click reply to get the full comment to display on mobile. That makes it more justified.
Now all I have left is this classic parable driven by my commitment to free speech and not personal benefit. First Scott came for Wuffles because he violated comment section norms. Then Scott came for me because I violated comment section norms. And then there was no one left for Scott to content moderate because he solved all of the problems.
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 ...
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Socialist was "polite code" for communist, which has become a very propagandized term (aka think 1950's, and what America said/wrote about communists).
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 process.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...;.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.
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
So you are okay with torture, even torture of democratic officials, so long as you can throw the bastards out? How about when the bastards start removing democracy in other countries?
If the state can torture political enemies, democracy is not functioning. I do not think we are there now. Do you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor
How confident do you feel that you'd know if democracy is not functioning?
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.
Yes, I do agree to this, however, I'm not certain that I want to say we should "keep going and keep a stiff upper lip" if we're committing genocide or torture.
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.
Most people demonstrably are, outrage against "enhanced interrogation techniques" isn't high on any major movement's agenda.
I thought both parties' populists were pretty much in favor of removing the Patriot Act. And the Democrats had a long run of being "against torture."
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.
1980's was the last time that constitutional amendment was floated (for Ronald Reagan, apparently HW Bush was enough of a "nah" that Republicans would rather keep Ronnie).
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 ;-)
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
Berlusconi used to be the convenient yard stick to measure Trump against.
Perhaps Mussolini might be the next rung up that ladder.
We call Bernie Sanders a socialist because he calls himself that!
Sanders calls himself socialist and famously vacationed in the USSR, calling it a "strange honeymoon": https://archive.is/lpIPW
He's vastly more socialist than Trump is fascist.
It's interesting to me that you are always just debating Trump, and how bad he might turn. He is a senile old egotistical man who won't live for much longer. A decade at best.
If I was from the US, I would be much more concerned about whoever will be his successor. Especially if said successor wouldn't need an election to come to power. At this time it would be JD Vance ...
I just... man. I can't help laughing at these comments.
How do you see Vance coming to power without an election? Specifically? (Other than if, God forbid, Trump dies or is killed in office.) There is no support in the American body politic for scrapping our Constitution and replacing it with a dictator. Literally none, zero, zilch. Ask me to imagine a contingency in which that MIGHT happen, and it's something like... the aftermath of WWIII? Maybe? When 90 percent of us are dead? Probably not even then.
I get that you probably see a distorted picture of American politics from overseas, but... I live in the deepest, reddest part of hillbilly MAGA country, and any of my neighbors would laugh in your face if you suggested J. D. Vance should cancel elections and appoint himself Reichsfuhrer. We practically WORSHIP the Constitution in these parts.
Trump dying was specifically what I had in mind though. He isn't exactly healthy and more than three years is quite a long time.
I don't think for a second that J.D. Vance would cancel elections and appoint himself. But republicans are already working on ensuring that the next election is even more rigged than the last one. And republicans are cheering those changes on.
You most definitely don't actually WORSHIP the Constitution. If you would, you would have spoken up when Trump declared that all constitutional amendments are at the whim of the president. When he tried to abolish the 14th through Executive Order 14160, he essentially said that all amendments, in his opinion are only valid for as long as the president doesn't issue a presidential order saying otherwise. Which essentially means that your first and second amendment are valid for as long as the president says so. And you guys didn't even flinch at that ...
I know I'm gonna regret asking, but how was the 2024 election rigged? Never heard that one before.
I don't agree with EO 14160, the courts (so far) haven't either, and I find it highly unlikely it will stand. That's how the system works. It's how multiple previous EOs from multiple presidents have been declared unconstitutional. If issuing controversial EOs is synonymous with declaring the Constitution is at the whim of the president, then Truman beat Trump to it by about seventy-five years.
I'm not even specifically blaming the republicans. Just the fact that Gerrymandering is a thing, from both sides, makes your elections less democratic. The way your voter registers seem to be forgetful at times also doesn't really boost confidence. I wouldn't even be confident to claim that at the national level it changed the election, or that it benefitted Trump. But on the local level these shenanigans happen and are turning US democracy into a joke. It would take some serious research I'm not qualified to provide to quantify which side profited more from the BS. But that it's still legal and done openly in the US is really awful.
> I don't agree with EO 14160, the courts (so far) haven't either, and I find it highly unlikely it will stand.
That's not the point. Your argument boils down to "it isn't an attempt at eroding the rule of law because it ultimately probably wasn't successful". That's not how that works. At best that proves that there is still hope for the US when resistance to authocratic tendencies succeeds ...
> It's how multiple previous EOs from multiple presidents have been declared unconstitutional.
An EO being declared unconstitutional isn't that same thing as an EO outright trying to reframe or anul an amendment to the constitution.
Also I didn't claim that Trump was the first president in US history with authocratic tendencies. Though the seizure of a steel mill doesn't really strike me as being on the same level of authoritarianism as challenging the constitutions validity directly ...
"Fascism" aside there are lots of things that the Trump administration has done that are extreme by historical standards, in terms of consolidating power in the executive:
* firing people in the executive branch when it's illegal to do so. This one is most obvious because the supreme court has signalled they're going to overturn 100-year old precedent in order to allow it. If they're breaking 100 year old supreme court precedent, clearly they're going farther than people in the past.
* Arresting/detaining people based on the Alien Enemies Act and declaring that their presence in the US is against the US's interests based on political speech. Again, their description of what they're doing, not mine.
* Withholding funding from various programs they don't like, against the anti-impoundment act
* Allowing or blocking mergers depending on whether the parties settle a lawsuit that Trump filed against them.
* The FCC demanding critics of the administration be taken off the air (and actually succeeding temporarily).
* Pushing the DOJ to arrest/indict political enemies when the career prosecutors in the DOJ didn't think the charges were justifiable.
* threatening law firms unless they provide them with "pro bono" legal services
* accepting a billion dollar plane from Qatar in exchange for diplomatic favors
Honestly there's a lot more, those are just what come to mind.
"If they're breaking 100 year old supreme court precedent, clearly they're going farther than people in the past."
Well, not farther than the people 100 years in the past. SCOTUS has overturned long-held precedents before. Anyway, fascism is when the president arrests the judiciary, not when they rule in his favor!
"Arresting/detaining people based on the Alien Enemies Act and declaring that their presence in the US is against the US's interests based on political speech. Again, their description of what they're doing, not mine."
Not American citizens. Again, the president has abided by court decisions on these issues. Not fascism. Not particularly extreme.
"Withholding funding from various programs they don't like, against the anti-impoundment act"
All presidents play these games. Is it bending the rules, sure. So was declaring a "police action" in Vietnam. So was the "Dear Colleague" letter. I don't hyperventilate every time the president gets in a pissing contest with Congress.
"Allowing or blocking mergers depending on whether the parties settle a lawsuit that Trump filed against them."
No evidence of this.
"The FCC demanding critics of the administration be taken off the air (and actually succeeding temporarily)."
The FCC probably had nothing to do with it, it's a poor species of fascism that can't even cancel its critics for more than a week, and it's nothing compared to what the Biden admin did to its social-media critics.
"Pushing the DOJ to arrest/indict political enemies when the career prosecutors in the DOJ didn't think the charges were justifiable."
This one is hilarious, given that Letitia James literally campaigned on "getting Trump". I guess that didn't strike you as abuse of power. Anyway, presidents pressuring DOJ to arrest/indict is nothing new. Every president in my lifetime has done this. James will get her day in court.
"threatening law firms unless they provide them with "pro bono" legal services"
Haven't heard of this one. Got a link?
"accepting a billion dollar plane from Qatar in exchange for diplomatic favors"
Show me the quid pro quo.
> The FCC probably had nothing to do with it, it's a poor species of fascism that can't even cancel its critics for more than a week
That point is fair enough.
> and it's nothing compared to what the Biden admin did to its social-media critics.
This point is not. Social media is small beans and the government doesn't actually have authority over it. The FCC actually does have authority over broadcast TV, which reaches huge numbers of people.
These days, it's the broadcast media that's small beans. There are tons of YouTubers with much more influence and larger audiences than Kimmel.
The government exercising authority it doesn't have is worse than the government exercising authority it has, even if it shouldn't have that authority.
I agree in the case of Trump enacting tariffs by dictatorial fiat: he has no such Constitutional authority. But "jawboning" is a different matter: if a company is led by someone with spine (like Rupert Murdoch, who's not backing down from Trump's lawsuit on the Epstein letter) they can persist in its face.
The highest rated TV programs reach maybe 4 million people. That's peanuts. Broadcast is almost, but not quite, irrelevant. Social media gets 10s of millions of unique views every single days.
Who on social media gets that?
> Well, not farther than the people 100 years in the past.
Before 100 years in the past, the executive branch mostly didn't do the types of things now done by people insulated from being fired. It's less that SCOTUS switched 100 years ago, more that it was a pretty new situation. Also ... in US history there's a lot of things from 100 years ago we really don't want to bring back.
> fascism is when the president arrests the judiciary, not when they rule in his favor!
I didn't say they were being fascist, I said they are going farther than previous admins. The supreme Court being on their side doesn't change that.
> Anyway, fascism is when the president arrests the judiciary, not when they rule in his favor!
Don't have to arrest the judiciary when they almost always rule in your favor! Plus most people will agree, autocrats in this day and age like to keep the trappings of a democratic system, e.g. elections even if they're rigged.
> Not American citizens.
This isn't an argument that they aren't going farther than others, just that you think it's fine.
> the president has abided by court decisions
Releasing the person you arrested when the court says you violated their rights, doesn't mean that you didn't violate their rights.
But even so ICE has repeatedly detained US citizens with no provocation and ignored them saying so and offering up ID.
> All presidents play these games.
This isn't a rebuttal to the claim that this administration has gone further than others. It's like responding to "the president just shot someone" with "hey, all presidents bend the rules".
Also Congress overwhelmingly approved the Vietnam War, the "police action" thing wasn't executive aggrandizement.
> No evidence of this.
The merger approval came a few weeks after the settlement, and both the merger and the lawsuit had been outstanding for awhile prior; the chairman of the FCC said that the merger was based on promises about media coverage; and Trump himself linked the settlement to the merger in a Truth Social post: https://trumpstruth.org/statuses/32150
Do you actually believe that they are not linked?
> The FCC probably had nothing to do with it
The chairman of the FCC said about it, "These companies can find ways to change conduct to take action on Kimmel or, you know, there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead".
And again, Trump saying that they discussed directly with the White House, and threatening them over un-cancelling: https://trumpstruth.org/statuses/33072
> Anyway, presidents pressuring DOJ to arrest/indict is nothing new.
Do you have any examples of a different president telling DOJ to indict someone when the career prosecutors thought it wasn't justified? Trump directly told Pam Bondi to indict Comey in a public post and they fired the prosecutors who said there's no basis.
As for Tish James, whatever you think of her, it isn't an example of the executive branch aggrandizing power.
> Haven't heard of this one. Got a link?
Several, here was one: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/20/white-house-law-firm-sanctions-026866
Other law firms have fought against the sanctions and I believe all of them have won, nobody thinks they're legal.
> Show me the quid pro quo.
I don't have access to private government communications, but does anyone seriously believe Qatar gave Trump a $1 billion dollar gift out of the goodness of their hearts?
I really can't argue with you if you think having the Supreme Court on Trump's side doesn't matter. They're the supreme legal body of the United States. Whose opinion of the legality of his conduct could be more dispositive?
I myself believe the president should have full and absolute discretion over the personnel of the executive branch. The first sentence of Article II is quite clear, and Congress' usurpation of the president's prerogatives in this regard hasn't (in my view) gone well.
If you regard that view as extreme or authoritarian, we'll just have to disagree. At least you don't think it's fascist.
Most of what you're writing here is just throwing shade, of the "do you really think..." variety. I rarely find that convincing, and never when it's about Donald Trump, who has been the target of more baseless smears than I can count.
> if you think having the Supreme Court on Trump's side doesn't matter
The way you appoint judges is so heavily politicised that the Supreme court isn't really indicative of anything in the US anymore. That's another part of your political system that you should improve. Not even because of Trump. It isn't any better when democrats are stacking the court either ...
> I really can't argue with you if you think having the Supreme Court on Trump's side doesn't matter.
Again what I originally argued is that Trump went farther than previous presidents, which is true, whether or not SCOTUS is "on his side".
Though he did of course repeatedly violate supreme Court precedent *before* they signaled they're likely to change it; and in many cases where the supreme Court is giving him what he wants, they aren't even agreeing that what he did is OK but finding a lack of jurisdiction/standing/etc.
Anyway, I'd say that defying the supreme Court is worse than *not* doing so, but that doesn't somehow mean that nothing he can do is problematic so long as the supreme Court acquiesces.
> I myself believe the president should have full and absolute discretion over the personnel of the executive branch. The first sentence of Article II is quite clear, and Congress' usurpation of the president's prerogatives in this regard hasn't (in my view) gone well.
Not only is the first sentence of Article II not clear on that, but it conflicts with the rest of the article. On a basic level executive personnel is specifically covered in the article, and the president is *not* given absolute discretion. Some personnel must be approved by the Senate, and Congress may decide for the others that their appointments can be vested in some other places.
Not to mention a bunch of other stuff in Article II that's totally superfluous with a maximal interpretation of the "vesting clause".
> If you regard that view as extreme or authoritarian, we'll just have to disagree. At least you don't think it's fascist.
I don't think a "unitary executive" is necessarily authoritarian. But that, combined with accepting an executive branch of the size we have, and no other checks on the president's use of the powers this would grant him, or even an idea that the president should be reluctant to use the power, necessarily is. The traditional conservative view would be a unitary but weak executive, the trump view is a unitary and strong executive.
> Most of what you're writing here is just throwing shade, of the "do you really think..."
The reason I'm saying it is because I think it's pretty obvious what's happening in those situations. I haven't actually heard anyone say that they *don't* think that, e.g., Qatar's "gift" was intended as a bribe, and I'm not even sure what the alternative explanation is supposed to be.
Seems to me like you aren't answering because the only realistic answer is that you *do* think it's a bribe - which you didn't even deny thinking in your previous comment.
No, the answer is I don't think it's a bribe, and I would need to see direct evidence of a quid pro quo to believe it is. Qatar didn't give anything to Trump personally. The airplane is not his, it's the US government's. The Biden administration also signed off on it!
Looks like yet another ginned-up controversy to me.
> it's a poor species of fascism that can't even cancel its critics for more than a week
Your argument here essentially boils down to: "they haven't secured enough power yet to actually always get what they want when they attempt it" ...
Technically Plessy was never overruled, but it was 60 years old when Brown substantially weakened it and it's basically been uncited since. There are times old precedent is just bad!
Wickard v Filburn is 83 years old and desperately bad precedent.
>The FCC demanding critics of the administration be taken off the air (and actually succeeding temporarily)
Yeah not really what happened. The FFC chair was kind of indirectly jawboning, Kimmel's a hateful unpopular trashbag, but apparently popular enough for people to shoot at an ABC station to bring him back.
What I said is that Trump is doing things that are more extreme than other presidents in terms of consolidating power in the executive. The fact that some supreme court precedents are bad doesn't change that.
But the fact that they overturned an old precedent to allow it does show that he is, in fact, doing more than other presidents did.
Re the current situation - the real principled conservative view on this is that not only should the president be able to essentially fire anyone in the executive branch, but there shouldn't be all these people in the executive branch with all these powers anyway. The traditional conservative view has not been that the president should personally have the power of every person who's currently in the executive branch, most would agree that is too much power for the president (up until that president was trump).
EDIT: re FCC - he directly threatened them, it's funny how trump and his minions can directly admit to doing the bad thing and people will still make excuses for them, and in many cases also claim that the other side did the same thing based on attenuated evidence and some leaps in reasoning.
Do you believe the 2020 election was stolen and that Trump would have won it if it were fair?
If you believe Trump did NOT win the election, how do you reconcile supporting him post-Jan6 if he's mentally unable to see that he lost an election?
If you believe Trump DID win the election, what do you think are the mechanisms that kept him from rightfully being declared the winner?
"Do you believe the 2020 election was stolen and that Trump would have won it if it were fair?"
No.
"If you believe Trump did NOT win the election, how do you reconcile supporting him post-Jan6 if he's mentally unable to see that he lost an election?"
Because supporting a president doesn't mean believing he is, and always has been, right about everything. I'm certain a moment's reflection will reveal some profound disagreements with presidents you've supported. We have a two-party system; as Biden so astutely put it, "Don't compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the other guys."
Fair points and thank you for the response. I will tack on that I don't think I've ever really supported a president, just viewed some as having less-bad policies than others. I've voted third party multiple times, including 2016, but will confess to have voted D in 2020 and 2024 in what I perceived as damage mitigation, but not enthusiasm.
Technically, I didn't vote for Trump, either. I always do some pie-in-the-sky write-in, because I live in a deep red state (WV) where the outcome is never in doubt. But I would have voted for him if I lived 20 miles away in Pennsylvania.
Over in Pennsylvania, there's tons of Democrats voting Trump. : - )
>"Don't compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the other guys."
You've mangled it. The expression ends "… the alternative."
Fascism/nazi (and Hitler) is bound to continue being used in frivolous and absurd circumstances because there's few other labels left that inspire the intended extreme reaction.
In a post religious West where accusations of heresy/blasphemy/being the devil no longer hold any sway, there needed to be an accusation to fill the gap and this is it. The vagueness of the definition is a feature not a bug, that way it doesn't take much effort to slap that label onto someone, if you squint hard enough you can make anything fascist.
When determining hard lines and limits it's alot more useful to use actual descriptive terms and come to conclusions based on those
There is, of course, still a secular, not-directly-ideological accusation used copiously on both sides: treason, flung around rather carelessly even though it indicates participation in a real, serious crime. Corruption, too, to a lesser degree.
I don't think we should take "this person is a fascist" as a literal statement of "this person ought to be killed," *even if* the speaker would in general consider fascists an acceptable target for violence.
Like, the Nazis were unambiguously fascist, but I don't think we should interpret Woody Guthrie's statement as calling for genocide against Germany. After the war, a great many Nazis did not get killed, and I think that was a good and correct way to handle the end of the war.
This also is why I don't think it's worthwhile to split hairs over "is Stephen Miller a fascist or merely an I-can't-believe-it's-not-fascism authoritarian." Whether Stephen Miller should be jailed, executed, or assassinated, does not depend on the exact details of what he believes in his heart of hearts, but rather on the utilitarian calculation of how many atrocities he's commanding and how likely your violence is to stop them from happening. Once violence is on the table, there are other factors in play besides merely "is the violence against a good person or a bad person?"
(I think this is technically giving up option 2 in your list, but I think it's a pretty minor modification. Fascists may be an acceptable target, but not every acceptable target is a practical one. As you once said, be nice until you can coordinate meanness.)
James J. Heaney wrote a surprisingly similar, and imo arguably more fleshed out and well written, article on this topic in 2019 (which he reposted in the wake of the kirk shooting): https://decivitate.jamesjheaney.com/p/one-reason-to-punch-nazis
It's also from a wildly different perspective - a conservative catholic christian never-trumper - but it's definitely worth checking out.
>arguably more fleshed out and well written
He doesn't even begin to grapple with the question of - at what point political violence starts to make sense, something of a hole one might say.
Maybe things are different here in the suburban Midwest, but I didn't think there was a major constituency for number 2.
Regardless of how bad an ideology is, if it's held by (approximately) the majority of the population, the right response is to vote with your feet and leave. If a person eliminates the ability of the people to change thier leader by voting in a free and fair election (a reasonable barometer would be that it is stated as such in mainstream newspapers of non-crazy allied countries), then only less peaceful ways remain to change leadership... Avoiding that seems like basically the reason we invented elections. Although in that case I personally would still probably choose to vote with my feet.
Similar to probably wrong, among people who say the 2020 election was stolen, I actually have a lot of empathy for the ones who showed up on January 6th, and have trouble believing people honestly believe themselves when they lazily maintain that it was stolen without acting like it's a five alarm fire.
I should add that if people start getting tortured or disappeared before an election that seems to have to qualify too. Wasn't thinking darkly enough...
Remember that guy floating in the reflecting pool? That was after he lost an election...
I think you need to differentiate your premises:
American fascists who are using violence break the social contract that political violence is not ok, and therefore can become valid targets themselves (rules of thee are rules of me). Obviously, this creates a feedback loop - so breaking this cycle is the real challenge.
I think if this is your distinction, then you should say "it's acceptable to use violence against people who have started the violence themselves", and the concept of fascism isn't doing any work.
Well, that’s the point. The concept of fascism is a constructed one, so we can look at it’s qualities and criticize their implementation independently, allowing one to skip fruitless debates on whether a current regime is or isn’t fascist.
As a matter of pragmatism, may I suggest voting with your feet before resorting to political violence.
That is difficult when the United States holds an enormous arsenal of incredibly powerful weapons. Sadly what happens there impacts everyone.
As many folks I know have stated... if the mid-terms are stolen (in a meaningful way) then that's time for mass protest. If the mass protest is violently repressed, then it's time to answer violence with violence.
Yeah, you'll show them!
"I think people should reject premise (2) above and stop talking about fascists as if it’s okay to kill them." That's probably prudent, but 'talk' is the operative word here. Woody Guthrie killed zero fascists, and I suspect the same can be said for his guitar.
What is true historically?
a) German and Italian fascists did wonderfully after the war, outside a handful of exceptions. In fact, after a few years of very half-hearted accountability ('denazification'), German fascists (suddenly "former Nazis", at worst, and "partners for democracy" or "successful businessman", more commonly) were downright subsidized and favored by the occupying authorities - the entire matter became tiring, and of course you don't want to hand central Europe to socialists or Communists. This is a fact of which most Americans are probably half-aware.
b) Much of American folk song has the Spanish civil war as a referent. There, fascists were met mainly in the battlefield, where it was unambiguously acceptable to shoot at them. (There was some shooting elsewhere, some of it between antifascists factions; to put it a bit callously (towards the POUM and so forth), that's an error term in comparison.) That was the first stage of WWII - a stage the fascists won. So, none of the complicated task of what to do the day after.
One might then suspect that, when people talk about fascists as if it's OK to kill them, they are really... talking about talking about them as if it's OK to kill them? Talking about taking some down while they are shooting at you, and killing your friends in Granada? There's really not a lot of precedent for killing fascists in peace-time. Some hangings of collaborationists, and that's about it.
What became of ex Nazis in East Germany? Or did they mostly all manage to escape to the West before the fall of Berlin?
It seems that a lot of those who were lucky enough to be alive and free by 1948 could live lives like any other citizens of the sovjet zone, later GDR. Sometimes they were recruited by the internal secret service (Staatssicherheitsdienst aka Stasi).
German language article about this: https://www.mdr.de/geschichte/ddr/politik-gesellschaft/entnazifizierung-nazis-in-der-ddr-100.html
Interesting. Not what I would have expected, to put it mildly.
> That was the first stage of WWII
Spain wasn't a battlefield in WW2, they stayed neutral. The Battles of Khalkhin Gol weren't stages of WW2 either, that was a border conflict between the USSR and Japan, after which there was a non-aggression treaty which lasted for most of WW2.
Either statement is only technically true. In terms of ideologies, which is what we are talking about, the Spanish Civil War was the first major literal battleground between fascism and antifascism, and a prelude to the rest. Franco stayed out of WWII in part because his country was in ruins and possibly also out of prudence.
The Soviet Union was helping out Nazi Germany early in WW2, mutually planning the division of eastern Europe & Poland (which had previously stopped the westward advance of the Red Army) specifically. The UK drew up plans to bomb Soviet oilfields to stop them supplying Germany. The fact that the USSR had previously supported the opposite side in Spain as the Germans & Italians was irrelevant to that. After Operation Barbarossa, Finland was a co-belligerent with Germany against the USSR. This wasn't because they were fighting for an ideology, they instead saw themselves as in a Continuation War to the recent Winter War.
Ethiopia, unlike Spain, actually was a battleground in WW2. That was because Mussolini tried to attack Britain's holdings in east Africa. There have thus been (incorrect) arguments that WW2 can be dated to begin with the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, but in that case Nazi Germany was one of the few countries to provide any military support to Ethiopia.
Hum... I could have sworn that Ethiopia was an independent country, not a Commonwealth minor country.
You would have sworn correctly and I said nothing to the contrary. Italy had already conquered Ethiopia, but their attack on British East Africa resulted in British forces retaliating and kicking them out of Ethiopia, thus restoring Ethiopia's pre-invasion ruler.
Two points here.
First, let me needlessly defend Stephen Miller: calling people "Fascist" is hardly a sign of Fascism; and suggesting that somebody should be arrested for what one understands to be a threat of physical violence is not Fascism at all, but rather an expression of law-abidingness: American law, following law everywhere, considers threats of violence a crime or at least a felony.
Second: this post is in need of a definition of Fascism. It can be, in the modern style, "shit I don't like" and it can't conflate hardcore Communists like Pol Pot with real Fascists like Franco. Whatever Communism is, it's not Fascism.
Some time ago, I proposed this definition: "If you know your Fascist states, you know that their defining characteristics are single-party rule, nationalism, anti-feminism (women are expected to take a place as mothers and wives only, as a rule) and government control of the economy in partnership with the private sector." Happy to discuss and adjust if needed. We do require a clear definition here.
There's an annoying right wing talking point where they say "Left wingers are the real Nazis." With these types of political messaging maneuvers highlighted, let's get them out of the way and plainly state: There are people on the left that support isolationism, want to use the military as a domestic police force to enforce communism and put capitalists into reeducation camps, and generally fulfill all the negative qualities associated with fascists that merits violent resistance to them. The reason it's not justified to kill these people is because they hold no power in America. Communists are one of the most hated political groups and they hold no Congressional seats and nobody in individual states elects them to power either. Bernie Sanders is the furthest left politician in Congress and while he has stupid policy positions like abolishing private healthcare, he is one of the least successful Congressmen in terms of passing legislation, and he's also one of the longest serving ones.
A better test for when it's justified to use violence against radicals is not when they meet some stipulated definition of being a radical. It's when they
1. Message on doing blatantly illegal things,
2. Are doing blatantly illegal things,
3. There is no non-violent recourse stopping them from escalating and doing more blatantly illegal things.
With Republicans we have #1 and #2 met. If you think they haven't met #3, they are increasingly encroaching on it. When Judge Immergut blocked the Trump admin from federalizing the National Guard because the conditions of 10 USC 12406 were not met in Oregon, the Trump admin issued another order federalizing the California National Guard to be sent to Portland. Then another order from Abbott where he volunteered the Texas National Guard to be sent to Oregon and Illinois. The judge within 24 hours called another hearing and asked the DoJ lawyer "Mr. Hamilton, you are an officer of the court. Aren’t the defendants simply circumventing my order?” https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/05/us/oregon-trump-california-national-guard after the DoJ lawyer defended the deployment by saying the troops were just being repositioned to Portland - because that would be a blatantly illegal "repositioning" that flouts the judge's original order. The reason she states he is an officer of the court is because it sure looks like he is not truthfully representing the second order to the court and not truthfully representing the first order to the federal government - that means she's hinting that he's engaged in contumacious behavior and there will likely be contempt proceedings or referral to the lawyer's Bar counsel for intentionally misrepresenting the legal situation in such a high stakes case.
There is nobody on the Republican side speaking out against this. Instead there is unanimous support for impeaching the judge, ignoring the judge's orders, and invoking the Insurrection Act to let the military perform law enforcement functions in blue states and cities. Trump addressed all of the military generals last week and told them they would be using blue cities as military training grounds, sending them after the enemy within, and swatting the Democrats like flies. This is all not just very bad, but it's not stopping, because there is nothing to stop them. Republicans aren't being stopped by the democratic objections of the majority of people in these blue states. The federal government being shut down isn't stopping them. Judges' initial orders are not stopping them, they have to call back DoJ lawyers on an emergency basis within 24 hours to draft another TRO to stop them. (A continuing pattern from the Abrego Garcia case where the appeals court denied another stay pending appeal after the Supreme Court already rebuked the federal government, or from the CECOT flights where Drew Engisn was lying to judge Boasberg about the flights not taking off, or from the myriad cases about foreign aid still being illegally frozen.) Did anybody predict things would get this bad at the start of Trump's second term? To anybody thinking violence isn't yet justified against Republicans, you better start mentally clarifying when it is, because they will stop at nothing, so we'll be there shortly.
This.
I'm reminded of the distinction between "enemy" as a casual word for someone you don't like, the legal term of art for the target of a formal declaration of war (or a similar equivalent), and the foreign policy assessment that lies somewhere in between. The US has very few enemies, because they tend to die ugly deaths in short order. But there are quite a few *adverseries* to contend with on the grand stage of geopolitics.
Eliding the distinction is unfortunate, and goes hand in hand with a sloppy approach for when the extreme violence the US is capable of ought to be used.
>The US has very few enemies, because they tend to die ugly deaths in short order.
Even if they happen to reside in nuclear-armed countries?
Agree with most of what you say, and I don't usually call people "fascists" because it seems too loosely defined. Couple of reactions:
* Whether political violence is acceptable isn't just a question of how bad the target is, but the political situation. Are there times where it would be OK to assassinate the president? Most people would say yes, e.g. if he announces "ok guys I'm a dictator now, kill the opposition". But if that same guy is a lone Congressman with 0 national constituency, then no.
* It's hard to say that people shouldn't "talk about fascists as if it's OK to kill them" because one of the biggest and most defining events in US history, was basically us killing fascists for 4 years. But even though it was OK to summarily kill a nazi on Omaha Beach, it isn't OK to machinegun a neo-nazi rally.
* It's not the case that the left is more likely to talk up political violence. The right is constantly calling the left "fascist" and even more commonly "communist" (while also saying the two should be seen as morally equivalent); Trump personally constantly calling for people to be executed, etc; posts AI videos wishcasting violence against enemies; people always talking about civil war; etc.
* For Woodie Guthrie specifically, I take it as meaning more like this machine kills fascism. Makes more sense, he isn't saying his rad tunes are going to facemelt Nazis like in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but that they'll spread cool anti-fascist vibes and make their ideology go away.
* Is it "political violence" that we are blowing up boats in the Caribbean on basically nonexistent pretexts, and Stephen Miller according to media reports wants to do it purely for political/demagogic reasons? There's an asymmetry about how we talk about this with violence *by* the state vs by others. I think you can defend it but it should be pointed out.
> I think you can defend it
Of course, you can just reuse the stock phrases developed for explaining why taxation isn't theft. Something like "the price you pay for living in a civilized society," and "but who will build the roads?"
It sounds like when I say "you can defend it", you think the defenses are bad. If so, do you agree that Miller is engaged in political violence?
Precisely in the sense that any wielding of state power is political violence.
It seems to me very clear that fascism, like most things, is a sliding scale and is an analogous term. German Nazi fascists were a different level of evil from Italian fascists, who were much worse than Franco's Spanish fascists. I would react to a Nazi with utter revulsion and horror, but I do understand why someone might support Franco. And, of course, if you want to be extremely strict with your definitions you could define fascism so narrowly as to only include Mussolini, or broadly enough to include the Malibu Police Chief.
Stay out of Malibu, Lebowski!
"I don’t think this implies support for fascism, any more than saying that you shouldn’t kill communists implies support for communism. They’re both evil ideologies which are bad and which we should work hard to keep out of America"
Cany you clarify what you mean here, this doesn't seem like a fair equivocation to me as written.
I'm guessing it's supposed to mean that some forms of Communism can be as objectionable as some forms of fascism. E.g. a violent tyrannical Communist regime might be as evil or more evil than a mild kind of fascism that's only marginally ethno-centric and anti-democratic, just enough to warrant the label.
But communism isn't inherently a violent or undemocratic ideology the way fascism is.
Maybe the most central member of the "communism" cluster is a violent tyranny for historical reasons. But it seems perfectly coherent to be a communist who's against private property but other wise pro-democracy and pro-liberalism, in a way that it's not coherent to say "I'm fascist but pro-democracy and against ethno-nationalism."
Just being against private property doesn't strike me as the kind of view that needs to be "kept out of America" unlike almost anything that really could be described as fascism.
So it doesn't seem fair to equate them in abstract terms, especially given the post is about not applying terms too broadly.
Communism always leads to a single-party dictatorship because communists don't recognize bourgeois electoral competition as legitimate.
If someone said "I recognize the legitimacy of bourgeoise elections but I'm still opposed to private property" wouldn't that still count as communist?
"Property is theft" is a quote from the anarchist Proudhon, rather than any communist.
Greg Lukianoff said this in a recent article, making a distinction between fascism and RW authoritarianism:
"fascism was a weird melding of left-wing and right-wing ideas, combining nationalism, racism, and socialism in a way that won more adherents than it ever should have — especially among intellectuals and, distressingly, on German campuses. Meanwhile, right-wing authoritarianism is basically the story of the human race prior to the 20th century, when left-wing authoritarianism started to become more prominent."
This is the first time I can recall that Scott talking about stochastic terrorism, and he seems to frame it very negatively. Is there more detail about the reasoning for that thinking?
The entire concept is meant to mute your opponents.
Isn't some muting good in certain cases? For example, if I advocate that everyone named David is an intrinsically evil person who should be forced to wear a scarlet letter in public and it's responsible for all evil, and a lot of other people also started saying that and spreading it, it seems like that social influence can eventually lead to violence, albeit indirectly. That's my understanding of the concept, is that just a bullet we bite for free speech?
Your premises sort of assume your conclusion. The problem with the world you posit is that lots of people believe the calumnies. You are positing the bad outcome. People are more likely to believe Im morally abominable if I actually am. Therefore, it’s best to let the marketplace of ideas adjudicate my moral worth. That’s basically what reputation in a free society is.
Well, to get into concrete details, what about Kirk? It seems like a lot of people hated his ideas, talked about how bad he was, and enough people believed it that one of them eventually killed him. I posit the bad outcome because it seems like it happened. If I'm correct that stochastic terrorism accurately describes the people who said that Kirk was evil and should be punished, why is that concept bad? Is it an accurate concept but still one that should be rejected? Why?
Yup, either Scott or someone else will need to expand on exactly what in that concept-space is "wrongheaded". I expect I mostly agree with him on what downstream scholarship, etc. is wrong here, but the top-level diagnosis clearly has some explanatory power re: the July 2024 Trump and September 2025 Kirk assassination attempts, and denying that will not lead anywhere good.
Equating saying that someone is bad with terrorism I think is problematic. Terrorism's kind of a loaded term to begin with, but to equate it with the expression of an opinion or statement of belief is a) over the top and b) ripe for abuse, because nobody wants to be associated with the word "terrorism."
How does physical violence against medical practitioners and administrative staff of places which offer abortions, figure into this? Because there are clergy(various faiths) and pundits who continually rail against abortion, equating it to evils which need violent opposition including illegal means, and then behave all surprised and innocent when a member of their congregation/audience carries out a shooting or bombing. "I said they were the enemies of God and called on righteous warriors to rise up and smite them, but you can't blame ME for what happened"; I've heard the term "stochastic terrorism" used in those situations. Was that inaccurate?
As David says, it's a term that can be used to mute your opponents, but the catch here is that it's based on a real phenomenon: if you tell enough people X, then a few of them will believe X. This ought to be self-evident, from the fact that textbooks exist. The stronger, less evident form is that if X is hard to believe, but you tell enough people X for long enough, then a few of them will believe X, and act on it.
The catch _there_ is that no one knows exactly how long you have to tell people X, or which people you have to tell X, or how farfetched X can be, but everyone seems to agree that these are factors in computing whatever P(belief) is. And when the action has a payoff in the neighborhood of highly influential people being assassinated, people have a high interest in knowing more about that function, and in getting it as low as they can, at least for themselves.
So there are movements to clamp down on any of those three, or all of them, but mostly the third one. The problem there is that everyone disagrees on how farfetched any given X is.
I've seen it discussed recently how more people these days are saying that political violence is acceptable in response to survey questions on the topic, and I always wonder how the question is phrased, because as you note, I think almost everybody would agree that political violence is justified *in certain circumstances.* Like if you were in the Soviet Union in 1939 and saw a drunken Stalin wandering alone down the Moskva River, I think it'd be unethical not to push him in.
On the other hand, you have to consider that a lot of the people who are willing to engage in political violence are not at all motivated by pro-social instincts and instead find violence useful for their own narrow interests, or perhaps are just driven by tribalist antipathy; they don't have any motivating principles other than "my ingroup is not wielding what I deem to be sufficient power at the moment." We seem to have a lot of people these days motivated by tribalist antipathy. This should probably raise your bar re: what circumstances need to exist before political violence becomes acceptable.
I agree with your conclusion that 2 is the obvious part of the chain that has to break. You can't use political violence simply because you've decided on a label. But the way you approached this makes me concerned for the political culture in SF/among rationalists which seems to have normalized violence far more than it realizes.
As an intuition pump, communism is a violent expansionary ideology that has killed tens of millions at a minimum and likely well over a hundred million. Further, communists control the second most powerful state in the world today and a few other states. Support for communism (not socialism, communism) in the US has tripled recently and it's fully acceptable to be Ezra Klein and say communism is his goal jokingly. None of this is true for fascism.
The right is expected to live in that world, and in a world where it has suffered multiple disproportionate assassination attempts (some successful), and not commit political violence. The left is expected to live in a world where fascism has low single digit approvals and where almost everyone who supports Trump will at least explicitly disavow fascism. And this has caused it to seriously reconsider its commitment to avoiding political violence.
Now my actual thought is that reactionaries are generally reacting to something and so you generally see the rise in fascism after the rise in communist violence. So this fits the pattern. But my point is this piece basically doesn't grapple with the idea that these tools could ever be turned on the left or the fact that avoiding political violence and mutual tolerance is not a polite concession by the civilized left but detente against the right doing the same.
Also, I think it's particularly foolish for the left to indulge it. Because when the knives come out the right tends to win.
I really don't think the right is the "faction of peace" that you're making it out to be. There have been multiple terrorist attacks in this country committed by right-wing individuals with right-wing grievances. And there have been assassinations and assassination attempts against left-wing figures by right-wing assassins.
It seems to me that the right-wingers who say that they're completely innocent and the left are the real baddies are just rationalizing away any guilt on the part of their side for all the attacks committed by people on the right while being as uncharitable as possible whenever an attack is committed by a person on the left. I don't know why I have to take their concerns very seriously when this is the mental process they're using to arrive at them.
I don't know who has a bigger violence problem; it's clear to me that there are violent people on both sides. And quite frankly, I don't really care that much who's worse. It exists in big enough numbers in the right and the left that I see it as more useful to place the blame on the individuals rather than collectivizing it to the entire political sides.
I'm not making the right out to be the faction of peace. Simply the side that lives in a world where communism is far more normalized and globally powerful than fascism. Usually people don't even bother to dispute that and skip to explaining why communism isn't like fascism or it didn't kill as many people as it did because denialism is far more normalized around communism than fascism.
My point is under these facts the right is still expected to be peaceful while under a much less harsh set of facts we get this piece of Decker being lionized for a Secret Service investigation. Is there an equivalent to that among rationalists? If so I'm unaware of it. I make, and need not make, any claim about right wing peacefulness.
There have also been rightwing attacks on Democratic politicians (two were killed in Minnesota, for example), even if you aren't aware of them.
I am aware of them. However, no equivalent of Charlie Kirk or the two attempts on Trump that almost succeeded. Thus "disproportionate" which implies both sides have some proportion.
This is a common form of defensive thinking: you subtly change the claim from a true one to an untrue one, drop the harder to debunk points, and then debunk that. It's a mix between a non-sequitur and a strawman.
Actually murdering two politicians, which I believe was enough to tip the balance in the legislature, had more actual impact than attempts on Trump that didn't even result in any serious injuries. You could add the attempted assassination of a SCOTUS judge, which again didn't amount to anything (though I think it's terrible another judge is reducing his sentence because he's now claiming to be trans). If you discount state-level politicians, I could add that somebody broke into Nancy Pelosi's home and attacked her husband with a hammer.
I assume you're not talking about the attempted assassination of Kavanaugh where there were actually shots fired. It's sad there's so many. But if you count up the total number of successful assassinations/killings against federal politicians the majority are by left wingers. Though there's not that many so it's a small sample size. And some of the victims are Democrats.
If you want to tally what it comes down to is how you define left or right wing violence. Generally speaking, it depends on who a couple of specific groups (like Islamists) get defined as. One study that showed right wing violence was overwhelming defined being pro-Palestine as right wing, for example, because it's a religious and nationalist cause.
None of which changes that you're avoiding engaging with my substantial point.
They mean the Roske attempt: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/03/kavanaugh-assassin-sentencing-00593998
Weird case. Flew out, geared up, saw the guards, turned back, called their sister, called local PD to turn themself in.
Edit:
>Generally speaking, it depends on who a couple of specific groups (like Islamists) get defined as.
A lot of the data is just badly coded too. The Prosecution Project (https://data.theprosecutionproject.org/?tab=General¤tPage=1&numShown=10) has one of the better public data sets, but I don't think they do that much followup.
Some very confusing cases, like one where a group of black guys beat up an older white lady and her disabled son for not paying "the white tax" is coded right-wing. Which... you can argue it's not left-wing, but it's not meaningfully right-wing either. And that's downstream of different charging standards too.
Agree about the short-term situation in the US.
However, although he didn't do his dirty deeds in the US, Breivik makes me reject broader claims about right-aligned (defined w.r.t. recent Western political coalitions, e.g. Islam-inspired violence counts as left-aligned for this purpose) political violence being less of a problem than left-aligned political violence.
Yeah, I think right aligned violence is a problem. As I said elsewhere, I want defenses of Stalin and Hitler (or Castro and Saddam) to both be seen as unacceptable. The difference is that one of those is FAR more close to mainstream acceptability than the other.
"no equivalent of Charlie Kirk"
--ok, but it's just dumb luck (and the dumbness of the guy who tried it for not knowing that she wasn't there) that Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House, didn't have her skull fatally bashed in by an intruder. I think that would have been worse, although less dramatically caught on video, than a podcaster.
>two were killed in Minnesota, for example
Right-wingers famously take orders from Tim Walz, indeed (to be clear, the imagined Tim Walz that phoned their schizophrenic brain, not the actual goofball)
Boelter was known to be right-wing.
I find it somewhat mind-boggling anytime someone accuses the Trump administration of authoritarianism. An Administration that seeks to actively reduce the size of government and remove 10 rules for every one that is issued is incredibly libertarian and freedom minded compared to anything else we've had in the last four decades.
https://natlawreview.com/article/president-trump-issues-new-10-1-deregulation-order
Forget authoritarianism, this is better than anything the libertarian party could have ever reasonably hoped to achieve.
Not mind-boggling in the slightest. He's not reducing the size of government, he's exploding the deficit (which Elon Musk has called him out on). He's claiming the authority to place tariffs even though only Congress has the Constitutional power to set taxes.
The Trump administration is largely focused on exerting power *without* creating fixed rules. Did they make a rule to bomb Venezuelan fishing boats? Did they make a rule to extract bribes in exchange for tariff exemptions? Of course not.
Also, I don't believe that any agency is actually doing this "cancel 10 rules" thing. While I don't have hard proof it isn't happening, I don't remember seeing any "10 rules eliminated" press releases in the past 6 months.
And hopefully they aren't! "We have blindly to eliminate rules" is a stupid way to run a country ... unless your goal is "abolish the concept of limited government, and instead have a dictator rule by whim and bribe".
There's this charming American tendency (on both sides) to associate fascism with jackbooted restrictions on liberty rather than the cluster of beliefs around racial/sexual/national/cultural purity alongside strength-based hierarchy and corresponding economic arrangements.
As both a moral and practical matter, it might be useful to consider what levels of minority oppression and inequality make political violence acceptable, instead of milestones of speech restriction and defiance of institutions.
Alternatively, if one is trying to load the deck in one's favor the other way, one might instead consider what level of taxation or regulation makes violence morally acceptable.
So there is some level of inequality that justifies political violence? Sounds like one could use this as justification for all sorts of behavior.
It's interesting that during the Bush years the word "fascist" was thrown around quite cavalierly as well, but without the accompanying threat of real violence. It's unfortunate that the bad behavior of a few people can have so much power over our language
I mean, it still gets cavalierly thrown around today without accompanying threat of actual violence. Compare e.g. the internet drama exploding on the Framework forums right now: https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-right-racists/75986
Seems obviously true, but maybe it's only obvious because didn't we already do this recently?
1. Everyone is at least a little bit racist through unconscious bias.
2. Racism is an unforgivable crime that disqualifies you from participating in society.
3. We want broad participation in society.
The correct answer is to reject #2. Racism is bad and a moral failing, but not cause for ostracism.
You have omitted the very important item 4 - it's impossible to be racist against whites, and likely impossible for anyone non-white to be racist.
If your only options are "do nothing" and "kill the fascists" you'll find yourself in a concentration camp or laying down tracks in siberian permafrost before you manage to actually kill anybody. It's all about gradual escalation. (NATO, during the cold war, had an escalation ladder with dozens of rungs!) Government tries to boil the frog, it escalates a bit, the civic society escalates as well. You can publicly complain, join a demonstration, refuse to pay your taxes etc. before you get to the level of violent pushback. It's a quick and finely graded feedback machanism. And from afar, it looks like it works pretty well in the US. Compare to Russia: In the 90's they've had an actual democracy. But when it started slipping, there was close to no escalation from the civic society and here they are in the deep shit.
aren't we just reframing (or like revisiting) the paradox of tolerance? Like isn't that the whole point of the paradox --- that endless tolerance undermines tolerance so at some point those that value tolerance have to be intolerant
We have to be intolerant of violence specifically, and the government can legitimately use violence in response to violence.
I think a lot of popular discourse around fascism, violence, and so on, is very confused because so many of the concepts are derived from the punk and hardcore scenes, especially in the 1980s and 1990s.
There was a large contingent of skinhead punks that people wanted to keep away from their scenes, and a certain amount of young men fighting each other was already normal.
In the United States, most of the slogans about punching Nazis, antifa imagery, debates over free speech vs. hate speech, that you see used by members of the general public traces back to some situation like this.
For example: the famous "Nazi bar" analogy which you hear constantly repeated. How many people have ever been to a bar where it's even possible for a Nazi to show up and a leftist bartender to threaten him with a baseball bat? I've never had that experience. In the story it's specifically a "shitty crustpunk bar".
I think it may be bad that these weird and famously dysfunctional subcultures have been given some kind of ownership over the concept of organizing politically to oppose fascism.
Regarding the definition of Fascist, it's kind of like the problem of defining Socialist in that there are colloquial definitions and absolute definitions. If you try to use the colloquial one, a defender will No True Scotsman you with the absolute definition. If you use the absolute definition, such as nationalizing industry or having workers control means of production, you run the risk of your point being lost and a defender can still contradict you by pointing out a slight variation in the rather complex definitions and saying "So, what I'm proposing is not really socialism/fascism because it SLIGHTLY differs from the definition you gave" even if the spirit is 99% there.
Regarding when violence becomes "okay", that's a pretty difficult question. As a kid growing up in a conservative rural area, a lot of people were edging pretty close to calling for violence against Clinton and the FBI after Waco and Ruby Ridge. Years later however, a lot of these same people were cheering for local law enforcement shooting unarmed black guys (I'm ignoring the protests here, they were outright cheering and making racist comments about the shooting victims, even people like Walter Scott or Ahmaud Arbury). Ultimately, people are willing to overlook stuff from their preferred side, either cheering it, ignoring it, or possibly saying "Well, it was bad but...". People are also willing to get pretty jumpy when their non-preferred side does the same. As for where the line is, it's different for many people. I hate to take the Justice Potter approach, but sometimes you can just say you'd know it if you see it, but can't pre-define an existing line, just evaluate on a case-by-case basis.
> I think I land somewhere between Orban and Hitler, but I can’t say for sure, nor can I operationalize the distinction.
Orban is on track to lose re-election. The supreme virtue of democracy, no matter its multitude of defects, is that it removes the need to actually fight a civil war for political power, as you can instead just count up how many people would be on each side and skip the war to its presumed outcome without all the deaths & destruction.
Well, unless some court annuls the election and/or disqualifies political opponents from running.
little carve out of the right to bear arms for "bad people", a little bit of troop deployment, a few targeted arrests of political enemies, a little strong arming of American corporations, a few restrictions on who can receive emergency assistance, a few boons provided to loyal rich capitalists, a few Americans detained and beaten, a few lies about the status of American cities justifying more federal control, a few targeted arrests of political rivals, a few more pundits getting kicked off of mainstream media, a few loyalists getting put in charge of mainstream media outlets, more insistence that people must carry around their citizenship papers and normalizing that those papers are checked frequently, more restrictions on web access for the common good, more restrictions on travel for certain types of disfavored activity (or punishment of those who aid such disfavored travel). Slowly normalizing the idea that non-citizens should have fewer rights than they do. Normalizing that military action isn't accountable to legal process. Normalizing that it is ok to harm Americans who are peacefully protesting.
Soon:
Normalizing that taunting counts as violence and thus deadly force is a legitimate response. Normalizing that non-citizens don't have first or second amendment rights. Normalizing ignoring courts other than SCOTUS. Normalizing military presence at voting centers. Normalizing carefully and intimidatingly verifying the citizenship every person who votes. Normalizing refusing to let people through to the polls, even if they meet state voting requirements. Normalizing that it's no big deal that illegal immigrants die in custody. Normalizing that citizens shouldn't protest alongside non-citizens, because any reasonable person would know they might get shot if they do that. Normalizing further restrictions on the right to bear arms without proof of citizenship. Normalizing that it's normal for federal agents to maintain a list of who is buying weapons, even if state law prohibits it. Normalizing the rescinding of federal pensions for people who leave the country. Normalizing the FCC restricting the licenses of media companies, unless they are owned by allies of the government. Normalizing that all social media participation requires proof of citizenship.
Finally: arresting a bunch of rival thought leaders and seizing their passports since they are flight risks. Coincidentally, ICE picks up a bunch of people who don't have proof of citizenship, and immediately put them in a boat to CECOT. Coincidentally, hours later,the military destroys a boat that they claim was transporting drugs. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
There's no society-wude white line here, just the careful erosion of rights in the name of "common sense safety"
We submit that guns are the easiest metric: if the NRA protests a "minor" gun restriction and the government does it anyway, you need to start buying an AR 15 (start at $500) with cash, and/or start stocking up on 5.56mm ammo.
Hopefully you'll never have to use it.
I think this is much ado about nothing. Fascism is no worse than other forms of non-democratic forced collectivism (democratic forced collectivism being better). Incitement should not be a crime. People should take responsibility for their own actions. Sticks and stones...
Democracy is a set of rules by which everyone abides and that limits how much you can hurt your politicial opponent while your side is in power, lest they do the same to you when the pendulum swings and they are back in power. Fascists reject these rules because they accept no limits on how much they can hurt their opponents. They willingly position themselves outside of the protections of the liberal-democratic ruleset. Therefore, they absolutely are legitimate targets of political violence, up to and including deadly violence, because they intend to do the same, given the chance.
So if fascists are a legitimate target, when is the legitimate time? It is wrong to say that everyone has a different "red line" after which they resort to violence. The very notion of a red line is illusory; that's how computers function, but not humans. Humans are able to endure abuse, rationally inexplicable amounts of it, because they know that violence creates irreversible consequences, and they want to be really sure that the time is right. More often than not, the "right time" is a singular event, completely insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but around which all that resentment crystallizes into very real consequences that reach much further than could ever be justified by the event itself. Basically every culture on Earth and in History has experienced this; think Rodney King and the LA riots, Franz Ferdinand and WW1, Mohamed Bouazizi and the Arab Spring. Maybe the same will happen again in the USA; perhaps one ICE raid too many, a National Guard accidentally killing a protester, Ghislaine Maxwell pardoned and given a celebratory White House reception.
There is also no "trivialization of violence", some simple reward system of "Oh I killed this guy and life got marginally better, let's do that again!". Violence is a safety valve. It is the "ultimate ratio regis", but also the "ultimate ratio populi", and whether or not you believe that since WW2 or so we suddenly made a moral quantum leap and now live in a more enlightened age (I don't), then our proven history of violence was at least no obstacle to this current state of affairs.
No. There's a sleight of hand here: #1 (Many Americans are fascists) is a factual claim that you want people to be able to say *even if it isn't true now*. But #3 is "Political violence in America is morally unacceptable (*at the current time*)". Notice the problem here? The latter applies to the current time, and the former explicitly doesn't.
Your position should be:
Political violence in America is morally unacceptable (at the current time)
We should not say "many Americans are fascists" at the current time (because it isn't true at the current time).
Political violence in America may be acceptable in some other situation, but not now
We can say "many Americans are fascists" in some other situation (when it's actually true), but not now.
I guess what Scott meant is:
The following are simultaneously untenable.
1. Many americans are fascist *at time t*
2. Fascists are an acceptable target for political violence
3. Political violence in America is morally unacceptable under political conditions which are satisfied *at time t*
That may be what he meant, but it isn't what he said. And that's not a trivial difference. Because if that's what he meant, the answer is "if time t means now, #1 is false". And Scott doesn't dare say that #1 is false. First of all, his leftwing allies will all reject him if he does, and second, he probably doesn't want to admit it to himself. The whole song and dance about how #1 at least has the "potential to be true in the future" is there to keep him from having to admit that #1 is false today.
So of course sometimes by fascist we mean "person pushing policies we don't like" but sometimes by fascist we mean "person pushing policies that seem like they might lead to a genocide."
Seems like neither definition warrants violence when they are not a threat (I'm thinking of my youth when every neo-nazi movement in America just seemed pathetic and completely unthreatening).
but if we're talking about the latter, and it seems like they have a decent shot of taking over (or worse, already have) violent resistance seems almost compelled to me at that point.
I'm not attempting to locating trump/maga anywhere on this spectrum more just sort of sketching out how I would think about it.
What genocide are you talking about?
What do you call Trumpian movement that uses tariffs and other levers to compel the compliance of private industry with political efforts? Corporatist(by the way used in the article, not the correct usage by the way) typically seek to strengthen Corporate power, this government seeks to saddle it to their political enterprise. The correct term is indeed fascism, but that I've never subscribed to the theory that violence is acceptable towards fascists. Revolution is an entirely different political phase where violence is the means utilized to reform. As you said, we're not at that phase.
This is well below Scott's usual standard. There have been reams of books and articles on the question of when, if ever, political violence is acceptable.* Scott could have summarized and critiqued that literature, as he often does. Instead, we get this?
*eg:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/how-terrorism-is-wrong-virginia-held/1101399360?ean=9780190454227
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/when-all-else-fails-jason-brennan/1128553882?ean=9780691211503#
An important distinction wrt political violence being justified: There are circumstances (which I hope to never see in my country) that would justify a civil war to overthrow the evil regime and replace it with something else. It's not at all clear how to define those circumstances, since civil wars are very destructive and there may not always be a bright line that the government has crossed that makes it clear that they're that bad.
But this applies to civil war. It doesn't apply to freelance political violence.
Consider some kinds of political violence that don't have much to do with civil war:
a. Street violence (showing up at a political rally you dislike with some friends and busting some heads)
b. Targeted violence (catching up with someone whose expressed ideas you dislike and beating him up or terrorizing him)
c. Rioting/looting/burning during a political protest.
These are all kinds of political violence that aren't anywhere close to civil war, have no chance of overturning an oppressive regime, but are often cheered on by some folks (mostly on the left) in the modern US. I guess (a-b) would be the "punch a fascist" idea.
ISTM that we can condemn those without risking giving up on the possibility that there can be justification for trying to overthrow an oppressive government. Similarly for stuff like targeted kidnappings, bombings, and assassinations that exist to spread terror to the other side, but have no hope of changing the regime or anything.
There's a lot of relevant context that's often elided in discussions of this kind. I'm going to use the first part of this comment to make it explicit.
1. The government is the organization that can do violence in some territory so effectively that nobody can stop them. (So: Microsoft is bigger, with more people, economic influence, technological prowess, organizational capacity, institutional memory & procedure, etc than the governments of many countries. It is nevertheless not a government, because there is no territory where it can do arbitrary violence with impunity.)
2. Governments come into existence when some organization does political violence effectively enough that it can no longer be resisted by anybody within the territory; it becomes the new government. (This is how the US government was created; it was originally a rebellion, committing political violence against the officers of Great Britain. It won, seized the whole territory, and now it's the government.)
3. The US Constitution is very smart, in creating various processes to change how the government works without having to violently overthrow and replace it every time; and in having elections to facilitate peaceful political transitions. It's much, much better to get a bunch of people together to vote and change the government, than to get a bunch of people together to fight the government and replace it. This abstraction (from mass violence to mass voting) is the fundamental principle of democracy.
And here's what I'm going to assert. The following isn't general principles everybody should know, but rather my own opinion:
The people of the US are fundamentally a democratic people. The terms "communist" and "fascist" are offensive to us because they're accusations that somebody has betrayed the US Constitution and the voting > office > law abstraction that we use to alter the government without violence. Those terms don't just mean "very far left" or "very far right". The Communists sent spies and saboteurs to subvert the American democratic process; the Fascists had private armies of brownshirts doing extrajudicial political violence. When you put those terms on someone, you mean that they'd be willing to, for instance, bribe officials, subvert election procedures, falsify evidence, etc, all the different ways that the democratic process can be corrupted, up to assassinating politicians and terrorizing the population. You're basically calling them an enemy of the democracy.
That's the reasoning behind the "violence against fascists is okay" idea. It's like marking somebody as an outlaw. Since they've betrayed the fundamental democratic abstraction, they shouldn't benefit from it anymore. (This is crazy and bad; both sides think the other side has betrayed the Constitution; so all you're doing when you yourself betray it is to prove the other side right.)
Anyway, it's not as simple as "political violence is evil", that way lies anarchy. The government creates itself with political violence, and maintains its existence by using violence to overcome smaller competitors (the mafia, rioters, extremist groups, drug cartels, etc) for control of its territory. When you talk about a government, you're talking about historical political violence crystallized over time into habits of thought, laws and institutions.
Hum, About the constitution, note that (cribbing from Naval Gazing) that when we rewrote the Japanese constitution after WW2 we did not make it near as labyrinthic as ours.
Orwell observed in the 1940s that "fascist" was so loosened in meaning as to simply mean "something undesirable". So I think that people who care about truth and precision should find a more precise word to use.
The only suitable answer is : arguments vs arguments, political proposal/program vs political proposal/program. All the rest is commentary.
(Edit : as long as we are not in a war or civil war context)
The rule is just the breaking of the silver rule: don’t do to others what you don’t want done to you. If a party normalizes state violence against their citizens / political enemies, they remove themselves from the civil rules of engagement.
So I would say that at the base level, fascists should not be considered acceptable targets of violence. But historically, the fascist parties did inflict violence on their citizens / political enemies, which is why the latent feelings are that fascists are ok targets of violence. So you can call a new party fascist (in the definitional sense) without thinking that violence should be incurred against them (latent feelings). But you should be worried about this party due to historical context.
So Newsom calling Miller a fascist is more meaning “you are the type of person who commits political violence against your own citizens” (verifiably true, see all the American citizens hurt and shot in ICE raids recently). And Stephen miller calling for Newsom to be arrested for saying such a thing is self proving that he is the type of person who condones weaponization of the state against political enemies.
>But historically, the fascist parties did inflict violence on their citizens / political enemies
True of many other groups that did not become the go-to political slur.
"Fascism views forms of violence – including political violence, imperialist violence, and war – as means to national rejuvenation."
All of the violence and rioters and human trafficking and drug poisonings of our nation is coming 99% from the extreme left Antifa wing. It is why California is bringing back mask mandates, to give Antifa an excuse to hide their faces while they carry out violent operations by their fascist militarized civilians. Obama's Antifa brown shirts are the modern day fascists. Period. Full stop.
Human trafficking & drug smuggling is done for money, not political motives. And a whole lot of rioting is "for fun & profit", as Banfield put it in The Unheavenly City. There is political rioting, but January 6 would be an example of that, and it wasn't antifa.
Obama hasn't been president for over 8 years. He isn't in charge.
Two thoughts:
I didn't understand your argument defending #1. It's completely consistent to say "there are only a few fascists right now, meaning violence is unacceptable, but if I was in pre-WW2 Germany and could stop the Nazi movement through violence, I should".
Second: it seems like all three can be true if you interpret the second statement to "fascists are sometimes an acceptable target for political violence" rather than "fascism implies acceptable target". And it seems like most antifascists who endorse violence are implicitly referring to the former; they're not going around asking everyone their political beliefs, they're punching protestors who they see as actively spreading those beliefs.
I am less completely married to the non-aggression principle than I was in the past but it still seems like a good guide in this case. Fascists marching through the streets, shouting "Jews will not replace us!" are not legitimate targets for violence. Fascists pulling a weapon and pointing it at someone are. As are fascists who say "On Monday, June 14, at 2:00 PM we are going to go kill this left-wing politician." All this is in accordance with existing law, and I find it sufficient - you can do violence to someone who poses a current, active, identifiable threat to you. Otherwise you cannot. Their ideology is irrelevant. There are border issues here (the first is an implied threat but imo not specific enough to make a reasonable person afraid of imminent violence) but the general principle is sound.
When it comes to actual government operatives, we have a harder case. We legitimize some violence from governments - for example, police can forcibly restrain someone committing a crime and most agree if they're convicted in court, government workers can then put them in a prison and forcibly keep them there.
So the question becomes "is the violence legitimate" but I and every other person on earth will disagree to some extent on what is legitimate use of state violence. So the bar must be higher than "I personally don't think the government should be permitted to levy an income tax so I can shoot anyone who tries to collect."
The actual answer is "when the breakdown of state legitimacy and social cohesion is less costly than enduring the current status quo" but on a meta level we should agree on this, because it's costly not to have shared values around these principles. As much as I've thought about this question (even pre-Trump, just reading history), I suspect my answer will always, forever, be "not quite yet." That said, I do truly believe we have non-violent, legitimate chances to pull things back. There's no sign yet that we're cancelling 2026 elections, and that might be a decent bright line. I would welcome some clarity on how other thoughtful people think about this.
Do you feel obligated to wait until the 2026 elections are canceled to take action? If there are ICE agents and red-state national guard outside every purple-county polling station on election day, do we still refrane from violence because the 2026 election was allowed to proceed? If we are only allowed to act against threats, does my status as a straight white dude prohibit my participation in the uprising?
Like I get you are trying to be fair minded, but the explicit plain-language position of the administration is that they will use state violence against political opponents and ethnically cleanse America. This is not a euphemism, words have meaning, etc. The executive branch is literally promising to use the state power, including the military and the judiciary, to imprison or kill their political opponents, and they appear to have the ability to do so, and are proceeding in that direction.
At this point it's like if a news agency interviewed a member of the NAACP, then brought on a Grand Dragon of the klan in order to get a balanced perspective and consider both sides.
It did occur to me after making this comment that elections are not likely to be cancelled. In the most likely case, they will instead by restricted, and voters intimidated. I still do think we have to be cautious about advocating political violence.
Other than that statement, my comment wasn't meant to be fair-minded about the present, it was meant to use extreme hypotheticals to point out issues with various justifications for violence. I'd agree that the stated position of the administration is that they intend to attempt a fascist takeover of the United States government. The question (to me, at least) is whether that attempt has literally any hope of success at all, whether a violent intervention would be helpful, and whether other means of stopping it can still be successful. And that's a moral position. I think you should only harm others when you have to.
I think there's basically no chance of the 2026 elections being cancelled, making it senseless to talk of "waiting" for that.
> the explicit plain-language position of the administration is that they will use state violence against political opponents and ethnically cleanse America
No, it isn't.
> to imprison or kill their political opponents, and they appear to have the ability to do so, and are proceeding in that direction
Who have they imprisoned & killed?
>the explicit plain-language position of the administration is that they will use state violence against political opponents and ethnically cleanse America
Narrator: "It was not."
Scott, I have always appreciated your deep commitment to fairness and epistemic humility. Unfortunately, politics, morality and power are not objective sciences. Not withstanding that political violence is often a bad TACTIC, the moral case isn't hard to make.
The apparent contradiction in your 3 points can be reconciled by the following: the level of violence justified against facists is directly proportional to how much power they have.
Newsome defining far-right nationalism as anything patriotic political moderates and conservatives want is the reason why we can't have a discussion about politics any more.
There may well be a lot of fascists in America, but I'm pressing X to doubt that it is the ones who are being so called.
Did you notice that in “far-right nationalist authoritarian corporatist” you just have to swap two words then you can abbreviate it with FRANC? Just need a couple more attributes and you arrive at “Francoist”.
Excellent article. However, we already know the threshold for when mass political violence becomes legitimate:
It's when a Black fetanyl-addicted petty criminal with a heart condition dies in police custody after being restrained by a White police officer using standard methods
Is there no other way to overturn fascism than by violence?
People have been talking about Franco, and that didn't end via violence.
If fascists are an acceptable target for political violence, then so are communists.
If fascists are an acceptable target for political violence *merely for holding their beliefs*, then so is everyone everywhere at all times.
Surely the entire point of democracy is that if the government annoys enough people to cause a successful revolution, the revolution doesn't have to happen because you can just vote it out.
As a very wise man once said, the entire point of the law is to get whatever would have happened anyway to happen without bloodshed.
So you shouldn't resort to violence until it's become impossible to get rid of the government by voting.
If you don't even have enough support to vote out the government you don't like, starting a civil war is likely to be quite counter-productive. Civil wars are usually very very bad.
If you're just talking about taking random pot-shots at your political enemies then all that will do is inspire them.
I don't think I've heard that wise man's quote before. Who was it?
"If you're just talking about taking random pot-shots at your political enemies then all that will do is inspire them."
Incredibly important point! The plan of "fascists" becoming fearful and timid after you shoot a few of them didn't even work on the ACTUAL FASCISTS. They made a very famous song about Horst Wessel! And it definitely isn't going to work on people who don't consider OURSELVES fascists -- we'll just think you are an evil terrorist who must be opposed at all costs.
To this discussion one must add the mindset behind the name calling. It is one thing to discuss the authoritarian impulses of one side and whether the term fascist applies. You then really need to look into what actually motivates people and what divergent positions you might be lumping together.
It is another if the cultural climate itself has been hyper charged with emotional and black and white thinking. Then the other side becomes automatically evil and othered, and one is free to straw man and misrepresent divergent positions.
IMO what the authoritarian and conformity inducing impulses on the left contributed to young minds going through the left dominated education establishments, was an out of control negativity bias against Western societies in general and the US in particular. Introduced into susceptible minds, this was soul destroying and convinced them that “there was never anything good about America, it was evil from the start” (from a leftist discussion forum) and that the only path is to live in constant opposition. Neither a happy or safe place. As FIRE has demonstrated, the acceptance of various kinds of violence against speech is increasing disproportionately on the left, and this is a consequence of this catastrophic mindset, that can then move from one topic to another in order to find an outlet.
Let me offer a couple of clarifying examples:
FIRE addressed the following mandate to teachers within California’s community college system:
Professors were required to acknowledge that “cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid and intersectional” and to develop “knowledge of the intersectionality of social identities and the multiple axes of oppression that people from different racial, ethnic and other minoritized (sic) groups face” Professors were informed that "persons that think they are not racists are in denial" and that the drive towards color blindness in society "perpetuates existing racial inequalities". They were warned not to “weaponize academic freedom” to “inflict curricular trauma on our students” (FIRE Quarterly, Fall 2023)
FIRE successfully sued for this. They stated: "These regulations are a totalitarian triple whammy. The government is forcing professors to teach and preach politicized viewpoints they do not share, imposing incomprehensible guidelines, and threatening to punish professors when they cross an arbitrary indiscernible line."
This affected 54,000 professors, but FIRE was able to take action only because a few professors were willing to stand up as litigants in this case. Otherwise it would just have continued without resistance from within the left bubble, that apparently had no antibodies for bad ideas on its own side or expelled them from their system, because the mindset was widespread:
An example of institutionalized catastrophic thinking:
From guidances implemented first at Mount Sinai Medical School , then adopted at other major medical schools (Academic Medicine 95(12S):p S44-S50, December 2020) :
“There is no priority in medical education that is more important than addressing and eliminating racism and bias”… "It is impossible to embark upon this journey, especially for people who are White, without making an active effort to leave behind who we think we are, what we think we have accomplished, the titles and publications—all of it. These are meaningless in the face of what our colleagues and students of color face every waking moment of their lives. Worse than meaningless, they are unearned, and we have achieved them primarily because every day we are given advantages that others are not based solely on the color of our skin".
Credit to Rikki Schlott for finding this.
Much of what people object to on the right would not have happened but for this (and other examples of censorship or mandates, such as during covid). It caused many to go into full cultural self defense mode.
Quote from a neighbor: She asked what her son had learned in school that day. He summarized: "I learned that all white people are evil and that borders are racist" She added: "If someone messes with the gender of my child...."
While you're at it Scott, you should stop using the word 'evil' as well. It's not what you mean, and it's a weak moralistic cop out. You never use the word 'holy'. What you mean is that fascism (or communism) is *ineffective* - it both loses wars to liberal democracies and it lowers the standard of living as well.
Scattered thoughts:
1) every discussion for whether someone is or isn’t “fascist” that I have ever seen has ultimately been an unhelpful exercise in semantics. Debates about whether Stephen Miller or Donald Trump are fascist (even in 2025) are no exception. I personally try to use some combination of “authoritarian” and “bigot” as appropriate, which usually capture what people actually dislike about fascism
2) Made the mistake of looking at the DSL thread for this article. See a bunch of idiots who are tying themselves in knots refusing to admit that maaaaaaybe the guy who threatened his critics with prosecution (something you cited in the article), whose tried to jawbone CBS into firing Jimmy Kimmel, who has deployed the national guard to cities to deal with disorder which, as near as I can tell, doesn’t actually exist, could POSSIBLY be regarded as authoritarian. Why a man who already tried to stage a coup once could possibly not be trusted to simply step aside when his term is done
Let's test our intuitions on what we mean by "morally acceptable" here.
A thought experiment - if you could painlessly assassinate a political figure and you somehow knew for certain that it would be seen by everyone as an accident or natural death (don't fight the hypothetical), at what stage would it be okay to do so?
This is basically asking (if you're a utilitarian): "at what point is the harm caused by this person existing (or acting politically) greater to the harm caused by killing this person?"
I think I'd have a relatively low bar for that - many of the actions you've mentioned in the article are harmful enough to justify the consequences for the fascist in question, and this "invisible assassination" would therefore be morally acceptable.
But the *actual* question of moral acceptability for political violence *that is viewed as political violence* is more like: "at what point is the harm caused by this person existing (or acting politically) greater to the harm caused by killing this person, and all the political backlash, revenge attacks, increase in polarisation, loss of national stability etc. that follows?"
For obvious reasons, I'd have a much, much higher bar for this.
> A thought experiment - if you could painlessly assassinate a political figure and you somehow knew for certain that it would be seen by everyone as an accident or natural death (don't fight the hypothetical), at what stage would it be okay to do so?
Isn't this the classic case of Prisoner's Dilemma ? If everyone gets their own "kill politician" button, and everyone chooses Defect and spams that button, then you don't end up in political utopia -- but rather a land of ghosts. Thus the correct move is to destroy the button instead, even though by doing so you suffer a temporary loss.
Jefferson said, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of *patriots and* tyrants."
Great read as always.
I wish Scott covered the fashionable slogans such as Punch a Nazi and how they fit into this framework. What does it mean to punch a nazi? Sure, that's a form of political violence, but allegedly a softer on. I assume it means you want to punch the nazi, not kill the nazi, you just hurt them enough to stop being nazis. At least that's my read. What happens if they punch back, though? How many times to we punch them again? Do we punch them until they die? In which case, why isn't the slogan Kill a Nazi?
My initial reaction to this article was that the real statement to reject was (1), because while "many Americans are fascists" might be true, everyone disagrees on which ones. Everyone disagrees, because the definition is vague. And when the definition is vague, all the energy goes into pulling it into whatever shape will fit over whatever someone doesn't like. As many have noted in the comments already: Orwell anticipated this decades ago.
Reject claim (1); if you have the luxury to make a formal, widely acceptable case for why someone is a fascist, then you have the luxury for a trial, and the US already has a system for that.
waiting for the discourse from reddit subs in response to this post:
"scratch a liberal, a fascist bleeds"
"epitome of enlightened centrism"
"jewish zioshill blah blah blah"
"what about my preferred bigotry? It's not that bad"
"I'm not a fascist ok, I'm just ok with concentration camps for my enemies"
am I missing some?
Leaving alone the fact that fascism is an empty word, I would be careful about using it, lest it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I think that those fascinated with the idea of civil war - on the Left and the Right - should be sentenced to ten years of reviewing of the historical documentatio about the American Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, the War in Yugoslavia and other, and to write every day an essay about 'what happened to my wife and children after the other faction broke into my home and tortured and murdered me'
> So I think the natural conclusion is to abandon 2. Fascists, although evil, aren’t automatically a legitimate target for political violence.
There's a weaker version of 2 which is "Fascist _leaders_ are a legitimate target for political violence" which is not considered here and I think deserves consideration.
I think most people distinguish between movement leaders and followers. It would have certainly been acceptable to kill Hitler and Himmler, but the carpet bombing of Dresden (although I'm sure it killed many fascists) is much harder to defend.
I appreciate your attempt to address a difficult topic and I personally found it useful in clarifying my thinking.
One note about fascist synonyms: I've definitely heard "Nazi" used, which carries a similar negative connotation to "fascist." I've also heard "dictator" (specific to the leader, eg Trump in USA), and "authoritarian" (which admittedly doesn't carry the same degree of negative connotation).
I also still hear "racist", "sexist," "white nationalist", "KKK", and similar used in basically the same way to describe MAGA folks. In context they often make sense by themselves, but sometimes only really make sense as a makeshift synonym for "fascist."
"Many Americans are fascists
...And I don’t want to abandon 1, because it seems like a factual claim that might be true - even if you don’t think it’s true now, it obviously has the potential to be true in the future - and we shouldn’t ban people from asserting true claims."
How many is "many"? A hundred thousand? A million? Out of a population of 340 million, how many Americans are real, genuine, actual Fascist as in "Heil mein Führer" type and not the "if you don't agree with me 100% on every tiny thing then you are a fascist" type of fascist?
"I think it’s probably bad practice to demand that reasonable people not use the word “fascist”. "
On the contrary, I think reasonable people should not use this word until they really do mean, and really can provide evidence to back up their claim, that those they are calling fascist are fascists. I presume we are meant to think the Phoenix Project lady is unreasonable, but that's what we're getting when "fascist" has lost all meaning beyond "this labels you as a bad person".
I'm not going to call Gavin Newsom a Communist or socialist, because he's not. He's a socially progressive liberal. I think it's stupid and counter-productive to call everyone "lefties" or Communists when they're not, and I think it's stupid and counter-productive to call everyone a fascist ditto.
So does this post mean you'll be voting for Katie Porter for governor of California? 😁 She seems to agree about the "many Americans" bit, what with the "How would I need them in order to win, Ma'am?" query (as an aside, this interview is comedy gold for the sheer entitlement on display: I don't need to give a flying fig about 40% of the electorate of California and as for the other 60% of course they are gonna vote for me and nobody else, it is a divine law inscribed on tablets of stone that the Democratic vote goes to the one anointed candidate which will be me, me, glorious me!)
https://www.imightbewrong.org/p/some-constructive-criticism-for-katie
"But the bigger problem is that you seem to believe that you’re entitled to people’s votes on account of being a Democrat. You’re all but daring people to vote for someone else. You may think that you’re making a factual point about electoral math, but you really just told voters: “We’re a one party state, dickheads. You’re gonna vote Republican? Fine: Good luck making eye contact with the wine moms in your neighborhood association after that. That ‘D’ next to my name stands for ‘Don’t you dare downgrade your social standing by voting for someone else,’ or ‘Deez nuts are available for sucking if you even think about not voting Democrat, because it’s California, bitches, and I’m gonna be governor whether you like it or not.’” And — unless I dramatically misunderstand your campaign — those impressions are off-message."
Motte: “fascist” is a useful technical term for a specific intersection of politics and aesthetics. It’s on par with “communist,” “libertarian,” or even “liberal.” The categories were made for man. We’re far enough from WWII that *Brown v. Oklahoma* is more relevant than *Chaplinsky v. NH.*
Bailey: whatever this is. https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/dewaffling_tech
I feel a little guilty linking it, a little complicit in nutpicking. But since we’re talking about perceived threats, I think it’s worth giving an example. This is not an argument about prevalence or accuracy of such attitudes. It’s an observation that if you’re looking, you *will* find people who make Newsom look careful and conciliatory.
I’d like to keep using the practical, clinical definition. I’d prefer not to give the most shameless partisans more legitimacy.
> Your threshold may differ from mine, but you must have one.
I don't think this is a good approach. It makes it easy for fascism to divide-and-conquer its opposition.
Your red line was crossed today, so you revolt - but I don't join you because my red line is a little farther down the road and was not crossed yet. Decker won't join you either - his red line was crossed last week, he revolted alone, and now he's in jail. So today you too are alone in your revolution, which is therefore bound to fail and tomorrow you'll be Decker's cell-neighbor.
The threshold cannot be individual. It needs to be unified. It need to be a Fire Alarm.
Is there a distinction to be made regarding where the fascism is happening?
We acknowledge that violence against fascists abroad has been ok in the past (I don't know many reasonable people arguing against fighting Germany in WWII and there are many other examples) which presumes it would be ok in the future as well.
But if those same people were in our country it would not be ok? Like, using the WWII example, it was ok for Britain to fight Germany but not for Germans to do violence against Nazi Party beforehand? That seems silly.
Now, maybe this gets back to your question of line drawing and crossing. Germany crossed a line by declaring was on Poland. But the responding nations, fighting fascism, we not declared upon, they made that first step.
In any event, this means that intra-nation violence against fascism is basically never ok, because there isn't really a person-to-person or group-to-group declaration of war function (aside, I guess, from starting to do violence).
So under this framework, anti-Nazi Germans would not have been in the "right" to use violence against fellow citizens on the Nazi side.
And again, that kinda seems wrong to me. Maybe I'm nuts here.
Interesting article. I branched off your chain of reasoning in a slightly different direction: in law, we uphold an evidentiary standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt" before saddling someone with a label that can be punished with the death penalty. The probability of being killed because people are calling you a fascist (or socialist or whatever else the case may be) is drastically lower than the death penalty being applied once you're labeled a serial killer or whatever, but it still seems reasonable to have a high burden of proof for deciding someone can be fairly stuck with a label many people will connotate with "ought to be killed."
1) Nicholas Decker is a ridiculous engagement-optimized caricature and an embarrassment to anyone that claims to be a sane utilitarian.'
2) Gonna make some popcorn now, I'm sure the most obnoxious of your commentariat will be out in force.
I think that, at the bare minimum, we should strive to maintain the norm that mere words are responded to with words, not bullets (as Scott had pointed out in his earlier days). So if there's some truly odious blogger out there preaching about how gingers have no souls to his massive audience, and his screeds set your ginger blood boiling... then calling for violence against that person should still be met with gasps of outrage, not approval.
Quote "And I don’t want to abandon 1, because it seems like a factual claim that might be true - even if you don’t think it’s true now, it obviously has the potential to be true in the future - and we shouldn’t ban people from asserting true claims."
Okay, but if you redefine the first statement from "Many Americans are fascist" to "Many Americans are fascist or might become fascist in the future" then there is no longer any logical contradiction in the three statements and your entire argument falls apart.
Forget fascism for a second. Clearly political violence is legitimate against political ideologies or systems that are sufficiently hostile to human rights, even if those ideologies are followed by a significant percentage of the population. That's an extremely uncontroversial claim to make. To deny this is to claim that abolition was wrong, that the US civil war was fundamentally unjust. In fact the very independence war that established the US would be unjust. And of course we'd also have to call the entirety of the fight against the original Nazis, both from within Germany and from outside, as illegitimate.
And having established that political violence is justified against some ideologies, even if followed by a large percentage of the population, the only questions left to answer is if fascism is such an ideology, and if the ideology of the a significant fraction of Americans can legitimately be described as fascism. In fact we can cut out the middle man and just immediately ask if a significant fraction of Americans follow an ideology against which violence is acceptable, without having to nitpick over the definition of fascism.
I think there's a pretty simple solution in that fascists are morally legitimate targets for political violence, but that you still have to do the utilitarian calculation of what the consequences of jumping off that slippery slope are.
>"I think it’s probably bad practice to demand that reasonable people not use the word “fascist”. It risks giving unreasonable people a heckler’s veto over every useful term"
In what way is "fascist" a useful term in any 21st-century context? It basically only means "right-wing plus the speaker wants you to instinctively hate the target and favor otherwise-taboo methods to silence them". Which, OK, is useful for someone who wants to convey that message, but we should understand that this is the only way the word is ever really used. If someone means to say "right wing but I don't mean to say we should start punching them", then it's just as informative to say "right wing" and much easier than saying "fascist" and trying to clarify that you're referring to some exotic class of non-punchable fascists.
It's at least possible that someone might want to argue that [contemporary political figure X] is practicing a brand of authoritarianism that is a closer match to that of Mussolini and Franco and you-know-who than to any of the other horrid forms of authoritarianism we've had to describe over the centuries. Not sure how useful that would be; I don't think there are any specifically anti-fascist techniques we would bring to bear that are any different than we would use against any other sort of authoritarian. But more importantly, aside from a few pedantic history nerds, almost nobody ever does that without meaning to invoke "...and we all agreed that we hate Mussolini and we're glad he wound up on that meathook". And the pedantic history nerds are going to have to spend many thousands of words explaining exactly what they do mean, so there's no real advantage to leading with "fascist".
Anybody who uses the term "fascism" today, in any non-meta and non-historical context, should be understood as saying "right wing" plus "unthinking hatred" plus "commence with the punching". This will not change. Once the historic meaning of a word has been this badly perverted, it is Literally Impossible to undo the damage. Canute would have had as much chance of holding back the tide, as Alexander would of convincing people that it is unacceptable to use violence against people labeled by the term that means "acceptable to use violence against".
We do need a language for discussing political violence, and when political violence is appropriate and who it might be appropriate to use such violence against. But we don't need that language to be couched in stealth and misdirection. So anyone saying "[X] is a fascist", should get at *least* the response they'd get for saying "we should punch [X], and everyone knows we should punch [X] so I don't need to justify that". Whether that means heckling or shunning or banning, will depend on the forum and the context.
And if we are ever so careless as to let e.g. "environmentalist" become *nigh-universally understood* to mean "person that we should punch because of their environmental views", then it will become necessary to similarly taboo "environmentalist" anywhere we want to have a productive discussion. We'll need a new term, maybe "conservationist" for someone whose pro-environmental policies don't rise to the level of punchability. But we haven't got to that point yet, and Scott's "some moron says it's OK..." doesn't come close to rising to that level, so there is still legitimate use for "environmentalist". Let's try to keep it that way, because "fascist" is a lost cause.
I agree with Scott’s sentiment here, but the headline seems to have summarized the argument incorrectly…
“Facism” can’t be both a vague term that gets applied to almost everything, and a legitimate target.
It feels something like a Motte and Bailey argument. In the Second World War, the allies did use armed force against regimes described as fascist (Benito Mussolini). It would seem to not follow as an argument that this justifies force against the many other things that get called fascist.
I also think that the Woodie Guthrie quote and many like it were understood to not be serious.
What is different right now is it feels like the US is sliding into major political violence. Ands it’s not really because people are suddenly getting called fascist. Everyone’s been called a “Fascist” since the 1980’s, at least.
The 1980’s, which gave us
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta
Violence is only acceptable as protective force when there is no better alternative. If we had an effective and well-resourced justice system, we would never need violence for anything. On the other hand, if anyone, fascist or not, breaks into your house and corners you with a weapon, you're practically obligated to hurt them.
People are in fact being cornered with weapons and the justice system is not effectively protecting them. Self-defense wouldn't be political violence in this case, but what is a victim to do after surviving such an encounter, finding themselves no better protected or resourced than before, and meeting another person spouting the same views that nearly got them killed? Take the high road? They can if they have the resources to believe they can.
It comes down to a judgment of whether you think you can protect yourself and those you care about with the tools at your disposal. Can we blog our way out of this? Or vote? Or peacefully protest? Or accept the consequences of inaction? Violence is a function of losing faith in available alternatives.
I once watched ducks being fed in a chain link enclosure with an open gate. When the food was dropped inside, most of the roaming ducks successfully found the entrance, but the last stragglers found themselves on the other side of a rapidly diminishing pile of food - able to see it but not reach it. Confused, hungry, and being approached by more hungry ducks of a different species, a fight broke out. It would have been simple to just go around the fence, but they couldn't find this or any other solution, so violence became nature's last resort.
I feel like there are lots of ways to diffuse this trilemma at every point, but I'll give some of my primary reactions:
>2. Fascists are an acceptable target for political violence
Possible response: killing a fascist isn't *political;* violence, it's self-defense.
If a foreign army invades your nation with troops on the ground, is it *political* violence to shoot back? Or is it just the normal sort of retaliatory/defensive violence we have laws to protect and justify?
Fascists today are already pulling citizens into vans and sending people to foreign torture camps and shooting peaceful protestors in the face, and there's every reason to think they'll do worse in the future. Opposing them with violence now isn't a *political statement*, it's just trying to oppose tyranny and bloodshed before it becomes too entrenched to stop.
>3. Political violence in America is morally unacceptable (at the current time)
What does it mean for something to be 'morally unacceptable'? Do you mean in terms of deontology, utilitarianism, or virtue ethics?
There are many times when we might want to say that something is deonotlogoically wrong, but utilitarian correct.
Yes, these systems should all converge on the same answer under *normal* circumstances, but we're currently in precisely the type of extreme circumstances where you should expect the tails to come apart.
So there may be nothing inconsistent with believing 'yes, w should have a generic rule of thumb that political violence is wrong' while also believing 'yes, these specific limited instances of political violence are justified/necessary because of how much is at stake', if you are vacillating between deontology and utilitarianism, or etc.
More generally: a big part of the reason to *have* utilitarianism is to recognize when broad vague binary rules are failing to capture a specific unusual scenario. Finding a single utilitarian exception doesn't disprove or contradict the broad general rule, it's just a form of exception-handling.
>1. Many Americans are fascists
This may be conflating across different uses of the word 'fascist'. primarily, between fascist leaders/officials who are actually implementing fascist policies and doing fascist things in the world, vs. people who support/vote for those officials, or who just have abstract ideological or aesthetic preferences that overlap with fascism in major ways.
It's not unusual for words to have different meanings like this is different contexts; it's useful to be able to use the word 'fascist' to describe both a dictator and a writer, but you should only use violence against the dictator.
I think most people using the term understand this; that a fascist movement (like any movement) is made up of many passive members with only a vague association, as well as a few leaders and actors who actually do the violence.
And, then, again - those leaders and actors are the only ones who are legitimate targets for violence, but not *because* they are fascists, rather *because* they are hurting people and will hurt more if not stopped.
being a fascist is *strong evidence that they will keep hurting people* and will get worse over time, since that's how the history of fascist movements has always gone. But, still, it is the evidence of the harm they have/will cause that justifies violence, not their politics.
>3. Political violence in America is morally unacceptable (at the current time)
Whether or not it's acceptable. it's always, always and forever, been a part of American politics.
You can believe the morally correct thing would be for both sides to put down their guns and talk peacefully. That doesn't mean either side has a moral obligation to put their gun down *first*, and start talking rationally while the other side is still gleefully shooting them.
It's *bad* that we're in a world where political violence is used to suppress your opponents, but we've never *not* been in that world, and suddenly starting from zero and saying 'but why is political violence against *fascists* tolerated?' is an isolated demand for rigor.
Fascists are already committing political violence, *today*, and their opponents will commit political violence, too; yes this is all morally wrong, but that doesn't mean anyone will or *should* stop, and give their opponent an asymmetric advantage.
But is this term useful? One can, after all, use Fascist to mean the original party.
I think using an "identity" (in the adjective sense, not the identitarian sense) like fascist (or any other) as carte blanche for political violence is a massive mistake. Once you've done that, all you have to do is decide who the shoe fits, and none of these shoes appear to have very strong, well-defined boundaries (that's a feature, not a bug). Even CRIMINALS are not valid targets for violence outside of a rather prescribed and adjudicated set of processes that we have encoded in law and legal procedure.
What justifies political violence is political circumstances, and not who the target is or what the target believes.
I’d like to abandon #1.
The term “fascist” has not only emotional but also *historical* baggage, enough that I would say it doesn’t make sense to use it to describe *anyone* in the modern era. There are approximately no “fascists” today any more than there are “whigs”. Or “nazis”. These three terms all described people with some set of views *in a specific historical period* and we have no continuity with that period. So if the underlying concept is still useful, due to the passage of time we’d need to make a *new* term for it, preferably one acceptable to the group as a self-description.
“neofascist” might still be an option but “fascist” is Right Out.
(To the extent the term “fascist” has a modern definition it seems to be either “person who opposes socialism” or “person I don’t like”.)
80 years ago Orwell said "fascist" basically meant a bully, and "fascism" simply meant something undesirable. I don't think we've gotten beyond that in public discourse.
Good post, one of your best in recent times.
People on the right aren't fascists in the political sense of the word either though. In general, the American Right is significantly less authoritarian than the American Left, and my understanding is that this goes way way back historically.
Examples: the American Right is generally anti regulation, and in favour of greater state independence, and a smaller government.
In general, the American Right is conservative (wanting to preserve tradition / precident rather than change) and in the context of America that means the constitution / founding father's vision, which is quite a decentralised anti-fascist view.
Ofc, you can have sub factions that are fascist, but in general, the American Right is not. I would argue the American Left is far far more authoritarian, more into censorship, more into centralised government and more into political violence (e.g., see recent YouGov poll data, where young 'liberals' where 4!! times more likely to endorse political violence).
In general, I see the use of the term as part of the currently standard left strategy of demonizing, otherizing and dehumanising anyone they disagree with. E.g., have views on immigration -> racist, have concerns about women's spaces -> transphobic, disagree with them politically -> fascist. Didn't vote for Hilary and Kamala -> sexist. Honestly, this is the way the regular democrat seems to use these words. They don't even have a mote, they are all bailey.
I don't love the linking of facism to a polical flank, left or right.
Fascism, at its core, is the idea that the nation should function like a single corporation, where business, labor, and citizens are all organized under centralized state control to serve a common purpose. It replaces both free markets and democracy with managed unity directed from the top. Violence and censorship were tools, not the essence; the real principle was obedience, the merging of private and public life into one state-run machine.
Mussolini’s vision was less about chaos or brutality, and more about building a tightly controlled, hierarchical order where the state acted as CEO and the people as employees. The thug part is sort of an add on.
In this context it becomes a lot easier to say the Trump style of government is fascist. I don't love saying that but he has a very corportist flair to his policy.
It's hard to call a person a fascist. Because a person is not state control.
The violence part is just an adjunct of any political belief.
Singapore Inc might be a more benevolent example of facism provide you don't do drugs.
If someone believes in corportist central economic nationalist control of economy then they are by definition a fascist.
If they like beating people up and putting them in prison they are a bad person who may also be a fascist.
The sleight of hand between "right-wing person I don't like" and "person it's justified to kill" ***is the point***. This is why we see the exact same dynamic with "Nazi" which is typically a lot less accurate of a term.
People wanted to say "Charlie Kirk should be hurt" but couldn't, so they said "Charlie Kirk is a fascist" and then made sure everyone knew how morally justified it is to "punch" fascists/nazis.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ToiletPaperUSA/search?q=fascist&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all
I honestly don't even know what Scott or the NYT mean when they write "fascist" but I know it's a completely different meaning than how I see that word used every day. In practice all you're doing by using that word "correctly" is providing more plausible deniability to the people who want to see blood (at least those that are on the left).
"Fascist" just means "evil" to most people. And calling people "evil" is just a way of directing violence at them. There is no evil in reality. It's a human fiction that we use (essentially) to direct violence. So, if you call the other side "fascist", you are essentially declaring civil war. Fine, but then don't be surprised if other side uses violence against you.
Am I wrong for not thinking any of this discourse is in good faith? The issue is not even being framed as "when is it okay to violently overthrow an oppressive government?" but "when is it okay to kill people who we've managed to make an ideological label stick to?"
Left-wingers are leveraging the facts that: (1) WWII still looms large in the American imagination (2) People today seem to think we went to war with Germany because they were racist and fascist.
Therefore it's justified to kill anyone who we can call fascist. We already went to war about this after all! Reddit told me my great-grandad who fought on the beaches of Normandy was Antifa. What a convenient pretext to snipe the right winger coming to my school.
Obviously Trump hasn't done anything close to what left-wing idols like Lincoln and FDR did, and obviously they've called every Republican president in my lifetime a Nazi. Are people like KoopaKing in your comment section, who openly advocate for violence against the President and his tens of millions of voters, really so committed to the rule of law and the separation of powers? Or are they mentally unbalanced people who find it a convenient excuse?
To answer your question in good faith, in a liberal system you should not kill people for simply believing in any political system. Premise 2 is false.
In the case they organize and gain political power, there is still no workable bright line because overthrowing a leviathan is practically guaranteed to be extremely deadly and chaotic. Especially when you're overthrowing one that was popularly elected like a year ago.
It's fun to chat online, but is a president flouting a Supreme Court order by illegally deploying the National Guard (as an example of a possible bright line) seriously worth a bloody revolution? What if the National Guard leaves after a few months and nothing really comes of it? Would it still have been worth the mountain of skulls to prevent that fascistic act?
People are just not thinking seriously about what a violent revolution means, and what level of oppression is preferable to it. Probably because it's their opponent in power, and they're more fantasizing and LARPing than thinking.
Astral Codex Ten has been bullied by the wokeists, probably more than once, and now he's afraid to say what he really thinks. Moreover, he's afraid to think what he really thinks. The wokeists have successfully intimidated him.
Fascism is arbitrary and unfettered government intervention in every aspect of citizens' lives. This is closest to Mussolini's definition. Leftists who regulate everything are fascists, while Republicans, including Trump, are actually anti-fascists because they deregulate everything. Even to the point of abolishing the Department of Education. There have never been any fascists in history who abolished the Department of Education, or who would even think of such a thing. On the contrary, true fascists are always deeply concerned about what and how children are taught. Fascists always impose their ideologies through the education system.
Don't use political violence until democracy has so badly failed that it's easier to win a civil war than an election. And also, don't expect it to only catch on on your side. If people keep assassinating for right targets, they'll eventually start assassinating people on the left. They're the ones with all the guns.
It is probably important here to distinguish between "fascist" meaning a person who subscribes to or submits to a certain far-right ideology and "fascist" meaning a person devoted enough to that ideology that they are actively trying to coordinate mass violence. I think a lot of leftists are way too fast to put someone in that second category, but I do think it exists and is a category of people who it is reasonable to discuss committing violence against. "Reasonable to discuss" does not imply I currently think someone should do it, only that it makes sense to have a debate about when violence becomes acceptable against such a person.
(I am inclined to think it has a lot to do with how likely they are to actually succeed in their campaign, and how likely killing them or committing some other violent act against them is to actually end the campaign or reduce its effectiveness.)
I think that it is a matter of options.
By far the best way to get rid of Trump is to wait for him (or Vance) to finish the term, then vote him (or his successor) out of office. So far, he does not have committed any human rights violations which would justify ending the American democracy experiment and rise up against his regime.
My threshold for "fuck the will of the people, this must be stopped now" is actually rather high. If he sends death squads to kill Hispanic-looking people in the streets, or nukes Oslo, that would be sufficient cause, but I am very hopeful that he will keep at roughly his current level of performative cruelty, which seems vastly better than civil war. I also have high hopes that democratic institutions will prevent him from using his office to improperly influence the elections too much.
The situation with Hitler was different. It was very clear that the Germans were not willing or able to vote him out. The humanitarian costs he was inflicting were also much too high to justify giving the Nazis a few generations in the hopes that they would become more moderate on their own.
Personally, I think there are not one but two thresholds for political violence. The lower one is for purposeful political violence -- instrumental violence committed while pursuing some legitimate, achievable goal. There are generally cost-benefit calculations to decide if a particular action is acceptable, especially as far as non-combatants are concerned.
The higher threshold is for violence which serves no purpose except to inflict costs on the enemy. This makes sense under some schools of decision theory -- the purpose is not to make your timeline better, but to lower the probability that you will end up in that timeline. Killing enemy adults is a legitimate objective above that threshold. For example, it might be ok to respond with nuclear attacks on your cities by nuking the enemy's cities, even if such attacks serve little strategic purpose. Or it is totally acceptable to start an uprising instead of quietly getting on the train to Auschwitz, even if everyone knows beforehand that the uprising will be crushed.
Of course, the distance between the present situation in the USA and that 2nd threshold is ridiculously large (unless you are one of the ones getting deported to an El Salvador megaprison without a trial, perhaps).
This comment section is probably already long and dreary enough, but I would suggest a simple litmus test for whether someone is a fascist.
Ask them "Are you a fascist?" If they say yes, then feel free to assume they're a fascist. If they say "No, I'm a [something else]" then go along with that, and if you think [something else] is stupid then feel free to argue with that. Similarly, don't go around calling people "communists" unless they claim to be communists.
Forestalling an obvious objection, this rule doesn't apply to words with actual robust definitions.
Words are symbols and we have individual phenomenological responses to symbols exacerbated/mediated by social mores that occur at practically light speed. Good for those who can slow down enough to think/ration through the use of these words and symbols and for those who slow down enough to listen/consider. It takes courage to participate in imagination (following the logic) at any level without caving to fear. It changes the atmosphere for all of us.
It seems to me that the best solution is to push back on people using the term "fascist" (or racist, communist, whatever) on too wide a group of people. Obviously the connotation is meant to imply that the people being called fascist are like people who were called fascist in the past, and to remind people that we have previously agreed it was not just okay but good to kill such people.
But the reason we were willing to kill those people was not because they were right wing, or even right wing authoritarian dictators. It was because they started multiple wars and killed millions of people. If Steven Miller starts WW3 while trying to wipe out multiple ethnic groups, I will agree that he should be stopped by just about any means necessary, up to including armed revolution. But it seems that instead most of what he's saying has been within the Overton Window sometime within the last 50 years and is much closer to American norms than Nazi ones.
Calling him a fascist is inaccurate, and more so intentionally misleading in order to try to make him and his beliefs anathema in the political discourse. It lowers the value of discourse and cheapens us all. Similarly when Obama was called a Communist as an attack. At worst he was a free market socialist, well within the Overton Window. Likely not even that. Which means calling him a Communist is wrong and misleading in the same way that calling Miller a fascist is.
This seems like a good place to link to Performative Bafflement's essay in which he points out that collectivism has a far worse historical track record than fascism:
https://substack.com/@performativebafflement/p-162945544.
I also think it's relevant to point out that collectivism is far more damaging to political institutions than authoritarianism is. The fascist Axis powers all recovered relatively gracefully after the war, whereas Russia is still floundering 30 years after the fall of communism. Obviously there are confounding factors there, but the general principle still makes intuitive sense to me. Fascists don't destroy political institutions so much as subvert them to their will, whereas collectivism is a top-down reorganization of the basic principles that make society function, and in my view that's much harder to recover from. A metaphor would be a child who misbehaves vs a child who has metastatic cancer. The misbehaving child can be easily course-corrected without much worry but the cancer sufferer is going to need risky surgery and might never be the same.
The point is I think democracies can get much closer to fascism without risking long-term harm than they can to communism. I think political centrists intuitively understand that, I think 2020 shocked people into an awareness of just how close our institutions were to tipping over into a hard-to-dislodge collectivism (with identity groups playing the role of the proletariat), and I think that means that they're willing to tolerate a fairly significant jump towards authoritarianism as a corrective. That's certainly my view. It's not ideal but desperate times call for desperate measures. The only real risk of unrecoverable harm lies in the potential for Trump to disrupt the electoral process and I really don't think that's plausible. If he refuses to leave office in 2028, or suspends elections or otherwise makes it impossible to vote his party out then I think people would immediately revolt and I think they would be justified in doing so. But I would put the odds of that happening at far less than 1%.