Americans Have Lost Sight of What 'Fascism' Means
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Absurdist Techno-Hallucinogenic Terrordome? Meatgrinderism? Everything is fine, get back to work or die aleadyism?
[0] https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/e...
Fascism is reactionary phenomenon that emerges from democracy failing. You should look signs of it in democracies like the US, not stable authoritarian regime like China. They don't become fascist just because they do ethnic genocide.
Chinese are firmly suppressed under the thumb of communist party and Xi. There is no energetic mass movement and energy of fascism.
Paxtons five stages of fascism:
1. Intellectual exploration, where disillusionment with popular democracy manifests itself in discussions of lost national vigor
2. Rooting, where a fascist movement, aided by political deadlock and polarization, becomes a player on the national stage
3. Arrival to power, where conservatives seeking to control rising leftist opposition invite fascists to share power
4. Exercise of power, where the movement and its charismatic leader control the state in balance with state institutions such as the police and traditional elites such as the clergy and business magnates.
5. Radicalization or entropy, where the state either becomes increasingly radical, as did Nazi Germany, or slips into traditional authoritarian rule, as did Fascist Italy.
Some definition are considered better than others. Paxton's definition is one of them.
Still, most of the article's points stand: "fascist" is used to mean "bully," something that Orwell pointed out in the 40s. If you're going to call Tom Cotton a "fascist" then you should also call any mouthpiece of the CCP "fascist".
A good example is healthcare. Sweden has universal healthcare, but it’s highly decentralized and managed at the municipal level. Sanders is not proposing something like that. He rejects the ACA, which has state-run exchanges that could be expanded to provide universal coverage. Instead, he supports a single centrally administered federal insurance system. As noted in the article above, this love of centralized power is quite different than the countries Sanders invokes as models:
> Although Sanders often justifies his plan by referring to Canada and European countries, they generally achieve universal coverage without the degree of centralization he is calling for. The Canadian system is financed and run at the provincial level. Many European countries have multiple insurance funds and institutionalized bargaining among stakeholder groups, with power devolved on regional bodies. As in the case of tax policy, Sanders’ policies are more traditionally socialist than those of most of the countries he invokes as models.
There are many other examples: https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-report/swedens-less...
> If Sanders and Ocasio‐ Cortez really want to turn America into Sweden, what would that look like? For the United States, it would mean, for example, more free trade and a more deregulated product market, no Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the abolition of occupational licensing and minimum wage laws. The United States would also have to abolish taxes on property, gifts, and inheritance. And even after the recent tax cut, America would still have to slightly reduce its corporate tax. Americans would need to reform Social Security from defined benefits to defined contributions and introduce private accounts. They would also need to adopt a comprehensive school voucher system where private schools get the same per‐ pupil funding as public ones.
> If this is socialism, call me comrade.
Sanders is a left wing populist, not a Swedish social Democrat. While Swedes are cutting corporate taxes, Sanders is demonizing Wall Street and saying “billionaires shouldn’t exist.” His political is a politics of class warfare: unlike Sweden which taxes everyone broadly to pay for social services, Sanders promises to make “the rich and corporations” pay for everything. Sanders is ideologically much closer to someone like Jeremy Corbyn, who admired Cuba and the USSR and largely missed the boat on the market-oriented revolution in thinking that distinguishes Sweden circa 1970 from Sweden today.