1933 and the Definition of Fascism | Hacker News Reader

1933 and the Definition of Fascism

acoup.blog

40 pointsc-cube20 comments

The analysis is dead on. In the American political system, a two party system, the lily-livered SPD's and Victor Emmanuel are represented by those who fail to vote, or actively work against a dastardly outcome; whether they're the abstainers, or GOP fellow-travelers who believe they can control the maelstrom. As the piece says: if you fail there is no next time.

> The analysis is dead on. In the American political system, a two party system,

Currently fallen into a two party K-hole, sure.

But not intrinsically a two party political system and one founded initially by many who were vehemently oppossed to party politics.

A good question for the reader is how did the US political system end up in an unrepresentative quagmire of two parties to the effective exclusion of all others?

Is this the inevitable emergent outcome of that particular iterative rules based system?

Is some political variation of Hotelling's law at play here, can other voting systems help?

Interestingly, a similar issue befell UK politics in the small few last decades. It is basically two party - two parties get >90% of the seats, then there's a plethora of small parties.

What happened in the last election, for example, is that "small C" conservative voters had no one to vote for. The actual Conservative party was unelectable, mired by scandals and gross incompetence. Labour party, the other one of the two, was anathema. Taking smaller steps to the left or right, you have the Liberal party or Reform, neither of which had any chances of getting a significant number of seats in the parlament.

In a healthy multi-party system, some other "small c" Conservative party would spring up to hoover up the votes. As it is, people had the choice of voting for a party widely seen as incompetent (including by its own sympathisers), a party that wants the opposite of everything they like, or a fringe party with no chance of shaping UK politics.

I have some theories as to why these happen at the same time... But anyway, it's not a uniquely American phenomenon.

It's a consequence of voting systems and one that First Past the Post systems (such as the UK House of Commons) are prone to.

People who are (say) Left-ish but not full blown supportes of BigLeftParty have the choice of voting for the major Left Party or an alternative left faction .. which is a wasted vote in a tight FPtP contest.

Worse a not BigLeftParty vote is one that effectively supports the major Right Party as it lowers the count for BigLeft.

Preference systems, Ranked Systems (there are variations) allow for direct first preference votes for a variationLeft Party with secondary fallback BigLeft preferences.

The direct support for not the main platform shows and causes deals to be made, the votes that fail to elect a variation still fall through and support the LeftWing while allowing the growth of alternative views.

Ranked voting fosters a healthy ecosystem of alternative smaller parties which can then grow, take seats, and help better represent the population at large with a diverse range of views, not just the BigTwo which end up as slightly variations of things not many support.

I suppose UK politics with a more representative voting system would actually be a multi-party system. Last election, Labour and Conservative got 60% of the vote, and neither would be close to a majority on its own. And that's already with some people voting tactically.

So I guess the two are inextricably linked.

Yes. The rules of the game are the rules of the game, or at least until some nutjob tears up the rule book. It's inextricably linked. So, we play by the rules.

In the UK, if a small-c Conservative has no one to vote for, that citizen should ask themselves whether there's someone they really should vote against and cast their vote accordingly, holding their nose if they must. In the last UK election, I didn't get the impressions that either side was particularly dangerous to democracy or order, so maybe an abstention is justified. I think that this upcoming US election is a little different.

Weimar Germany had a proportional system and the responsibility of actively voting against Hitler moved from the citizen to the citizen's representative in the Reichstag. The SPD just couldn't bring themselves to support the KPD and box the Nazi's out. They opted to temporize and accommodate. Then the rule book was torn up, and it all went to hell in a handbasket.

Both electoral systems can exhibit pathologies if the parties responsibly for saying "no", the citizen in a FPTP system, or their representative in a PR system fail in their responsibility.

While it feels complete to see a comment literally "both sides"'ing electoral voting systems in a full Godwin's law sense, the issue isn't whether "both electoral systems" can exhibit pathologies.

( Addressed in a peer comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41961834 )

The question is which systems have fewer pathologies, less often and with smaller consequences.

Iteratively spiralling open field non party demographics into a non representative two party stand off is not a desirable outcome.

I agree. The pathologies are strange though. At the extreme, one is a vacillating/occasional hegemony (FPTP) and the other is parliamentary paralysis (PR). I'm inclined to PR as a better system, but it has some weird outliers.

I think that it's partially explained by the voting system, see this for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf7ws2DF-zk

That's a good starting short lecture.

It's something everyone should look into. Some will get further than others.

A giant caveat is that mathematical impossibility in an idealised setting isn't quite the same as real world implementations.

A smaller scales the US first-past-the-post system worked tolerably well for some time.

Tweaked proportional does much better, pitfalls are rare and "real world" untidiness can address that well enough to reap the other benefits.

The subject of the video you linked is mainly Arrow's impossibility theorem which is covered early in a number of applied math | discrete math courses.

    Plurality-rule methods like first-past-the-post and ranked-choice (instant-runoff) voting are highly sensitive to spoilers, [..]

    By contrast, majority-rule (Condorcet) methods of ranked voting uniquely minimize the number of spoiled elections by restricting them to rare situations called cyclic ties.

    Under some idealized models of voter behavior (e.g. Black's left-right spectrum), spoiler effects can disappear entirely for these methods.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...

The focus on no system being perfect distracts from bigger issues; which systems suck less than others, which systems result in better representation, which systems can doom spiral, etc.

What’s important to note about this analysis is that it’s well researched with links to sources. A reader is free to disagree with what the evidence may demonstrate or not, but at least it provides an education. This is the type of political discourse that we need more of rather than the vitriol that has become standard fair.

Those who don’t know their history are cursed to repeat it. And unfortunately, if 51% of the population doesn’t know their history, everyone gets to repeat it :(

Or 49% (or even less) if you're in a winner-take-all country with a system more baroque than one person, one vote.

The difference between Fascism of the 30’s and today is that in the 30’s there was a mass movement which was organised as part of the Fascist parties. Whereas today that is missing. The notion of “Inverted totalitarianism” by Sheldon Wolin, I think encapsulates our current political situation.

What's your definition of "mass movement"?

An anecdote that I find has some[0] parallels:

In 1936[1], when the League of German Girls and Hitler Youth had open-air camps at the Nazi party meeting in Nürnberg, many came back pregnant.

This was enough of a scandal that they got rid of the girls' open-air camp in 1937; not only because one of new mothers named 13 people as possible fathers, but also because they were all going to be new mothers: Nazis had pushed to largely outlaw abortion in 1933.

[0] albeit much sketchier than the 4/4 (elements of fascism), or 14/14 (Eco's elements of Ur-Fascism), evaluated in TFA.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichsparteitag#:~:text=Zu%20d....

EDIT: another loose parallel: if you do a search for the word "Nazi" in german language newspapers, they occur pretty often in the years leading up to 1933, but after that year the word suddenly occurs only in foreign-published german-language papers — even back then, even the historical Nazis didn't like being described by that nickname:

https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/search/newspaper...

WNYC’s On the Media had a story on Fascism last week:

“Host Brooke Gladstone speaks with Jason Stanley, a professor of Philosophy at Yale University and who has written several books on fascism. He first warned about Trump’s fascist rhetoric in 2018, and explains why it's more important than ever to call it by its name.”

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/fascism-fe...

"The time to stop an authoritarian takeover of a democratic system is before the authoritarian is in office, "

So we should have some solace that Trump has already been in office and unable to continue, did not lock Clinton up as he promised, etc.

This time the supreme court has already given him immunity. This time he has less to lose (he’s old, and term limited _unless_ he “fixes” that).

I've understood it was because no one, including the Republicans, expected Trump to win. And that this time they're ready.

Failed to deliver on promises smh

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