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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> Musk is not a fascist.

He is an active, high-level, participant (formally an adivsor, clearly practically exercising directive influence) in a fascist, kleptocratic regime. There may be some definition of personally being a fascist where this is consistent with him not being a fascist, but I would suggest that any such definition is inconsistent with what the bast majority of people you might speak to mean by “being a fascist”.

> Fascists don't follow neoclassical economics.

Neoclassical economics, like Newtonian mechanics, is an approximate descriptive model, not a normative system; to the degree that it is accurate, everyone follows it, regardless of ideology.

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He, and Trump, do not meet the definition of fascism. He is not pushing the supremacy of the State. He is not stating the State must control all aspects of society. He is not forcing businesses to close because they don't support the State. He is not banning other political parties. He is not Anti-Democracy. He is not Anti-Liberalism. They do not practice Hegelian Dialectic. These are the requirements for Fascism.

Musk and Trump - are well within the bounds of Liberalism. They may not be John Rawls. Trump is a Neo-Liberal protectionist. Musk tends to be more classical liberalism.

They’re saying that organizations which do not support his politics should lose federal funding. He’s blackballing law firms based on their employees having represented the other side in his cases. He’s arguing in court right now that he doesn’t need to follow laws which conflict with his plans.

Ok - cool. He's acting political within the bounds of precedence and a liberal democracy. It still doesn't meet the definition of fascism. Wake me up when he bans political parties, centralized power to the federal government, installs political officers in the public and private sectors, and bans capitalism.

You may not like it - but his constituents elected him to defund, or try to (congress is really the only people who can), those politically bias programs. This is how democracy works.

> Ok - cool. He's acting political within the bounds of precedence and a liberal democracy.

That is not true in any sense in which it was not equally true of Adolf Hitler in 1933 Germany.

Fascist regimes don't usually spring from the head of Zeus as fully formed unelected autocracies, they are a failure mode of other systems, very commonly representative democracies.

Nazism and Fascism are definitionally different.

Fascism does not care about ethnicity. Fascism is Anti-Capitalist Anti-Socialist. It cares about the collective. It thinks some capitalist mechanisms are important but it must be under the state control.

Nazism may function similar to Fascism as is also Anti-Capitalist and Anti-Socialist but it requires German Mysticism. German Mysticism pins the idea of Aryanism to rule.

This is all besides the point - it is not 1933 - what is happening is nothing like 1933 - Their policies are not even close to 1933 - your failure to recognize that prevents you from seeing the actual issues and offer real solutions. This is why Trump won the majority vote. Stop using thought stopping clichés

> Nazism and Fascism are definitionally different.

Nazism is a specific instance of fascism the way the latter is used as a general political term; it is, of course, distinct from Fascism in the narrow sense of the particular Italian movement of Mussolini.

But, I mean, if you prefer that I describe Musk as a Nazi rather than a fascist, I am fine with that.

That's weird, I went to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism and saw a lot of definitions but nothing about Hegelian Dialectic. I did see this list of defining characteristics of fascism:

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism 2. Disdain for the importance of human rights 3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause 4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism 5. Rampant sexism 6. A controlled mass media 7. Obsession with national security 8. Religion and ruling elite tied together 9. Power of corporations protected 10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated 11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts 12. Obsession with crime and punishment 13. Rampant cronyism and corruption 14. Fraudulent elections

By my count, Trump and his movement score 14 out of 14.

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