# Explain fascism please. **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 17, 2010, 10:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/explain-fascism-please/547065 "2010-07-17T22:15:20Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 9
**Author:** ![sqweels](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f19dbf/32.png) [@sqweels](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sqweels)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2010, 8:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/explain-fascism-please/547065/161 "2010-07-21T20:57:11Z")
> [@villa](#): > > Was there working class support for the Nazis? Yes. But that support wasn’t the mainstay of the party. The divisions of course get blended during the recession, but the fact of being unemployed and poor doesn’t necessarily make someone working class. And of course working class people don’t support fascists just for the promise of more money and better working conditions. The working class is a great repository of national pride, is highly religious, and more susceptible to manipulation by national myths. They’re more likely to have ties to the military too, and again, they’re more likely to find a source of pride in these things, since they’re deprived of the pride that comes with things like wealth and education, etc. ---
**Author:** ![Damuri\_Ajashi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/898d66/32.png) [@Damuri\_Ajashi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Damuri_Ajashi)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2010, 4:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/explain-fascism-please/547065/162 "2010-07-22T04:54:37Z")
> [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > Which is precisely what you _opened_ with. WTF are you talking about. Someone posted a description of fascism that sounded remarkably similar to the tea party. Everything from the root dissatisfactions to the class to which it appealed to the early stages of how that disatisfaction was manifested. So tell me how that description is different than the tea party. > [@](#): > > If you are really incapable of seeing that a band of citizens, not gathering to take power or assault minorities, but angry about bad governance and dedicated to reform of corruption and waste, is not Fascist, then as I said, you are the sick one. Did I ever say the tea party was fascist? And BTW you must be living in a cave if you don’t think that the tea party wants to take power (by resort to the second amendment if necessary IIRC). They aren’t angry about bad government or corruption and waste. There is no corruption and waste today that didn’t exist when white man was president. They are angry that the Democrats are in power and a Black democrat is president. If Bush did every single thing that Obama did, from the stimulus (oh wait he did) to TARP to health care reform, they would not be toting guns at rallies and shit like that. They see democracy gone awry and a nation they no longer recognize and they want their nation back. I was just commenting that the start of fascist movements sounds eerily similar to the way the tea party started. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2010, 5:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/explain-fascism-please/547065/163 "2010-07-22T05:18:26Z")
> [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > I do not agree at all with the idea that Communism was rationalist. It claimed to be so, but I consider very much that it was a product of Romanticism. But that is because I consider the entire rationalist movement to have effectively died and been absorbed in weird ways into romantic thought. The Communists may have been less poetic and more in tune with precision machinery and modernist styles, but they were otherwise very Romantic and avoided its actual fact whereever possible. They were obsessed with symbols and mythmaking, falsifying hisory, and paying homage to the Will to Power in ideology if not in name. > > Honestly, while they claimed to be scientific, the plain fact is that the Communists are about as close to Rationalism as a rotting twinkie. Likewise, I agre the French Revolutionaries pretended to be Rationalists. But they were deeply Romantic in effect. No Rationalist would ever dedicate it as a Temple to Reason. Let’s take this particular debate to a [new thread.](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=571743) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/explain-fascism-please/547065.md?page=8)