Which Dem legislation does this?
He’s being sarcastic and talking about non-discrimination legislation that includes LGBTQ.
“Fascist” as used by conservatives tends to mean when the government controls people and the sets the norms of acceptable social culture.
For example, the most prominent term is Islamofascist - controlling women, controlling sexuality, controlling social discourse, etc.
The classical understanding of fascism - dictator, jingoist military buildup, etc. - clearly better fits the Republicans of today. The real issue at hand is what anyone means when they say “fascism.”
I don’t know anybody who favors “hate speech laws”. (Presuming that such laws would outlaw said speech rather than making it mandatory.) Even those who might philosophically favor such a thing realize that such laws would bump up against the first amendment rather quickly.
Liberals/progressive do favor hate crime laws, and appropriately so. And here’s why. Say I take a dislike to my neighbor and late one night go out and spraypaint on his garage door a common seven letter word that starts with “A” and ends with “hole”. That’s a crime, vandalism. And he’s the victim, the only victim.
Now let’s say that said neighbor is African American and instead of the previously mentioned term I instead elect to spraypaint what polite society has come to refer to as “the ‘N’ word”. Same crime, vandalism, but he is no longer the only victim. That crime now victimizes every black person in my neighborhood who hears of the incident and thinks “could have been me”. And you know what, it also victimizes every white person in my neighborhood through a presumption of silent complicity.
It is the fact of victimization of persons beyond the individual immediately affected that justifies “hate crime” riders to a variety of other offenses.
Reviving this for 2 reasons. The first is the treatment of the press by the administration - both the continual discrediting of them, and for the new normal of no recording of press briefings. That is so outrageous, and sad that there isn’t more furor over it.
The 2nd, and more disturbing reason is the letter sent to all states attorneys general this week. While it’s nice to know that both blue and red states have already rejected the request, it is a despicable attempt at overreach.
Fascism is authoritarian. Liberalism, no matter what kind, requires a democracy. Thus fascism is not liberal. That’s actually pretty simple, IMHO.
Now whether fascism can be placed on the left side of the political spectrum is another question. However, given the inherent nationalism involved, I would tend towards placing it on the right side. Nationalism requires a sort of exceptionalism based on one’s place in the world, and that doesn’t really fit in anything I consider to be on the left.
I mean, it’s not the moderate left, as that is liberalism. It’s not middle-left, as that social liberalism, and it’s not the far left, which is either socialism or anarchy. All of those, in theory if not in practice, deny any group a sort of exceptionalism.
I will also point out that the name “national socialism” was a propaganda tool. It was not socialist, but explicitly a third way besides capitalism and socialism. It’s just that socialism was popular at the time, so they tried to work off of that.
It is true that Mussolini originally ran as a socialist, but he created the Fascists to specifically be different from the socialists after his defeat.
If the Right wants to argue a sort of authoritarianism on the left, they can do so without appealing to fascism. Fascism is nationalistic.
As for the reason this thread was raised: yes, Trump is at least leaning towards fascistic. He is very much a nationalist, and pushes for a type of authoritarian control. He is opposed to the libertarian part of the Republican party given what he ran on for trade. Sure, he ran as a populist, but his ideas of how government works are very fascistic.
I really, really hope we never elect someone with his ideas but the actual intelligence to carry them out.
I don’t think that all kinds of liberalism require a democracy. All liberalism (and conservatism) is relative, so we might be considered extremely conservative and not liberal at all a few centuries from now. Conversely, many Islamic empires as well as the Mongol empire were much more religiously liberal than Christian Europe at the time, and they weren’t a democracy.
However, meaning is also derived from usage, so despite what I just said about relativism, if you don’t believe in equality, I wouldn’t consider you a liberal these days, since that’s what people use the word to mean. But that wouldn’t necessarily make you a conservative either: if there were a European-style fascist-leaning party in America today, which was to the right of the Republicans on immigration and race and the defense-police state, but the same as or even to the left of the Democratic party on social spending, I would consider them neither liberal nor conservative. Which wouldn’t prevent both parties from accusing them of being on the other side.
Thing is, I don’t agree with any of that. Liberalism is just the name of a group of ideologies with a certain underlying concept, that of freedom of the individual. And, as such, it requires democracy. Without self-governance, no person can actually be free. It’s a concept that was first put forth very close to the American Revolution.
Conservatism appears to only have an underlying meaning of “preserving the way things are or were.” I can find nothing else really in common with it, and it was coined in opposition to the French Revolution and their liberals. So I could see why that would be relative.
I would use the terms “left” and “right” for what you are describing, which is why I went ahead and addressed that as well in my comment. If the people described in the OP mean what I would call “left,” then that is my answer to that.
And while I think it may be possible there are some ideologies that just do not fit on the left-right axis, I am not really aware of any. An analogy might be an x,y graph. Every point in that graph will have an x coordinate, and thus will be on the left, middle, or right side of the graph. (Though, since ideologies have variations, they all are better represented as areas, not points.)
And, yes, this is ultimately all my opinion, but I do think I have decent arguments for that opinion.