It probably depends if the US government is pressuring the social media companies. Which it is, but not necessarily on this issue.
Social media does censor criticism of the government in more repressive countries, eg:
BTW also recently applied to the usage of the word “tyranny”.
It is Populism. Not fascism.
And here’s where the ideological explanation for Trump’s seeming vanity comes in. If Trump is the only authentic emissary of the people, then how does he reconcile that role with unspectacular crowd sizes, weak poll numbers, the loss of the popular vote, mass protests by people claiming he doesn’t represent them, and critical media coverage of the policies the people allegedly want?..The legitimacy of populists comes from mass opinion,” said Norris. Trump “doesn’t have legitimacy through the popular vote. He doesn’t have legitimacy through experience. He doesn’t have legitimacy through the [Republican] Party,” which institutionally has had a rocky relationship with Trump. “So he claims this mythical link to the people.”
Sure you can draw parallels between trump and fascism, but since fascism has no hard definition, sure it matches- a to some extent.
trump, Chavez, Boris, Jansa, Lukashenko, Netanyahu, Duterte, Putin, Modi, and so forth. Populism is the new fascism.
https://institute.global/policy/populists-power-perils-and-prospects-2021
** Donald Trump’s attempts to subvert the democratic process and peaceful transfer of power illustrate the risks associated with populist leaders, who undermine the norms and institutions on which liberal democracy depends. But Trump is just the most salient example of populists in power around the world. Our annual study takes stock of the prevalence of populist leaders globally at the start of 2021.*
** We find that the number of populist leaders in power around the world is down from its mid-2010s high, but it is close to the same level as at the start of the last decade. The composition of populist leaders in power has shifted. Cultural populists now constitute the majority of all populist leaders.*
While populism has no economic or social doctrine, it does, in the words of political scientist Jan-Werner Müller, have a “set of distinct claims and . . . an inner logic”.17 Populism has two essential features. First, it holds that the people are locked into conflict with outsiders. Second, it claims that nothing should constrain the will of the true people.
#### Insiders vs. Outsiders
Populism draws an unbridgeable divide between the people and outsiders. The people are depicted as “morally decent . . . economically struggling, hard-working, family-oriented, plain-spoken, and endowed with common sense”, in the words of sociologist Rogers Brubaker.18 The people are defined in opposition to outsiders, who allegedly do not belong to the moral and hard-working true people. While many studies of populism define the essential social conflict as between the people and the elite, this report uses the more general term “outsiders”, because populists as often stoke divisions between marginalised communities as between marginalised communities and elite.
From there, populists attribute a singular common good to the people: a policy goal that cannot be debated based on evidence but that derives from the common sense of the people.19 This general will of the people, populists argue, is not represented by the cartel of self-serving establishment elites who guard status quo politics.
Now I know, you want to call them ‘fascists’ because that is a nasty name. But they are not.
No, once you substitute that, you are referring to Populism.
Objectively false. The definition of Fascism is harder than the definition of gravity.
Debatable. They haven’t overtly codified all of their beliefs, and the alt-right (or whatever we’d like to call the non-classical conservatives of today) is actually an extremely diverse spectrum of ideologies, but in general there is a gravitation towards fascist ideas. They certainly tend to subscribe to the idealization of the Hero, they tend to agree that morality should be derived from the state (indirectly and covertly, but ultimately they view the State as an apparatus for the enforcement of morality), they tend to assign extremely high value to history, family, and social tradition…
I mean, the list is long and they check off a huge portion of it:
In the Fascist conception of history, man is man only by virtue of the spiritual process to which he contributes as a member of the family, the social group, the nation, and in function of history to which all nations bring their contribution. Hence the great value of tradition in records, in language, in customs, in the rules of social life
Furthermore, the theme of a strong rejection of Socialism runs strong amidst both ideologies:
Such a conception of life makes Fascism the resolute negation of the doctrine underlying so-called scientific and Marxian socialism, the doctrine of historic materialism which would explain the history of mankind in terms of the class struggle and by changes in the processes and instruments of production, to the exclusion of all else.
That the vicissitudes of economic life - discoveries of raw materials, new technical processes, and scientific inventions - have their importance, no one denies; but that they suffice to explain human history to the exclusion of other factors is absurd.
Most alt-righter’s would agree with these statements without the slightest contention.
This I can agree with. Populism and Fascism can have a lot of overlap but they’re not the same thing: Bernie Sanders is also a Populist, but certainly not a Fascist.
Modern American right wing populists are rather distinct from Fascists - and I would argue rather contradictory - in their overt distrust of the State. My best guess regarding that is that this distrust would evaporate the moment the State is under their control and adopts their ideologies (and we see evidence of this with every ‘He Drained the Swamp’ post on other social media), but I can’t read minds or predict (hopefully) alternate timelines.
I think this is perfectly correct, and not contradictory at all. If the state was under their control and adopted their ideologies, I daresay you would start distrusting it yourself.
True. But the American Nationalist-Populists would never adopt the language that it’s “for the state, with the state”. They’d continue to claim it’s for God, Family and Liberty or any permutation of that set, and that “the state” is just the guardian thereof.
I’ve been referring to them as the far white, because they’re essentially a white supremacist party now, IMHO.
Well I was only quoting Mussolini’s definition. My own smell-test for fascism has three markers:
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I’m above you just because I was born here. (I can be a failed postcard-watercolorist or rabble-rousing pamphleteer, but I’ll claim the achievements of anyone I identify as my own too)
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All my/our problems are not my/our fault. It’s because of “them.”
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I’ll knife anyone I have to to rise. Even fellow members of my in-group. Especially so, actually. (Might as well pervert Darwin, since we already twisted Christ’s cross into a swastika).
The true fascist always do #3, sooner or later. But look at 1 & 2: the Left do those as much as the Right. Radfems and Queer Activists and Bohos all buy into that, no denying. Back in the 90’s I read a saying in the gay, leftist Seattle Stranger I’ve never forgotten: “hereditary guilt is a Nazi concept.”
Of course. We are all about freedom.
We sanctioned facebook and twitter in order to protect your free speech, we organized armed gangs of brown shirts to protect your second amendment rights and we eliminated your right to vote in order to prevent the opposition from taking away all of your other rights.
First, we need to distinguish between fascist followers and those who design and run it—there are big differences between what they think and do. And fascism, like all political ideologies, is tied to a specific idea of economics as well. One reason “Hitler equals Stalin” is false is that large private corporations did fine under the Nazis (despite there being a Nazi “left-wing”) and did not exist in the Soviet Union. So to understand fascism, we need to look not just at the political platforms and policies but also see what economic actors the regimes support. This article is an interesting starting point re contemporary fascism.
I believe that Fascism also espouses a sort of Darwinian brutality. Historically, a common theme of Fascism has been that anyone outside of the core culture is “undesirable” and less than human. Indeed, they are often the very thing the great leader is going to “save” the people from.
I agree. Good point.