By any legitimate or accepted definitions of either term, the U.S. is neither fascist nor a dictatorship. The closest one can come to invoking “fascism” is to ignore the historical meaning of the term as it actually existed in Italy, Germany, Spain, and several political parties in Eastern Europe prior to WWII. The only other way that one could describe the U.S. as “fascist” is to invoke it as a general term of opprobrium as employed by various (generally shallow thinking) Left-wing speakers.
And I doubt that it is very useful to employ an erroneous definition in order to challenge the errors of a poster who seems to have abandoned the discussion over a week ago.
My own father, ordinarily a very rational person, thinks we’re living under “fascism” already. I’m not convinced; his hatred of Bush is even more visceral than mine. There are various definitions of “fascism” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism#Definition:
By any of these definitions, what we’ve got in the U.S. at present is not really “fascism.” Most fascist movements have been rooted at the beginning in a street-level populism with its own socialist tendencies and class-war rhetoric – all distinctly missing from American politics in the past few decades. The nationalism/patriotism Bush has stirred up and capitalized on since 9/11, with its rhetoric about America being a “beacon of hope and freedom” for the world, is IMO dishonest, but when you look at it closely it’s really just a more extreme form of traditional “American exceptionalism.” And there has been no effort during the Bush Admin to completely silence the opposition, or exert state control over all sectors of society and the economy. What we have is merely a plutocratic (but then, it always has been plutocratic) constitutional republic afflicted with some corruption and abuses.
republic: from Latin res publica, meaning “thing of the people.” democracy: from Greek demokratia, meaning “rule by the people.”
Note that “people” here means the race, the “in” people of the city & culture, not just any collective of random human beings. But seriously, they’re synonyms. Get over it.
Well, yeah, most liberals agree with some conservative ideas, & most conservatives agree with some liberal ideas. Anyone who thinks for himself is likely to deviate from party lines.
Your problem is that you’re absolutist in all your freeking definitions. “All-or-nothing-ism” is a syndrome afflicting many adolescents. I’ve gone through it myself.
I think some participants here are falling prey to a bit of bait-and-switch demagoguery. A republic in my understanding is an organized system of governance founded in the principle that sovereignty resides in the people (or in the state as the organ of the people, a somewhat outmoded definition), as opposed to residing in the person of a monarch, an oligarchy, an ideological code, or some other person, group, or concept.
In contrast, a democracy is generally defined as a system of government in which the people arrange for their own governance, either by making the laws themselves and choosing a leader, or by electing representatives to make such laws.
The idea that “democracy” means only pure democracy – Athenian ecclesia, New England town meeting, the two Swiss cantons that preserve it – is actually putting a restrictive definition on the term in order to contrast it with representative democracy in a typical republic or constitutional monarchy. Then, because the representative democracy is not a “pure” democracy, they arbitrarily constrict the term to exclude it.