Ron DeSantis is a Fascist

Politics & Elections
61

But they do. All the time.

It’s not what makes the headlines, what with it being crowded out by the right’s pushing of their culture war agenda, but the Democrats are passing legislation that helps people in the Rust Belt, and will talk to any media that is willing to hear about it.

But talking about how they paved roads and improved water and electrical systems isn’t sexy, and isn’t what the media wants to talk about.

This is a large part of the fascist playbook, gaslighting the people into thinking that the people who are helping them are the ones ignoring them. The right spends all of their time attacking marginalized groups, and then when people come to their defense, they are said to be ignoring the problems of “ordinary Americans”.

The right has done nothing for the people of the Rust Belt. They have broken up unions, destroyed safety nets, and encouraged policies that led to the opioid epidemic ravaging these communities. Almost all the problems that the Rust Belt is having is due specifically to policies pushed by the right.

But a Democrat dares to stand up for a marginalized group under attack by far right identity politics, and the people rush to put into power those who have and will continue to harm them. They don’t care that their power goes out in the winter because it’s cold, or in the summer because it’s hot, they don’t care about roads or schools, they don’t care about having a functional government that helps people displaced by globalization and automation. They just care about what genitals other people have and what they are doing with them.

As long as the Democrats are willing to defend groups under attack by the right, that will be spun as being the only thing that they are doing. I don’t think that the Democrats should abandon the victims of our growing fascist state, but as long as the right controls the narrative, as long as the things that Democrats do and propose to do are drowned out by the ideological division that is being weaponized by the right, people will come to the counterfactual conclusion that the Democrats aren’t helping people, especially in the Rust Belt.

How to overcome this fascist propaganda is an exercise left to the reader.

62

Yes, but if he’s the nominee, Biden (or another Dem nominee) can point out all the fascist-like things he’s already done in Florida, and draw the parallels to Hitler and Mussolini.

IOW, don’t just call him a fascist. Show voters how he’ll become one.

63

We really need to ween ourselves off of labels most American don’t even know the meaning of. We’re not post-WWI Italy or Germany. Just call people like DeSantis autocrats. No. Damn it! NASCAR fans will love that.

64

Right, for some reason, some people are afraid that upsetting Republicans will cause them to turn evil or something, and are upset if they are “called names”.

The thing is, we aren’t just calling him a poopy-head, we are pointing to the fecal matter spread over his cranium. The defense of course, is that his whole head isn’t made of excrement, so he’s just a “proto-poopy-head”.
As though that somehow makes it all okay.

65

There are a substantial number of voters for whom that will be a positive.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about Weimar Republic and there are some very disturbing parallels.

Stranger

66

Of course. But we need a theme that will motivate middling purple staters to vote Dem, and This guy wants to turn the US into the new Nazi Germany might just do it.

67

And as long as you are part of the WAG 55% of Amerika who think you’ll be on the winning side of that conversion, and that otherwise the USA is headed straight to the Democrat’s Hell in a handbasket, you’ll vote for that transition and eagerly so.

Remember, we live in a society where something like 60% of Americans believe they will end up in the top 10% of the income distribution. Folks with personal optimism that misguided can’t imagine that any change will be bad for them. Doubly so while the would-be Nazis are loudly telling everyone like them that they will be the winners and those Horrible Other People will be the losers.

68

Maybe… if they can for a moment stop worrying about what their neighbors are doing in the bedroom, or what genitals the person in the stall next to them taking a shit has.

69

Too many people think the only problem with Nazi Germany being that it lost.

They see our military might, and assume we won’t make that mistake.

70

Indeed. And the news those voters are seeing doesn’t report about the Democrats talking about it every day and twice on Sunday. It just ignores what the Democrats are actually saying, and reports instead on what the Republicans are saying about the Democrats.

The Democrats do need to keep talking about – and when possible doing things about – helping out people in the Rust Belt and elsewhere. But I don’t know what to do about getting anybody to listen. There were certainly problems with having only a handful of news outlets, especially on TV, so that everyone had to pretty much watch the same ones and get the same info – in particular that a lot of info got ignored entirely by all of those outlets; but a large part of the mess we’re in now, IMO, is due to everyone now being able to select news outlets that agree with them, and large numbers of people ignoring the others entirely. I don’t even have an if-I-were-in-charge-of-the-world idea of what to do about this.

At this point, I suspect that’s what will happen even if they stop. The only principle left that the Republicans, and the Republican media, are still holding to is “Must Get Republicans Elected.”

“This guy wants to tell you what church you have to go to” might do it for some of them. The ones who are entirely sure it’ll be their church may be unreachable; but some of the others are, I think. – DeSantis is Catholic. Most of them aren’t. Have to be careful not to feed into anti-Catholicism, though.

— hmmm. Pictures/video of Biden and of DeSantis. “Both of them are Catholic. (Switch focus to DeSantis, ideally with an applicable quote, which I don’t have at the moment.) Only one of them wants to put his church in charge of the USA”?

But again – how do you get them to see the ad?

71

I’m content to view DeSantis as a sleazy self-aggrandizing pol intent on lapping up the dregs of Trump support.

If it makes others happy to denature the meaning of “fascist” by labeling him as such, have at it. It won’t have any meaningful impact on his candidacy.

72

I mean, it’s not like the categories of “sleazy self-aggrandizing pol Trumpist parasite” and “fascist” are in any way mutually exclusive, though.

73

Many would say that you are just calling him names.

OTOH, if people keep making excuses as to why he doesn’t fit their definition of fascist, it very well may have a meaningful impact on his election.

At least in the 1930’s Germans and Italians didn’t have history to see where this is going. We don’t have that excuse.

74

I guess I don’t really understand why we should care whether he’s a fascist or a Fascist or not.

This is America. We should have a problem with authoritarians of any and all stripes, whether on their way to Fascism, totalitarianism, or kingship. The lack of real accountability for those in power is the problem (and continues to be my problem with the Trump era), not the specific parallels with comparatively recent historical bad ideas in other Western governments.

75

If someone could show me how a campaign of calling DeSantis a fascist would make a positive difference in an election, then I’d jump on.

I don’t see it. Right now the conversation is nothing but recreational outrage. If that keeps people motivated and spurs them to greater effort to defeat the Republicans in 2024, fine. If that grows into a distraction like the obsession with coming up with names for Trump in 2016 to proclaim he didn’t have a change of winning, I see that as a problem to be stomped out.

76

I agree, which is why the people who seem to want to cover for him tend to turn it into a semantics argument. “He only checks 11 of 12 boxes”, or “He hasn’t achieved a fascist government, yet.”

I prefer to use the term to show what they intend to accomplish, not to bemoan what they already have.

Others prefer to ignore the actions, and prefer to lecture those who they don’t think are using words the way they want them to be used. I see it as an intentional distraction to let fascists like DeSantis consolidate power, until the day that he finally does check all the boxes, and it’s now too late to oppose him.

77

Who said anything about a campaign? Is this thread part of a campaign?

Sure, campaign literature should be very careful to not offend the easily offended or confuse the easily confused.

OTOH, I assume that people who choose to participate in political conversations are of higher calibre, and are not so easily swayed, so don’t need to have all the rough edges filed off to prevent offense.

I mean, yeah. What are either of us actually accomplishing with this conversation? It is in fact, purely recreational. As far as the outrage part, I’d say that’s reserved more for those who get upset whenever they see the word fascist and have to go into a tirade against anyone who uses it.

I must have missed that obsession. Are you saying that calling Trump names won him the election?

Yes, stomp it out, shut them up!

78

The same way people see any ad. Remember, we don’t care about the people who are going to vote R anyway – we target the people who don’t exclusively consume GOP messaging.

Agreed – but I think it’s less effective to call DeSantis a fascist, authoritarian or whatever and more effective to describe what he will do if he becomes President. IOW:

  • Bad: Ron DeSantis will make the USA a fascist dictatorship.
  • Good: Ron DeSantis will criminalize homosexuality, just like the Nazis did.
79

It strikes me that DeSantis, if he is not technically a fascist already, is only a fascist in waiting because as a governor he doesn’t have control over the sort of federal/national things a fascist would have control over. Given the chance at national office, I think it rather extremely likely he would be as fascist as he could get away with.

80

I agree. But if we have a thread like this one, and I say that DeSantis is a fascist because he will criminalize homosexuality, that’s when the woodwork starts crawling with those who will point out that he’s not exactly like Hitler, so not a fascist.

I see that as far less helpful than accurate labels to which some may object.

Exactly, you get a fascist government when the fascists take over. They don’t become fascists only after they have achieved power.

I assume that even after people are being herded into concentration camps, there will still be those who point out that they are using buses, rather than trains, so not the same as the fascists.