Well yeah. Nobody is arguing that what they want is realistic or sustainable.
But it’s definitely painful and frustrating for them, and right wing politicians can rather easily tap into and harness that pain and frustration via fascistic rhetoric and policies. It promises a disruption to the status quo that isn’t working for them, and the image of a strong leader who’ll bulldoze obstacles and enemies is highly appealing when you want disruption.
You may want to check out the series “The New Look” on AppleTV about fashion designers Christian Dior and Coco Chanel in Nazi-occupied France during WWII (where I assume they battled Hugo Boss and the Nazis. I haven’t seen it myself).
The problem I have with the “self reliance” idea is how that connects to an attraction to strongmen. It’s not doing it for yourself: it’s having big strong guy fix everything for you.
As Beau of the Fifth Column points out, rural people tend to be very anti-authoritarian, very distrustful of the state. And yet those are the people who someone gravitate towards more authoritarian candidates, including fascist ones.
If you are mean enough, if you hurt the people you don’t like enough, then that somehow makes them more trustworthy. Their obvious selfishness and desire for more and more power should make them more suspicious.
Claiming that the guy in charge is weak should logically be a boon to them, because that means they have less power to oppress them.
But the same people who want the government to do less and leave them alone also want the guy in charge to be very power hungry. That’s what doesn’t make sense about the appeal.
Yep. I think there’s a subset of this cohort that believes the Republican lies, that they’ll bring back coal, reopen the factories, bring back the jobs the went offshore, etc. No evidence for this, but you need some comfort from the despair.
But I think there’s another subset who doesn’t believe, doesn’t believe anything will get better, so let the whole place burn down. They vote for the bomb throwers.
It’s the idea that if he’s busy hurting the people you don’t like, he’s not hurting you, and in fact is working on your behalf. That’s the logic, I think.
What’s the expression? Oh yeah: people in hell want ice water. Economic migration, on international and intranational scales, has been the way of the world for centuries now. My parents didn’t live near their siblings or parents when they were raising me and my siblings, and now we (my siblings and I) are similarly spread across the US. Might have been nice to live in the same neighborhood, or even the same suburb, or even the same metro area, but not if we couldn’t find jobs that matched our education and interests - such is life. But it never occurred to us to be bitter toward people who were able to live close to extended family while employed in their preferred line of work, or to pursue fascism as a means to restore an imagined “good old days” in which we could have everything we wanted without any compromises or sacrifices whatsoever.
You know that. I know that. But to them that is all confirmation of what they’ve been propagandized, that the system favors rootless materialism that holds traditional ways of life in low value.
(The cultural influencers in question go back not centuries but millennia – it’s the Bible with a pastoralist hill people being held up as the righteous light upon nations while the great centers of civilization, like Babylon, are portrayed as the seats of wickedness.)
They are vulnerable to the siren song and some of them don’t even know it is because they’ve been primed for it from the cradle. And maybe it would “never occur” to us to react like them, but who knows what siren song WE could be a good target for. At least we know to be on guard.
It’s not that the “system” used to place a high value on traditional ways of life; it’s just that traditional ways of life were allowed to endure because of the slow pace of technological change prior to the industrial revolution. If you want the system to specifically value traditional ways of life, you have to suppress everything non-traditional. You can do it like the Amish, with a culture that actively shuns you if you choose not to live like your parents before you - or you can do it like Pol Pot, by killing anyone with a college education, anyone who wears glasses, anyone who owns a business. Do it rigorously enough, and you won’t be mining coal or farming with heavy equipment; you’ll be plowing your fields with a team of oxen.
Again, you and I know that. But we have the luxury, or privilege, of having learned and internalized it.
Many haven’t. To them it’s a barrage of “change the way you live!” and the fear that their grandchildren will become aliens to them for all intents and purposes and that “what they are” will perish.
Hence the attractiveness of the notion of some way to make sure that Who We Are does not perish… “even if it kills ya”.
Yep, I suppose that does go a long way toward explaining fascist/anti-intellectual purges throughout history.
Why does anyone ally themselves with an evil ideology? They don’t see it as evil, they don’t know how evil it is or they think it’s better than the alternative. Human beings are fundamentally the same today as they were thousands of years ago and we’re closer to apes than angels so it shouldn’t be too surprising.
In my experience they simply deny it- literally call it fake news.
As I’ve pointed out before, I think many here at the Dope are in their own bubble. Head on over to one of the Trumpy sites and you’ll see endless posts about how much better everything was under Trump. The border was closed. Gas was $2/gallon. No wars. And I’m not making any of that up. We all know we live in a post-truth world. There are websites that will tell you what you want to hear, all you need to do is choose to believe it.
Lots of good responses to this topic, I can’t say that anyone is incorrect.
My two cents is that it all comes down to resentment and bigotry. People feel that they aren’t getting their fair share of the pie, however they define it. They don’t like the fact that they’re working hard and not seeing as much fruit of their labors as they think they deserve- they’d get more money if they didn’t have to compete with women and minorities in the workplace, they’d pay lower taxes if the government wasn’t providing limitless services to immigrants, they’d be more comfortable in their own religion and their own sexuality if there weren’t other choices that other people were making. Things aren’t perfect and it’s all “their” fault.
There are plenty of “theirs” to point fingers at- people with different color skin, different faiths, different preferences, and so on. The fact that these others exist and are able do so freely and thus continually remind them that their way is not the only way pisses them off. They develop hatred for these people for taking a slice of the pie and for not being cut from the same cloth. What good is freedom if “other” people have it too? So they embrace strongmen that tell them that they are perfect and their troubles and shortcomings can be traced to someone else, and it’s the existence of these others that threatens their way of life. Faced with the choice of having the freedom to be different and of ridding the world of the “others”, they’ll enthusiastically choose fascism- so long as it’s oppressing the correct people of course.
Going back to basics, humans are both highly migratory and inquisitive, but also territorial and tribalistict. So of course there’s going to be conflict.
Resolving this conflict can be via old-fashioned primate behavior based on aggression and deception (both hallmarks of Fascism), or by working it out with something everyone can live with.
Posters to this thread point to the rural/urban divide. But British Fascism was an urban affair both with Oswald Mosely’s 1930s corner-boys and the fascistic 1980s football hooligans.
My family lived in rural America during the Great Depression. No Fascist yearnings then: they welcomed big government aid like manna from heaven.
The “we wuz robbed” motivation, harkening to a mythical, thwarted past is applied to post-WWI Germany, but doesn’t always work. Two WWI victors and two neutrals (Spain and Portugal) fell for it too. One loser, Turkey, didn’t buy into all the claptrap, but instead went in for racism and authoritarianism on a purely pragmatic basis, as did their former Arab colonies.
This suggests there’s a lot of PR involved, and not inevitable social dynamics.
That PR relies on the mean monkey basics. There’s not a lot of useful philosophy in fascism. At least Communism had its germ in Hegel, via Marx and then Lenin. Fascism is not cerebral, but simpleminded and flashy.
Although it was only a minor element and not the basis of its popularity in Germany, Nazism seemed to have a degree of flat-out mysticism. To the point that the Nazis figure prominently in the lore of crackpots like hollow-earthers, the nuttier fringe of UFO believers, and para-Satanists.
True, and the roots of Nazism (separate from Fascism) were in the same 19th C. Woo that gave us Mormonism, Madam Blavatsky Theophism, Metaphysics, Conan Doyle holding seances, etc. Combine that with German reunification and industrialization and you get some dangerous shit.
I think yoiu mean unification, right?
And to answer the title of the OP:
It works. For a while. And for a given value of ‘works.’
The following will be all anecdotal. In the 90’s I lived in Spain with a Spanish GF. She was 17 when Franco died and had very clear memories on what it was like living under fascist rule. Her family was on the republican (i.e. losing) side of the cicil war and what little they owned was confiscated in the aftermath.
We talked about it and about her thoiughts on Franco. Did she hate him? Well yes. In an abstract way. Because that ws the way she was brought up. But in her everyday life - no, not really. Spain was really, really poor, which is - IMO - the main reason it (and to an extent Italy) was the first country in Europe to experience true mass tourism.1
Plane after plane arrived to the Islands and the coastal resorts becuae it was dirt cheap. Great climate, and cheap booze went a long way. And it was so safe too, hardly any crime…
And that was the thing she remembered, very little crime. It felt safe. That safety was provide by Guardia Civil who simply vanished everything undesirable from pick-pockets and up. Nothing in court. And even if they were poor, as compared to the guiris,2 everyone, I stress that everyone had a job. And owned their home (because people with mortgages are not likely to take to the street. Seriously).
When I say that everyone had a job, I mean men. Women didn’t have jobs. They raised babies. In fact, they couldn’t even leave the country oin their own. They could only travel with a pater familias who got the woman’s name in his passport.
So: A roof over your head, a job - low paying but enough to feed the family and pay the mortgage - and low crime rates. That was quite enough and lasted 36 years. Because the oppression was not overt.
I get the impression that a lot of Americans in this thread see fascism as something like a mix of the Nuremberg rally and Kristallnacht. It might be. But there are +350 million of you in the third largest country in the world. I’d venture that “soft” fascism, as Franco did, would work better for the presumptive dictator to remain in control. Even Putin holds “elections” and provide the masses with bread and circuses.
Obv. Agent Orange isn’t smart enough, but the architects behind project 2025 are.
1 Spain had 85 mkillion tourists in 2023, behind France (100M). But Spain’s population is about 2/3 of France.
2 Gringos, sort of. But in Spain.
By coincidence, here’s a new article about resistance to change in a small town. It’s not about fascism at all, but it does speak directly to the “sitting out in the sticks clinging to the old way of life” mentality that’s come up a few times in the thread.
They’re all worked up because … the school got an electric bus.
An electric bus.
Sure, they may raise a few valid concerns here and there, as they examine their new conveyance. But instead of looking at it as an opportunity to grow and learn and adapt, the reaction is consistently “this looks hard and difficult, let’s just go back.”
Folks like this aren’t really doing a lot to counter the “stubborn yokels” stereotype. And it’s not a great leap to think they’d be attracted to a leader who promises to keep the change at bay.
Especially when it’s reported by “Yahoo News” 
An Electric Bus is what you get when you cross The Electric Company with The Magic School Bus.
Or maybe The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test with The Magic Bus