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   William Lindsey :toad: (wdlindsy@toad.social)'s status on Tuesday, 15-Oct-2024 06:21:30 JST William Lindsey :toad:

   Mark Lawrence Schrad writes that Republicans have abandoned policy to promote the public good, including assistance following natural disasters.

   "Since at least 2016, scholars and journalists have consistently sounded the alarm on the Republican drift into right-wing authoritarianism. But even tinpot dictators and autocrats at least pay lip-service to working for the common good."

   #Republicans #CommonGood #NaturalDisasters #authoritarianism
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   https://www.salon.com/2024/10/12/how-the-turned-disaster-relief-into-political-warfare/

   • Embed this notice
     William Lindsey :toad: (wdlindsy@toad.social)'s status on Tuesday, 15-Oct-2024 06:21:23 JST William Lindsey :toad:

     in reply to

     • Philip Cardella

     @philip_cardella "Trump is openly channeling Hitler. Repeatedly. The press needs to identify this AND why it's so dangerous *in headlines*."

     I very much agree. And his choice to hold his big upcoming rally at Madison Square Gardens, where the big Nazi rally was held back when underscores what he's doing.

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     William Lindsey :toad: (wdlindsy@toad.social)'s status on Tuesday, 15-Oct-2024 06:21:24 JST William Lindsey :toad:

     in reply to

     • Philip Cardella

     @philip_cardella My perspective is to ask repeatedly, Why is so much of American political commentary (and media commentary) so averse to using the term "fascism" and to comparing Trump to Hitler even when Trump parrots Hitler's exact words as he talks about racial purity or the bloodstream of the nation being infected by the impure?

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     Philip Cardella (philip_cardella@historians.social)'s status on Tuesday, 15-Oct-2024 06:21:24 JST Philip Cardella

     in reply to

     @wdlindsy totally agree.

     I do think the term is watered down the way Orwell described in 1944. There was a generation of scholarship that worked hard to remedy that but it's efforts and work are watered down today.

     I think the media needs to do a better job, even in the headlines, of connecting the dots.

     Trump is openly channeling Hitler. Repeatedly. The press needs to identify this AND why it's so dangerous *in headlines*.

     Bill repeated this.
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     Philip Cardella (philip_cardella@historians.social)'s status on Tuesday, 15-Oct-2024 06:21:25 JST Philip Cardella

     in reply to

     @wdlindsy I appreciate that. But even Orwell said in 1944 the term fascism has no meaning other than things we don't like. But he warned that was a mistake though he wasn't sure what to do about it. "All one can do for the moment is use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swear word."

     I know you're not doing what Orwell warned us not to do. I'm suggesting the author of the piece you quoted is.

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     Philip Cardella (philip_cardella@historians.social)'s status on Tuesday, 15-Oct-2024 06:21:26 JST Philip Cardella

     in reply to

     @wdlindsy from the standpoint of persuading the broader public there may be some merit to a more flexible definition of the term.

     However, from the standpoint of using observations of the current neo fascist movement and making reasonable assertions of their true intentions given *they are sticking to the historic model* it's important.

     For example, they know damn well before the Holocaust came mass deportations and property seizure and before that came talk the masses dismissed as hyperbole.

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     William Lindsey :toad: (wdlindsy@toad.social)'s status on Tuesday, 15-Oct-2024 06:21:26 JST William Lindsey :toad:

     in reply to

     • Philip Cardella

     @philip_cardella I know I'm repeating things I've said before, but as someone who had (perhaps still has?) a foot in the academy, and also someone sharing commentary in the public square, I see matters like this through a kind of split screen. I understand and honor the academic concern to ground popular usage of terminology that points back to discrete historical moments in those formative moments. I also think it's inevitable that popular usage will take flight from that historical grounding.

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     Philip Cardella (philip_cardella@historians.social)'s status on Tuesday, 15-Oct-2024 06:21:27 JST Philip Cardella

     in reply to

     @wdlindsy interesting. We might disagree here. The author in my opinion doesn't give the concept more power rather they dismiss concept while literally using definitionally fascist characteristics to describe what they call not fascism.

     Also, while the press and lay population may use a more flexible variety of the word, people like Stephen Miller are using the textbook definition (if such a thing exists, strictly speaking), though I'd argue it's an evolution best described as neo fascism.

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     Philip Cardella (philip_cardella@historians.social)'s status on Tuesday, 15-Oct-2024 06:21:28 JST Philip Cardella

     in reply to

     @wdlindsy as much as I agree with the author here, I feel like they don't understand what fascism is.

     As you know, fascism is a replacement of politics with violence, a rejection of the Enlightenment in favor of a birth determined hierarchy all serving the biggest grievance based ideology imaginable.

     While Interwar fascisms absolutely had a goal of some common good for the people it assigned as worthy, this was secondary to the need for violence and grievance.

     What they're describing.

   • Embed this notice
     William Lindsey :toad: (wdlindsy@toad.social)'s status on Tuesday, 15-Oct-2024 06:21:28 JST William Lindsey :toad:

     in reply to

     • Philip Cardella

     @philip_cardella My reading of the term "fascism" as it now echoes through both popular and academic discourse is that the term has taken on a more elastic meaning. Some might say that development makes it meaningless. For me, it gives the term more power, since it detaches the term from its discrete historical roots in the same way that, say the term "clericalism" can be detached from the battles in 18th-century France that produced the French Revolution.

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     William Lindsey :toad: (wdlindsy@toad.social)'s status on Tuesday, 15-Oct-2024 06:21:29 JST William Lindsey :toad:

     in reply to

     "Modern Republicanism’s belief that the core role of government is instead to wield the power of the state to punish one’s enemies goes beyond myopic allusions to authoritarianism, fascism or caesarism to a premodern, pre-capitalist rival conception of government known as patrimonialism, in which the state is not meant to serve society but society is meant to serve the state — and the autocrat who runs it."

     #Republicans #CommonGood #NaturalDisasters #authoritarianism
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