2024 ELECTION THREAD

ding ding ding

glad you took a breather from your shadow mod support role to step in and help end the insanity

Thinking the Soviet Union would be a fun spot for a honeymoon hasn't helped his cause either.

I think they're willing to rubber stamp anything that Trump wants to do.

And yes, allowing the national leader to have no controls on his action is fascist, IMO.

You seem to have a different definition of fascism than most people here. Why don't you give us your definition, then we can state policies that fit, if there are any.

Everyone giving you examples of things they think are fascist and then you saying you don't think those things are fascist isn't really very productive.

They just don't have it in them I don't think to make the perfect move, the "Thanks for having me, America" speech. Instead, the denial from the Whitehouse is building. They make their candidate orange tonight to quell the "pallid old man versus the tanned much younger looking Trump" factor. So we have two orange candidates instead of a winning move.

As if communist being throw at the democrats by republican was not ?
Fwiw I see way more fascism in maga and trump than communist in democrats .
Actually I see even maga supporting Putin lol….

If you people used the word "communist" even half as often as you used the word "fascist", then that might be a discussion worth having. Just on this one page in this thread, there are 27 uses of the word "fascist" or "fascism", and that is not including when it is quoted from a previous post or referred to but the word is not explicitly used. Like I said, that is just on this page, which are posts 3961 through 4048.

How many times is the word "communist" used? Three times, all of them by you. Two of them were in your quoted post above, where you use it in a pretty irrelevant whattaboutism.

While I'm not saying you and rick are wrong, the last page is kind of a silly thing to use for that exercise when the current discussion being had is about the use of fascism. Of course there will be many uses of fascism and very few of communism.

Yes, fascism is probably overused. But others are right that not many are calling Trump and others fascist, but typically suggesting they are engaging in fascist behaviour, appearing more fascist, have plans that are more fascist, etc.

I find it hard to get too wound up about whether the use of the word is always perfect given the way people use "liar", "genocide", and many other words around here. And don't get me wrong, I can recall having arguments with jbouton about his use of fascism, so I'm not throwing shade for anyone else doing the same. But it doesn't get us too far, unfortunately.

Well, in spite of what I said before Biden has no characteristics of a communist, except like he and Marx both think the earth revolves around the sun. He is a center right capitalist, arguably a fanatical capitalist as he believes in crazy things like privatized hc and private militaries.

Trump has some characteristics that are widely agreed upon as components of fascism, though there is no clear cut definition.

Whether he crosses the threshold or not is just vibes.

Is Biden a comunist? = is a glass of orange juice a sandwich?

Is trump a fascist? = is a hot dog a sandwich?

You can ask 10 experts and get 10 answers. But here was the frst short list of characteristics of fascism that came up.

Powerful and continuing nationalism. ...
Disdain for the recognition of human rights. ...
Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause. ...
Supremacy of the military. ...
Rampant sexism. ...
Controlled mass media. ...
Obsession with national security. ...
Religion and government are intertwined

Much of that gets a check. This would be less credible if he didn't try to overturn the election, but he did.

That fact that you think that "much of that gets a check" is laughable. The only thing that it really shows is how spoiled we are in this country that you can look at that list and think to yourself "hmmm, we have sexism in the United States, which is exactly like Germany's sexist policy of forced breeding of Aryan women. We are so fascist!"

Yeah, that is a pretty silly one for the list, I agree. But how about addressing the others?

It's not my list.

It doesn't say sexim exists, it says rampant.

Hyper machismo and such is often listed.

Men who feel weak or insecure often like to feel powerful by siding with a strongman who kicks around the weak.

You know, the guy who drives a giant truck and collects giant guns and watches so much cuckold porn that the terminology creeps into his everyday language. Travis Bickle.

There is no comparison with any one of those on the list. You can argue that any country has some degree of nationalism or xenophobia, but the difference between fascism and every other country to ever exist is marked by its extremes.

Powerful and continuing nationalism

The biggest characteristic of Fascism is that the state is put above everything else. It is the duty of all citizens to put the state first so that the glory days (of the Roman empire / WW1 Germany / etc.) can be recaptured (by force). We have never had anybody even suggest anything like that in this country, and in fact, what we have is the complete opposite as we are ultra-individualistic.

Disdain for the recognition of human rights

That this is even subject for debate is embarrassing. There is no government policy in the USA to round up and exterminate people for any reason.

Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause.

Again, there is no government policy of scapegoating enemies within this country. To the extent that there is some of that, such as against immigrants by both the far right and left in the United States, we are not talking about the extremes that was seen by actual Fascists, where there was government policy to persecute "enemies of the state."

Supremacy of the military.

Unlike other nations in the 20th century, it has never even been suggested that the United States' military would ever stage a coup or do anything that would imply that our military is above the law. Spending a lot of money on military technology is not the same as deifying the military, such as by Fascist Germany or even Fascist Spain. We don't even have a draft anymore!

Controlled mass media.

Are you arguing that there is government control of the mass media in this country? Because that is demonstrably not the case. If you want to see what this actually looks like, you can look up China's censorship policies and contrast those with the total lack of censorship we have here.

Obsession with national security

Again, this is a matter of degrees. Every country is concerned with national security. But are we so concerned with national security that the press is completely censored? That there is no immigration allowed? That there is no emigration allowed? There are countries in this world where those are actual policies due to the obsession of national security, but the United States is not one of them.

Religion and government are intertwined

I am not sure that I agree that this is a defining feature of Fascism, as religion was not particularly emphasized in Nazi Germany. If you want to look at what modern religion Fascism looks like, the closest thing you can find resembles the many governments in the Middle East, where homosexuality or drawing Mohamed will result in a death sentence. Does our government execute people for working on the Sabbath? Does our government engage state terrorism in the name of Jesus?

Again, we are supremely spoiled in this country to look at the atrocities that extreme forms of government inflicted throughout the 20th century and have the nerve to tell ourselves "oh yeah, we are just like that!" Whether it be Jews that survived death camps, intellectuals that lived through the Killing Fields, Republicans that survived persecution after the Spanish Civil War, or students seeing their friends massacred in Tienanmen Square, they would all be rightly offended if they could see you comparing today's United States to what they went through.

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of what the list you posted is describing. When it describes rampant sexism, it isn't talking about guys in pick up trucks (wat?) or that watch a lot of porn. It is describing government policies that persecute women. The Taliban's prohibiting women from being educated and forcing them to wear full-body burkas would be a prime example of something that would be akin to what your list is describing. The existence of Travis Bickles is not Fascist...

Almost all of these responses are off base. But this is the worst -

Disdain for the recognition of human rights - you think the only way that can be shown is by rounding up and exterminating people?

No one has claimed that Trump and the main part of his followers are Nazis, and of course there has been nothing like the holocaust in the US (at least since a similar thing was done with natives). No one has said that these horrible things you mentioned have happened.

Some of these others are things that aren't currently happening, but Trump seems to want to happen. Of course they aren't happening now, Trump isn't even in office!

But he did try to do things like control the media while he was president, and he has promised try harder to do such things if elected again.

When someone promises to do terrible things of elected, it is no rebuttal to state that those things aren't currently happening.

If Trump tried to control the media, then he was spectacularly incompetent in his attempt, as it is hard to think of anybody more lambasted in the media than the former president.

Look, you can tell yourself day and night that we are careening toward the same fate as Germany in the 1930s. You are clearly wrong, and the fact that you think we are headed toward concentration camps or whatever is obviously delusional, but you can believe it. In this country, you have the luxury of believing whatever you want without fear of government reprisal. How very not fascist.

It's all relative. Obviously, Trump wants to and has stripped women of bodily autonomy, which has been recognized for 50 years and is favored by a large majority. This is also religion and staye intertwined.

He openly brags of committing sexual assault.

The hyper machismo thing overlaps with sexism, but is a commonly listed component. It's part of the psychology. You need angry small men to have fascism.

Nobody said the USA is currently exactly like Nazi Germany. The question is if Trump is a fascist, or at least in the ballpark.

E.g. no, people are not rounded up and exterminated. But we do have the highest (I think Bryce said this is no longer true but google says it is idk) incarceration rate in the world.

We do round up mentally ill, petty criminals, drug users and others and throw them in cages. We also have poor prison conditions. Terrible food, no books in some cases, etc.

Trump would like to accelerate this.

He would also like to round up an deport like 15 million people. What would that look like? I mean, visualize what would have to happen.

Again, his attempt to overthrow the duely elected government moves the needle A LOT.

You could point to ther things. For example, Trump did not start an unprovoked war of aggression. Unusual for a US prez, and a real fascist would likely do so.

But obviously it's reasonable to ask if the hyper nationalstic strong man with worshipful followers who wants to round up all the dirty foreigners and destroy the "deep state" and tried to execute a coup is kinda fascy.

Lol, neither I nor anyone here claimed that we were like Germany in the 1930s. I just said that no one thinks Trump and his followers are the same as Nazis.

But you can tell yourself that everything Trump wants to do is fine because he's not as bad as Hitler. Most of us have higher standards than that.

Yep. The dude tried to ban tik tok, but he doesn't want to control the media.

Totally normal. He just wants to monitor the media and punish them when the don't say what he wants. Sounds like liberal democracy to me.

??
fascism is not only about nazis.
godwin law is only about nazis.
fwiw we already went though this about authoritarian regime are not all about fascism of course but all fascism have authoritarian in it.

regardless u go on the left side or right side about authoritarian regime, its both disgusting while trump just keep praising those regimes.
Go figure.
Who would of though an american president would praise a dictator like putin while american battle for decades such regimes during the cold war..

lol ?
what kind of sample is this to try to prove anything with that ?
obv when there is someone distorting opinions about what people says about fascism, more reply about fascism will pop up.

i bet you a million dollars the word communist been used by the republican towards democrats at least 2 fold more
then democrats using the word fascism toward the republicans in the last decade and even the decades before...

The distinction tho is at least democrats uses that word vs far right omnipotent
(thx SC latest decision) ex president and MAGA supporters while republicans was spewing that word towards centrish democrats for decades , light years away from being communist...

The MAGA movement more closely resembles Nazis than the fascists in the axis. They're a violent, racist, cult-like organization that attempted a coup where a bunch of people got hurt and died. The leader refers to himself and other members of the coup as "political prisoners" who he will free when he wins again. Anyone not in the cult is an enemy to be dealt with. The reason I think they're more like the Nazis is because of the cult like rallies and the coup attempt was similar to Beer Hall Putsch.

The main feature of Nazism was not racism or genocide. It was Hitler. So much so, that many referred to it as "Hitlerism". Trump has the same relationship with MAGA. It doesn't exist without him.

Both Nazis and MAGA have fanatical base devoted to dear leader. The religious nature of it all complete with rejection of reality are probably why most people call MAGAs fascists or nazis, but there's no denying the racial elements of the party.

Nazis viewed "aryans" as the superior race. Everyone else was inferior. MAGA is inclusive toward racist organizations who feel the same. The oath keepers, 3 percenters, neo-nazis, proud boys and more white supremacists took part in the coup attempt on January 6. MAGA includes racial theorists like Stephen Miller who created the family separation policy that created detention camps where they jailed thousands of children who were removed from their parents.

There's no denying the racial elements involved with the MAGA movement. They haven't exactly setup gas chambers yet, but I wouldn't be surprised one bit.

Trump' definitely wants to cripple media coverage that he perceives as critical, even media coverage that is objectively accurate. This is an underappreciated aspect of his authoritarianism.