Hillarity Ensues: Clinton vs Tulsi

DavidTC in reply to Chip Daniels says:

It is theoretically possible for there to be a white ethno-nationalist party that isn’t misogynist or homophobic, but it would take some serious changes in the current lineup.

I would argue it’s not. Or, at least, we can’t get there from here. It’s the same reason that anti-Semitism keeps sneaking back in, despite Jews officially becoming White People(TM) at the end of WWII. Hell, they still get _anti-Catholicism_ showing up at the edges, and that really sorta died before turn of last century.

The thing is, fascist movements exist to find enemies. And once an enemy is found, and justifications are invented to hate that enemy, those justifications are inserted into the DNA of the movement, and it’s utterly impossible for those justifications to ever go away. Which means those justifications are the very first thing located when the movement needs to slightly expand their hated groups.

Of course, these movements are good at creating reasonable-looking _facets_, where an organization might ‘just’ be homophobic, or misogynist, or racist, or whatever.

But the movement itself, the interconnected parts, will always ‘know’ how various groups are the enemies, that woman are X, and gays are Y, and Jews are Z. They’ll know that forever. It’s just…built into them now. They ‘figured it out’ way back, and now they just know it. It’s why the facets keep _screwing up_, why homophobic organizations often accidentally reveal themselves as racist or whatever. They’re not trying to be, it’s just…part of them.

It is possible to postulate a white ethno-nationalist party that isn’t homophobic. Hell, it’s possible to imagine a ethno-nationalist state that is heterophobic. It’s possible to imagine one run by women. Fascism can _technically_ have any in-group and out-group it wants, although considering the in-group has to start with some level of power, both my hypotheticals seem very unlikely in the modern world.

But it’s not possible for the white ethno-nationalist movement descended from the current one in the US to turn into that, because they will always immediately turn against their historic enemies given the slightest need to expand their power.

As others pointed out, homosexuality might be split off and disappear as a wedge issue, but for the foreseeable future racism and misogyny will be the animating power of the conservative party.

I find it unlikely that, even in some hypothetical other universe that evolved differently, that you’d ever get a misogynistic fascist group without them being homophobic, too. They are almost the same thing, being exceedingly concerned with gender roles and the people failing to follow them.

At best you might get an organization that is okay with homosexual _only if_ homosexuals perform some sort of excessive gender-conformity outside of their homosexuality.Report

DavidTC in reply to Chip Daniels says:

It’s actually sorta a wrong statement, honestly. One of the main premises of fascism is separating society into groups, where some of the groups are good, and the other groups are the enemy.

Which means having found enemies is almost a precondition of fascism. You get the ‘enemies’ before the fascism, in a sense.

Of course, all political movements are blobs, with fuzzy edges, and one of the ways that fascists get power in the movement is identifying enemies…which means they have incentive to expand the movement. It’s like a liquid, it expands to fill all available space.(1)

And the ‘past enemies’ are the lowest lying land, if you will. They fill up first. Because earlier fascists spent a lot of time and effort digging up the ground there, leaving big holes to fill.

1. Some people are thinking “Wait, he means ‘it expands up until half the population’, because surely at some point they start accidentally hating their own supporters and cannibalizing themselves”.

Nope. They do that. In fact, any group that hates women is already automatically against over half the population, and add in the racism and homophobia and stuff, and honestly they’ve basically against 80% of the population.

This is where the various facets come in handy, but the thing is, once people are already in the movement, and the movement swivels around to point at them, they tend to assume the movement doesn’t mean the ‘good people’ in their group, just the bad people…and the movement will pay lip service to this.

The expansion only really stops when the ‘next’ obvious subgroup isn’t very well-defined or looks the same or is confusing to the majority of the fascists. Like…fascists can’t attack Italian-Americas, because honestly most people are unable to identity Italian-Americans at this point. (Granted, they have the same problem with Jews, but that’s sorta grandfathered in.)Report

DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

I’m going to ignore your baiting about ‘the left’, and continue to present facts about fascism, communism, and totalitarianism.

They also put in the 40-hour workweek, worker representation for factories, and organized labor and owner into “syndicates” where they pulled together instead of being at loggerheads. The Soviets and Nazis did similar things, since if the government represented the workers then the workers shouldn’t go on strike unless they’re acting as foreign agents, class enemies, or saboteurs.

Yes. All totalitarian systems have to work to reduce the ability of workers to strike in some manner, and they often do this by actually trying to be nice to the workers, and utterly disregarding the wishes of the owners of factories.

You can come to whatever conclusions you want about this, but the actual reason is that it is easy to seize factories and remove the unhappy owners, whereas it is nearly impossible to seize the labor of unhappy workers and used them as slaves. Or at least it’s a hell of a lot of work and requires even _more_ people.

Ergo, if the state is going to pick one of them to make happy…it’s the workers.

But it has parallels to the current far left in the US, who focus on unity by identifying everyone who disagrees with them on any issue as a Fascist and an enemy of the people.

Fascists don’t identify people as ‘enemies of the people’. That’s what communists do. Communism asserts it is the final form of liberal democracy. It is lying and all instances of it so far have been just as totalitarian as fascism, but the point is, the government supposedly being ‘the people’ is a communist thing.

Fascists instead identify enemies as ‘enemies of the state‘. Fascism would never, ever, claim to represent ‘the people’. Because fascism explicitly rejects the rule of ‘the people’ as a premise. It completely rejects liberal democracy in all forms, and holds that the people are currently decadent, and thus need a strong leader telling them what to do.

No totalitarian regime, of any sort, actually respects democracy, of course. But fascism is founded explicitly on not respecting democracy, whereas communism comes at from the completely opposite direction and claims to be the _only_ true representation of democracy.

It’s why every fascist regime ends up with the word ‘national’ everywhere (The ‘National Fascist Party’ in Italy, the ‘National Socialist Party’ in Germany.), because the state is the ultimately important thing. Whereas every communist regime ends up with the word ‘people’ and ‘republic’ and ‘democratic’ in the name everywhere, because it’s lying that the people are.

It actually makes it pretty easy to tell the difference between the two, once you catch the trick.Report

DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

So that whole thing about the German “volk” and the attempt to spread German DNA across the globe was just a distraction?

Heheh. ‘Volk’ is a really bad example. See, volk isn’t as just ‘people’ or ‘folk’, which it’s commonly translated as. It also translates as ‘nation’. For example, the League of Nations was called ‘Völkerbund’ in German…which would otherwise translate to the nonsensical ‘people’s organization’.

But let’s answer the question you mean to ask: How does the Nazi’s dismissal of its people fit in with their racial theories?

And the way it works is…that question is silly. Nazism obviously admit people exist.

What they don’t admit is that people have any rights, or at least, no rights with regard to the state. The relationship with the state is one-directional.

Hence the state would not pretend to represent the people. Because their entire thing is…they don’t. They admit they don’t. Ergo, they wouldn’t talk about ‘enemies of the people’, but enemies of the state. The people are merely a means to the state.

And, hence, for example, the people have a duty to reproduce, to strengthen the German state.

Note you’re wrong there. The Nazis did not encourage ‘spreading German DNA across the globe’. That isn’t how that worked. They certainly did not want ‘German’ genes mixing with everyone else’s…they wanted them to stay at home, and make Germany bigger and better.Report

DavidTC in reply to George Turner says:

I’m pretty sure they didn’t want Germans to stay home or they wouldn’t have sent them to settle in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and other places.

I didn’t say the Nazis wanted Germans to stay home. I said they wanted German _genes_ to stay home. Or perhaps a better way of saying that is that they wanted ‘Aryan’ genes to stay in ‘Aryans’. They absolutely did not want ‘race mixing’.

Now, maybe you meant something else there, I’m not sure.

According to the people in charge of German, a government’s main purpose was to help a people fulfill their racial destiny. Governments come and go, but its the people, locked in an eternal battle with other peoples, that matters.

No, it wasn’t. The goal of Nazi Germany was to create a ‘Neuordnung’, aka ‘New Order’. This would expand the German state itself to the ‘Aryan’ nations, and place all of the rest of Europe under its control. (Minus the Soviets, who they would destroy.)

Here’s how Nazi Germany spoke: The Führer gave expression to his unshakable conviction that the Reich will be the master of all Europe. We shall yet have to engage in many fights, but these will undoubtedly lead to most wonderful victories. From there on the way to world domination is practically certain. Whoever dominates Europe will thereby assume the leadership of the world. -Joseph Goebbels

You will notice a complete lack of justification, or even mention, of the German people in that. It’s the Reich that comes out ahead, not the German people.

Or here, why they do mention some people, in an interesting way: : World peace is certainly an ideal worth striving for; in Hitler’s opinion it will be realizable only when one power, the racially best one, has attained complete and uncontested supremacy. That [power] can then provide a sort of world police, seeing to it at the same time that the most valuable race is guaranteed the necessary living space. And if no other way is open to them, the lower races will have to restrict themselves accordingly. -Rudolf Hess

There, they are giving something to the ‘most valuable race’, but it’s almost an incidental side effect of Nazi hegemony. In fact, they aren’t even talking about helping ‘the German people’, but helping ‘the Aryan race’ itself. Which they, in other places, asserted comprised most Nordic countries of Europe, including places they were invading.

You’re operating off the assumption that all governments justify their actions as helping their citizens, and thus would present enemies to the government as enemies of the people. It’s an easy assumption to fall into, because you, and me, and everyone here, exist in a liberal democracy where governments do that all the time. The government claim to speak for the people and be there to help the people. That is their entire justification for existing.

But fascism doesn’t do that. It doesn’t try to justify policies that way. It doesn’t need to justify things, or just it recursively justifies them in that they are what the state wants, and the state is good, ergo, what the state wants is good.

And, yes, the outcome of that sounds identical to communism. Placing the state above the people is what all totalitarian governments do. They have to. But communism _pretends_ the people are above the state, and operate the state. Aka, communism lies. Which is why it puts ‘people’ and ‘democratic’ and ‘republic’ everywhere, in a desperate attempt to pretend that is what is going on.

Whereas fascism doesn’t lie. It openly admits what is going, it openly places the state above the people, and it doesn’t like its ‘the people’ that much…often calling them degenerates.

Consequently, Soviet and Nazi propaganda don’t sound alike at all. Soviets pretend to be the good guys, saving people from the evil of capitalism. But Nazis…just claim the right to invade everywhere and break shit, and their justification is some vague handwavey stuff about history and stuff. National myths, like you said.

And, thus, fascism wouldn’t say ‘the enemy of the people’.

Goebbel’s and other propagandists went to great lengths to explain that National Socialism was distinct from International Socialism because it cared about the people, as a group, not “people” as a nebulous distinction from horses and cows, or as a synonym for “serfs” that excluded everyone else.

If by ‘distinct’, you mean ‘completely discounted the premise of Marxism’, yeah. National Socialism was distinct from ‘International Socialism’ because National Socialism operated the national level (Hence the name)…it asserted that the German and Italian states were the proletarian nations, vs. bourgeois nations that it was invading. I.e., it took the class struggle between people, and turned into a ‘class’ struggle between nations.(1)

As literally the whole premise of Marxism is ‘all of society and history is a transnational class struggle of the worker vs. the property owner, and thus we need to overthrow the blah blah blah…’, attempting to apply that to the level of nations and calling the result ‘national socialism’ is a bit like calling basketball ‘bouncey baseball’ on the grounds there are still two team of people and a ball and a competition.

I mean, regardless of how people feel about Marxism, Marxism says some pretty clear things. And National Socialism isn’t those things in any manner whatsoever.

1. It is probably possible to sort countries by ‘class’, but frickin Italy and Germany were not that different than their surrounding countries…if people want to argue the international order has ‘classes’, it would be the First World vs. Third World or something, which people could make a class metaphor out of.(2) But Germany wasn’t a different ‘class’ than France, Germany just a shitty economy because they’d lost a war and had a bunch of loans, and then a world-wide depression happened.

2. And people have made that metaphor. China actually does manage to make a semi-coherent argument about that, how Western countries and capitalism exploits third-world countries in a way that mimics the class struggle of Marxism. Not saying I agree, but it’s not automatically stupid like the whole ‘neighboring European countries’ analogy the fascists came up with.Report