This, I think, is the main point of the article. I don't disagree, and I tend to argue for at least trying to talk to people, but I admit that I am concerned about how much I am hesitating on even discussing some subjects with people.
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
I think the Charlie Kirk thing scared people straight for a few weeks but I've definitely seen an uptake of submissions to HN about various tempests in teapots such as the recent drama about an open source project that was big in 2005 and only niche since 2012 or something about waffles and now a laptop maker that tweeted a link to the wrong thing or something.
There is still this emphasis by certain on canceling people at conferences and stuff because they are "fascists" but a lack of recognition that the democratic institutions that they like so much are putting "fascists" in power throughout the world -- and if they want it to be different they're going to have to stop dehumanizing people who vote the wrong way and talk to them. The message of "you are bad", "your society is bad" just doesn't sell, in fact Black people don't want to hear about they weighed down by the legacy of slavery, they want to maximize the life that's in front of them.
Thing is that people find meaning in believing "society is bad" so it serves the interest of this selfish meme to put "fascists" in power; the Heritage Foundation or the Federalist Society or Fox News couldn't have done a better job engineering a fifth column for the left which would keep the right in power permanently.
Not everyone to the right of the "far left" is a fascist, but the administration in power undeniably has a fascist core. And people who actually study this stuff professionally largely agree.
"We are in the process of the second American Revolution which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be."
(One may also want to actually *say* the things and provide some evidence rather than gesticulating vaguely towards them.)
A certain amount of blame can be laid at centrist politicians who can't take advantage of left-wing populist sentiments because they are too afraid of donors. [1] But an ultra-left that is obviously warming up the ovens for DHH because he said something stupid once and might come for me because I'm cisgender just seems fascinated with fascism because they're jealous the same way Charlie Kirk was fascinated with "cancel culture" because like David Horowitz he wished he could punish anyone in academia who he disagreed with.
[1] Look at the donors who will give money to anyone who isn't Mamdani no matter how bad because they don't have faith in the ability of blue state institutions to completely frustrate and hamstring anyone who tries to do anything.
Now, how to define the metrics are outside of my comment, including the current administration. But Ive been seeing quite a few of these seem to match here in the USA for quite some time. And now, more seem to match quite well with historical fascist movements.
https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.html
1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism
2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights
3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause
4. Supremacy of the Military
5. Rampant Sexism
6. Controlled Mass Media
7. Obsession with National Security
8. Religion and Government are Intertwined
9. Corporate Power is Protected
10. Labor Power is Suppressed
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
14. Fraudulent ElectionsOne, a 14-point checklist is functionally worthless in politics.
Two, why is Britt the final say on what fascism is?
Three, this list is extremely ambiguous. When does criticism cross into disdain, interest into obsession, grim tolerance into rampant acceptance?
Everything on that list is accurate as a retrospective tool. But for contemporaneous measure, it falls short by failing to propose clear tests.
You added 'final say what fascism is' to create a controversy where there is none. That was never the claim. This was a set of commonalities of previous historical fascist governments.
And you add in an ad hominem to Political scientist Dr. Lawrence Britt. His study is in this realm, giving proper credence as an evidentiary start of analyzing fascism.
And yes, the abbreviated list I copied and pasted pales into comparison to the source. But I find many on HN dont bother to read linked articles, and instead create strawmen of the copied text. After reading tge posts so far, well, point made.
Checklists are good, including in public discourse. A 14-point list where every item is ambiguous, is not.
It’s not useless per se. Just insufficient as a consistent definition.
> you add in an ad hominem to Political scientist Dr. Lawrence Britt
Literally don’t. (Ad hominem would be me saying I hate Dr. Britt and rejecting his checklist on that basis.)
Saying I reject Britt as a final authority on a topic I don’t believe we have any final authority on yet is very different from rejecting them in any capacity.
Who gave Britt final say? Nobody in particular, and yet his criteria are often cited and used in more serious discussions of fascism. So a lot of people seem to think his criteria are useful. Language is a collaborative thing, meaning comes from diffuse and tacit agreement. If you expect that some power authorize and enforce a rigid definition of any political or sociological term, prepare to be deeply disappointed when you realize that nobody can provide such solid and concrete definitions of any terminology, even words you think you understand. What's democracy? Capitalism? Authoritarianism? Socialism? They're all defined by tacitly approved sets of criteria invented by an unofficial source and iterated upon by academics and misconstrued by and to the broader population.
That’s my point. OP said “we have an actual consistent way to define fascism,” and that’s simply not true.
That doesn’t mean we can’t call out fascism in real time. But it does mean that everyone who disagrees with you isn’t necessarily a fascist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism
but it's hard to find a functioning organization that doesn't have some of his characteristics because a certain in-vs-out distinction is necessary to an organization surviving as much as a cell needs a membrane. "Anti-fascism" as it as practiced today ticks at least eight of the boxes.
In fact, a casual search suggests that the supposed author (From your link, "Political scientist Dr. Lawrence Britt") is neither a Ph.D nor educated in political science: https://danielmalmer.medium.com/the-long-complicated-history... so it cannot even be used as an appeal to authority. This seems to be confirmed by the publication from which the list is taken, (note the different spelling of the first name): "Laurence W. Britt is a retired international businessperson, writer, and commentator. He is the author of 'Fascism, Anyone?' (FI, Spring 2003), the most reprinted—and most pirated—article in the magazine’s history." (https://secularhumanism.org/authors/laurence-w-britt/). Interestingly, the author seems to have no footprint online other than his fame through this list, so this guy is, in a non-derogatory sense, a non-entity.
[EDIT] More searching turns up a post in which comments purportedly by Laurence Britt (#24) also deny that he has academic credentials and also provides more context (#26) about writing the list: https://www.ryananddebi.com/2004/10/16/laurence-britts-14-po...
He doesn't have plans to seize the entirety of South America. He just wants to depose a dictator and it's not even clear he will actually do it. He's just putting pressure on it to happen.
No, it's actually not.
Although it's really more about the people running Trump. Trump by himself would be totally ineffectual.
Meanwhile, most of us see policies that are obviously authoritarian, don't worry about which brand, and oppose them for the usual reasons: no one should have that power, or we don't know how to organize humans to use that power safely, or it will normalize giving away a different power, etc.
Authoritarianism: a political system where a smaller group winds up with power, often with a military (or a monopoly on violence) to enforce that power. Often characterized by laws that are selectively enforced one some people, or "some who the law protects but does not bind, and others that the law binds but does not protect".
Communism: a philosophy of government where the government holds the "means of production" in the name of the people. In practice this devolves into a singular group ("the Party"), controlled by relatively few people deciding what is best for people, and this usually winds up in authoritarianism in anything larger than a small community (where individual social pressure can keep it in check).
Fascism: a philosophy of government that starts with authoritarianism, but goes hard into picking out groups of people from within the country as "the enemy" and blames all of a societies ills on those people (Mussolini picked socialists and labor unions first, Hitler also started with socialists and the disabled before moving on to Poles, Gypsies, Jews, and others). Part of this is also picking a chosen people, and creating a nationalist image around those people (True Italians for Mussolini, "Aryans" for Hitler), while at the same time projecting those people as the victims of the minority that is being blamed. Violence against these enemies is justified as being right (often in religious terms), and any check on that violence is portrayed as evil (e.g.: due process).
So the Soviet Union was actually less fascist than the U.S. was at the time (not saying the U.S. was fascist, but we certainly blamed black people for a lot). E.g.: the U.S.S.R. often mostly-correctly propagandized how much better the few black people that were in their country were treated. But the Soviet Union certainly was more authoritarian than the U.S. was.
Alternatively we might just remember the basics: "Even if you disagree very strongly, don't injure, imprison, or kill each other at will, like lunatics. Follow the law instead."
Political violence against fascists has only become morally questionable as fascism has become normalized. The article is correct that political violence is extremely bad, but it has also always been acceptable (or at least easy to culturally compartmentalize) against certain groups. That is the norm, not some idealized abstract notion of politics entirely encapsulated within rhetoric and debate, which has only recently been broken by "the left." A country that burns crosses and shoots up synagogues and bombs abortion clinics, where the police and ICE kidnap and kill with impunity, that sends the military into its own cities to kill immigrants and harass political dissidents, that builds concentration camps for "enemy combatants" in undeclared wars, has no right to clutch its pearls over actual white supremacists and neo-nazis - unambiguous fascists - taking what they themselves would freely give.
As fascism has become normalized, or as the term has?
If you're going to label expedited restaurant registration as "fascism", then violence against fascism had better not be normalized.
Fascism. The normalization of the term has followed the normalization of the politics.
>If you're going to label expedited restaurant registration as "fascism"
I haven't done anything of the sort.
In any case, here is a quote from Stephen Miller, who inspired this blog post, naming and shaming a nebulous enemy:
> They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen in all of us because we stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble. And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing.
To suggest otherwise seems like a false equivalence.
Ethics is (nominally) universal; morality is about identity and therefore about exclusion. Morality is a weapon: that is why the people who like it like it.
Ethics is moral philosophy. Most of the time these terms are used interchangeably but your description of the accepted difference is inaccurate and inflammatory.
Ethics is the moral standard accepted at community level, not quite universal. Morality is the projection (or rejection) of parts of ethics on individual level. In itself, morality is not a weapon and it's not about exclusion, at least no more than ethics can be.
> Morality is a weapon: that is why the people who like it like it.
Ironically, you are trying to blame moral people for being immoral because they like the "weapon" called morality... You speak from the view point of your morality that rejects morality and it gets funny.
Here, labeling certain individuals on the right as fascists is claimed to necessarily also be a call for violence against them. The only example provided for this claim is a reference to a musician in the middle of WW2 sporting a "This machine kills fascists" sticker on his guitar, as if wartime propaganda from 80 years ago is still relevant today.
I certainly haven't seen any relevant individual on the left calling for violence - whether that be people with significant followings in media and especially not among elected individuals.
In contrast, not only do I see pretty significant calls to violence from the right (e.g., Trump's rallies calling for violence against media members, his speech on 2021-01-06 whipping his crowd into a frenzy before the attack on the capitol, the "enemies within" speech he just gave to top military brass, etc.), but we're also seeing ICE becoming increasingly violent.
The claims about attacks on freedom of speech are similar.
Those on the left organize protests and boycotts against people they disagree with, thus exercising their own freedom of speech. Occasionally, such actions have resulted in individuals losing their jobs and their reputation. I won't claim that cancel culture doesn't go too far sometimes or get started over some incredibly petty things, but by and large, it's a movement that relies entirely on exercising speech as its mechanism.
Contrast this again with actions on the right. We have a sitting president launching lawsuits against anyone who says something he doesn't like. At the same time, he's directed his FCC secretary to threaten removal of broadcast licenses and interfere with business mergers of anyone using speech critical of Trump. That is textbook government censorship.
And no, Biden's administration requesting things on social media being taken down is not the same thing unless you can demonstrate said requests were also accompanied by threats of government action. It probably shouldn't have happened, and it definitely should have resulted in political consequences of some sort (it did), but it's not the same thing without threats being levied.
> Logic is inapplicable here. Politics is arbitrary, and labels/categories are worse than arbitrary, they are random.
Broadly speaking, at some level, I agree with them.
There is no machine that will flash an indicator when pointed at a “fascist”. Yet certain intelligent people are always willing to use pure reason to confront a world that does not admit such scientific classification. The retort is always, “You know one when you see one.”
The is a definite humility that is lacking in such debate, as if everyone shares a logically necessary psychological reality.
None of these thinking persons, of any stripe, are prepared to do the work of articulating, with nuance, where the logical consequences of another contradict their own, and more tellingly, where interpretations of words/labels/categories are themselves foundational in arguments.
People, myself certainly included, are not free with their energies teasing these details out, and are instead more than ready to indicate, in laborious, technical detail, why they are right.
This is a very sick time in shared discourse. I want people to pause and ask if this intellectual turmoil is indeed useful in the present moment or is irrational behaviour forced by economic, social, and environmental anxieties of our time.
Isn't Stephen Miller behind the ICE raids?
And he's been itching to do it since the last administration: https://archive.is/QBh3p
This smells like yet another example of "enlightened centrist" bias on this site. The userbase voted; leave it flagged.
johng•3h ago
mallowdram•3h ago
https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/irrationality.htm
JumpCrisscross•3h ago
The paper you cite is entirely unempirical. It’s using the same methods you criticize in the article.
mallowdram•2h ago
JumpCrisscross•2h ago
Fair enough, in a formal manner it’s empirical.
As a work, it’s political philosophy. Not science. Which makes it odd as a counterpoint to arguing the article in question is too aloof.
(Also, conflating irrational and illogical is unfounded. Nature is irrational. Per Caplan, individual agents may find it advantageous to act illogically. It doesn’t follow that one can’t use logic or rational thought to characterize the system.)
mallowdram•2h ago
By nature, irrational things or behaviors are not logical, which means politics has no basis in logic-derived axioms as propagated by Alexander.
Please adhere to a scientific, or axiom-based argument. Your replies are extremely irrelevant.
JumpCrisscross•2h ago
What would you call someone who waxes philosophy on politics?
> By nature, irrational things or behaviors are not logical
Lovely, so logic—by your construction—is useless given nature itself, lacking the ability to understand, is not rational.
(You’re mixing up sub-definitions of rationality. None of this is relevant, however, to the broader topic.)
> Please adhere to a scientific, or axiom-based argument
Was this written by AI?
mallowdram•1h ago
JumpCrisscross•1h ago
Robust counterargument.
To conclude the thread, yes, you obviously can reason about politics in the same way one can reason about anything else that doesn't behave rationally, like fish, through to things which can't reason at all, whether they be oceans or planets. Moreover, one can logically characterise that which behaves illogically in the same way we can mathematically characterise and constrain the behaviour of fractals and fluids and other objects which are, fundamentally, impossible to precisely describe.
mallowfram•35m ago
If engineers remain uneducated in this way, you'll become sycophants led as lemmings by cult figures like Alexander.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7415918/
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF•25m ago
Of fractals and fluids? I think you misunderstood what they wrote.
mallowfram•10m ago
JumpCrisscross•24m ago
The math of orbital mechanics has no relation to the behaviour of objects in orbit?
mallowfram•13m ago
Stick to politics, that's the thread, engineer.
bigbadfeline•3h ago
It is, but only for those who know neither logic nor politics.
> So creating logic games from arbitrary metaphors
So don't create them.
> arbitrary metaphors [are] what politics is based in and especially when each side is calling the other with the same arbitrary label.
That's true for the R/D circus but it's not true for politics in general, it's not a law of nature, it's just a fact of present day politics.
More importantly, framing that fact as something inevitable renders the framer incapable of recognizing its utmost importance as a piece of evidence that can help a diligent investigator uncover the political truths hidden behind it.
mallowdram•2h ago
The framer has no valid framework. There are no such things as empirically valid statements in political science, as the field is composed of subjective narratives. There are no such things as political truths.
bigbadfeline•2h ago
Oh, yes it is, there's history to learn from, just because you're unaware of it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
> The framer has no valid framework.
If you understood the comment you replied to, you'd realize that "the framer" there refers to you, so your statement above means "mallowdram has no valid framework". Ironically, it's true - you lack a valid framework because you lack knowledge of logic, history and politics.
mallowdram•2h ago
If you had an understanding of what history is, you'd understand it has no scientific validity.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537995/how-history-gets-thin...
As there is no scientific basis for history, and there is no logic to politics (it is irrational), nothing stated by Alexander is valid.
bigbadfeline•1h ago
mallowdram•1h ago
o11c•2h ago
Or to pull out another example: what level of overstep is necessary for it to become acceptable (praiseworthy?) to throw your shoes at George W. Bush?
foogazi•2h ago