Nothing related to "politics" regardless of its context, content or importance, is seen to "gratify intellectual curiosity" here. Practically all "political" content is considered categorically off topic and flagged by the community unless it has some obvious technical dimension to discuss (and even then it's touchy, depending on the headline.)
Yes that is technically against the guidelines, no, they don't care, nor will they stop.
Welcome to Hacker News. Blood in the streets doesn't spark curious conversation so let's talk about compilers!
>Otherwise it quickly becomes politics all day everyday.
No, it doesn't. This is one of Hacker News' weird phobias but it doesn't reflect reality. I know the mods believe it too so there's no point in debating it but even Reddit isn't politics all day every day. The nature of the community here is a self-correcting mechanism. This thread is not a flamewar, the posted article isn't low quality (certainly not on a forum where posting Twitter posts and Wikipedia articles is allowed,) and it poses literally no threat to the community, but HN still treats it like a cancer.
America does have basically every characteristic of fascism on every important list of fascism characteristics ever made.
That's actually kind of important to the tech community, considering we are wildly complicit in this.
So, maybe consider that more than "politics junkies" might be interested in this, and that the tech billionaires might have a vested interest in making sure stories like this get flagged (very easily done).
> the tech billionaires might have a vested interest in making sure stories like this get flagged
Interestingly, this "anyone with an opinion different from mine must be a paid shill" argument doesn't pop quite as often in the discussions about Clovis Culture tools, Roman Empire letters, or pre-Linotype typesetting -- the fact that makes me think that maybe keeping politics out of HN is actually a good thing.
I don't live in the US so this doesn't quite enrage me, especially since I'm aware that every US president gets tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars in donations to their election campaigns, so a gold statue does not look like a big deal when compared to that.
Given there's a lot of the audience here being actively involved in building said Torment Nexus, it's not a surprise that discussing it can generate friction. Like Upton Sinclair so nicely put it: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
It makes the numerous Nazis infesting tech feel uncomfortable, and creates an unsafe space for them. They prefer an environment where they can "apolitically" implement a Nazi agenda without being called, you know, Nazis.
It's funny how much democracies with free speech are always self critical with rampant doom saying while actual autocracies that crack down on this kind of speech are quiet and content when economic times are good only really cracking at the seams during distress.
I know its a healthy part of democracy but it is very draining.
The problem is that America is not in a terribly healthy democratic state, and pretty much all of the indicators show it. At best, America is a "flawed democracy" ala The Economist. The worst evaluations label America as a "hybrid regime" / "competitive authoritarianism" / "electoral autocracy" or many other terms to describe a democracy-on-the-surface that has, in reality, become heavily titled in favor of one party rule.
The problems extend well beyond one party (see: Citizen United), but to me, the "fascism"-ish stuff is mostly concentrated on one end. It has been clear for a long time that the Republican Party has embraced the "illiberal democracy" model of Viktor Orbán. Orbán's government never got to the full-on violent oppression used in actual autocracies, but instead used many of the tools that the Republican party uses today to attempt to stay in power. That being: gerrymandering and other aggressive vote meddling; media manipulation (not full on censorship, but attempting to ensure that dominant media voices were party line); propaganda using social / culture war rhetoric; and government pressure on institutions (schools, businesses, etc.) to destroy independence, and force conformity to the party line.
There are differences between the two -- Orbán never attempted anything like ICE or the immigrant detention camps, but Orbán was able to capture the judiciary better than Republicans have so far. But it's the closet comparison I can think of.
Some of the characteristics of the "Orbán style" do share some similarities with fascism... however the "Orbán style" lacks classic fascism (along with the more direct cousin of "the Vladimir Putin style")'s full on authoritarianism. But as the above demonstrates, there isn't a term right now that neatly encapsulates hybrid governments at the moment, so I guess that is why folks are running with the term everyone knows. Besides, there is always the danger of a hybrid regime backsliding into an authoritarian regime. Russia, who many do see as a modern flavor of authoritarian fascism at present, was rated as a "hybrid regime" in The Economist in 2006.
Just to be clear: Are you twisting the fact that America hits every metric for fascism into saying it must therefore be a healthy vibrant democracy full of free speech - because someone pointed that out? In a flagged story, that isn't anywhere near mainstream news?
... You know we have people getting thrown in camps and deported for saying maybe genocide is bad, right? And like, students and faculty in Ivy league schools getting beaten and/or fired for saying maybe we shouldn't be complicit in the mass murder of children?
Apologies if I've misread your remarks - deep and biting sarcasm doesn't always play well in text.
As a German, I started wondering if every nation has to experience a fascist catastrophe on its own, before a majority agrees that a fascist takeover is possible at home (surely the peoples who failed to stop all the other fascist regimes were just dumb). Then again, 30% of German voters would vote for the fascist AfD party today, so there's that...
I agree with the premise of the article wholeheartedly. Minor nitpick:
> The German dynasties behind Porsche, Volkswagen and BMW pretty much merged with the Nazi regeime.
Volkswagen was founded by the Nazi regime after they have already taken over. While support by car companies was relevant, there were far more important supporters of the war effort in the chemical and steel industry.
Its sad thing but in every society there appears to be a significant portion of people who support the tenants of fascism. The whole 'that minority group over there is wrecking things for you, we will punish them' vibe seems to really strike a chord time and time again.
There's a peer-reviewed study of this that appeared in the last couple of years that showed the percent support for authoritarian rule tends to hover around 20% worldwide regardless of country, plus or minus some fuzz amount. I can't find it now because I keep finding other papers but this is another report that's is pretty consistent with it:
Once you get that group control is when you have problems.
This is kind of an interesting deeper dive into why people support fascism. Maybe not surprising but highlights the two main reasons: something like "we need a strong leader to take control of the government away from corrupt elite and put it back into the hands of the people" and "the government needs to be in the hands of the real, true, competent people, and not the other, fake, lesser people".
Personally I'm past the point of "what does fascism look like" and want to have a realistic discussion about "how do you reestablish a democracy when you're in a fascist regime?" So far the historical examples at my fingertips are all basically some variant of "people get tired of it, the cult leader passes away and everyone kind of magically agrees that fascism isn't working".
There is research that suggests that our brain composition determines our political ideology. More or less gray matter in different parts of brain determine where we land on spectrum of progressive, liberal, conservative, authoritarian.
don't forget about the historical examples of having your home destroyed by war (usually a war started by your leader) and the regime being forcefully replaced by a foreign power. Japan, Italy and Germany are democracies today.
Germany's current political course is a replay of the Weimar Republic. Including the people wagging their fingers about the dangers of fascism. You'd think the people telling us not to repeat history would read a history book.
The parallels to the rise of Nazi Germany are striking. But it can be much worse. Read "February 1933" if you want to get a feel. Pretty much daily reports of people getting killed in clashes between Nazis and Communists. Hitler almost immediately suspends right to assemble, free speech etc, and orders police to kill dissidents on sight. Prominent artists and journalists are getting arrested or are fleeing the country. All of that within a month of Hitler taking power.
There is still hope for the US. The press is still critical, the opposition is not arrested, the courts are still giving push back, and it's not civil war level violence.
The midterms will be a landslide if allowed to run fairly.
Trump’s response to that landslide will tell us whether there’s hope.
I don’t expect Civil War levels of violence because the country is mostly united in its hatred of how the GOP is running it. No large group of people will pick up arms to support Trump’s right to invade countries and ruin the economy.
> The midterms will be a landslide if allowed to run fairly.
SCOTUS just repelled the "voting rights" part of the civil rights acts, allowing states to gerrymander the black vote out. Which all red states immediately did. The midterms already won't be fair, and it can get worse until then.
> the country is mostly united in its hatred of how the GOP is running it.
It really isn't, 30% of the country is still diehard MAGA. They may be disappointed about the results (or lack thereof), but nothing will make them reconsider their support for Trump. And these people have disproportionately more firearms than the rest of the population.
That 30% have also been in a decades long information silo that has convinced them that anyone marginally to the left of them is either mentally ill or demons. I grew up with Michael Savage on the radio.
Disclaimer: I don't want to make people despair nor do I want to install fatalism. People should take action, no matter the bad chances.
> if allowed to run fairly.
> Trump’s response to that landslide will tell us whether there’s hope.
The fairly part is already out of the window, we have had the fake bomb threats at the polling stations. But as you have seen in Hungary, an autocrat has to fear a mass revolt. So an outsized signal can still make it through, despite the rigged elections.
But that isn't even the most important part. Imagine the Dems win next round. What then? I have the impression that the Americans do not fully grasp the structural damage that has been done. The Dems won't be able to clean up the mess that the conservatives had left them as they have been doing traditionally.
This time the US is highly isolated, the economy is under severe threat from the GOPs own doing; Iran, almost unlimited lawless access to European markets (contrary to popular belief) for the tech oligarchy, institutional knowledge gone, soft power gone.
Also imagine throwing the owners of fake news blasters like Fox News in jail, would you think that would be possible? When an outsized portion of the populace think this is Free Press, there is a cultural problem that prevents root causes to be dealt with. The commercial apparatus is necessary for "flooding the zone", but doesn't function as the Fourth Estate, a required function the general population would not even know about.
The Heritage Foundation at alii have a large time horizon, they have been working on overthrowing democracy for decades. The asymmetry of having no regards for the rule of the law versus having to follow it is another disadvantage for the Dems. It is a seduction to join the dark side, to let the Dems play the game the other party is good at.
The Dems are setup for failure; they need a bizarre effort to overcome the structural damage and the corporate occupation of culture. Notwithstanding the neoliberal factions inside, which are equivalent to the "GOP of older times sliding into autocracy but not there yet". The GOP is bad, but I don't want to portray the Dems as 100% good, on the contrary. The Democratic Party is a big tent, and should rather be broken up in different parties, so Americans have something to choose from actually.
In short: people should not hope that the other party will fix their problems; they should start to question themselves, the cultural beliefs they have been fed and most importantly, they need to understand their own and their peers role in this mess. The change should come from bottom up, grassroots style.
Please correct me if I'm wrong and I would hope to stand corrected, but my impression from across the pond is that the Dems in general would enjoy being in the same lead and would gladly use similar mechanisms - so they wouldn't change structurally that much even when they get to the levers. Many techbros and other personalities would also simply swear new allegiances, get celebrated for "their" win and continue to erode at everything because money is money in the end and the GOP lead demonstrated there's good money to be made this way. Of course there are and will be exceptions to this, but significantly many? Time will tell.
> would gladly use similar mechanisms - so they wouldn't change structurally that much even when they get to the levers.
To address the first part, «similar mechanisms», the Dems realize too late that the GOP had stopped playing the same 'game', as in: the rule of law, respecting institutions, not overstepping the boundaries. They would not gladly use similar mechanisms, because it would mean that no party in the USA would be a democratic rule-abiding party. You would end with a Russia governance style, where 'might makes right' rules instead of the law. In other words: maffia governance.
That is why rules alone wouldn't save a democracy. If you can get away with ignoring them, the rules are dead
The second part, «so they wouldn't change structurally», is a real problem. There is quite a bunch of senators and people clinging to their position and their networks, standing in the way of real chance. Franklin D. Roosevelt had the same problems.
The moneyed interests are a big problem too. From a distance I think AOC is the most clear-headed and general interest driven person, but she has to overcome established interests in the Democratic Party. That requires money and backing from influential people.
And frankly, the press might sometimes sound critical about current affairs (out of necessity, they have to maintain strata-specific degrees of credibility), but they don't raise the alarm (which has been several years overdue). For some politicians and power brokers, just facing up to the consequences of their (in)actions would be too unpleasant, let alone they would want to give up their interests. So they gladly let themselves be lulled to sleep. If the editorial boards would stop down-playing and bullshitting, those "all is more or less fine" people would start to face electoral heat, but you can safely bet the corporate incentives aren't aligned with that.
Also, don't get the [flagged]. For what it's worth: Rutger Bregman is a historian and best-selling writer from the Netherlands. While you don't have to agree with everything he says most is thought provoking at least.
Another opportunity to recommend "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45" by Milton Mayer. The audiobook is great too.
A critical but empathetic look at how fascism rises and spreads through, and alongside, ordinary people in ordinary society. Excellent book, incredibly relevant.
Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, ACTUAL facists (as in no serious discussion possible, nobody needing to be convinced) were in power from 2023 to 2025. The country of the author has had a fascist prime minister for 2 years ...
And the main reason that stopped is that a bunch of his party members ran off and started a new party.
As a reaction voters became more extreme. The FvD (forum for democracy) is making big strides forward and they lack the (very few) positive qualities the PVV did have. PVV was anti-violence and pro-democracy. Oh, and FvD is anti-democracy in the sense of they're against "1 person 1 vote", and looking for ways to limit who can vote (and going to lengths that Trump and Republicans are not even daring to mention (yet?)
While some* of that is true, does that matter to the argument being made by the author? And yes, that author also opposed fascist forces in the Netherlands.
: Former prime minister Schoof was was not* a fascist, but basically just an independent bureaucrat hired to attempt to hold a very brittle coalition together. He failed at that miserably. Also, the 'main reason that stopped' was that the PVV party went from 23% of the votes to 17% of the votes in the next election, and none of the other parties was willing to work with them again in a coalition.
Donald Trump strikes me as a low-level antichrist who's more honest and upfront about everything, whereas other politicians are more cute and polite about their agendas, or are just stupid in their policy making.
But then again, most of politics is corrupt.
You really are voting for the lesser of two evils, in that, the choices you're given are all actually evil, no matter what party, platform, or side of the aisle you're dealing with.
I think Donald Trump is especially popular though because of bad handling of immigration in the USA, and any politician that is serious about dealing with waves of immigration in the same way in Western countries has the ability to take advantage of a similar trend.
In other words...
...90% of illegal immigrants are probably genuinely seeking a better life or even desperate for it, but then you have demographics such as devout Islamist populations, criminals / bad actors who take advantage of, and the fact that if people can flood across borders, it seems that they will.
And then border towns in whatever country will bear the brunt of the issues that causes, or you will have literal replacement and a huge uptick in violent crime like what's happening in the UK...
...not to mention local citizens and legal immigrants tend to notice that illegal denizens get a fast track toward government benefits and legal protections they themselves have not and do not receive.
Now, are Donald Trump and those like him bad? At best they are a step backward due to real and serious policy failures by more "Left" politicians, and at worst they are just as awful, but a realistic backlash, according to Horseshoe theory, that extremes on different ends of a spectrum wind up being functionally the same, for example, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union during World War II and the Cold War, despite having arguably antithetical ideological beliefs.
In the USA too, its worth pointing out that our Democrat party is heavily influenced by hardcore leftists, that is, not reasonable people who want high tech trains, better healthcare, and a strong social safety net, but rather people who literally are alright with items like transgender "medicine" and pornography for young children, rioting, and think terrorists are justified openly calling for rape and murder.
I think its worth pointing out too that actual historical fascism is openly violent, xenophobic, war-positive, genocidal, and eugenic.
I really don't like Donald Trump, but I would describe him as a moderately right populist that isn't a complete idiot when it comes to dealing with real problems, which is perhaps what makes him dangerous, is that he actually is correct on certain prominent issues, and again, just as antichrist as most politicians, which generates a fair amount of detached cynicism within me.
I'm one of those people too that sort of thinks that a lot of differences between Left-and-Right or Conservative vs. Liberal actually collapse into nothing on a lot of simple problems, for example, gun rights, healthcare, border security, and that a lot of it is just meant to divide us.
For example, why shouldn't we trust private, law-abiding citizens with guns after they take a one-day or two-day class in safety, have laws that prevent someone from buying weapons during a day long random bi-polar episode, and have police officers or security guards in schools?
Why not have quality government provided healthcare and a welfare state, as well as private alternatives in healthcare and an understanding that opportunity and attitude is the biggest factor in persons lifting themselves out of poverty?
Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFcf5RQqVEM -- Elephants in Rooms discusses these very issues, even the Texas governor in the US getting mad and bussing illegal immigrants to liberal cities like New York who then said they couldn't handle the influx
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJNTnA2UvWw -- A discussion on the harms on Islamism as it pertains to the fact that the ideology of a reasonable amount of persons who claim to follow Islam is not compatible with Western societies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrM78ZigyPE -- A Republican senator in the US makes the argument that for the same reason you lock the front door of your house at night, a nation should have a secure border and properly vet anyone entering into the country
I would suggest doing your own research into what's happening in the UK for example, don't just take my word for it obviously.
Real fascists like Pinochet and Videla murdered thousands of innocent people.
The USA is not even close to that - massacres in football stadiums, students thrown from helicopters into the ocean, entire villages burned alive in Belarus, etc.
Pinochet didn't start by murdering thousands of people on day one.
It takes time and work to dismantle every part of the system that will stop you from doing that. Less time in weak democracies, more time in stronger ones.
The republican party is currently doing it's traitorous best to turn Trump into an above-the-law-king, and to turn the country into a place where nobody could stop him from doing that. Every one of them is complicit.
With the risk of sounding naive: How come this post is flagged?
Reading the guidelines I can't see how this is off-topic or does _not_ "[gratify] one's intellectual curiosity."
Edit: spelling
I guess it falls under "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics".
My thoughts exactly.
And it's not even possible to vouch fot it
It's not possible to vouch for articles that are not dead
If you could, you would just lose vouching privileges.
Nothing related to "politics" regardless of its context, content or importance, is seen to "gratify intellectual curiosity" here. Practically all "political" content is considered categorically off topic and flagged by the community unless it has some obvious technical dimension to discuss (and even then it's touchy, depending on the headline.)
Yes that is technically against the guidelines, no, they don't care, nor will they stop.
Welcome to Hacker News. Blood in the streets doesn't spark curious conversation so let's talk about compilers!
> Welcome to Hacker News. Blood in the streets doesn't spark curious conversation so let's talk about compilers!
Probably for the better. Otherwise it quickly becomes politics all day everyday. There are plenty of other places where you can get that already.
>Otherwise it quickly becomes politics all day everyday.
No, it doesn't. This is one of Hacker News' weird phobias but it doesn't reflect reality. I know the mods believe it too so there's no point in debating it but even Reddit isn't politics all day every day. The nature of the community here is a self-correcting mechanism. This thread is not a flamewar, the posted article isn't low quality (certainly not on a forum where posting Twitter posts and Wikipedia articles is allowed,) and it poses literally no threat to the community, but HN still treats it like a cancer.
> The nature of the community here is a self-correcting mechanism.
It looks like the community has deployed its self-correcting mechanism in this case.
That isn't what I meant, but I know that's the only way it can be interpreted.
The culture here is so deeply self-sabotaging because it's so deeply afraid to be human. It really gets depressing sometimes.
Good day.
Politics junkies are the least human people around.
America does have basically every characteristic of fascism on every important list of fascism characteristics ever made.
That's actually kind of important to the tech community, considering we are wildly complicit in this.
So, maybe consider that more than "politics junkies" might be interested in this, and that the tech billionaires might have a vested interest in making sure stories like this get flagged (very easily done).
> the tech billionaires might have a vested interest in making sure stories like this get flagged
Interestingly, this "anyone with an opinion different from mine must be a paid shill" argument doesn't pop quite as often in the discussions about Clovis Culture tools, Roman Empire letters, or pre-Linotype typesetting -- the fact that makes me think that maybe keeping politics out of HN is actually a good thing.
Meanwhile, America's tech CEOs are gifting the president with gold statues and accompanying him on diplomatic trips.
I don't live in the US so this doesn't quite enrage me, especially since I'm aware that every US president gets tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars in donations to their election campaigns, so a gold statue does not look like a big deal when compared to that.
Complicit? How about “proximate cause of”?
Sure.
This, and the good old "The Torment Nexus is now complete and operational, check out the cool tech they used to muffle out the screaming!"
Given there's a lot of the audience here being actively involved in building said Torment Nexus, it's not a surprise that discussing it can generate friction. Like Upton Sinclair so nicely put it: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
It makes the numerous Nazis infesting tech feel uncomfortable, and creates an unsafe space for them. They prefer an environment where they can "apolitically" implement a Nazi agenda without being called, you know, Nazis.
The Führerkult also has a problematic conclusion: Everything needs to happen during the Führer's lifetime, for only he can restore the nation.
That's obviously a problem when your Führer is 80+ years old and overweight.
It means the Führer will try and fix everything as soon as possible.
It's funny how much democracies with free speech are always self critical with rampant doom saying while actual autocracies that crack down on this kind of speech are quiet and content when economic times are good only really cracking at the seams during distress.
I know its a healthy part of democracy but it is very draining.
The problem is that America is not in a terribly healthy democratic state, and pretty much all of the indicators show it. At best, America is a "flawed democracy" ala The Economist. The worst evaluations label America as a "hybrid regime" / "competitive authoritarianism" / "electoral autocracy" or many other terms to describe a democracy-on-the-surface that has, in reality, become heavily titled in favor of one party rule.
The problems extend well beyond one party (see: Citizen United), but to me, the "fascism"-ish stuff is mostly concentrated on one end. It has been clear for a long time that the Republican Party has embraced the "illiberal democracy" model of Viktor Orbán. Orbán's government never got to the full-on violent oppression used in actual autocracies, but instead used many of the tools that the Republican party uses today to attempt to stay in power. That being: gerrymandering and other aggressive vote meddling; media manipulation (not full on censorship, but attempting to ensure that dominant media voices were party line); propaganda using social / culture war rhetoric; and government pressure on institutions (schools, businesses, etc.) to destroy independence, and force conformity to the party line.
There are differences between the two -- Orbán never attempted anything like ICE or the immigrant detention camps, but Orbán was able to capture the judiciary better than Republicans have so far. But it's the closet comparison I can think of.
Some of the characteristics of the "Orbán style" do share some similarities with fascism... however the "Orbán style" lacks classic fascism (along with the more direct cousin of "the Vladimir Putin style")'s full on authoritarianism. But as the above demonstrates, there isn't a term right now that neatly encapsulates hybrid governments at the moment, so I guess that is why folks are running with the term everyone knows. Besides, there is always the danger of a hybrid regime backsliding into an authoritarian regime. Russia, who many do see as a modern flavor of authoritarian fascism at present, was rated as a "hybrid regime" in The Economist in 2006.
Just to be clear: Are you twisting the fact that America hits every metric for fascism into saying it must therefore be a healthy vibrant democracy full of free speech - because someone pointed that out? In a flagged story, that isn't anywhere near mainstream news?
... You know we have people getting thrown in camps and deported for saying maybe genocide is bad, right? And like, students and faculty in Ivy league schools getting beaten and/or fired for saying maybe we shouldn't be complicit in the mass murder of children?
Apologies if I've misread your remarks - deep and biting sarcasm doesn't always play well in text.
As a German, I started wondering if every nation has to experience a fascist catastrophe on its own, before a majority agrees that a fascist takeover is possible at home (surely the peoples who failed to stop all the other fascist regimes were just dumb). Then again, 30% of German voters would vote for the fascist AfD party today, so there's that...
I agree with the premise of the article wholeheartedly. Minor nitpick:
> The German dynasties behind Porsche, Volkswagen and BMW pretty much merged with the Nazi regeime.
Volkswagen was founded by the Nazi regime after they have already taken over. While support by car companies was relevant, there were far more important supporters of the war effort in the chemical and steel industry.
Its sad thing but in every society there appears to be a significant portion of people who support the tenants of fascism. The whole 'that minority group over there is wrecking things for you, we will punish them' vibe seems to really strike a chord time and time again.
There's a peer-reviewed study of this that appeared in the last couple of years that showed the percent support for authoritarian rule tends to hover around 20% worldwide regardless of country, plus or minus some fuzz amount. I can't find it now because I keep finding other papers but this is another report that's is pretty consistent with it:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/02/28/who-likes...
Once you get that group control is when you have problems.
This is kind of an interesting deeper dive into why people support fascism. Maybe not surprising but highlights the two main reasons: something like "we need a strong leader to take control of the government away from corrupt elite and put it back into the hands of the people" and "the government needs to be in the hands of the real, true, competent people, and not the other, fake, lesser people".
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/political-science/artic...
Personally I'm past the point of "what does fascism look like" and want to have a realistic discussion about "how do you reestablish a democracy when you're in a fascist regime?" So far the historical examples at my fingertips are all basically some variant of "people get tired of it, the cult leader passes away and everyone kind of magically agrees that fascism isn't working".
There is research that suggests that our brain composition determines our political ideology. More or less gray matter in different parts of brain determine where we land on spectrum of progressive, liberal, conservative, authoritarian.
https://www.psypost.org/authoritarian-attitudes-linked-to-al...
https://youtu.be/t-hwrIkTNFo?si=V3TKg-3dqc1htQBU
don't forget about the historical examples of having your home destroyed by war (usually a war started by your leader) and the regime being forcefully replaced by a foreign power. Japan, Italy and Germany are democracies today.
Germany's current political course is a replay of the Weimar Republic. Including the people wagging their fingers about the dangers of fascism. You'd think the people telling us not to repeat history would read a history book.
The parallels to the rise of Nazi Germany are striking. But it can be much worse. Read "February 1933" if you want to get a feel. Pretty much daily reports of people getting killed in clashes between Nazis and Communists. Hitler almost immediately suspends right to assemble, free speech etc, and orders police to kill dissidents on sight. Prominent artists and journalists are getting arrested or are fleeing the country. All of that within a month of Hitler taking power.
There is still hope for the US. The press is still critical, the opposition is not arrested, the courts are still giving push back, and it's not civil war level violence.
The midterms will be a landslide if allowed to run fairly.
Trump’s response to that landslide will tell us whether there’s hope.
I don’t expect Civil War levels of violence because the country is mostly united in its hatred of how the GOP is running it. No large group of people will pick up arms to support Trump’s right to invade countries and ruin the economy.
The National Guard may end up having a decision of a lifetime
> The midterms will be a landslide if allowed to run fairly.
SCOTUS just repelled the "voting rights" part of the civil rights acts, allowing states to gerrymander the black vote out. Which all red states immediately did. The midterms already won't be fair, and it can get worse until then.
> the country is mostly united in its hatred of how the GOP is running it.
It really isn't, 30% of the country is still diehard MAGA. They may be disappointed about the results (or lack thereof), but nothing will make them reconsider their support for Trump. And these people have disproportionately more firearms than the rest of the population.
That 30% have also been in a decades long information silo that has convinced them that anyone marginally to the left of them is either mentally ill or demons. I grew up with Michael Savage on the radio.
Disclaimer: I don't want to make people despair nor do I want to install fatalism. People should take action, no matter the bad chances.
The fairly part is already out of the window, we have had the fake bomb threats at the polling stations. But as you have seen in Hungary, an autocrat has to fear a mass revolt. So an outsized signal can still make it through, despite the rigged elections.But that isn't even the most important part. Imagine the Dems win next round. What then? I have the impression that the Americans do not fully grasp the structural damage that has been done. The Dems won't be able to clean up the mess that the conservatives had left them as they have been doing traditionally. This time the US is highly isolated, the economy is under severe threat from the GOPs own doing; Iran, almost unlimited lawless access to European markets (contrary to popular belief) for the tech oligarchy, institutional knowledge gone, soft power gone.
Also imagine throwing the owners of fake news blasters like Fox News in jail, would you think that would be possible? When an outsized portion of the populace think this is Free Press, there is a cultural problem that prevents root causes to be dealt with. The commercial apparatus is necessary for "flooding the zone", but doesn't function as the Fourth Estate, a required function the general population would not even know about.
The Heritage Foundation at alii have a large time horizon, they have been working on overthrowing democracy for decades. The asymmetry of having no regards for the rule of the law versus having to follow it is another disadvantage for the Dems. It is a seduction to join the dark side, to let the Dems play the game the other party is good at.
The Dems are setup for failure; they need a bizarre effort to overcome the structural damage and the corporate occupation of culture. Notwithstanding the neoliberal factions inside, which are equivalent to the "GOP of older times sliding into autocracy but not there yet". The GOP is bad, but I don't want to portray the Dems as 100% good, on the contrary. The Democratic Party is a big tent, and should rather be broken up in different parties, so Americans have something to choose from actually.
In short: people should not hope that the other party will fix their problems; they should start to question themselves, the cultural beliefs they have been fed and most importantly, they need to understand their own and their peers role in this mess. The change should come from bottom up, grassroots style.
Please correct me if I'm wrong and I would hope to stand corrected, but my impression from across the pond is that the Dems in general would enjoy being in the same lead and would gladly use similar mechanisms - so they wouldn't change structurally that much even when they get to the levers. Many techbros and other personalities would also simply swear new allegiances, get celebrated for "their" win and continue to erode at everything because money is money in the end and the GOP lead demonstrated there's good money to be made this way. Of course there are and will be exceptions to this, but significantly many? Time will tell.
The second part, «so they wouldn't change structurally», is a real problem. There is quite a bunch of senators and people clinging to their position and their networks, standing in the way of real chance. Franklin D. Roosevelt had the same problems. The moneyed interests are a big problem too. From a distance I think AOC is the most clear-headed and general interest driven person, but she has to overcome established interests in the Democratic Party. That requires money and backing from influential people.
And frankly, the press might sometimes sound critical about current affairs (out of necessity, they have to maintain strata-specific degrees of credibility), but they don't raise the alarm (which has been several years overdue). For some politicians and power brokers, just facing up to the consequences of their (in)actions would be too unpleasant, let alone they would want to give up their interests. So they gladly let themselves be lulled to sleep. If the editorial boards would stop down-playing and bullshitting, those "all is more or less fine" people would start to face electoral heat, but you can safely bet the corporate incentives aren't aligned with that.
Seems like a needed rehash of Eco's article about "ur-fascism" https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/
Also, don't get the [flagged]. For what it's worth: Rutger Bregman is a historian and best-selling writer from the Netherlands. While you don't have to agree with everything he says most is thought provoking at least.
See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV8KGcFqeLc.
Another opportunity to recommend "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45" by Milton Mayer. The audiobook is great too.
A critical but empathetic look at how fascism rises and spreads through, and alongside, ordinary people in ordinary society. Excellent book, incredibly relevant.
An excerpt, if you don't want to commit to the whole thing: https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
Flagged? Truth hurts I guess
Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, ACTUAL facists (as in no serious discussion possible, nobody needing to be convinced) were in power from 2023 to 2025. The country of the author has had a fascist prime minister for 2 years ...
And the main reason that stopped is that a bunch of his party members ran off and started a new party.
As a reaction voters became more extreme. The FvD (forum for democracy) is making big strides forward and they lack the (very few) positive qualities the PVV did have. PVV was anti-violence and pro-democracy. Oh, and FvD is anti-democracy in the sense of they're against "1 person 1 vote", and looking for ways to limit who can vote (and going to lengths that Trump and Republicans are not even daring to mention (yet?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_for_Freedom
While some* of that is true, does that matter to the argument being made by the author? And yes, that author also opposed fascist forces in the Netherlands.
: Former prime minister Schoof was was not* a fascist, but basically just an independent bureaucrat hired to attempt to hold a very brittle coalition together. He failed at that miserably. Also, the 'main reason that stopped' was that the PVV party went from 23% of the votes to 17% of the votes in the next election, and none of the other parties was willing to work with them again in a coalition.
Donald Trump strikes me as a low-level antichrist who's more honest and upfront about everything, whereas other politicians are more cute and polite about their agendas, or are just stupid in their policy making.
But then again, most of politics is corrupt.
You really are voting for the lesser of two evils, in that, the choices you're given are all actually evil, no matter what party, platform, or side of the aisle you're dealing with.
I think Donald Trump is especially popular though because of bad handling of immigration in the USA, and any politician that is serious about dealing with waves of immigration in the same way in Western countries has the ability to take advantage of a similar trend.
In other words...
...90% of illegal immigrants are probably genuinely seeking a better life or even desperate for it, but then you have demographics such as devout Islamist populations, criminals / bad actors who take advantage of, and the fact that if people can flood across borders, it seems that they will.
And then border towns in whatever country will bear the brunt of the issues that causes, or you will have literal replacement and a huge uptick in violent crime like what's happening in the UK...
...not to mention local citizens and legal immigrants tend to notice that illegal denizens get a fast track toward government benefits and legal protections they themselves have not and do not receive.
Now, are Donald Trump and those like him bad? At best they are a step backward due to real and serious policy failures by more "Left" politicians, and at worst they are just as awful, but a realistic backlash, according to Horseshoe theory, that extremes on different ends of a spectrum wind up being functionally the same, for example, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union during World War II and the Cold War, despite having arguably antithetical ideological beliefs.
In the USA too, its worth pointing out that our Democrat party is heavily influenced by hardcore leftists, that is, not reasonable people who want high tech trains, better healthcare, and a strong social safety net, but rather people who literally are alright with items like transgender "medicine" and pornography for young children, rioting, and think terrorists are justified openly calling for rape and murder.
I think its worth pointing out too that actual historical fascism is openly violent, xenophobic, war-positive, genocidal, and eugenic.
I really don't like Donald Trump, but I would describe him as a moderately right populist that isn't a complete idiot when it comes to dealing with real problems, which is perhaps what makes him dangerous, is that he actually is correct on certain prominent issues, and again, just as antichrist as most politicians, which generates a fair amount of detached cynicism within me.
I'm one of those people too that sort of thinks that a lot of differences between Left-and-Right or Conservative vs. Liberal actually collapse into nothing on a lot of simple problems, for example, gun rights, healthcare, border security, and that a lot of it is just meant to divide us.
For example, why shouldn't we trust private, law-abiding citizens with guns after they take a one-day or two-day class in safety, have laws that prevent someone from buying weapons during a day long random bi-polar episode, and have police officers or security guards in schools?
Why not have quality government provided healthcare and a welfare state, as well as private alternatives in healthcare and an understanding that opportunity and attitude is the biggest factor in persons lifting themselves out of poverty?
Sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFcf5RQqVEM -- Elephants in Rooms discusses these very issues, even the Texas governor in the US getting mad and bussing illegal immigrants to liberal cities like New York who then said they couldn't handle the influx
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJNTnA2UvWw -- A discussion on the harms on Islamism as it pertains to the fact that the ideology of a reasonable amount of persons who claim to follow Islam is not compatible with Western societies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrM78ZigyPE -- A Republican senator in the US makes the argument that for the same reason you lock the front door of your house at night, a nation should have a secure border and properly vet anyone entering into the country
I would suggest doing your own research into what's happening in the UK for example, don't just take my word for it obviously.
> support for a dictatorial leader
no
> centralized autocracy
no
> militarism
I'll give this one
> forcible suppression of opposition
no
> belief in a natural social hierarchy
not sure, but no
> subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race
no
> strong regimentation of society and the economy
no
this article is trash ragebait
> support for a dictatorial leader
Yes. Trump
> centralized autocracy
Totally. Wars without congress permission, illegal tariffs, etc
> forcible suppression of opposition
Yes. Rigging elections. Making difficult for oppositors to vote
> belief in a natural social hierarchy
Totally. White supremacism. Proud boys, ICE...
> subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race
Yes. ICE.
> strong regimentation of society and the economy
Yes. DOGE shit. Cuts to healthcare programs, etc.
...
> Yes. Trump
not vs democratic institutes, so no
also Trump is not authoritarian
> Totally. Wars without congress permission, illegal tariffs, etc
first I gave in another item to a degree, tariffs are still controlled by other branches so no
> Rigging elections
lol
> Totally. White supremacism
In the entire US? In the government? no
> Yes. ICE.
Nope, that's not subordination of individual interests in any measurable capacity
> DOGE, cuts
are regimentation of society? in what way?
economy? regimentation?
laughable.
Your reply is same ragebait as the article. It is an insult to honest discourse.
Real fascists like Pinochet and Videla murdered thousands of innocent people.
The USA is not even close to that - massacres in football stadiums, students thrown from helicopters into the ocean, entire villages burned alive in Belarus, etc.
Perhaps attempted fascism is also bad.
Not all authoritarian regimes are fascist. Pinochet and Videla regimes were more military juntas and bureaucratic-authoritarian states.
I wasn’t aware fascism was defined by a body count.
Pinochet didn't start by murdering thousands of people on day one.
It takes time and work to dismantle every part of the system that will stop you from doing that. Less time in weak democracies, more time in stronger ones.
The republican party is currently doing it's traitorous best to turn Trump into an above-the-law-king, and to turn the country into a place where nobody could stop him from doing that. Every one of them is complicit.
No he literally did start murdering thousands of people on day one.
He murdered a few people on day one. The thousands happened over decades of his rule.
Wonder how many times i saw this article with different countries…
Which ones? Russia and what else?
Which countries? Can you be specific about two or three of them?
And what point are you trying to make?
The fascism is worldwide now.
Reddit-style spin posts leaking into HN.