re: #282 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus

I think you’ve gone a bit off the rails there. Work requirements are no more fascistic than anything else having to do with being part of a society.

And the Patriot Act is authoritarian but authoritarianism is widely implemented in societies, not just fascist governments.

The War on Terror was the the typical war drums that leader like to beat. Again, not fascist.

And of the “liberals” that I know, none of them have done what you assert.

I’m not saying those people are not out there, but it has not been my experience.

I didn’t say they were fascist, I was saying that you can eventually nudge liberals into fascism by playing on the underlying assumptions that lead to liberals supporting bad, dumb policy because liberals want to be safe and want there to be a meritocracy.

Which I think is true from my experience: you can absolutely convince liberals to abrogate freedom in general by threatening their status quo, and you can convince liberals to do fascist things by presenting it as necessary self-defense.

Fascism is the return of the coercive structures directed toward the periphery to the metropole: the state learns to manage and coerce people at the edge of the empire, and then imports those strategies to the center when social disorder increases. If I only use the recent twenty-year occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan as peripheries…then my point is that liberals regularly vote for policy, and supporters of policy, that facilitate an internal unaccountable authority that matched the external unaccountable authority wielded in those nations.

I chose the things I chose carefully, although I was being jocular.

The War on Terror is sold as self-defense which allows people to overlook that it has constantly involved stripping rights, specifically the right to privacy and the right to speech, from people in general but Muslim specifically because they’re treated as the host population for terrorists. Hateful speech is bad if it’s Muslim-derived hateful speech, so it’s suddenly not-curtailing-freedom that we police fundamentalist Muslims differently than we do other hate groups. Furthermore, the entire notion that there is an acceptable amount of side-death to the War on Terror…implicitly, only in black and brown countries…functionally amounts of collective guilt: the words matter less the decision over and over to kill people for being near targets.

The exact same “well, we must be given allowances to do excess death to keep people safe” is now a standing part of cop operations, and it is de facto deployed unequally.

Downstream of that, The Patriot Act is a thing that a bunch of liberals supported as an act of self-defense that also amounted to a giant curtailing of civil liberty and also restructured state enforcement agencies to give them broad ability to track and monitor people with no pretext…implicitly mostly directed against Muslims, but now expanded to police leftists organizations that are labelled “terrorists” far faster than rightists ones.

I bring up work requirements because they represent a liberal concession to what amounted to a Stab-in-the-Back myth perpetrated by Ronald Reagan. They exist because of the notion that black people don’t work and just get welfare: caving to this—a worldview in which people are unequal and the state exists to sort people and uplift only the worthy—is a step towards the fascist worldview.

And plenty of weak libs have gone fash: that’s what stuff like Gamergate was, successful entryism into normal, center-left spaces and creating reactionary outrage while using the language of liberalism…reform, meritocracy, accusations of cheating, inverted idpol in which “gamer” is a protected identity…resulting in an entire wing of people that are now fascists.