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A Brief Note about Fascism, Antifa, and President Trump
There’s a little checklist making the rounds on social media and purporting to list “characteristics of fascists.” As lists go it isn’t a very good one, in that it oddly omits the sine qua non, the single essential aspect, of fascism, which is the blunt use of government authority to completely control the economy and the people.
That, after all, is what fascism is, so it seems worth mentioning.
It omits that important detail because its purpose is to sell the idea that President Trump is a fascist. And that’s a problem, because the current administration isn’t authoritarian and doesn’t seek to control the economy and the people.
On the contrary, the Trump administration is famous — or infamous, if you’re on the left — for deregulation, for trying to remove controls imposed by government on the economy and the citizen. (Folks on the left really don’t like deregulation.)
The Trump administration is also famous — or infamous, as we’re about to witness again — for appointing judges who are known to support Constitutional ideas about limited and restrained government. (And folks on the left really don’t like judges who support Constitutional ideas about limited and restrained government.)
These are exactly the opposite of the things fascists do.
So this leaves our friends on the left with a couple of problems. First, they want to call the President a fascist, even though he doesn’t act like one. Secondly, they’d like to defend Antifa, who actually do act like fascists, because Antifa shares their goals and ambitions.
Antifa and folks on the left have something in common: they both want more government authority over the economy and our day-to-day lives. They both want a vastly larger government with vastly more regulatory authority. Antifa folks call it communism; our friends on the left call it the Green New Deal and a bunch of other happy names for Big Big Government. What they have in common is that they want more regulation, more control of the economy, more restrictions. (“For our own good, of course.” “Yes, of course.”)
What a conundrum! What does a Man of The Left do, when the people acting like authoritarian goons are actually on his own side and share his vision of Endless Government Organized on Eco-Friendly Scientific Socialist Principles?
Relax, Man Of The Left! You have a powerful ally in the press.
Since most people don’t know anything about Antifa, and since most of our mainstream media is effectively a branch of the Democratic Party and so not interested in talking about Antifa except in happy, fanciful terms, most people don’t know that the Antifa clowns are violent, ignorant, intolerant, hard-left goons who like to beat people up for expressing the wrong ideas. That leaves our friends on the left free to talk up Antifa as the good guys, and to sell us a story that it’s “the police” and “white supremacists” who are causing all the violence, looting, arson, murder, etc., that’s currently afflicting our cities.
Antifa, of course, was wearing masks long before the coronavirus hit; masks were their trademark, that and beating people up. Antifa thinks it’s okay to intimidate and hurt people who express ideas Antifa doesn’t like. That’s what Antifa does. It’s also what fascists do.
That’s what authoritarianism looks like.
What fascism and authoritarianism don’t look like is deregulation, reducing the federal government’s control of local schools, lowering taxes, appointing judges who want to limit government authority, and supporting free speech and free markets.
This is a very inconvenient truth, if you’re a liberal fascist.
Published in Elections
I prefer to refer to 21st century Progressives as totalitarian, not authoritarian, because of their belief in the need to control not only the government, but all the institutions of society, along with the actions, speech, and thoughts of all individuals. Everything is political. There is no distinction between the personal and the political.
Calls to mind “Liberal Fascism” by Jonah Goldberg, back before he went off the TDS cliff.
Henry,
You are on the target. Not only is fascism totalitarian empowering total control of the economy and people but it firmly believes in eugenics. Eugenics is racism on steroids. Of course, if the Progs were to face the real definition of fascism they might find themselves looking in the mirror. After all, Woodrow Wilson, the first Progressive President, was a firm believer in eugenics and brought back racial policies to the federal government that had been abandoned after the Civil War.
It is amazing that some otherwise highly intelligent and sophisticated people have a total blind spot in this. NAZI stands for National Socialist German Workers Party. The Progs never take the hint.
Regards,
Jim
Pretty sure, at its core, bands of people attacking those who don’t agree with them fits
Right?
If the Antifa jerks wore brown shirts instead of black masks, everyone would get it.
What, you’re thinking people know history?
“Now who’s being naive?”
Nonsense, KE. There’s a reason Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is the most-read book in the English language.
Just in America, or is that including other countries?
If people were that smart, they wouldn’t be so easily fooled by antifa. “No, no, we’re not brown-shirts! Can’t you see? We’re wearing BLACK!!! That proves we’re different!”
Everywhere. Even in California. Go check the stats. It outsells the Bible. And Harry Potter.
Honest.
Perhaps most-bought. Can you prove most-read? It seems like the kind of thing people might buy to put on a shelf to impress visitors.
And if people are reading books, including that one, why are they still so dumb?
No, I can’t prove most-read. In fact, I can absolutely guarantee that nothing I said about the book and its popularity is true. The idea is absolutely preposterous.
Well, bottom line, even if it’s sold 30 million copies since it first came out, that’s less than 10% of the current US population. Not including those who may have read it but have since died in the intervening 60 years.
Here’s a line from Arthur Koestler’s piece, The Fraternity of Pessimists, which appeared in the New York Times Magazine in November 1943:
Replace the words “Nazism’s New Order” with “Antifa’s ideas” or “BLM’s antiracism” and the sentence is still true.
The Left is now burning copies of the Harry Potter books. Now, who else was famous for burning books? Oh, yeah:
Somehow I don’t thing Rowling would mind all that much if they keep buying copies of her books, and burning them.
Meanwhile in West Coast cities there are mobs of BLM people forcing others to make gestures and say slogans of their movement under threat of violence. I know what “fascist” means and they do not–purposefully.
Ah, I see the problem. You’re not differentiating between bad fascism and good fascism!
Antifa is “doing fascism right”
And BLM is “doing racism right.”
As other have noted, when they have book burning, sooner or later they get around to burning authors, too.
Exactly! And that is entirely the point, though they’ll never admit it to anyone, including themselves.
Antifa is not fascist. Antifa is more Communist.
Fascism and Communism are both terrible, but they’re different.
By the way, when you say “shirts”, you mean “shorts”, of course. Footer bags, you mean?
Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.
(Where they burn books, they will end in burning human beings.)
— Heinrich Heine, 1823
Here’s a description of the core principles of Fascism (at least in its Nazi variant) by an acknowledged expert, Joseph Goebbels:
https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/haken32.htm
They’re really not.
They have a lot of similarities and some important differences. Basically, Communism is a bastard child of the Enlightenment, whereas Fascism is explicitly counter-enlightenment.
One characteristic of today’s Progs is that they are mostly not atheists of the scientific materialist variety; they tend to have a set of mystical beliefs in things such as astrology, magical crystals, homeopathy, and a conscious Gaia. More similar to the metaphysical orientation of the Nazis than that of classical Marxists.
Don’t confuse Nazism with fascism.
Yeah, yeah, I get it. You’re a bunch of wonks.
Fascists, socialists, communists, Nazis, Marxists — the street thugs don’t know or care. They’ve got their lists of demands and grievances, and what all the progressives and Antifa pansies and BLM hypocrite haters have in common is that they all want to ram their demands down our throats with the big stick of government.
You’re all welcome to geek out about it. I’m going to try to keep it simple.
I could have sworn narcissism was synonymous with fascism.
Are you absolutely sure narcissism and egoism have nothing to do with fascism?
*spoiler*
This is sarcasm.