One more point. I think the name for this concept is simply bound to produce a confused debate for the simple reason that the concept of fascism has been elaborated for 80 years, but there were once mass movements who called themselves fascists. The move that is being attempted here is to label a movement that largely rejects the moniker with it anyway. It is much like the GOP attempt label Democrats as communists even though almost no Democrats call themselves that. The point is the historical smear for present political ends. That is why, in both cases, there is a strong hostility to historical analysis of these post-hoc charges.
Thank you Ben. I very much agree with this perspective, as someone with an MA focusing on the interwar years in Australia. I have even changed my level of alarm upwards regarding what happened on J6 (mainly because the hearings convinced me that Trump himself tried to do something there, rather than the real estate agent riot it first seemed), but do not think that impacts the fascism debate. We have a history of violent and lawfare attacks on democratic elections in our own history from Bush v Gore to the post-Reconstruction state coups, to a recent trend of the Texas GOP simply legislating away city powers that are ever used for progressive ends. These things are terrible and people should absolutely be alarmed about them.
But the fascism debate is about people who want to say Hitler in a political debate and still have the self conception of being the “adults in the room.” Some academics who love going on MSNBC are more than willing to play the “expert” in this charade (Tim Snyder jumps to mind). It is very silly. Thomas Zimmer recently did a two part essay where the first part concedes that he doesn’t think fascism is a crucial analogy but that Trumpism is indeed very bad. The second part attacks your camp for supposedly going easy on Trump. But the evidence for that is that you don’t agree with the fascism analogy. Your sin is simply depriving some MSNBC boomers of a talking point referencing WWII.
Nietzsche May (or may not) have been a fascist, but he did make the useful point that “only that which has no history is capable of being defined”. As Wittgenstein elaborated, the meaning (semantics) of words is downstream of their use (pragmatics). This is a huge problem for any project of bringing the tools of traditional analytical philosophy - of the kind that aggressively ignores both these observations - to political discourse.
It seems like you ultimately recognize this because you abandon any attempt to specify necessary and sufficient conditions that would apply to the regimes and movements of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and the pre-war KKK (although I know narrow-concept users of the word “fascism” who would deny it applies to the latter two). Instead you talk of draining the word of its emotional force which is definitely about pragmatics, not semantics.
The substantive question is whether parts of the Sanders-aligned socialist or social democratic left (although not the man himself) are complacent in a way analogous to the KPD, the SPD and the bourgeois liberals all were in the last years of Weimar. For the KPD, this was out of sectarianism. Which definitely feels like a thing in the contemporary American socialist left.
One more point. I think the name for this concept is simply bound to produce a confused debate for the simple reason that the concept of fascism has been elaborated for 80 years, but there were once mass movements who called themselves fascists. The move that is being attempted here is to label a movement that largely rejects the moniker with it anyway. It is much like the GOP attempt label Democrats as communists even though almost no Democrats call themselves that. The point is the historical smear for present political ends. That is why, in both cases, there is a strong hostility to historical analysis of these post-hoc charges.
Thank you Ben. I very much agree with this perspective, as someone with an MA focusing on the interwar years in Australia. I have even changed my level of alarm upwards regarding what happened on J6 (mainly because the hearings convinced me that Trump himself tried to do something there, rather than the real estate agent riot it first seemed), but do not think that impacts the fascism debate. We have a history of violent and lawfare attacks on democratic elections in our own history from Bush v Gore to the post-Reconstruction state coups, to a recent trend of the Texas GOP simply legislating away city powers that are ever used for progressive ends. These things are terrible and people should absolutely be alarmed about them.
But the fascism debate is about people who want to say Hitler in a political debate and still have the self conception of being the “adults in the room.” Some academics who love going on MSNBC are more than willing to play the “expert” in this charade (Tim Snyder jumps to mind). It is very silly. Thomas Zimmer recently did a two part essay where the first part concedes that he doesn’t think fascism is a crucial analogy but that Trumpism is indeed very bad. The second part attacks your camp for supposedly going easy on Trump. But the evidence for that is that you don’t agree with the fascism analogy. Your sin is simply depriving some MSNBC boomers of a talking point referencing WWII.
Nietzsche May (or may not) have been a fascist, but he did make the useful point that “only that which has no history is capable of being defined”. As Wittgenstein elaborated, the meaning (semantics) of words is downstream of their use (pragmatics). This is a huge problem for any project of bringing the tools of traditional analytical philosophy - of the kind that aggressively ignores both these observations - to political discourse.
It seems like you ultimately recognize this because you abandon any attempt to specify necessary and sufficient conditions that would apply to the regimes and movements of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and the pre-war KKK (although I know narrow-concept users of the word “fascism” who would deny it applies to the latter two). Instead you talk of draining the word of its emotional force which is definitely about pragmatics, not semantics.
The substantive question is whether parts of the Sanders-aligned socialist or social democratic left (although not the man himself) are complacent in a way analogous to the KPD, the SPD and the bourgeois liberals all were in the last years of Weimar. For the KPD, this was out of sectarianism. Which definitely feels like a thing in the contemporary American socialist left.