Sure, I am trying to tighten up the category of what I think a fascist is. Guilty as charged.
I just think when you think about fascism as an impulse or a tendency and ground it in things like a the desire for strong leadership, the fear of social chaos and disorder, the resentment of perceived enemies and outsiders, and the longing for a sense of national or ethnic identity and purpose, you can kind of make sense of the apparent contradictions in someone like Gabbard, Trump or Bannon.
Basically all intellectualism boils down to just trying to formulate better categories, ultimately.
In other words, I’m trying to set aside the idealistic frame in which most political science tries to operate and say: guys, we’ve learned a lot of about human nature and how it operates in political economies, so there might be a more useful framing for understanding the apparent ideological contradictions we see … which are only contradictions in the idealist notions of these ideologies. But not contradictions at all, if reduced to core tendencies.
What I think is when you do this simple reframing, you can see the fascist golem for what it is. I actually think we try hard not to see it, and make bad mistakes trying to categorize it, because a synthesis like this has better explanatory power, in my view.
In conclusion, to me, fascism is better understood as an impulse in people to wield permanent political and economic power, by capitalizing on cynicism of polities, and using cultural control (propaganda) and pseudo-religious mythos to contain the political conservation in a cultural envelope, that leads to extreme depoliticization of the average member of the polity.
brockm / Mike Brock
npub1hy…wk7cp
2024-03-26 00:12:54
in reply to nevent1q…cdhz
Author Public Key
npub1hyqrsvl6hle8r5rc9cpshesm0mpcee75tgde4p5lhke5h83dyqqqdwk7cpPublished at
2024-03-26 00:12:54Event JSON
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