I think both trump and musk have taught us how fascist leaders gain power: they understand all press is good press, triggering the opposition tricks the opposition into more press, and the inability of influencers to put morals over clout means the fascist leader will never starve for attention from all directions, even the opposition will hitch their stars to a black hole for likes
One of my news feeds had 10...TEN... fluff articles on Musk 2 days ago. It's like they just hang out on Twitter drooling over every word he manages to spell.
@seachanger Fascist has a clear definition and I miss a lot of it on both of those toddlers. Populist and opportunist is fitting better.
(fascism: militarism, elitism, nationalism, racism, populism, Fuehrer-Cult, anti-liberalism, enlignment of all media)
@dr_jo_mue consider the wording of the original post though, for me what’s of note is the process by which trump and musk just get more and more famous despite being more and more abhorrent. not to say they are fascists at this point, I don’t think so, but for all of us who grew up incredulous about how prior fascists seemed to drop out of the sky fully formed, I think it’s instructive to look at the process through which it can happen.
Tom Nichols made what I think was an important point on Preet Bharara's podcast:
Words have meaning. What we're seeing from Trump, Musk, et al is authoritarianism. He said to be careful with use of the term "fascism" because we may genuinely need use of that word some day.
@robhon I agree it’s important to be accurate. I think in this post I’m considering how it often feels that POOF we now have fascism - Hitler, Mussolini etc do rise to power under certain conditions, and weren’t fextbook definition fascist until they were. Hopefully we can learn to see proto-fascism and understand how it happens in our own era. Would a president trump allow a governor desantis to persecute and execute? I think so
I think the problem is that people can become desensitized with the over use of the term. Then, when the shit really hits the fan, we're stuck saying the same thing we've always been saying without the capacity to effectively communicate the fact that we actually have moved fully into fascism.
As it is, these people are definitely authoritarian but not full-on fascist... yet.
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