Honestly, I don't trust anyone who doesn't find stuff like the Pledge of Allegiance or the bombastic jingoism of the Fourth of July at least a little creepy.

But a lot of people -- cis-het white people specifically -- have internalized so much of this stuff as "normal" that political discussions are derailed by having to convince them that things are already bad for other people and that it's been happening for years.

"We have to fight fascism!"

Yes, but you don't even know what fascism looks like.

It's been here for a while. It just wasn't threatening you.

This is fundamentally the problem of arguing politics with white liberals: they prefer to believe fascism is a dramatic new thing that COULD happen, not an extension of existing systems with built-in inequity at every level.

Few are so tone deaf as to vocally support, e.g., sweeping up homeless people and throwing them in jail, but many accept it, and few seem to contemplate why homelessness even exists or why our only solutions are to criminalize and imprison people.

It just doesn't register.

@gwynnion
There's a certain gaslighting quality to liberals constantly browbeating everyone critical of Biden or Democrats in general by saying that it's either them or a fascist takeover.

Superficially, it's not *wrong.* In the ballot box, there are only two choices for all intents and purposes: dictatorship and not-dictatorship.

However, this conveniently ignores that the failure of Democrats to actually combat fascism is how we got to this point in the first place.