Mastodawn

The basic reason I think it's worthwhile to push back on the "America has always been fascist" talking point is that it creates the impression of a sort of acausal, inevitable present. But America's current fascism has been the culmination of work by a surprisingly small number of groups and people, with plans and goals and means, which often enough we can identify. And that means we can understand it and fight it from a position of understanding.

America's anticorruption laws had to be totally fucked to get here, and they were, on purpose. America's election laws had to be totally fucked to get here, and they were, on purpose. Etc etc. The basic premise of pluralistic democracy embodied by a post Civil Rights era US has been under attack basically since it was born, and if America was always just like this the fascists wouldn't have needed to do all that.

That hardly redeems the many failures and inequities of the US as the height of its democratic health, but we can still sensibly distinguish one thing from another

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Tiota Sram 13h ago

@PallasRiot okay, I kinda agree, except I think there are also reasons to push against the "America was great before the fascist Republicans for into power narrative, and to talk about how the US has been a fascist/fascist-equivalent project in important ways since the start, because if people don't come out of this crisis with an understanding that the problems go *much* deeper than Trump, we'll be right back in it in a few years or decades.

From the perspective of the hundreds of Native tribes the US genocided (but who it's important to note are still around today; genocide is never fully successful), the US has always been no different in effect than a fascist invasion. Same goes for the slaves, until the (soon-to-be first?) Civil War. The cherished narrative of the US as a beacon of goodness with more freedom, opportunity, and fairness than other places was only ever intended to apply to some people. The slightly-less-odious narrative of an "imperfect" project that allows for improvement through struggle (implied is: unlike other places/systems) likewise serves to subvert outright opposition into reform movements which do sometimes make things better but which can never fix the deep structural problems and will always leave certain groups facing unjust death and oppression at US hands. No matter how much "progress" is made, we still have atrocities and an oppressed underclass. The illusion that reforms within the system could fix this and that this isn't how the system was designed to function is just that: an illusion, and it serves to insulate the system from criticism.

Trump is really making a run for it, but Jackson (defied the supreme court to openly commit genocide) is still a worse president, and while bombing a couple hundred children in Iran is horrific, a war crime, and in general an action deserving of lethal revenge, so was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that at least my history books tried to justify as a good thing.

So... I agree there's usefulness in distinguishing the horrors of democracy from the horrors of fascism and potentially we could even prefer the horrors of democracy and spend some effort to go back to just those horrors. But I really worry that the "America only recently slid into fascism" line is too often spoken by people who would really like to get back to brunch amidst the less-visible and more-contained-to-a-smaller underclass horrors of democracy. (I do know from following you that you're not in that group.)

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Violet Madder

@tiotasram @PallasRiot

The USA was founded on values that were deeply, inherently fucked to start with-- regulations and democracy were never going to last on such rotten foundations.

"All men are created equal" sounds cool, but what they really meant was "Rich, white, land-owning males are more equal than others." and nobody else got to vote.

They overthrew monarchy because they didn't like the idea that the aristocracy are inherently superior human beings due to the arbitrarily divine virtue of their bloodlines-- instead they established a "meritocracy" entitled to rule by divine virtue of their supposedly not so arbitrary wallets.

Abolishing slavery sounds good, but what the 13th Amendment really meant was, "Slavery is still totally fine for anybody we decide isn't a real person" which is no abolition at all.

The corruption and evil keeps getting repackaged and stuffed into a fresh tin that says "new and improved we promise" on it but still has the same old rotten crap at the bottom.

The Founders were slave-owning genociders who believed democracy was far too dangerous to just let loose without guardrails (the electoral college for just one example) to stop us rabble from unseating the elite. THOSE safeguards stay real fuckin solid while the good-sounding parts of the Constitution and other regulations and checks and balances get treated like so much toilet paper.

As far as the indigenous peoples and imported slaves were concerned, the Nazis won and we're all speaking German right now.

Capitalism, racism, and patriarchy are baked into the fundamental blueprints. Mere reforms can't fix that.