@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.)

@tiotasram I don't think that recognizing modern American fascism as a distinct thing is contradictory with recognizing the failures and atrocities of America's past, but "America has always been fascist" is a thought terminating cliché that prevents deeper analysis. America hasn't always been fascist, and even the past worst moments of American government were, for the most part, bad things other than fascism. And the modern fascism arose out of the failures and contradictions of bourgeoisie democracy, which is worth understanding because if we view fascism as this bedrock continuous force that America has always embodied then that fascism is less the product of movements and forces in specific context and more the product of some sort of vague pseudohistorical mythology.

"America has always been fascist" is what the *fascists* believe, and we're suckers if we buy it.

@PallasRiot I guess to me the value of seeing the continuity of American horrors between the various eras of democratic past and the fascist present comes with naming nationalism and states in general as the problem, which admittedly I did not do explicitly in my previous reply. I can also see how without doing that, "America has always been fascist" does not naturally connect with that conclusion for many and can instead reinforce the fascist ideal of inevitability. In fact while Jackson was definitely a kind of fascist, other American presidents that ordered atrocities very much weren't, and giving fascism credit for those atrocities misidentifies how to stop them.

I think that "American fascism is only a recent invention" can be just as much a blocker to clear thinking as "America has always been fascist."