| Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism#%22Fascist%22_as_a_pej... > it's explicitly totalitarian and doesn't tolerate dissent or different opinions; everybody needs to be loyal to the leader, or is considered an enemy of the people. Right, which is most echo-chambres. Under a psychological definition, we're all fascists. An echo-chambre is totalizing (ie., everything is subsumed under the ideology), it has unimpeachable leadership, and no dissent is considered. Try r/feminism or r/conservatism. Fascism isn't an ideology in the modern "world view" or psychological sense... that's the impact of psychoanalysts being, somehow, the main people humanities students turned towards for explanations of the 20th C. The right people to turn to are political scientists, wherein fascism is an ideology in the sense of "state apparatuses, doctrines, institutions, practices, economic conditions", etc. In which case Stalinism wasn't fascism, nor was Nazism. Nor were many things. Fascism quickly became a term of abuse in tabloids of the 40s, esp. in america. And here we are today with everybody being fascists. There is no deep connection between the "psychological fascism" that is of rhetorical interest to the left, and the state apparatuses of fascist italy. This connection is a pseudo-scientific one from the psychoanalysis of the 50s and 60s; and it is a duplicitous and alarmist one from the left today. |
Echo-chambers might have the feature that they don't like dissent, but that doesn't mean everybody prefers echo chambers over open discourse, nor does it mean people in an echo chamber want to apply their echo chamber to the entire country, with a great leader in charge that everybody needs to be loyal too.
So no, you're wrong about that. Not everybody is automatically a fascist, and the word does have meaning. There's a very clear difference between fascist leaders + followers, and the people who disagree with them.
And yes, there are differences between Nazism Stalinism and Italian Fascism, but they have a lot more in common with each other than with liberal ideologies. Not every liberal is liberal in the same way, not every environmentalist has exactly the same priorities, not every conservative is conservative about the same things. Similarly, it's not so strange for there to be multiple interpretations/implementations of fascism. They may differ in details, but they're clearly related.