| > Immigration can totally be a problem, and voters in the western world increasingly ask their leaders to address it. Stop equivocating. I didn't say that opposing immigration = fascism, I said that identifying marginalized groups, pinning all of the nation's problems on those groups and then persecuting, victimizing, terrorizing anyone who looks like they belong to one of those groups - that is fascist. > Opposing socialism isn't "fascist" Again, stop equivocating. I didn't say that opposing socialism is fascist, I said "aggressively anti-socialist", as in, violent anti-socialist rhetoric. Similar to the previous point. > afaik the Trump admin has done nothing significant about it That's wholly detached from reality. The only reason he hasn't dismantled all of the social programs yet is because the courts have stepped in and intervened when he tried. See: USAID, withholding SNAP funding, Medicaid, the whole DOGE disaster. > Again, all of those measures are very superficial and nothing like what real fascism did in Italy or what Nazis did when they came to power. You can't reason just with outrage and headlines. Those are the core qualities of fascism. I get it, you don't like being called a fascist so you sea-lion about the differences to distract from the overwhelming similarities. Even when Trump dismantles the judicial branch, people like you will maintain that the US isn't fascist because people aren't speaking Italian like they did in fascist Italy, or German like they did in nazi Germany. I feel comfortable saying this because we're not just disagreeing on whether the US is fascist right now and there's still room to have argue there, but we're disagreeing on whether Trump has a fascist agenda and whether he's actively working to transform the US into a totalitarian regime following the fascist playbook, which he absolutely is. |
I still don't understand why "aggressively anti-socialist" policies are fascist. Fascism is itself a branch of socialism (Mussolini was one, in France the fascist leader Jacques Doriot was one as well, for instance). Being a totalitarism, it aims at engulfing every aspect of the daily life, which means supporting socialist policies (similar to communism, another totalitarism).
Authoritarian regimes in the 30´s that were "aggressively anti-socialist" weren't fascist. Franco or Salazar are relevant examples, even thought today they would be categorized as such, since you guys seem now to have only single word left to designate populist or authoritarian regimes then don't like.
Trump lacks deeply indeed the socialist aspect of fascism; it would likely be better defined as plutocratic cesarism, even though he did not make a coup (yet).