[MomsAVoxell]

Or, just identify it as a personality - a facade, a facsimile, a fake being put in place to shield from perceived filth.

Anyone is capable of manifesting this personality. Anyone is also capable, of replacing it with something else. Calling someone a fascist tends to lock them in an immutable argument - calling out their fake personality, drops the shield and it turns to dust.

[scarecrowbob]

I think this view indicates that you have either had very few personal interactions with specific fascists or you don't have a very specific sense of how they are working.

[mindslight]

> Anyone is capable of manifesting this personality

Okay, but we have a large segment of the population currently manifesting this to some particular ends, wreaking untold havoc on our country. Do you have anything specific and constructive to say about how to undermine that movement?

Like sure, I'm receptive to the idea that fascists (autocratic authoritarians) don't really like being called fascists (autocratic authoritarians). But it's not like trying to meet the current crop in the middle has been working either. In fact I'd argue it's their own pattern of supporting whomever claims to uncompromisingly represent them, while actually utterly conning them, is exactly how they've gotten themselves into their situation. They seem hopelessly incapable of analyzing policies to foresee the outcomes, meaning that compromise is impossible - one could even propose policies that 100% match their professed desires, but that still wouldn't be good enough without also banging their partisan drum.

So ultimately the way I see it is that the useful idiots still flying their Grump flags in 2026 are never going to be reached regardless of what kid gloves we might use. So we just need to call it what it is so those still sitting on the fence might see what's at stake - including people who may still be assuaging their own conscience with preposterous labels like "conservative".

[MomsAVoxell]

> Do you have anything specific and constructive to say about how to undermine that movement?

Yes. You rub their face in it.

Dignity is the Lynch pin in modern American politics. Everyone demands their own bit of it.

What a "conservative" thinks is dignified versus what a "liberal" thinks is dignified, is of zero consequence when you have actually spotted the totalitarian-authoritarian personality, in either case, or indeed .. in any case.

There is a backlog of rejected dignity in American politics. It starts with war crimes prosecutions, because the public are in very serious danger of letting their war criminals get away with it. Totalitarian-authoritarianism can be spotted by the war crimes, crimes against humanity, and violation of human rights at massive scale.

What the war criminals do to other nation states, they eventually do to their own. ICE is an extension of crimes against humanity already committed, and now refined for local application.

And both sides are doing it.

So, you just simply don't let either side get away with it.

War crimes are the exact opposite of human rights - a government committing war crimes on other states is denying the human rights of its citizens, also.

So, constructively, if you want to do something about all the "useful idiots" consider whether you might be an idiot, or totalitarian, or authoritarian, or none of the above - particularly when it comes to the crimes of the state from which you gain survival.

An easy way to express the solution is to demand that there be no more secret, or unknown, war crimes. In this you will make your own local change, and it'll infect others, too ..

Remember, the wars are the reason for all the local human rights abuses at home. If there weren't a fetid desire to bomb cultures considered inferior into oblivion, the local culture would be being attended to in equitable ways.

"Your streets are ruined because your state profits more from ruining (other nations') streets than building them (locally)."

[mindslight]

I don't understand what you're concretely advocating.

I agree there is a strong thread of dignity, and lost dignity. But what I see is one of the main dynamics is they think Grump is going to restore their dignity. Any bit of their current situation that chafes against their sense of dignity is written off as a product of the Other. eg "Our streets are ruined because of the socialist liberals". If they connect it to war, it's the previous war by the other guy. In their mind, Grump is going to fix those streets some time as part of a longer plan. There is no connecting the billions of dollars recently spent on war to how it could have been directly spent on infrastructure instead.

Every thing that Dear Leader smashes or steals supports their dignity - because it shows Dear Leader is powerful, and Dear Leader is their leader, so his glory reflects on them. He speaks to them, telling them how special they are. What matters is not the effects from institutional damage 10-20 years out, but rather the immediate high from the wanton destruction.

The strongest instance of reality-in-their-faces I can think of is Alex Pretti. Here is someone who should check all of their boxes to empathize with - blue collar, white, male, gun owner, directly helping a fellow human. Summarily killed in a gangland-style execution by a group of government-empowered thugs. Their alarm bells should be going off - this could just as easily happen to me, a massive impingement on their dignity [0]. But yet the rationalizations abound for why Pretti should be slotted into the Other camp, and how such a thing could never happen to Them. And while there seemed to be some reflection and processing after this incident, it was more of a speed bump than any sort of rude awakening.

Never mind the countless other victims that only match their identity-archetype 80%, or less, and are thus written off in a heartbeat.

(also, and this is a tangential point that I don't want to dominate our conversation: given the strong reaction against the use of the F-word doesn't it seem like the characterization directly chafes at their dignity? they want to believe they are supporting some new and glorious revolution, rather than the same pathetic dead-end pattern we've seen before)

[0] I think this may be bumping up against the left vs right conception of dignity a bit, wherein the rightist view being killed isn't undignified per se. But it's hard for me to tell how much this is a real divide, and how much is just more rationalization. Presumably they wouldn't feel that way about their own child dying, even if "they are in a better place".