Conservatism has always been fascism
There’s a reason for the strong family resemblance
On The Daily Show Charlamagne tha God joked that the American people are unprepared for a second Trump Presidency because “Democrats have been crying fascist for so long!” He went on to say former presidential candidate Mitt Romney was unfairly maligned when he ran , and that today he is “a reusable grocery bag away from being a Democrat.”
This reduction of political positions to aesthetics is common among mainstream media figures. Downplaying the dangers posed by buttoned-up conservatism does fascism’s work for it.
However, the first rule of defining fascism is that you cannot define fascism.
In “Ur-Fascism” Umberto Eco states as much, writing
…fascism had no quintessence. Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions.
Eco manages to compile a list of 14 features that may or may not define fascism per se but which are so significant that “it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”
Among these features are “irrationalism” (alternative facts)", action for action’s sake (“Thinking is a form of emasculation”), disagreement being tantamount to treason (“You’re either with us or against us”), and contempt for the weak.
The last example comes from none other than Mitt Romney, just a few weeks before he would lose the 2012 presidential election to Barack Obama. The tail end of his remarks bear a closer look:
There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what... [My] job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.
Compare this with another conservative politician speaking about the domestic economy:
…a certain percentage of the population is proven superfluous in terms of statistics…Do they really believe that such a percentage of the national work force can lie idle for even ten, twenty, or thirty years without this idleness exercising any mental effect, without it leading inevitably to a spiritual change?
How much difference is there, in principle, between these two quotations?
Similarly, conservative “intellectual” Jordan Peterson makes similar arguments, claiming that 10–15% of the population is simply unfit to live in society. Knowing that cameras are on, he doesn’t say the quiet part out loud, but his audience is surely connecting the dots towards eugenics.
Donald Trump has repeatedly called for violence against his political opponents and has explicit aspirations to govern as a dictator if placed back into office. This is after failing to win the popular vote twice yet still claiming to be the voice of the American people.
Trump began his political career with xenophobic comments about Mexican immigrants, actually managed to stack the Supreme Court with misogynist judges to undo Roe v. Wade, relegating American women to broodmare status, and normalized white supremacist militias.
It’s not a question whether he deserves the label of fascist. The uncomfortable truth is that the modern Republican Party does too.
And that second “conservative politician”? It’s Adolf Hitler.
