For fascists, "Wealth, infrastructure, and technology are useful things to have for wiping out large sections of your own population, but if poverty is the cost of racial purity they’ll make that trade every time." www.liberalcurrents.com/it-wasnt-fas...
Trump thinks he's the star of an action movie, and that's about as deeply as he's thought about the war in Iran - @caitlinmoriah.bsky.social www.youtube.com/shorts/RsXiB...
"Despite endless obfuscation, sanitizing, and sanewashing from the mainstream media, the debate on if we’re living though a resurgence of fascism is now over. And, honestly, it’s been over for some time. We are." www.liberalcurrents.com/it-wasnt-fas...
"Fascists just don’t care about economics. To them, it’s entirely secondary to the project of racial domination. They can sound vaguely ‘populist’ and anti-corporate at times, ruthlessly capitalist at others. But in reality they’re neither."
"'Liberals will always side with fascism over socialism, because facism protects capital' it is claimed. But both historically and today liberals never do this (conservatives often do). Nor, for that matter, do fascists always protect the interests of business elites"
"The socialist core is very much geared towards a critique of capitalism. Liberalism’s central themes allow more flexibility, but it is still clearly interested in economic structures(. . .). Fascism simply isn’t.
And you see this in practice: Fascists just don’t care about economics."
"Socialists are assuming that because equality is a core concept of theirs, defending inequality (and hence capitalism) must be a central and defining commitment of their opponents. But it isn’t. Their competitor ideologies simply do not hold the same concerns, but in reverse."
"Change is good when it is natural, when it occurs within the extra-human framework. Thatcher welcomed new industry, and intellectuals talked of spontaneous change and spontaneous order. (. . .)conservatives can be very radical in reforming or destroying institutions that fall outside of that order"
"A conservative wants to preserve some parts of the existing order and reform others, a fascist wants to overturn all of it. ( . . .) conservatives may be violent, fascists must be violent. (. . .) For these reasons conservatives can exist within democracy, fascists cannot."
"Conservatives are not as motivated by individual rights as liberals, or welfare as socialists, and their commitment to the moral equality of persons is, at best, dubious. But they do have some limiting principles." www.liberalcurrents.com/it-wasnt-fas...
"However one thinks of conservatism, what the hell happened to it? Even if you go with an ‘unveiling’ model, in which it was fascism all along, why now? Why was the mask so suddenly and dramatically dropped?" www.liberalcurrents.com/it-wasnt-fas...
"Conservatism is not merely dead, fascism has paraded the body around, peeled off its face, and is wearing it as a mask for its own amusement as it does a demented little dance." www.liberalcurrents.com/it-wasnt-fas...
"Trump’s 2016 primary win did not just happen—it was the capstone of a decade of hard work by a radicalising activist base to discipline and replace the leadership of the Republican Party. Fascists have fought—and fought hard—to undermine conservatism from within."
"The story of the last ten years seems to violate the known constants of our political universe. Its primary character, Trump, appears then to exist outside of them. People talk of the man as a sort of political wizard. Being inconceivable makes it feel inevitable."
"Liberals—at least some of us—proved they actually believed in their creed. Fascists have always assumed that we don’t. That anti-racism, for instance, was entirely a sort of elite social posturing. That individual rights were a piety no one would actually put their body on the line for."
Today @caitlinmoriah.bsky.social and @trentrichardnelson.bsky.social talk with @jeffwaldorf.bsky.social about the conflicting, nonsensical, and sometimes straight-up Orwellian justifications provided by US politicians for initiating a war of aggression against another country in the Middle East.
"Many have a strong instinct that if fascism is ever fully defeated conservatism will rise from the ashes. That some people will always yearn for a Great Chain of Being and something will scratch that itch. Maybe. I’m honestly skeptical." www.liberalcurrents.com/it-wasnt-fas...
"I think there is a feeling that there will always be a force resembling conservatism, so it is our responsibility to ensure it’s a mostly benign thing. The assumption itself is a conservative one that liberals have no reason to accept." www.liberalcurrents.com/it-wasnt-fas...
Important and correct by @polphilpod.bsky.social Toby Buckle at @liberalcurrents.com Liberal Currents.
The "all conservatism was always already Trumpist and fascist" line is ultimately a way to normalize Trump, and should be resisted.
www.liberalcurrents.com/it-wasnt-fas...
"Our goal should be to recruit people to liberalism, not to resurrect the center right. There are a lot of people on the periphery of the Trump movement who can be talked out of it, or who are apathetic who can be activated." www.liberalcurrents.com/it-wasnt-fas...
"What if—and this is me being optimistic, but just imagine with me for a minute—across developed countries polarization stayed, but the contours changed to 70/30 rather than 50/50? In this world, fascism would still exist, but be unable to win national elections."
"My view is that conservatism is meaningfully distinct from fascism. They have some similarities (both are regressive ideologies), and can sometimes pursue similar policies (both Trump and Bush started new wars in the middle east), but are ultimately different families of political beliefs."
"Mainline conservatism is dying. In the US and UK at least, it is dead.This has been destabilizing to be sure, but let us not waste too much sympathy on it. It caused many harms and ignored many more. We should not fight for a creed that could not fight for itself."
Conservatism is "The belief that there are aspects of how society is ordered that are beyond our control, that we did not make and cannot change. Underlying rules that we may deviate from, but only to our detriment. We can, however, recognise them—they are permanent, predictable, and preservable."
"Unless we imagine a systematic severing of children from parents, birthright citizenship in the historical context of free immigration implies a constitutional regime of open borders." www.liberalcurrents.com/abolition-am...
"They are projecting their desire for a restrained, demilitarized foreign policy onto Trump, who is in fact hyper-militarizing American foreign policy… The White House’s own executive order shows that the rebranding is about readying the country for war, not reeling it in." (from September)
Considering Markwayne Mullin’s past as an MMA fighter, some additional relevant thoughts
www.liberalcurrents.com/merry-christ...
Pervert Politics: Trumpism’s Body Obsessions:
How Republicans went from the party of prudes to the party of perversion.
By @aselrod.bsky.social:
🧾 www.liberalcurrents.com/pervert-poli...
From Trump to Noem to Hegseth and beyond, we are being governed by a party of perverts who are set on making their own psychosexual derangements into policy
www.liberalcurrents.com/pervert-poli...
