You say that like they are different things…
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Well, it’s tough to characterize an entire political party as Neo-Nazi IMHO, especially if you consider every last person in the party to be one of its members. Certainly GOP House Reps appear to be leaning in that direction, although a huge amount of it in my opinion is their fear of alienating the base, losing reelection, and not being able to run the grifts any longer. FYI I don’t characterize every racist person as “neo-Nazi.”
Are the party leaders disavowing neo-nazis and pushing them out when found?
If not, I have no problem calling the entire party neo-nazi.
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Nazis are scared of alienating people?
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Those who fund, support and enable the fascists are, for want of a better term, fascists. If they don’t want to be associated with the various flavors of white supremacy embodied by the Republican Party, they could leave. But they won’t. Because they are.
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shrug I’m not as obsessed over the semantics as some people, I guess.
Are all racists neo-Nazis? I would submit that this is not the case, and there are dangers of painting too widely with that brush (I tend to argue this point somewhat regularly on bb, but find few others tend to grok what I’m getting at, so no need to debate it here once again ad infinitum, IMHO).
Are all people who voted for Republicans in 2020 fascists? I wouldn’t say that, but many of them are.
Now, the party itself? Is the GOP essentially a white power fascist party at this point? Yeah, more-or-less. But I’m not myself about to label 70 million Americans as neo-Nazi fascists. It may feel good and allow one to blow off some steam, but to me, it’s approaching the silliness of calling all Democrats “communists.”
I think a lot of folks on bb quickly forget that many Americans do not watch the news regularly, are not informed, and often, barely understand who and what they’re voting for. This core civics issue has been a problem for a long time, and it’s gotten us here.
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Not fascist but OK with fascists is, in practice and effect, fascist.
I’m not a racist, but if the KKK was lynching someone outside my house and rather than act I chose to turn up the volume on my television, then that would make me a racist by proxy.
So the non-fascist wing of the Republican Party are basically fascist by proxy. Of course, with history as a guide we know that they will be the first to go in the purity purges if the fascists win.
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But they make it so easy. Once again, if you find yourself marching under a Nazi flag…
You don’t have to, they already did. Even if someone is an extremely low-information voter, I don’t buy for one second that a single one of them didn’t hear him declare Mexicans rapists, his fondness for repeated sexual assault, his willingness to tear children out of their parents arms, his proclivity for sending federal troops in against peaceful protestors and gas clergy out of their church while simultaneously refusing to denounce neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
I hear what you’re saying about rushing to label large groups of people, but they dug this grave and knew exactly what they were doing.
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As usual, I appreciate your actually-thoughtful response.
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Something, something… Popper’s Paradox.
Also:
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That’s a remarkably appropriate image for the quote.
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Word.
Anyone wanting me to be ‘considerate’ to those who would happily kill me can go get fucked.
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I guess my question is, are we comfortable labeling the black people who voted for Trump and continue to be Republicans as white power neo-Nazis? That just utterly fails to make sense to me. I know I’m not comfortable making that statement. Under the sway of? Sure.
Perhaps this is a reductio ad absurdum argument, but last time I checked, 8 percent of black voters voted for Trump in 2020 – and that was a higher percentage than voted for him in 2016.
It does come down to semantics, but when you use the same word to describe a raging neo-Nazi who wears swastikas and attends Nazi and/or KKK rallies (literal ones) and say it’s the same thing as a black person who votes Republican, well, I find that very strange, unsettling, and not terribly useful at all.
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I don’t know what you’re “comfortable” with, but any Black person or BIPOC person who supported or enabled 45 and his cabal is very much Nazi/fascist adjacent in my book, and they are just as much as an existential threat to my life and well-being as their White cohorts.
This isn’t a game, this isn’t “a thought exercise”; this is reality and it has real life consequences and repercussions.
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As the expression goes, “What do you call Germans who supported the Nazis but disagreed with some of their positions? Nazis”
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Obligatory;
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Just went to grab that. The original blog post from which the quote comes, which I hadn’t seen until now:
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As a matter of political membership, if that’s what we’re considering, every member of the National Socialist Worker’s Party was a Nazi. Even the ones who just joined the party because they thought it necessary for their career advancement or whatever.
Not every Nazi was a full adherent to every facet of the NS party line as dictated by Hitler and the rest of the top brass, by far not every Nazi was a war criminal. But every Nazi was a Nazi.
IF we accept that the GOP, based on the words and deeds of Trump and the top brass, is a neo-Nazi party, then every Republican member, based on that analysis, is a neo-Nazi, just as much as every member of the NS was by definition a Nazi.
I do not assert that the GOP is a neo-Nazi party, but if we’re talking about the question “are Republicans neo-Nazis” that’s the question to be decided. If the answer is yes, then all Republicans are neo-Nazis, if it’s no then only those Republicans who are also members of some other neo-Nazi group are.
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