Sounds like a great idea in theory, except who gets to decide who’s a fascist and who isn’t? Even here in Germany, where we have a sad and shameful history with fascism, it is very difficult to exclude a party from the democratic process, and while that is sometimes exasperating, it is generally considered a feature.
Remember, in the US, to various people, anyone who is even slightly to the left of their own position is a “communist”, and/or anyone who is even slightly to the right of their own position is a “fascist”. In a working democracy, the fascists are allowed to run – as their own separate party, not as an internal faction of one of the two only parties that matter – but so few people vote for them and their noxious positions that in the end they don’t carry a lot of political weight. The way the US system is set up, where in various places the only serious choice is between the fascist and the person from the other big party who in Europe would probably pass for a center-right moderate conservative but in the US is made out to be left of Stalin, no wonder fascists do get elected (if only by 50.5% of the vote).
Well, people who advocate for fascist policies are in fact fascists. You want to put certain people in camps, or ban them from receiving care that they need, or ban women’s rights, or make sure certain people can’t vote, ban religions other than your own, you advocate for installing a dictator, etc, etc… then that’s fascism…
I know it might seem a huge mystery what is or isn’t a fascist, but I promise it’s not. There is a huge literature on this topic, facts we can point to. It’s not some gray zone here. But of course, we can’t “trust” those experts, apparently, because they are just Stalinlist, left wing “radicals”… which, no… they are not. And just because people claim certain things are “communism” doesn’t make it so. Again facts matter.
So we can stop “both siding” this at any point, start to trust the people who spend their lives studying this stuff, and stop pretending like it’s difficult to sort this stuff out, when we have ways to figure it out…
Yes, sure. But in a reasonable modern pluralistic democracy these are fringe positions and hardly anybody votes for them (certainly not enough people to give them political weight). If you are in a place where views like that can actually command a majority of votes cast, i.e., they represent the political mainstream, then you have a problem that probably won’t go away if you prevent these views from showing up on the ballot.
This is partly a solved problem though. You put rights in a constitution so that it takes more than a simple majority to take them away, and you require that elected leaders uphold the constitution.
I think you may have put your finger on the problem. We have a major party calling openly for ending the constitution and replacing it with authoritarian dictates. And 35-40% or so are perfectly ok with that.
The advantage of that approach is also that instead of “no fascists” you can decree “no parties with unconstitutional aims”, which is a lot easier to nail down and also covers cases which don’t involve fascists (think, e.g., “leftist revolutionaries” or people who want to impose Sharia law).
This is incidentally what we do here in Germany – but even so the bar is fairly high. Some years ago there was an attempt to outlaw the neo-Nazi “NPD” party which failed on procedural grounds; these days the NPD is, for the most part, politically insignificant which is why nobody seems to want the trouble and expense of having another go at them.
And if we have to keep getting more explicit in protecting those rights, we can do so. These are entirely man-made legal documents, and they should be used to protect basic rights. I think we can figure out what those rights should be, and the kind of language to use to make the protection of those rights explicit. and yes, eventually, we will need to change and improve them, as our sense of what is a human right evolves. The right to advocate for forms of genocide is not in fact a human right.
If they REALLY want to live in a white supremacist, Christian patriarchy, they can move to Russia or Hungary… They don’t get to impose their bullshit on the rest of us, and I’m tired of hearing people defend that shit on the grounds that it’s “democratic”… the fuck it is…
Yep. Fascism basically boils down to “might makes right”. The political version of the bully jocks ruling over the rest of the school that we remember from high school days. And yes, Biden’s immediate predecessor was a fascist, who truly believed that bullies should rule, as long as he was the chief bully.
Some states with multiple party systems have rules in place to curb fascist tendencies, mostly following Karl Popper’s rule that free societies can only remain free if they ban those who are against that very freedom. The fascists can be banned if it can be proven that they are actively working against the constitution of the government—a high hurdle to clear, because you have to be sure before you “kill” a political party, but one that can be cleared.
