While I'm aware that it's popular to assume that there's no difference between the Republicans and Democrats as they are both liberals, but if Democrats are liberals, Republicans based on the rhetoric and their on-the-ground operatives, they are pretty much close to fascist as you can get. Hell, even Ron Paul said so.
They have a philosophy that vilifies the meekest among us. Their strategy is to build more prisons, criminalize being an immigrant or speaking Spanish. They demonize the poor and minorities as being on welfare to score points with the base. Hey, vilify gay people as attacking their family values and vilify religious minorities such as atheists and Muslims as not being real Americans.
They are anti-intellectual as fuck, Santorum said "What a snob!" at the idea of everyone having a chance to go to college. Women are baby factories to them. They want to strip all of the hard fought for rights to abortion and birth control from women. Anyone who deviates from the norm is a prime target for bullying. You bet you can call them fascist.
They are also unapologetic and blatantly corporatist. They'll bail out the banks long before they would ever let a more bottom up stimulus pass. They would rather enrich the interest of the insurance industry than guarantee that eveyrone has even a barely symbolic modicum of access to health care. In circumstances where corporatism won't fly, they talk about small businesses when inside the beltway culture "small business" means Walmart." They're anti-union to the core and against the right to organize workers for collective bargaining.
When they were in power, they were the ones who really went gung-ho for any aggressive foreign policy. They reject the idea of internationalism in favor of unilateralism. The party has been calling for our withdrawal from the united nations since the 50's. The Tea Party made veiled and not so veiled threats to violently overthrow the government if the 2010 race didn't go their way.
And yes, I realize the Democrats are a weak opposition to this with many to this with many of the people with D's next to their names representing us being puppets for the same corporate bucks to keep their jobs, but the rhetoric coming from the Republicans is much more fascist. Hell, Chomsky says the Democrats are better than the alternative at least.
Then again, that stuff seems to be just right-wing asshole things. Fascism is more specific than that. Fascism is just a particularly nationalist form of liberal politics used by capital when facing the crises over overgrowing national boundaries. At best, the republican party draws on the same public sentiment that Neo fascists try to, they're just more amenable to present day global capitalism and thus more attractive to the conservative mass that sees nazi-style fascism as just another type of socialism or something.
Fascist ideology is actually fairly coherent in practice, American conservative ideology and the success of the republican party relies on a working class false consciousness that is really pretty unique and more complex.
"the Anatomy of Fascism" by Roberto O. Paxton:So Republicans basically. Then again, all this is for nothing as a good rule of thumb is that anything and everything is Hitler.
"Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."
Except Stalin. Stalin is Stalin.
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