• Cethin@lemmy.zip
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    3 months ago

    Which dictionary are you reading? A key component of fascism is a dictatorship. You can argue about controlling oppositional voices or segmentation of society in the US, but a dictatorship is pretty core to fascism in any definition I’ve seen. And yeah, our voting system sucks that still doesn’t make it a dictatorship.

    • octopus_ink@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      Which dictionary are you reading?

      I like Umberto Eco on this one. I’m in my 50s. We’ve checked many of these boxes throughout my life, and for some others you can point to various moments in our history, many of them recent. Certainly enough to satisfy the meme.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism#Umberto_Eco

      https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html

      • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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        3 months ago

        Yeah, those are traits of fascism, not a definition of fascism. Anyway, yeah the US has met many of them throughout its history. So has almost every other nation. The term is useless if you just call everyone fascist. The US has not met most of them at any one particular time. You can’t just take that list and say some traits were met in this period, some others in this other period, etc. and then say they covered all the traits at some point in time so must be fascist. That’s not how that works.

    • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      I was talking about the forceful oppression of opposition. That is an element that has existed in the US for a long time.

      US has had no dictator yet but a president has much more power than a prime minister.

      If you consider fascism to be a spectrum, then US has always had these elements. Dictatorship is basically the end of said spectrum.