,
12 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
And by the way, kids, AOC's new brainstorm about using political power to punish corporations that don't conform to her whack-job ideology is not "socialism."
The correct term is fascism.
The correct term is fascism.
It's sadly necessary to repeat this lesson because "fascism" is so routinely abused as a catch-all devil word, an insult for any idea the speaker doesn't like (or, these days, wishes to ban or violently suppress) but fascism is a distinct ideology.
Historians argue about this or that flavor of fascism, people are understandably obsessed with its horrifying side effects, but at its core fascism is precisely the idea AOC endorsed: capital is privately owned but controlled and directed by the State. and its ideologues.
Fascism overlaps with socialism, and most of the actual fascists from the early 20th Century described themselves as socialists, but you can have socialism without fascism. "Socializing" costs and benefits can be done without direct political control of industries.
Socialism and fascism are both horrible authoritarian ideologies, and it's very easy to slide from socialism into fascism, as AOC demonstrates with her characteristic thoughtlessness. Every frustrated socialist is one step away from "discovering" the power of fascism.
The soil from which the bloody evils of fascism grow is that tension between political supremacy and private industry. To put it simply, fascism is ravenously hungry for scapegoats - individuals and companies it can blame for the failures of infallible fascist leadership.
Maintaining fascist power demands rigid obedience to the dominant Party, which can never be seen as deserving of blame for the catastrophic outcome of its policies. As we saw across the bloody history of the 20th Century, hatred is the fuel that drives fascist engines
And if you pump enough hatred into socialism - enough arrogant self-righteousness, enough stubborn insistence that all opposition to socialist ideas is evil and selfish - it easily turns into outright fascism.
The line is crossed when frustrated socialists cannot secure enough political power and tax money to finance their vision for the nation. They can't win enough elections. Too many people disobey their commands and refuse to pay what socialists think they "owe."
So the next logical step is to bypass elections and constitutional restraints on power. You force private capital to do what you want by threatening dire consequences, ranging from government persecution to mob action. You let the capitalists know they will be HATED and PUNISHED.
If the socialists can put enough muscle behind these threats, frightened capitalists are likely to comply. It doesn't take anything like a "majority" to get that kind of muscle. A motivated minority convinced of its righteousness and without scruples against compulsion will do.
How do you develop that muscle? How do you make the sound of marching feet so loud that private citizens obey without agreeing, give you power beyond the law and authority beyond elections? Fascism offers the ideal toolset, and the tools have "socialism" stamped on them. /end
