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The thing about the GOP surrendering to Trumpism is that it's surrendering it's once sacred devotion to individual liberty. How? Trumpism being in fact fascism means that the GOP has now become a collectivist org.
Subordination to authority = loyalty to "nation."
Subordination to authority = loyalty to "nation."
What makes us a liberal democracy rather than an authoritarian one is our bedrock belief in individual liberty. This can be overemphasizes, as it has been for 40 years. Too much individualism, not enough republicanism imho.
That's republicanism with a small r (think civic virtue). As long as we have a nationalism committed to individual liberty, we've hard noticed that anyone was a nationalist.
But once it became collectivist, as it did after 2010, well, then fuck, everyone started notice this blood and soil bullshit.
In that kind of nationalism, the individual must be assimilated into the larger group or be eliminated. That to be explains why GOP policy often aims to kill people. Either you are with us or you deserve pain, humiliation and death.
It may sound odd but fascism was really a collectivist nationalism. IOW, it was anti-individual liberty, because *any* person, institution or symbol not in the sphere of the state cannot be tolerated.
Which brings me to another irony.
Which brings me to another irony.
The GOP, in surrendering to Trumpism, is not just a collectivist organization but a statist organization. Nothing can exist outside of the "nation"-state. That's what makes it totalizing or totalitarian.
To the extent that the GOP is an individualist organization it's that the Herrenvolk are more or less equal to each other.
All collectivist authoritarian countries rely on symbols. They must, because there is no common good for which individuals can set aside their self-interests and devote themselves to. There is no common language, only symbols.
It strikes me just now that the gun is a pretty good symbol.
You can't have a rational debate, because *any* debate threatens to undermine the potency of the symbol, to undermine the God-given nonsense re guns.
