Kudos to @Noahpinion for refusing this absurd assignment. And the @washingtonpost should be ashamed of itself for still, at this late date, failing to understand Trump & his movement. noahpinion.blog/p/against-stee…
As @whstancil has articulated so well, the whole appeal of fascism is that it releases you from any obligation to be decent or intellectually curious or coherent in your beliefs. It is a permission structure to wallow in your basest instincts, which is why it attracts assholes.
@whstancil When Trump tries to pitch his giant nationwide pogrom as a solution to the housing crisis, he is bullshitting. He's reverse engineering some plausible rationale for what he & his followers really want, which is to make brown people suffer.
@whstancil In other words, the real truth of Trump's housing policy is raw xenophobia & racism. By "steelmanning" that argument, the WA Post will be directly deceiving readers, leading them to believe that the real truth of the policy is some coherent set of "reasons."
@whstancil Whatever your thoughts on steelmanning in general, specifically steelmanning *fascism* is an intellectual sin. The point of fascism is to unleash raw ugly instincts -- that's why it is built around "rallies," ie, mobs where people can subsume their individual thought.
@whstancil Steelmanning an individual fascist policy, just in and of itself -- regardless of *how* you steelman it or what specifically you say -- is grossly misleading. There are not good, credible versions of these policies, because they were not derived from credible policy objectives.
@whstancil The "real truth" of fascism is the ugly instincts toward cruelty, persecution, resentment, and anti-intellectualism. The rickety "policy" they offer as a facade for those instincts is a pretense, a distraction. Steelmanning it makes it look otherwise. Shame on WaPo.
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