Posts one and two talked about the fascist mindset; how it's always around; and how harsh economic conditions makes it more influential among the sort of people susceptible to it. (Some people are more enthusiastic than others. A few Canadians might genuinely believe that Jewish overlords are trying to swamp "old-stock" citizens with swarthy immigrant hordes. Considerably more Canadians revere the Canadian Armed Forces and might support a political party that espouses brazen militarism.)
Fascism is a disgusting and dangerous political phenomenon. It's racism kills people. It's anti-democratic nature injures people and leads to national insanity. It empowers violent bullies. It leads to further economic chaos and war. So it is vital that when a society sees its fascist elements growing in power and popularity, that it seeks out the causes for this problem and tries to eliminate them. And this is precisely the problem with shit-libs. These are the partisan hacks who have reduced politics to a binary of Democrats versus Republicans in the USA and Liberals versus Conservatives here in Canada. Shit-libs look at the undeniably stupid and evil politics of the Republicans or the Conservatives and they decide that a binary of Good and Evil exists and since the Repugs and the Cons are evil then the Liberals and Democrats are good by default. They are good and everything they do is good. By definition. And any criticism of them is nefarious and illegitimate.
But the Democrats and the Liberals are justifiable targets for criticism as they serve the (by some measurements) more sophisticated capitalist exploiters. Most people are not fascist. Most people find fascists to be nasty, distasteful people. The majority of people are not afraid of immigrants and don't embrace anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Liberals and Democrats appeal to them for their votes. Most capitalists, economists and public policy thinkers do not believe in the fantasy-land of right-wing conservatives where a perfectly free market is possible and if only there were no taxes and no regulations (aside from whatever isolated tax-funded subsidies they might receive and specific regulations that each of them would like to see implemented) we would be living in a paradise of wealth creation. This being the case you will tend to see liberal parties like the Liberals and Democrats offering less economically insane policies. They won't blame poverty entirely on the moral failure of the poor but they won't do very much for the poor either. Liberal parties will accept that global warming is a reality but they won't do anything to mitigate it that would harm the fossil fuels sector or its investors.
Both Democrats, Liberals, as well as Blairite "Third Way" Labour partisans and other social democratic parties will target their appeal towards voters who embrace social diversity while right-wing "conservative" parties pander to voters who are afraid of diversity. But none of these parties will provide anything for their constituents if it would injure the interests of the oligarchy. And, for a long time now, we've entered the "Cancer Stage of Capitalism" where the opportunities for profits in a genuine economy of making things for people are harder and harder to find. The result has been financialization and parasitism which is "Killing the Host." The oligarchy is feeding off of the wealth that accumulated in the hands of the working classes during the Keynesian "Golden Age" and, as such, all of these mainstream policies are presiding over the continued immiseration of the electorate.
And it is shit-libs who deny this obvious truth. Case in point is the Democratic hack blogger "Driftglass" who goes along with attacks on Bernie Sanders and sneers at David Sirota while finding excuse after excuse after excuse for the grifting, egomaniacal, moronic Democratic Party leadership. I'm not too cool about anyone having a friendly discussion with racist shit-for-brains Ben Shapiro, but Matt Taibbi expresses the situation quite well at this substack post:
On Friday, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision granting women a constitutional right to abortion. This exact moment was supposedly why I owed my vote to the Democratic Party, and indeed the Supreme Court was on my mind when I pulled a lever for Hillary Clinton, a politician I couldn’t stand, in 2016.
Four years later, I voted neither. The Democrats between 2016 and 2020 not only lost my vote, but reveled in the idea that they didn’t need or want it, denouncing critics in all directions as traitors, white supremacists, and terrorists, no different from the “deplorables” who voted for Donald Trump. In that time they perfected an attitude of imperious condescension and entitlement so grating that at least half of America wouldn’t piss on someone like Adam Schiff if he were on fire. Then Friday happened and it was the same song everywhere: “See! We were right all along! You do owe us! And if you ever criticized us, this was your fault! ”
No, it wasn’t. Friday was the result of decades spent building a political project so incoherent, unsellable, and untrustworthy to ordinary people that in 2016 they chose Donald Trump over the person Barack Obama called the most qualified candidate in history. The justices who cast the critical votes Friday were picked by a man denounced by all of institutional America prior to election. All those voices were ignored. That total collapse in trust, not Jill Stein’s candidacy or Putin’s Facebook ads, led to Dobbs v. Jackson. Until Democrats reckon with that problem, which incidentally spread to every category of voter except white men in 2020 and looks poised to spread even more in the midterms, there will be more moments like this.
I'm getting tired of typing. I'll leave it here for now.
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