(2018-11-04) Haque America's Collapsing Into Fascism Because Americans Still Don't Understand Fascism

Umair Haque: America’s Collapsing Into Fascism Because Americans Still Don’t Understand Fascism. That part of you that objects, “but this isn’t fascism fascism,” does so because somewhere, probably in grade school, and then all over again in college, you were taught the definition that every American is taught. Fascism is the “concentration of state and economic power.”

this definition — “the concentration of state and economic power,” or those like it — has no racial or ethnic component, nor one of violence, whatsoever. Isn’t that, well, strangely, bafflingly ignorant?

Fascism is best seen this way. A person who believes that there is a hierarchy of personhood — that some people are more human than others, and some fall below the threshold of being people entirely — and furthermore, that that hierarchy should be institutionalized, is a fascist. (Tribal)

Why were Americans taught that socialism is fascism — when in fact the diametrical opposite is true?

But that creates a very big problem for America. If that definition is true — you are welcome to think about whether it is — then America was a fascist country for a very long time, and many Americans have always been welcoming to fascist ideas, because the central organizing principle of American life was just such a hierarchy of personhood — and its institutionalization. Slavery and segregation, after all, was exactly all this, wasn’t it?

Socialism, in the way of public goods, is the one thing that, by equalizing societies, prevents and mitigates fascism.

So what was likely to happen when fascism began to rear its ugly head again in America — driven by a sense of frustration, the very first time after the end of segregation that the economy stagnated?