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Don’t Think of It as a Contest Between Biden and Trump
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
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Yes, you are correct, our democracy is severely flawed and limited, and we should fix that. I haven't seen anybody say otherwise. Becoming fascist isn't going to help fix it.
The system is already fascist, we just get some benefits trickled down after the rich suck out almost the entirety of the fruits of our labor. Notice how republicans will magically get around half the votes no matter how much their demographics appear to be dying off.
Party leadership on both sides play all kinds of games to keep the balance of power, to keep voters scared of the other guys, in order to maintain control of their own parties, but that system isn't infallible. Bernie almost won the primary, twice, and Trump actually did. If he weren't so abysmally bad at placating centrists liberals, he'd still be in the Whitehouse. I think that's a terrifying prospect, but also, both hopeful, and instructive. A true left-populist candidate, who respects the rule of law and democratic consent of the governed, once in office, would be almost impossible to remove.
Overall, your assessment of the current system isn't bad, but you are very wrong to describe that as fascist. It just isn't, definitionally, what "fascism" means. Not yet. Certainly, significant aspects of fascism have been put into place, or have been there since the beginning, but our current system is not, overall, at the bar of fascism, and saying it is cheapens the critique of, and warnings against, actual fascism. In the big picture, our current system is actually much more democratic, and further from fascism, than it was not that long ago, even though there have been some specific, and worrying, steps backwards.
Being vigilant against fascism is good. Being defeatist about it is not.
Two parties working together to carry out whatever they feel like (e.g. full support of genocide) against the will of the people (and having a media machine trying to convince people that it's what they want) isn't much different from having a single figurehead acting as dictator. In fact it allows for plausible deniability.
Would the Holocaust have been better if it was carried out between two political parties where you get to choose who carries it out? Vigilance against fascism should include being able to identify when a system is fascist in a roundabout way.