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Liberal Death Cult
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2025
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Flippanarchy
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This is some Marxist nonsense my dude. Societies don’t have inevitable endpoints.
Have all the western countries that have had rising fascist dictatorship movements in the past few years come about through some other unrelated means?
We’re clearly in a trend of rising authoritarianism, but that doesn’t mean it’s inevitable. Such waves have receded in the past and they likely will again.
I just don’t like these inevitability narratives because they deprive people of agency in shaping society. Sure, maybe liberalism has a tendency to creep towards fascism, at least under some conditions. But this happens through the actions of the people that make up those societies and it can be resisted.
The last waves of fascism this advanced in America were in the 1930s. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century outright Nazis were generally associated with skinheads and were almost universally hated by mainstream culture. There are now actual Nazi movements in control of western nations. And even where they aren't, they are winning over sizable percentages of the population.
This isnt going to pass as easily as you seem to think. Genocide has been live streamed around the world for almost 2 years and resistance to it has been relatively minor in terms of what you would actually expect. White western Christians (men especially) are actually mostly very down with white supremacy and neofascism. It benefits them specifically. And they represent the largest voting block in most western nations.
Liberalism could have prevented this by preventing Nazis from ever coming into positions of economic / cultural / political power in the first place. Liberalism is primarily concerned with countering revolutionary politics, moreso even than preventing fascist uprisings. It's more important to them that pro capitalist values are the dominant ones in politics and culture than whether anti fascist values are. The ruling class almost entirely stands to benefit either way, they're ambivalent towards fascism.
I didn’t say it would be easy, just that fascism is not inevitable.
Can you elaborate on how liberalism could have prevented this? This seems in contradiction to your overall point that fascism is inevitable under liberal governments.
Support working class politics. Support public ownership. Essentially, become a working class state. Outlaw fascist rhetoric. Redistribute wealth from billionaires to the working class. The main reason that fascist media organizations exist is because billionaires do. They wouldn't be able to mass indoctrinate if they did not have essentially boundless economic power. Fascists won in Germany and America both because of media dominance and manipulation of the western liberal political system. In very comparable ways honestly.
The German democracy failed to respond in any way to the rise of the fascists. The only political party attempting any actual resistance of the fascists was the communists. The conservative and liberal parties were more interested in combating the communists than they were about combating the fascists. It was more important to them that the institutions of capital remains unaffected than fascism being stopped. They could have never let Hitler step foot out of a jail cell again. They honestly could've shot him, and a fair number of his nazi party upper echelon. People were calling for it, literally. Most people believe that Hitler mass indoctrinated all of Germany and won a landslide election and from there dismantled German democracy. That actually isnt true though. The final fair and democratic elections in Weimar Germany resulted in an extremely slim victory for the Nazi party. The communists were very close behind them. And in turn were conservatives and social democrats close behind the communists. On the whole, the majority of the nation voted for other parties. Once a bad actor was chancellor, all he had to do was find an excuse to enact emergency powers. He was handed the best possible opportunity on a silver platter by a young communist who was doing his part to fight back. If only others had followed his example, maybe history wouldve ended differently. As it was, Hitler enacted emergency powers to suspend all civil liberties in Germany. He banned the communists from any political organization and started literally rounding up communists and communist politicians and putting them in concentration camps. This was in 1933. The first camps were for communists. Then when Hindenburg died a short while later there was literally nothing standing between him and pure absolute dictatorship.
He could've been stopped at many points if liberal democracy was an ideology that prioritized the rights of the working class. If they had had an aim whatsoever of stopping fascism, it was preventable. Much like the democratic party though, their primary aims were to protect the ruling class of capitalists and the institutions that allow them to steal working class labor.
Literally all of this is in opposition to liberalism, there's a reason why the trend is the opposite in quite literally all liberal democracies
Yes, i very much agree. Liberalism will never present a legitimate defense against fascism, and will never prioritize working class rights.