Already is.
It already is fascist, but if you mean openly fascist, yes, it probably will.
The western left’s use of the term fascism, is borderline white-supremacist at this point. Fascism was a form of colonialism that died by the 1940s, and is only allowed to be demonized in public discourse, because it was a form of colonialism directed also against white europeans. It was defeated, and Germany / Italy / Japan reverted to the more stable form of government for colonialism: bourgeois parliamentarism.
British, european, and now US colonizers were doing the exact same thing, and killing far more people for hundreds of years in the global south, yet you don’t hear ppl scared of their countries potentially “becoming british colonialists.” This is why you have new leftists terrified that the UK or US or europe “might turn fascist!!”, betraying that the atrocities propagated by those empires against the global south was and is completely acceptable.
I remember my hottest take among my “libertarian socialist” friends at one point was when I said that nations preaching the ideology known as liberalism have been behind far more direct deaths than genuine actually-existent-fascism could even aspire to. Told it was bad optics to be comparing liberals to fascists, told it was ahistorical, yada yada. It’s materially true, though. Liberalism has been effectively whitewashed of its bloody, horrific history of violence and neglect because “fascism” emerged as a much scarier seeming alternative, a perfect slippery-slope bogeyman to excuse all of the deadly failings of liberalism.
Upvoted, because I largely agree, but I think there is a significant difference between them. Mainly that fascism is unstable. Liberalism and it’s rise were far more stable. It’s that very stability that makes it so much more dangerous. Liberalism is about the export of the suffering and death that capitalism requires while fascism is about embracing it. That difference doesn’t seem like much, but it’s the reason liberalism has given us an imperial core while fascism has been unable to achieve that.
I think westerners largely fear fascism because it would mean we have to experience the same thing liberalism has doled out to the rest of the world.
I think the question itself is flawed, and a result of McCarthyistic cold war propaganda. Attempting to equate communism with Hitler and nazism. Fascism in this sense, essentially becomes the right wing equivalent of communism. As if it was the result of decades of work from economists, political theorists, historians, etc just from the right wing this time.
To even define fascism is a challenge, you essentially have to compile historical documents about how the government of Italy was run back then, and compare them with the writings of Mussolini and kind of just fill in the blanks with the many contradictions, and boom you’ve got the political ideology known as fascism. So it really just exists as a slur, we wouldn’t even use it, if it was a bit harder to pronounce. Nobody ever seems all that concerned if their government will adopt Japanese imperialism, for some strange reason. Was America fascist when it was committing genocide of the native americans, enslaving africans, what about when it was segregated? If so, when did America stop being fascist exactly? If not, then is fascism really the biggest thing we should be concerned about?
Was America fascist when it was committing genocide of the native americans, enslaving africans, what about when it was segregated?
Idk, to me this just epitomizes the type of thinking where we see fascism as the big evil and the more evil it is the more fascist it is. Arguably in the aggregate, most atrocious acts in the span of history have had nothing to do with fascism. I don’t think America has ever been a fascist country. That does not mean American history is not soaked in blood.
So it really just exists as a slur, we wouldn’t even use it, if it was a bit harder to pronounce.
I want to qualify this with the reminder that as watered down as the term fascism may be, Marxism-Leninism does have an analysis of fascism that cannot be discarded.
To answer OP’s question, Ukraine is a good model for how fascism could come to America. Opposition media and parties get banned on the pretense that they pose a threat to national security. When Joe Biden says “democracy is on the ballot”, this is liberalism in contradiction with itself. How could democracy be on the ballot when the ballot IS democracy in a bourgeois republic? How long until certain candidates can be banned for posing a threat to “democracy”? The democrats and neoconservatives are now precisely two strides away from complete fascism.
Fascism is the ideology birthed out of Colonialist economic exploitation. It really isn’t anything other than that. The things Fascism did, the European empires were already doing to colonized peoples all over the world. The differences between the Italian Fascists, and the Nazis was the Settler Colonial direction the Nazis were heading in. The Italians wanted more colonies. The Nazis wanted to build a nation on land that was already occupied, the solution to that contradiction was to exterminate the current occupants. The same realization was made by the Americans, the same realization has been made by the Zionists.
Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire points out that the ideology of Hitler has its roots in European excuses for Colonialism.
Fascism is a tool that the bourgeoisie use to grant total obedience over massive injustice and exploitation. The US don’t need such tool, since their people already are. Only under the threat of a revolution the US bourgeoisie would throw illusory freedom under the bus, since illusory freedom is their biggest guarantee of stability right now.
deleted by creator
After the next big red scare, yes
