The title’s a bit disingenuous, I know: this didn’t come out of nowhere. White supremacism is as American as Manifest Destiny and has been heavily intertwined with Nazism from its inception. That overlap with the Republican party, and their gradual slip into the extreme far-right, is evident.
But Seig Heils? Even the most dense among them must know that blatant Nazism hurts their legitimacy in the eyes of the public, even among MAGATs (as is evident right now if you peek at their echo chamber on Reddit). Surely they would have a much easier time pushing their rhetoric and establishing their agenda by keeping a purposeful distance from that sort of indefensible imagery and symbolism. How do they expect to keep cohesion in the military when you imply to the soldiers that they are Nazis now, seig heils and all.
Why Nazis?
Any theories as to where this is coming from? Follow the ketamine-fueled leader? A directive for operative Krasnov, from Putin himself, to implode the country? True Nazi beliefs among the Heritage Foundation, Proud Boys, etc? I just don’t understand how they thought this would fly. I don’t understand anything anymore lol.
Fascism shouldn’t be thought of as a static “thing” or an object of ideology. Peoples beliefs come from their environment. We are so individualized as a society that often we as progressives take “personal responsibility” too far, we buy the premise implicitly without realizing there are flaws with thinking in this way. Every logical system has flaws and contradictions, its proven mathematically though I think some systems are more rigorous and based on evidence.
GWF Hegel’s philosophy of Right was written in 1820, and influenced political thought ever since. Liberalism was still in it’s revolutionary phase and theories about it were still fairly new, the Wealth of Nations was written just 50 years before, and Karl Marx was like two when it was released, although it would serve as the basis for much of his work analyzing the hidden relationships of Capital, and ethical political philosophy on the whole.
The book is the closest I think someone can honestly get to an actual “horseshoe theory” because not only did it influence the left but it also influenced the far right. Hegel, using the works of other great liberal philosophers such as Locke and Kant, who Hegel was always working to surpass, applied his dialectical philosophical methods to the writings of liberalism.
What he discovered was a natural tendency toward fascism. Like he prefigured fascism by 100 years. He wasn’t a fascist, there was no such thing. He was just exploring the ideas of this revolutionary philosophy, one that purported to liberate the mind, body and spirit, and discovered the oppressive seeds which might grow into something quite different.
This isn’t to call liberals fascists, I’m a communist and 20th century communism had a lot of problems, to put it mildly. I would say confidently that progressive liberals are not crypto fash, in fact the term “progressive” is a typically left-Hegelian ideal, in that it describes human progress and development as the subject of history. Instead it challenges the idea of the liberatory nature of private property, a key component of liberal thought. Of course this is all depending how you look at it, right-Hegelians see this same formulation as proof of the inevitability of their ideas and justification for their actions.
You’re getting a lot of different opinions about this stuff so I’m trying to make sort of a different point about philosophy, history and action. Other reading for a deep dive on fascism is the essay Ur Fascism by Umberto Eco (great empirical analysis, but the least scientific IMO), Trotsky’s pamphlet Fascism: What it is and How to Fight It, and HA Roy’s Fasism, Its Philosophy, Professions and Practice.
In a way, fascism has always been there below the surface, informally shifting the sands of history until it was formalized in the early 20th century. I don’t think you can have a society based on private property without some elements of fascism somewhere. Mostly “western democracies” will outsource their extreme cruelty to other countries where it doesn’t affect their citizens.
But in summary, Fascism is the realization of the contradictions inherent in liberal ideology, its liberalism turned inside-out, with all its appearances of justice and freedom cut away, leaving only the logic of expansion and domination that most liberal democracies do their best to hide. This is how fascists are able to hide in our society, their individual beliefs are not completely unpalatable to centrists and conservatives who have also started to dispense with justice and freedom in the interest of national greatness. Its what makes their beliefs so malleable, and its also why liberals have such a hard time defining it. But fascism isn’t an individual’s beliefs, if it was it would be just regular bog-standard chauvinism. Fascism is a mass movement which will use charismatic leaders amenable to their politics to rally the masses.
In our society, the middle classes are the “battery” for fascism. Middle classes are constantly under attack under capitalism and the individuals often feel this and become paranoid (doomsday prepping, etc.,) and this paranoia and real social pressure to produce or be wiped out, the fear from the constant threat of precarity and uncertainty fits hand in glove with the aims and means of fascists.
The entire problem with this conversation is that “liberal” has become an overloaded term. The concept was originally anti-feudal so the context of “private property” was very different from the industrial context Marx would eventually add. You can see this in the US and French revolutionary writers who are clearly more focused on the idea of “just laws” being a product of political self determination which requires individual liberty. And now we have modern liberal progressives who have extended that idea to a kind of radical inclusivity, and modern leftists who even got as far as suggesting it is a critical aspect of the post scarcity state.
But Hegel is controversial for a reason. Elements of the Philosophy of Right is filled with equivocation and even Hegel’s personal grudges. This is why everyone just projects their own ideas into Hegel’s writing - because he spends a lot of time not saying much. Also I do not recall the conclusion being that free men inevitably create autocracy. I recall it being more like "I haven’t figured out what comes next for the state "