America - The Official Thread

[Pupik]

What I find a shame here on GTP is that even the slightest flirt with Trump or Musk ends up being labeled like stupid, racist, fascist, homophobe , uneducated and wrong. All arguments are drilled into the ground with we are right and you are wrong. No wonder most people keep their opinions to themselves.

Some of us just aren't fans of the Tru Tux Tan for a wide variety of reasons.

Every one of the finer talking points by Republicans over the last 20 years has been co-opted and reversed because now it suits their massive agenda. They don't want a smaller government, they want their government. They want to pick the winners and losers. They want the fairness and equality that also gave them a platform to be destroyed. The media is an enemy, for how dare it give them a chance to have open thought. Let's cut everything but still run up massive debt and inflation by over-producing money to overcome shortfalls. And holy hell, the separation of church and state and peaceful protest are also codified in all of those flimsy blackletter decals on these truck which happens to get crummy gas mileage (don't forget complaining about the free market). Let's make sure the right to squelch those voices with a hammer's click as the first available option when it disagrees.

We'd warned people for the best part of a decade about what happens when you vote in an unprepared actor which upends situations because he ran on a platform to engage the uninformed of government processes and unaware of history, all for the same reason of desiring absolute power. We've seen this before and it rarely ends well. It's empowered by media which takes unified sides and bombards your senses with coded language over and over, like a simpler version of the Ludovico Method but with more ads for worthless supplements, and petty distractions about renaming the Arabian Gulf Gulf of Mexico (forgot about changing history because now it releases American dopamine).

And despite creating a hissy fit literally of epic proportions due to the personal inconvenience of not being popular enough during the difficulties of a pandemic (which honestly, was probably going to unseat any past President), decided to incite a riot to take back which he'd lost. And...many of his red minions refused to unseat him over that banana republic show of complete sore-loser douchebaggery, which drove a further contemptible wedge down our political body.

So maybe we'd thought you folks would have come to your senses about what would happen next. We tried to be genteel about it, and too courteous to a massively spineless fault. But many of us that aren't as politically-correct as your fine choices have no such need for restraint, as we have a functioning cerebral cortex.

But nope, you gave him another chance. Jokes on us, I guess.

So some of us are out of play-nice words for all this ****-uppery that's occurring all around us. I've been generous to you personally, but see how we may very obviously disagree.

 

[Biggles]

The US has brushed fascism before. Woodrow Wilson is often cited as a fascist president. Depending on how you view him and his policies, FDR had some fascist tendencies as well (like locking up American citizens in concentration camps). Then there was the entire time during the Cold War when politicians branded anyone they didn't like a Communist to jail them or discredit them.

I don't think Trump is anything new for America, and we've been here before; the only difference now is that there's more money and influence to chart the course while also having easily accessible platforms to spread nonsense. Think about how the Red Scare would've gone if social media had existed and crackpots had the opportunity to say whatever they wanted at any time. So really, we've always been here, it just hasn't been as easily seen as it is now since we have infinite access to information, a platform for people to say whatever they want and reach millions, and 24-hour news cycles. The amount of money being thrown at politics is also insane and the people behind that money support fascist ideals.

Checks and balances haven't been effective in a long time. It used to work when each branch was concerned with its power, but now it's just all about falling in line with the party leadership so you can keep your job. Whatever the head of the party says goes, even if the underlings disagree. The benefits of being in Congress are excellent and people don't want to lose that so they just continue to toe the line. Just look at what happened with Congressmen like Mitt Romney and Adam Kinzinger or Congresswoman Liz Cheney; they went against Trump and lost their power even though they were right.

It's telling that you would choose to cite Woodrow Wilson and FDR as examples of "fascists". A much more obvious example would be the Ku Klux Klan and various other rabidly nativist, racist and anti-immigrant organizations that grew up in the 19th century and flourished well into the 20th century. In addition, there were a variety of actual American fascist parties that received a lot of popular support in the 1930's.

 

[wowbaggerBR]

Lived to see someone frame FDR as fascist. I guess this is enough internet for this week.

 

[TexRex]

Lived to see someone frame FDR as fascist. I guess this is enough internet for this week.

Incarceration of citizens without indictment, prosecution or conviction solely due to ancestry was a super friendly affair, obviously.

 

[wowbaggerBR]

Incarceration of citizens without indictment, prosecution or conviction solely due to ancestry was a super friendly affair, obviously.

If I am not mistaken, there was a pretty big war going on at the time and foreign agents were indeed found on American soil plotting all kinds of sabotages during that war. It was a Japanese spy who related the ins and outs of the Pearl Harbour base and a bunch of german spies were delivered to the west coast by U-boat (granted, those particular operatives were incompetent, but at the time, how could anyone be sure there weren’t more?). While no one deserves to be imprisoned solely because of their origin - and the internment camps remain a stain on FDR’s legacy - the conditions in American camps were not remotely comparable to those where people were subjected to starvation, systematic cruelty, and FAR worse, as we all know.

FDR upheld democratic institutions, didn't dismantle them as fascist leaders did. He also didn't had an armed militia inside his party terrorizing dissenters, he didn't abolish free press. He won competitive elections, whereas fascists banned opposition parties and censored the press and cultural expression. Courts remained open and were allowed to be a check and ballance against his adminstration. Fascist dismantle the judiciary as soon as they got power. He also was probably the only American president to give more strength to worker's unions, while fascists would just outlaw them all, as usual.

Also missing from FDR, the raging fascist, is the cult of personality, the creation of a secret police or the persecution of opposition leaders. Oh, and he went ahead and got himself allied with the not fascists. But yeah, other than those small things, a huge fascist.

 

[Imari]

Incarceration of citizens without indictment, prosecution or conviction solely due to ancestry was a super friendly affair, obviously.

Obviously not, it was a terrible thing to do. But I feel like context matters - there was a world war going on and Pearl Harbour had just happened.

It was not the right thing to do, and even then the way in which it was done was pretty awful. But I think it's an understandable response, even though not an acceptable one. It may have been fascism by some technical definition, but I'm not sure it rightly should be assigned the negative implication that usually comes with fascism. The internments were not about consolidating political control or exterminating an entire race of people, this was about maintaining military and physical security.

And to be super extra double clear, it was a wrong thing to do and FDR should be viewed negatively for it. But probably not because it's fascism, because intent matters and words have meanings. FDR was many things but a fascist is probably not one of them, at least to my limited non-US understanding of the history of the dude.

 

[Joey D]

It's telling that you would choose to cite Woodrow Wilson and FDR as examples of "fascists". A much more obvious example would be the Ku Klux Klan and various other rabidly nativist, racist and anti-immigrant organizations that grew up in the 19th century and flourished well into the 20th century. In addition, there were a variety of actual American fascist parties that received a lot of popular in the 1930's.

None of those groups were in power. Yes, plenty of groups supported fascism, but I'm looking at it as who had power.

Also, I'm not saying anyone was an outright fascist. I'm saying they had fascist ideas, and the country was flirting with fascism. Wilson wasn't a good person, though; he was incredibly racist. He showed KKK propaganda in the White House (Birth of a Nation), supported eugenics, support Jim Crow, and resegregated the government. During WWI he even prevented one of America's best fighting forces, the Buffalo Soldiers, from entering the war purely because they were black. He pushed the Sedition Act and wanted it to be illegal to criticize the government. He dragged the US into WWI under dubious pretenses. He also likely led to the rise of fascism in Italy after stonewalling the Italians and leading to Mussolini, and he helped completely bumble how post-war Germany was managed, leading to WWII.

Was Wilson a fascist? It's complicated, but he certainly has fascist ideas. Also, did Wilson do good things? Yes, but it's worth recognizing the awful things he did because they were pretty damn awful.

Lived to see someone frame FDR as fascist. I guess this is enough internet for this week.

FDR put 120,000 Asian Americans, many of who were American citizens (upwards of 2/3rds), into concentration camps for four years. At least 1,800 people died. In addition to the Japanese, he also put Germans and Italians in camps as well. What's weirder is that he hated Jews despite championing for them when the opportunity benefited him.

Never mind he didn't want to give up power and managed to serve four terms as president.

But if you go back and read what I wrote, I didn't call FDR a fascist. I said he had some fascist tendencies, which he absolutely did and it was undoubtedly a brush with fascism in the US. Wilson falls into the same camp.

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Right-wing populism that Trump subscribes to is nothing new for the US either. Strom Thurmond, Joseph McCarthy, and Barry Goldwater all were right-wing populists. So while some think we are in uncharted waters with Trump, we really aren't. This stuff has been going on in the US for a long time. Even the corruption Trump does is nothing new. Nixon, Reagan, Harding, Buchanan, and Jackson were all incredibly corrupt and that's just what we know. Chances are corruption is rampant in the US government but it gets covered up. Trump's problem is that he doesn't know when to shut up so we see his corruption more than others.