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Do you think we are:

1. In fascism?

2. On the road to fascism?

3. The question is hyperbolic.

you think we are:

1. In fascism?

2. On the road to fascism?

3. The question is hyperbolic.

That mile marker passed by some time ago.

Do you think we are:

1. In fascism?

2. On the road to fascism?

3. The question is hyperbolic.

1. Certainly not.

2. No, except in the sense that any road that you are on leads to many different places. The road that is outside my front door leads to the end of the block, and it also leads to downtown Miami, and to New York, and Boise, and San Diego, and Toronto.

Democracy can lead to bad things without becoming fascism. The government has a lot of power. The head of state has a lot of power. If you democratically elect a bad person to be the head of state, that person will be able to do a lot of bad things - and that will still be democracy. Only if the bad person starts breaking or changing the rules of the democratic system do you start moving into fascism.

And Trump, for all of his sins, doesn't really break the actual rules of democracy to any great extent. Whenever he runs up into the actual limits of his power, he complies. That's why James Coney isn't in jail, while Alina Habba and Lindsay Halligan don't hold office why his Administration has actually complied with the Anti-Impoundment Act, why they ended up releasing one of their deportees the moment that a judge ordered the head of ICE into court, why they didn't nationalize any of the elections that have taken place in the first year of his term, why they didn't succeed in slashing the federal workforce by any material amount until they could amend the regs, etc. When a court issues a direct and final unambiguous order (or where that's likely to happen), Trump complies. That sort of stuff doesn't happen in a fascist government. And the "road to fascism" starts with the head of state starting to disregard the authority of those who can constrain him....which also hasn't happened yet.

What Trump has done is show how much power Congress has chosen to give the head of state. Over the last century or so, Congress built the modern administrative executive, and gave the President complete control over massive amounts of substantive decision making. Trump hasn't been seizing power to himself - he's been using power that was freely and democratically given to the office.

The reason this feels like he's breaking the rules or seizing power is because Presidents never used all that power before. They didn't, because they didn't want to damage their party and their allies. They wanted a legislative agenda passed, so they needed Congress - and because they needed Congress, they honored the past practice of not using all those massive powers that Congress had given in the expectation they would only be used in a true emergency.

It also feels like he's breaking the rules because Trump is a master at gaming the rules, but also the meta-rules, while complying with both. The "rules" are the substantive law - if the law says X is prohibited, you can't do X. The "meta-rules" are the rules that govern when there is a dispute over the substantive law - if the law says X is prohibited, and there is a dispute over whether Y is part of the X that is prohibited, what happens while the dispute is ongoing? Trump knows that there's an answer to that - that the meta-rules tell you what happens while there's a dispute over the law - and he's figured out that the answer is often that the law provides that the Executive's action is lawful and can continue until the courts decide.

Trump lived in a world where only one person was in charge, and therefore only one person's priorities mattered - and he's governed that way. So he hasn't paid any heed to what anyone else wants. He has no skill at managing a system with multiple sources of power. So he decided to ignore Congress and only use Executive power. That means he's completely sacrificed any legislative agenda (no modern President has gotten less through Congress). He hasn't escaped the boundaries of traditional democratic politics - he's just made a radically different choice within that democratic politics, abandoning legislation in favor of avoiding any political constraints on the executive power he lawfully wields.

Which is a too-long way of saying, no I don't think we're materially on the road to fascism. Trump is devoted only to government action that he unilaterally controls, but all within the bounds of power that was given to the office well before he was elected. If you elect a bad person to a powerful office, they will legitimately be able to do a lot of bad things. They way you stop them from doing that is by not electing bad people - once you elect the bad person, they have the democratic legitimacy to exercise the powers of the office. Fighting back against that isn't fighting fascism, and it runs the very real risk of actually eroding the democracy - because the key tenet of democracy is that the people who are elected wield the power.

Which is a too-long way of saying, no I don't think we're materially on the road to fascism.

You may be right.

But we do seem to be on the road to a failed democracy.

Meritocracy in the civil service is being destroyed, to be replaced by incompetents with the one quality Trump values: loyalty to him. Corruption is rampant. Congress and the Supreme Court have failed to effectively restrain Trump's authoritarian impulses. Wealth distribution gets ever more extreme and the middle class is hollowed out, leaving power mostly in the hands of the oligarch class who seem to have no particular loyalty to anything but the power they are able to wield in pursuit of their self interest.

So, I agree with you...we may not be 'materially on the road to fascism', but we do seem to be heading for something almost as bad. At this point, it is hard to see how the trend is reversed.

But we do seem to be on the road to a failed democracy.

Meritocracy in the civil service is being destroyed, to be replaced by incompetents with the one quality Trump values: loyalty to him.

Again, it's important to keep our terms clear.

Incompetence doesn't make for a failed democracy. Democracy doesn't guarantee a good or bad result - it simply guarantees a result that the electorate has chosen. If you elect a bad person to lead an office, and they fill it with incompetent staff, that's not democracy failing. They won the election, one of the powers of the office is choosing to hire and fire, so they have the ability to hire either competent or incompetent people.

In a democracy, the electorate is allowed to make a bad choice. It's allowed to elect leaders who make bad choices. It's allowed to elect leaders that prioritize loyalty over competence. If they do that, it's not a failed democracy - it's just a badly staffed government.

Pollyanna, there is so much wrong with this response. In your world fascism doesn’t exist until it does. It’s a light switch. In fact, your philosophy is so narrowly legalistic that if fascism were established through the democratic exercise of power it wouldn’t be fascism at all. It would be the will of the people. In fact. I’m pretty sure you can’t define fascism.

In the fall of 1922 Mussolini was constitutionally appointed Prime Minister. In the fall of 1923 the Italian parliament passed the Acerbo laws allowing a party that won a plurality of the vote to earn a supermajority of the seats. Perfectly legal. In 1924 elections, in which the fascists used the levers of power constitutionally available to them to influence the outcome, the fascists won the election and then proceeded to use the political power afforded them by their democratic victory to end democracy.

Based on your arguments, as long as the laws were followed, even if using those laws leads to the dismantling of democratic rules and norms, there is nothing fascist about this path to power and authoritarian rule. Or if you deny this, you would have a hard time pointing to the legal tipping point in which the exercise of legal power shifts from legitimate democratic governance to fascist rule. As long as there are laws behind the exercise of power, no matter how abusively that power is exercised, it must be respected as legitimate and abided by all who are subject to it.

You seem like an old guy. What advice would you have given Martin Luther King in 1959? Continue to sue for your rights young man?

The fascists are here. They have their hands on all three levers of federal power. I have to take them at their word when they tell me what is coming. What advice do you have? Wait until November? Trust that this is only bluster? I’m not sure those being kidnapped off the streets share your faith.

Those with wealth and power have tossed their lot in with American fascism because it is the only way to prevent the great economic reckoning that is coming in America. The people cannot be allowed to hold the levers of power at a moment in our history when the ruling class is realizing the consequences of the great concentration of capital in the hands of fewer and fewer individuals.

"Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege." - Tommy Douglas

Based on your arguments, as long as the laws were followed, even if using those laws leads to the dismantling of democratic rules and norms, there is nothing fascist about this path to power and authoritarian rule.

Let’s not forget that by the time Hitler applied himself to his “Final Solution”, everything he did was in full compliance with German law.

The fascists are here. They have their hands on all three levers of federal power. I have to take them at their word when they tell me what is coming. What advice do you have? Wait until November? Trust that this is only bluster? I’m not sure those being kidnapped off the streets share your faith.

Don't wait until November, but focus on November. Engage in political activism and protest, but not because political activism and protest is a substitute for winning elections in November - because it will help win elections in November. The people you oppose have power because they won the elections, and they have the right to use that power in lawful ways because they won the elections. You can't lawfully stop them from using the lawful power that comes from winning elections. The only way to stop them is to be in a position to win the next election, and win it.

Take them at their word when they tell you what is coming if you want...but that doesn't mean that what they say is coming is here yet. And look at what they do, rather than just what they say. They want you to believe that they are super-powerful, that they have the strength to gut democracy...but when you take a look at how they never actually have the nerve to do it, keep in mind the possibility that they're trying to get you to believe something that isn't true.

As for fascism in Italy, I'm well aware that the law can be changed to be fascist. But that's my point. They haven't done that. Virtually everything that Trump has been doing is the exercise of laws already on the books. Laws that were passed by non-fascist Congresses. Laws that have always been in place (or at least, in place for many decades). They're not "kidnapping" people off the streets - the law has always been that people who are in the country illegally are subject to detention and have no enforceable legal right to be at liberty pending their various claims (certain exceptions not relevant here). Detaining those folks isn't kidnapping, it's the lawful exercise of statutory authority. And again, the difference between this and Italy is that these aren't fascist laws - these are laws that have been in place for many, many decades.

I like your quote, because it encapsulates my argument pretty well:

"Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege."

That's my argument in a nutshell. The Administration has not begun to destroy political democracy. They've passed no laws like the Acerbo laws, haven't dissolved Congress, hasn't ignored the authority of the Courts, hasn't jailed their enemies without trials, hasn't suspended habeas corpus. All they've done is won an election and used the powers that they are allowed to use under existing law. That is following political democracy, not beginning to end it. And if opponents of the Administration decide that they don't have to follow the laws and themselves observe political democracy by allowing the winners of the last election to exercise the power that inheres with winning elections, then they're going to create the conditions they ostensibly oppose.

Have been asking the netsifter at various times. The answer can be paraphrased as ‚not at this point, but clear risk factors are present‘, which are increasingly crystallizing as follows:

1. Personalist leadership over institutions

A classic fascist pattern is loyalty to a leader, not to laws or institutions.

2. Delegitimizing democracy itself

Fascist movements often keep elections while insisting the system is rigged unless they win.

3. The “enemy within” narrative

Fascism thrives on defining internal enemies as existential threats.

4. Nationalism fused with grievance

Fascist movements often promise national rebirth after humiliation.

5. Use (and tolerance) of political violence

Fascism doesn’t always start violence—but it excuses it.

6. Attacks on independent media and truth

Fascist systems replace shared reality with leader-approved narratives.

7. Law-and-order selectively applied

Authoritarian systems often weaponize the law unevenly.

Have been asking the netsifter at various times. The answer can be paraphrased as ‚not at this point, but clear risk factors are present‘, which are increasingly crystallizing as follows:

That sums up our sad situation pretty well. Why our friends on the right can't see this, I do not understand.

but clear risk factors are present‘,

Ladies and gentlemen, the Mt. Vesuvius of irony.

it doesnt seem to be just a problem for the libs.
the proposal 'we are ok' because an autocrat has not attempted\succeeded in the worst promised or imagined is a fallacious argument; had that been established, forums like shredwm would likely not even exist.
(for a thorough look, i suggest the podcast 'autocracy in america' partnered by TheAtlantic)

the strategy here should be seen, again, as 'flood-the-zone', and pursuit or abandonment tends more towards noise as the mental state and abilities of trump are hugely damaged. let's take 2 examples :

comey legal retribution. why abandon simply due to just one humiliating court loss? trump need not use his near limitless legal resources on newer retribution.

biden bashing, 2020 steal. why still pursue? no one will ever award trump the win, nor will he ever run against biden.
i am even doubtful this still gets the MAGA ratings trump thinks it does, and i expect it moves more towards general claims of election fraud.


in the end, its flood-the-zone, and take the wins for anything requiring the least amount of effort.
when trump finds a clear demand for MAGA entertainment, as ICE seems to be, then go all out. unless it involves epstein, or distracts from grift.

‚not at this point, but clear risk factors are present‘

I have an analogy that no one likes. It's like rabies, once you have clear symptoms of rabies, you're dead. Don't wait for clear symptoms.

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