Is the Republican Party fascist?

[dazzleman]

Tell me if this doesn't sound like the extreme right wing of the Republican Party, which has control of the party right now.

This is from the Oxford Dictionary of Politics.

Genuinley fascist ideologies are:
MONIST: based upon the notion that there are fundamental and basic truths about humanity and the environment which do not admit to question.

SIMPLISTIC: In the sense of ascribing complex phenomena to single causes and advancing single remedies.

FUNDAMENTALIST: Involving a division of the world into 'good' and 'bad' with nothing in between.

CONSPIRATORIAL: predicated on the existence of a secret world-wide (in our case nationwide liberal) conspiracy by a hostile group seeking to manipulate the masses to achieve and/or maintain a dominant position.

This could describe some of the far right.....as well as the far left.  Many Democrats have a philosophy that matches those descriptions.

In any case, there's a lot more to fascism than what's contained in those definitions.  It generally involves the killing of many thousands, if not millions of people, and large scale murderous military aggression for the purpose of plunder and conquest.  Neither party in the US advocates anything close to these things, so it's shameful to be ascribing those beliefs to one of our parties.

[dazzleman]

I would also have to disagree with you that extreme leftists could be classified as a fascist. Most extreme liberals don't believe in a hierarchial form of government. They believe in a more socialistic form, which a lot of people, for some strange reason, associate with fascism. Probably because the Soviets and the Nazis were allies at one time and both our enemies. The Soviets were closer to fascism than pure communism.

Here, I don't know what you're talking about.  Socialism requires a hierarchical form of government.  Government that supports you controls you; there's no way around it.  The government that is powerful enough to give us everything we want is also powerful enough to take from us everything we have.

Are you suggesting that many liberals don't see a vast conspiracy by a hostile group (the religious, as opebo calls them) to manipulate the masses?  Please, I've heard so many Democrats arguing this point, that Republicans manipulate the masses into voting against their own interest through hate propaganda.

As far as pure communism is concerned, there is no such thing.  And any time that has been the goal, the result has been something so close to fascism as to be indistinguishable.

With all due respect, I think you're blowing out a lot of hot air.

[dazzleman]

Socialism is supposed to be a system in which there is no inequality, everyone is equal. You're thinking of Soviet socialism where the state controled the distribution of wealth.

Yes, our side does have a few consiracy theorists out there, but the leaders of your party think there is a liberal conspiracy in the media, the courts, and anything else they can think of.

The only way to have total equality is for the government to confiscate wealth on a large scale and control its distribution.  That requires a very powerful and hierarchical government.  It sure won't happen on its own, so these academic distinctions that you are making are without practical effect.  And I'll add that total equality can only take place at a very low level of wealth/standard of living.

[dazzleman]

The extreme wing of the Republican Party displays fascist qualities. Now does that make them fascist? I don't know. Maybe. And it's not my arbitrary definition, its Oxford's arbitrary definition.

Soviet communism didn't work, because a few power hungry groups took control of the system and hoarded all of the money for themselves, and that's why socialism doesn't work. Human Nature. I have no brand of socialism. I have no idea where you got that.

I'm not saying that all Republicans are Fascist. I know some really decent, moderate Republicans. But the extreme wing, which displays fascist tendancies, has taken control of the party has turned it into what it is.

I also admit that the extreme wing of the Democratic Party displays socialist tendancies, but we control our extremists. Of course most Republicans are too stupid to know what pure socialism is. Giving a little money to the poor is not socialist, it's human. Helping the disadvantaged is human. And if you call that socialist, than you are truly a simple minded creature.

Your problem is that you don't know that the money made in this country by our so called free market system is made by most corporate enterprises and very little is made by the individual investor.

I'm glad you've explained it all for us stupid ignorant Republicans.  I feel I understand it so much better now.

I don't know where you get the idea that the Democratic party controls its extremists.  Clinton did, but he's been gone a while now.  You have nutcases like Michael Moore and George Soros totally out of control.  And as for your definitions of fascism, the extremist Democrats exhibit all of them, no different from extremist Republicans.

[dazzleman]

How about throwing Arab-Americans into camps without charging them with a crime right along with criminal terrorists just because they are Arab. Suppression of African-American voters in Florida to gain control. Tearing down the Judiciary with false conspiracy theories.

It's hilarious to hear you accuse the opposition of making up "false conspiracy theories" right after you spew a bunch of conspiracy garbage.

Umm that's not a conspiracy theory, it's a real conspiracy.

Both parties are running "conspiracies" to get what they want.  It's called politics.  Democrats have run, and are running, plenty of "conspiracies" to get what they want.  You have a very one-sided view of things.

[dazzleman]

If you don't think sh**t goes on behind our backs like this, you're just a naive child. We are being manipulated on a regular basis by the media, politicians and interest groups. Theories aren't usually based on facts.

Politics is manipulation of the masses.  Always has been.  Both parties do it, and right now, the Republicans are simply doing it more successfully than the Democrats, by a small margin.  But that doesn't mean the Democrats aren't doing it.

You seem a little paranoid with all your conspiracy and manipulation theories.  Well informed people are much more difficult to manipulate than ignorant ones.

[dazzleman]

You're probably right. When I get going, man, I just can't stop. I don't really think the government is out to get me or anything like that, but there is a lot of bad sh**t that's gone down in the past without our knowledge.

Just think if no one would have found out about Watergate, and it was just some rumor floating around on the internet 30 years later like the Kennedy assassination. That would probably be called paranoia. Not probably, it would be called paranoia.

Dude, Watergate is nothing compared to some of the other stuff that has gone down over the decades.

There is stuff we don't know about going on all the time, and there's no point in getting all crazy about it.  It happens with both parties, so it's really not a partisan thing.  I think the president who had the most secretive and dishonest stuff going on, in recent memory, was Lyndon Johnson.  FDR was also a master of manipulation, using the FBI and the IRS to go after his political enemies, and stuff like that.  Eisenhower was big on using the CIA for clandestine operations deemed to be in the national interest.

Some of it is more mundane, like the dishonest deals cut with people in Congress to get them to vote for bills that they should be voting for anyway.  There are all sorts of under the table deals.

The media has a great deal of power, through their ability to decide what to emphasize and what to ignore.  While the mainstream media since the 1940s or 1950s was liberal, alternative media sources that offer other points of view have sprung up in the last 10 years, and the internet has diluted the power that the mainstream media once had.

I think you've gotten caught up in trying to justify academic and impractical definitions of a deadly philosophy, and that's really irrelevant.  People who are well-informed about politics know fascism when they see it, and we don't have it here in any big way, from either party.  We are very fortunate of that.

The bottom line is that we have to trust our leaders to a certain extent.  We can't worry about every detail, but we have to look at the big picture.  In a healthy democracy, large minorities will have voted against any president or congress that is in power.  We consider 60% of the vote a landslide, but that still means that 40% voted the other way.  And that's in a landslide situation, which we haven't had for quite some time.  The point is that at any given time, there will be multitudes of people who voted against whoever is in office, and we all get our turn at voting for losers.  You just need to get a longer term perspective and learn to live with it, and remember that even if the person you voted against is in office, he's still your leader and your president for his term, like it or not.