Kulturkampf

[benji]

to borrow terminology that this sector of the internet uses all the time, I feel like everyone calling things fascist these days are gaslighting

because they make me question whether I have a proper understanding of what fascism means, like all these people are so confidently saying things that seem retarded and unrelated but so many are doing it, maybe I just don't get it?

fascism isn't just the governments enacting those policies, but every tiny action that might somehow slippery slope lead to fascism as well?

eating peas is fascist, because my consumption of them proves there is demand which causes pea farming companies to force their laborers to work slightly harder, perpetuating a kind of modern regimented slavery which is in service to fascist ideologies

I'll try to simplify [ed note: aka he'll write an essay] but it's because they're aping Marxist writing. I don't necessarily mean this in the sense that these people are Marxists but in the sense that they think it's what smart analysis sounds like because they hear it from people they perceive as smart. They don't realize that it's all written like this because it was downstream from Soviet propaganda. An entire generation of the left, especially those in academia, was conditioned into accusing everything of being fascist. And this was the entire "analysis" of all that widely touted writing. Anything other than revolution followed by utopia was fascism. 

You have otherwise smart people who absolutely insist that fascism is the eventual form of capitalism because the Soviets declared it so. Even though fascism is centrally planned as nearly as much as communism and resists the idea that individuals own themselves and their labor just like socialism does. The dispute between fascism and communism in the 1930's was that fascism prioritized the nation while the communists continued to insist that there would be a international revolution of all proletariat worldwide. Even though this was anti-Marx, also the fact that nobody actually can do anything regarding an international movement so every socialist country has pursued nationalist policy (including most ironically the Soviets at the very moment they were attacking "fascism" rhetorically) since it's all they can do.

The Soviet use of the epithet was just a replacement for Lenin's original use of imperialism, which itself was supposed to be the most advanced form of capitalism. Fascism was anti-socialist in the regard that it rejected the idea that only classes exist. It insisted on unifying all classes under the nation because it was more realistic about the idea that you could abolish classes by fiat, something no socialist entity has ever achieved even theoretically. However, in fascism the state determines the classes and rigidly orders everyone into them, again the opposite of capitalism and exactly like socialism in practice.

None of this actual history or actual fascist thought has ever had anything to do with the Marxist usage of the term, which was beget to the "left" by the Soviets. Social fascism is almost perfectly what all our fascist scholars who dominate the internet talk about:

At the 6th World Congress of the Comintern in 1928, the end of capitalist stability and the beginning of the "Third Period" was proclaimed. The end of capitalism, accompanied with a working class revolution, was expected and social democracy was identified as the main enemy of the communists. The Comintern's theory had roots in Grigory Zinoviev's argument that international social democracy is a wing of fascism. That view was accepted by Joseph Stalin, who described fascism and social democracy as "twin brothers", arguing that fascism depends on the active support of social democracy and that social democracy depends on the active support of fascism. After it was declared at the Sixth Congress, the theory of social fascism became accepted by many in the world communist movement.[3]
...
Stalin stated in a speech in 1924:
Fascism is not only a military-technical category. Fascism is the bourgeoisie’s fighting organisation that relies on the active support of Social-Democracy. Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism. There is no ground for assuming that the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of Social-Democracy.[4]

It's just anything that is against what I want.

But combined with the first thing, almost everyone means Nazis when they say fascist and they mean this because Nazi just means "worst thing you can think of" to most people. Which is pretty much how the Soviets used it anyway, since the purpose was to tar anyone who broke from the party line as a fascist, same as they do/did with imperialist, revisionist, liberal, etc. The reality of the Nazis just helped sell this to everyone else even though the Nazis were fascist more by happenstance and were never the ideological theorists of fascism being almost entirely opposed to the idea of developing theory because it was constraining to action. The Nazis did implement fascist economics though, but so did almost everyone in the 1930's including the United States, and nobody in the West has ever really moved away from it. This is important to the whole "fascist" fearmongering because you allows you to claim a throughline and that we're always on the brink of fascism without having to really discern the components of fascism. Then rhetorically you just shift from the "similarities" to claiming there's a mindset or framework or whatever else and then you've exposed the underlying fascist thought in Blue's Clues. Which is pretty much what you get from any academic or "intellectual" writing about fascism that's not concerned with Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany between the wars.

Probably a perfect example is the essay I always shill, Repressive Tolerance by Marcuse: https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repressive-tolerance-fulltext.html

If you actually read it, you'll notice he never defines fascism at all, but it's entirely written as if you will understand his usage of the term and the entire argument rests on this. If he had defined fascism though the argument would fall apart because his central premise, that we live in the fascist moment on the cusp of absolute fascist victory over all of life, would obviously be false. Jason Stanley's book How Fascism Works is very similar, he can't reference Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany at all or the differences between those and our everyday lives would be obvious, so fascism becomes entirely a set of things in all societies that he just doesn't like. Fascism is everything and everything is fascism, so nothing is fascist. Especially not the original fascist ideology. (As I regularly like to point out many modern leftists completely and readily subscribe to most of 1920's fascism's actual tenets and practices, especially economics, other than the military hierarchy aspect. Take away that and the xenophobic stuff and see how much of what's left they'd fully support of The Big Bad's platform: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Program#The_25-point_Program_of_the_NSDAP)