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So you dispute the idea of "clerical fascism"? How would you classify Father Coughlin, then? How about the Ustaše? South Africa's Ossewabrandwag? To quote the latter's B. J. Vorster in 1942: "We stand for Christian Nationalism which is an ally of National Socialism. You can call this anti-democratic principle dictatorship if you wish. In Italy it is called Fascism, in Germany National Socialism and in South Africa, Christian Nationalism."
Did the "Emperor-system fascism" of Imperial Japan — which "advocated for ultranationalism, traditionalist conservatism, militarist imperialism and a dirigisme-based economy" — have such a movement? Would you count the Kempeitai or not? Did they "believe in the metaphysical state as an idealist concept which is the protagonist of history" — or was it more about the divinity of the emperor?
Again, did the Japanese?
According to who? Certainly not the Boomer conservatives of my acquaintance, let alone the libertarians or the progressives. People like the woman (apparently some personage in the video game industry) who say things like this tweet
Are they going to listen to your defenses about how big a difference "belief in themetaphysical state as an idealist concept which is the protagonist of history" makes before they start throwing figurative — or literal — rocks your way? Is it going to convince a sixty-something "fiscal conservative" GOP voter raised on WWII movies?
This relates to my effortpost (my second highest-voted post) on the competing definitions of "racism" and why convincing people of HBD won't fix our "disparate impact" regime. You can try to argue that an entire academic field — fields, really — is using the "wrong" definitions for the field's core terms, and that the definition preferred by many uneducated laymen is the "right" one, but like that guy who argued that physicists need to stop using the word "flavor" because "you can't taste quarks," I don't expect it to go anywhere. DR3 hasn't exactly been working. All it does is allow the strategic equivocation through which the moral opprobrium attached to "racism" defined as meaning "invidious racial discrimination against individuals" gets applied to elite usages where "racism" is used to mean "disparate impact in statistical outcomes between groups."
Or you can simply concede to the academic definitions, and then note that under such definitions, the opprobrium no longer attaches to the word, and focus on the questions that fight obscured — do we care about 'judging individuals not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character,' or do we care about whether statistical outcomes are proportionate to population fractions? Is the goal “colorblindness” or is it “racial equity”? Does fighting over labels clarify this, or confuse it?
Take a metaphorical page from judo or aikido. Don’t try to strike against the force of your enemy’s blow, go with it. Lean into it. Don’t try to fight the enemy’s labeling; own it. “Agree and amplify.”
Let the Kendi types have their desired definitions… and thereby empty them of their moral and political weight. If the official definition of “racism” means that “colorblind racism” is a thing… then let us be all for “colorblind racism.” If “anti-racism” means affirmative action and quotas and double standards and otherwise treating similar individuals differently on account of their skin color to equalize group outcomes? Then most people are probably fine with not being “anti-racist.”
While the left draws power from their radicals — you'll find plenty of people who will argue that there's no such thing as "too far left" — and sharply police their rightward edge ("no friends to the right, no enemies to the left"), what does the right do? Constantly police their rightward edge — and cancel anyone who even defends someone "too far right" (see how many people on the Right are denouncing Tucker Carlson for "platforming" Cooper) — while welcoming in every "I didn't leave the left, the left left me" person to be exiled from the left for failing to keep up with the latest phase of the revolution, even while they haven't re-examined any of their leftist priors and still fear and loathe those to their right more than they do those further left that gave them the boot. It's what I've seen called the neocon cycle:
You know, how you get right-wing pastors’ conferences inviting and looking to guidance from someone who wrote multiple books about how God doesn’t exist and Christianity needs to be destroyed (who thinks Alex Kaschuta is beyond the pale, and is now ranting about how the right is being taken over by a vast Theosophist conspiracy that seeks to summon the Archangel Michael). How you get right-wingers falling all over themselves to welcome and bestow leadership on exiled Leftists who do nothing to hide how they hate those to their right more than they do those to their left. Taking direction from broken scholars who still respect, and are desperate to get back into, the academic institutions they were banished from.
Is there a left-wing counterpart to Buckley purging the Birchers? You can put up a poster of Che in your office and still be a respected professor, but put up a poster of Pinochet, and see how quickly even conservatives will call for your ouster. You can talk about how Mao, despite the body count in the millions, had some good ideas, like… but try saying something about how William Luther Pierce made some good points, like… and see if you still have anyone willing to be seen in public with you.
There is no political “tent” big enough to hold both the likes of Pat Buchanan and the likes of James Lindsay — if only because when you invite in the latter, they end up “policing” the bounds of the tent to expel the former. We pander to those to our left, and purge those to the right, while the left… panders to those to their left, and purge those to their right. And what has doing that, decade after decade, far longer than I’ve been alive, gotten the right? Can we just stop letting new arrivals from the left decide who gets to be “acceptable” on the right? Instead of trying to make a "big tent" by trying to bring in every Jordan Peterson and Bret Weinstein, why not try bringing back in the Buchananite paleoconservatives? The Birchers?
All this trying to bring in definitional nuance — "I'm not a fascist, really, you've gotta believe me, because [something nobody outside the non-establishment Right cares about]" — will not defend you from the "nazi punchers"; from a modern order that takes WWII as its founding myth, and seeks to perpetually refight said war. (Which is why, when they cast you into that enemy role, you better be prepared to win that war.) It only fuels the above dynamic.
Not quite. Falangists were clerical fascists. Mere radical religious nationalism is not. Lest we have to call every single European regime before the French Revolution fascist. Which is not even true under the Marxist lens.
The hard to draw line is for Integralism, which has totalitarian mass politics and hangs out just on the frontier between fascism and other ultranationalisms. I think it depends on the implementation for that one.
But mere traditional nationalist monarchism? That's not clerical fascism.
I think quite a bit of what is said about Japan being fascist is abuse of analogy for lack of precise understanding by Europeans, frankly.
The wikipedia article you linked mentions this:
Japanese imperialism was a lot more like the IInd Reich than the IIIrd. I don't really think it makes sense to analyze it under the lens of fascism, precisely because the ideological component is quite different.
Anyone who refuses to turn their brain off at the mention of Boomer anathema. The numbers are growing every day.
You yourself seem to still live in this world where "Nazi" means anything. But it is nearly done. And when it is, understanding history beyond such clichés will be more valuable than the ability to manipulate a defunct frame. Because if you do you're able to reconstruct a new narrative.
What people miss about Lindsay's schizo rants is that he's actually right. Liberalism is a dead doctrine and the right is in fact memetically summoning something new out of its failure. I wish that people would stop themselves from laughing at the man driven mad by reading too much critical theory and actually give his claims as charitable a reading as they give, say, Nick Land. Lindsay's true failing is lamenting this, as a man who desires everything to be based on logic and reason he can't do anything else. But reason and logic alone brought us into this mess. Something easy to miss for someone who fought on their side against krits for so long.
Now the real reason to be weary of fascism under such auspices (and therefore to accurately identify it) is that it contains the worst parts of modernity alongside an unrestrained rejection of reason. This is what led to its failure in large parts. Repeating history would be pointless here, so at the least whatever new reaction needs to address its rightward critiques and more likely integrate the leftward ones as well.
Whatever comes needs to transcend the neocon frame. And you can't do it with naive XXth century idealism.
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