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Notes -
Harry has his problems, including an inability to let go or move on from his failed romance, but he can Jamrock Shuffle like nobody's business!
I would have thought they wouldn't go for "Fascists are just failures at getting girls" as being much too trivial. I mean, nobody in Revachol is getting any kind of happy ending; the working-class woman ends up with a dead husband, look at the entire tangle of desire and sex around Klaasje; all the broken marriages and relationships and not even started in the first place - Garte is the only one with any kind of a chance at a start, and that depends how you handle the phone call with Sylvie.
I guess the idea is mockery by not taking it seriously and reducing it to a clownish reason for anyone finding the philosophy attractive, but it's not like any of the other political quadrants are all happy happy joy joy at interpersonal relationships either.
I kept thinking about this yesterday, and one way of thinking about political alignments is that they also sort of align with, and are commentary, on traditional RPG alignments. You've got the "good" alignment, the "bad" alignment and two different interpretations of the "neutral" alignment. However, all also get commented on and subverted as concepts.
The "good" alignment is communist. Is communism good? YMMV, but that's what we know the developers think, from their interviews, and communist alignment is also what you get if you take all the romantic revolutionary options about defending the poor and so. And yet, the game will chew you out for all the crimes of the fictional communists and the unworkability of it all in practice, and most communists you encounter are compete messes, murderous wrecks and idiots, culminating with The Deserter, who is not really at all different from the fascists he claims to loathe.
The "bad" alignment is fascist. And fascism, as seen through the game, is indeed, bad, and the game makes no bones about it! However, it's not the "cool" sort of bad where you do epic shit, like become a conquering Dark Lord (KOTOR) or punch out annoying reporters (Mass Effect) or whatever. Rather, it's just being a dick towards other people, generally in a very banal way, including towards Kim. It's not fun, and deliberately so. Very few people end up stomaching a genuine fascist run in DE.
Moralism is the "neutral" alignment, interpreted as what you get when, in a normal RPG, you deliberately mix and match choices to keep the karma meter running too far to either side. That's often a smart way to play a RPG and keep your conversation options open, but DE reminds you that if you just avoid taking a side and play it safe, that's a choice in itself, and the choice in this particular game is just keeping up an oppressive and brutal system and being a part of it's machine.
Ultraliberalism is also a "neutral" alignment, but another way. I've seen jokes about how RPG alignment is like having game's choices be "There's a kitten in a tree, what do you do? a. Climb a tree to rescue the kitten b. Shoot the kitten c. "I can rescue this kitten... for a price!", and ultraliberalism is, of course, the c. option, playing a RPG in a way where you just maximize your resources and, typically, get better gear to make the boss fight a simple matter. And yet... here, there's no real reason to do that; money is necessary at places, sure, but you can run a perfectly fine character without buying anything, and collecting oodles of cash eventually just becomes a question of hoarding money without really having much use for it. Why? Because you're a greedy hustler, obviously! Or rather, you aren't, but you're pretending to be one in a game, for... why, exactly? And game ultraliberalism is just an ideological cover for that.
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