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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34907 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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There is... I don't have the number, but I keep seeing them pop up in forums all over the place(and for several years), so there's at least an amount of left-aligned individuals whom are absolutely convinced that America is only One Bad Day away from getting turned into a Christian Theocracy.

AOC is presumably one of those people.

I think they're not entirely wrong, but if I had to put money on it, I'd predict that, in the event of FedGov collapse/takeover, things would actually continue as normal and not go fascist at least for a while--maybe even long enough for things to return to something resembling the status quo ante. America is big and spread-out enough to keep all of it from going all red-banners-everywhere.

To back this up: Imperial Germany collapsed economically and politically in 1918, and Weimar Germany never obtained political stability (rapidly emerging and disintegrating governments) but it didn't succumb to totalitarianism until the early 1930s. For most of the intervening period, the social democratic left pushed for reforms, and even the (significantly large) authoritarian right almost all pined for the good old days of pre-WWI Germany, rather than the totalitarian revolution of Nazism.

I believe this was most lucidly established in the Hulu documentary "The Handmaid's Tale".

Didn't find it especially persuasive, myself, but have no shortage of female friends and relations who whisper about it in hushed tones with many significant glances.

Then again, I could possibly be described as a Christian theocrat.

I've seen the argument touted about for far longer than Hulu's version of the Handmaid's Tale, so. (And I won't go into a minor aside regarding Margaret Atwood, or the fact that said book was taking pages from what happened in Iran, or...)

I think it's a fairly silly take, myself.

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