CamillePagliacci [none/use name]

Well it’s certainly easy for you to try

No I don’t think I have pretended that Robert Paxton sat down and decided to fully rewrite his work during the Trump years, that would have been dishonest. But that his own interpretation of what is considered fascist is broad enough to include Trump but not any previous US president, and that this constitutes a lack of rigor that he has adopted in part out of his own political opinions on Trump becoming sourer through his reign. Which is evident when you compare his first article and his second article.

I think you’re just mad that I have demonstrated that I know what I’m talking about.

That would be an interesting definition of fascism, but it fails the test of including regimes that were listed as fascist. Pinochet’s Chile was very clearly in a situation where national and international capitalists were making decisions and where much of Pinochet’s power was reliant on the support of international (Particularly US) capital interests and national capitalists who could and did flaunt the laws of the state. I’m more shaky on the RoC but from my understanding there basically was no state power except sending in the military to knock heads occasionally, parts of that country were entirely run by corporations, parts of it were run by regional warlords, parts of it had functionally no government. Very few people were actually subject to the state, and the forces of capital in particular were not subject to much state power. Ownership of production, military power and state functionary tasks blended together and were often held by the same people who tended towards embracing profit motives. Although I will admit my knowledge of the RoC is limited and I might be misunderstanding.
As for the RoK, that was fully a subject state to US capital interests.

I’m also pretty sure the US is considered fascist in this particular discussion (Or at least that was my understanding), and I think the US capitalist class is kind of uniquely powerful.

If we are to set up a very restrictive definition of fascism, that one would be a worthy one to consider. But I don’t think it’s a correct or useful one for this particular discussion given our previous inclusions of other regimes that do not fit within it. It is certainly one that would fit for a lot of traditional 20th century fascist powers, and one with a very clear outlook on what is being discussed.

This is an awful take. He thinks Trump was exceptionally different from prior U.S. presidents (by a way other than his rhetoric),

Yes. He does. Which is why I think it’s not useful to say that his definition of fascism is uniquely restrictive. I have a suspicion that my interlocutor, given their focus on Francoist Spain was actually thinking of Stanley Payne who does have a very restrictive definition of fascism that specifically excludes francoism… because he is a francoist. I’ll address your other bigger point because it is actually worth addressing, I just saw this first.

Call me when that happens

Sadly thought it turned out that you were wrong and I was right, because I am always right.

I’m not though. You just disagree with me so others being smug pricks reads as just normal behavior to you.

In other words, turned out I fucking knew what I was talking about and you didn’t. Which of course I already knew

All true statements made by some sort of genius. Half the posts here have just been calling me an idiot, and I am not going to be shamed into falling in line. Therefore, “I’m right and you’re wrong”.

Let me remind you that Robert Paxton has now reached a point where he argues that trumpism constitutes a form of fascism in the US and that under Trump the US was fascist in a way it wasn’t before and after. So the idea that his definition and understanding of fascism is an inherently very narrow one is just pointless.

Robert Paxton argued that fascism comes from a specific confluence of events in which the traditional elite relies on a radical right wing to maintain their power due to having lost legitimacy or needing power to suppress the left, forming a coalition between traditional stake holders in the state (Like capitalists, clergy, nobility, what have you. In the Russian case this would be the capitalist class who bought out the state during the shock doctrine) and right wing nationalism which tends towards a mass movement character. This movement co-opts the popularity of the movement into a suppression of “actual democracy” (Really liberal bourgeois dictatorship of course) and maintains power by balancing the powers of the coalitions. This movement then either decays into generic “authoritarian” rule under the traditional elite, or is increasingly radicalized towards genocidal redemptive violence.

Russia of course decayed into oligarchic fascist rule by the traditional power brokers.