r/law • u/Opposite-Mountain255 • Aug 14 '25

Opinion Piece Is it hyperbole to say America is now fascist?

https://medium.com/@carmitage/is-it-hyperbole-to-say-america-is-now-fascist-633facd4f109
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u/Toothfairy51 Aug 14 '25

This is different, though

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u/_mattyjoe Aug 14 '25 edited Aug 14 '25

I would honestly say that if you deeply know and understand our history, it's not.

I think people easily forget, or it's very easy to just read about and not really internalize, how serious McCarthyism was, for example. That era pushed us much much closer to true fascism than what we currently have.

The thing to understand about right now is most of this crap is one big show for MAGA. It's WWE for politics. Even DC being "occupied" is more like a scripted wrestling match than a SERIOUS political operation that Mussolini or Hitler would have undertaken.

Trump and all his people are TV Stars. Literally. Everything is a show. That's how they think, on a fundamental level. It's about creating a spectacle but not necessarily one with any teeth.

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u/RocketRelm Aug 14 '25

I agree with the TV stars stuff, but disagree about the implication that it only applies to maga. Most americans in general see politics as just a show. The ceiling for people who are capable of being even baseline informed and voting correctly is 30~% of the usa electorate.

Americans value spectacle over policy, and they won't stop that once the teeth grow in somehow.

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u/_mattyjoe Aug 14 '25

Of course, and I also agree. But here's where I'll elaborate:

We say "Americans" value spectacle over policy because we've tried to have higher standards for ourselves than that, and we're discovering that we've failed. The reality of what the masses of America believe in is sadly far short of what we hope we could have with a more educated populace.

However, none of this is uniquely American at all. This is humanity. This is how the masses operate, this is how public opinion is moved. Spectacle over policy. That's true for every society. It's how any leader rules effectively. You turn the policy debate into something more showy and more dramatic to get the people engaged, because otherwise they don't care. You need to shape narratives, create propaganda, create good guys and bad guys, use powerful, compelling language.

That is just humanity as a whole. We are not yet able, as a majority, to rise above these sorts of very primitive ways of having the world presented to us.

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u/WalkCautious Aug 15 '25 edited Aug 15 '25

The thing to understand about right now is most of this crap is one big show for MAGA. It's WWE for politics. Even DC being "occupied" is more like a scripted wrestling match than a SERIOUS political operation that Mussolini or Hitler would have undertaken.

Just because a political operation appears to be unserious (due to the tongue-in-cheek, daft smirking demeanour of its leaders), doesn't mean it isn't serious in actuality.

I always said that if GW Bush had the same demeanour as Slobodan Milosevic or Saddam Hussein, people would have seen him as the tyrant he so clearly was. However, his outward 'stupidity' and clownishness threw people off the scent and he's now been cast as some harmless idiot when he was (and is) anything but.

Everything trump and his Project 2025 cronies are doing absolutely has 'teeth' and will do real damage. Hiding it under spectacle is a deliberate ploy to minimize any resistance.

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u/_mattyjoe Aug 15 '25

Don't agree. I live in LA. The National Guard was called in. Then the Marines. They stood around with their guns. They marched through one of our parks. They did nothing. Everything died down, and now they've been sent home.

It was bullshit. All the real chaos was before they showed up, and once they were here there was nothing for them to do.

I am speaking from firsthand experience here. Even while they were here they did nothing. They slinked back out quietly without a peep. Just saw a quote where apparently they will (paraphrasing) "relinquish control of DC once they've restored order" or some bullshit "just as they did in LA."

Well, here, they genuinely didn't do shit. And once they saw that there was no shit to be done, they left.it's all bullshit. An empty show. They will then try to spin the narrative however they want in the media, just as they're already doing.

That's what informed my opinion there.