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The problem with fascism is that its endgame always ends up with its adherents attacking each other. It always fails, it is not sustainable. Too bad its followe

The problem with fascism is that its endgame always ends up with its adherents attacking each other. It always fails, it is not sustainable. Too bad its followers never got that memo. I thought the Internet would just make the next attempt that much faster to die out, but apparently I was wrong! In related news, a relative of mine complained that he was receiving fascist posts on Facebook. Thing is, he didn't follow those groups, but one of his friends did, and Facebook's stupid algorithm thought it would share what his friend liked in his news feed, without asking.

pjc50 8y ago
> fascism is that its endgame always ends up with its adherents attacking each other. Historically both fascist governments and fascist movements require external attack to collapse - or a succession crisis, which takes a while. And a lot of people can get killed along the way.
- nostrademons 8y ago
  I'd read somewhere that the downfall of fascism is always on the battlefield. Fascism simultaneously requires that a large population believe they are a persecuted group in danger of extinction (else there's no reason to subjugate one's individual will & liberty to a strong leader) and that they are superior to those who oppose them (else their cause is futile and they ought to ally themselves with the superior force). The distortions in reality needed to justify these contradictory beliefs filter up into the leaders' decision-making itself, such that they eventually make stupid decisions like bombing Pearl Harbor or opening a second front in the European war.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  Personally I think it is more 'they ensure they will get attacked and bite off more than they can chew'. Since the fundamentals of totalitarianism just plain aren't sustainable. I mean Hitler's economy was a conquest dependent mess and the Soviet Union ended up collapsing under its own weight. As for ending up attacking each other I think that is a general authoritarian thing with purging to take/secure power - it happens with communism and it happened with monarchies. One interesting outlier along the lines was Fascist Spain. It was caused by a chain of events caused by internal attack of fascists for their own cynical reasons. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Luis_Carrero_Blanco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Luis_Carrero_...] Combined with a secret liberal king, Juan Carlos and the power was used to restore democracy.
  - agsdfgsd 8y ago
    >I mean Hitler's economy was a conquest dependent mess No it wasn't. The economic recovery occurred way before the war did.
  - andrekandre 8y ago
    soviet collapse was not so simple as just economic “overweightness” as much as gorbachevs “liberalizations” causing the whole thing to spin out of control: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Union https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Un...
hnauz 8y ago
>I thought the Internet would just make the next attempt that much faster to die out, but apparently I was wrong! That's how politics work, it's a pendulum. It has swung too far to liberalism, we're almost at Weimar republic now. Now it's time for the pendulum to swing back. If anything, the Internet is going to accelerate it.
- arduanika 8y ago
  Strongly disagree with any theory of history based on analogy to Newtonian mechanics. History simply isn't that predictable. History is stochastic. History only happens once. Read Popper.
  - deleted 8y ago
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c3534l 8y ago
Historically, fascism has collapsed because free societies tend to have better economies. Indeed, democracies are very new in the grand scheme of history. The US is going 200 years strong, but slavery was part of that is still younge in the history of civilization.
- XorNot 8y ago
  It's also worth noting that all of this is a historical anomaly - it's in no way clear that our present technological civilization requires free society to keep the economy going. Which is to say we need to be clear about our objectives: if free society and individual liberty is important to us, those need to be the goals potentially at the expense of short-term economic growth.
  - roenxi 8y ago
    Do you have a source on that? It is easy to underestimate just how _stupidly_ a non-free society can behave. I'm not even talking democracy vs other (there can be non-free democracies, or notionally authoritarian regimes that are quite free in practice), I mean the really basic "if you can work to better yourself, then go for it" style liberty. The system of corporations we have today is a super-civilised way of wresting power and control from existing structures - if you can do something better and cheaper than the company currently in power, you can displace them quickly and with minimum fuss. The core of that mechanism in the west is if you think a companies management are just clueless you can start your own company and compete. That is a big component of what freedom is - if you think you can do it better you can try to do it better. Non-free societies would almost certainly disrupt that mechanism as the first thing they did. Given how complicated a modern economy is, I'm not sure they'd be competitive with a free society. The inefficiencies would build up to spectacular levels.
    - balfirevic 8y ago
      Genuine question - how does China fit into this narrative?
zozbot123 8y ago
> The problem with fascism is that its endgame always ends up with its adherents attacking each other. That's also the "endgame" of pure democracy, and of basically every other "pure" form of government. (Classical Western philosophers knew this very well, BTW - they had very detailed models of how these violent crises happen, and how they lead to different forms of government in turn, with their own inbuilt instability.) It's one reason why sustainable government is pretty much always based on a variety of institutions that enable ongoing checks and balances among different organized interests. It's why we have republics, and not pure ("direct") democracies.
- natmaka 8y ago
  Polybius, 22 centuries ago, already saw at least some of those inbuilt instabilities and a resulting cycle (sequence of anacyclosis) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacyclosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacyclosis IMHO Leopold Kohr enlightened us about all this, "centralized political and economic structures" are the main culprits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#Philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#Philosophy
_iyig 8y ago
China seems to be doing fine. Having survived the Culutural Revolution, the Party seems quite wary of the failure mode you describe.

pjc50 8y ago

> fascism is that its endgame always ends up with its adherents attacking each other. Historically both fascist governments and fascist movements require external attack to collapse - or a succession crisis, which takes a while. And a lot of people can get killed along the way.

nostrademons 8y ago
I'd read somewhere that the downfall of fascism is always on the battlefield. Fascism simultaneously requires that a large population believe they are a persecuted group in danger of extinction (else there's no reason to subjugate one's individual will & liberty to a strong leader) and that they are superior to those who oppose them (else their cause is futile and they ought to ally themselves with the superior force). The distortions in reality needed to justify these contradictory beliefs filter up into the leaders' decision-making itself, such that they eventually make stupid decisions like bombing Pearl Harbor or opening a second front in the European war.
Nasrudith 8y ago
Personally I think it is more 'they ensure they will get attacked and bite off more than they can chew'. Since the fundamentals of totalitarianism just plain aren't sustainable. I mean Hitler's economy was a conquest dependent mess and the Soviet Union ended up collapsing under its own weight. As for ending up attacking each other I think that is a general authoritarian thing with purging to take/secure power - it happens with communism and it happened with monarchies. One interesting outlier along the lines was Fascist Spain. It was caused by a chain of events caused by internal attack of fascists for their own cynical reasons. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Luis_Carrero_Blanco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Luis_Carrero_...] Combined with a secret liberal king, Juan Carlos and the power was used to restore democracy.
- agsdfgsd 8y ago
  >I mean Hitler's economy was a conquest dependent mess No it wasn't. The economic recovery occurred way before the war did.
- andrekandre 8y ago
  soviet collapse was not so simple as just economic “overweightness” as much as gorbachevs “liberalizations” causing the whole thing to spin out of control: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Union https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Un...

hnauz 8y ago

>I thought the Internet would just make the next attempt that much faster to die out, but apparently I was wrong! That's how politics work, it's a pendulum. It has swung too far to liberalism, we're almost at Weimar republic now. Now it's time for the pendulum to swing back. If anything, the Internet is going to accelerate it.

arduanika 8y ago
Strongly disagree with any theory of history based on analogy to Newtonian mechanics. History simply isn't that predictable. History is stochastic. History only happens once. Read Popper.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 8y ago

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c3534l 8y ago

Historically, fascism has collapsed because free societies tend to have better economies. Indeed, democracies are very new in the grand scheme of history. The US is going 200 years strong, but slavery was part of that is still younge in the history of civilization.

XorNot 8y ago
It's also worth noting that all of this is a historical anomaly - it's in no way clear that our present technological civilization requires free society to keep the economy going. Which is to say we need to be clear about our objectives: if free society and individual liberty is important to us, those need to be the goals potentially at the expense of short-term economic growth.
- roenxi 8y ago
  Do you have a source on that? It is easy to underestimate just how _stupidly_ a non-free society can behave. I'm not even talking democracy vs other (there can be non-free democracies, or notionally authoritarian regimes that are quite free in practice), I mean the really basic "if you can work to better yourself, then go for it" style liberty. The system of corporations we have today is a super-civilised way of wresting power and control from existing structures - if you can do something better and cheaper than the company currently in power, you can displace them quickly and with minimum fuss. The core of that mechanism in the west is if you think a companies management are just clueless you can start your own company and compete. That is a big component of what freedom is - if you think you can do it better you can try to do it better. Non-free societies would almost certainly disrupt that mechanism as the first thing they did. Given how complicated a modern economy is, I'm not sure they'd be competitive with a free society. The inefficiencies would build up to spectacular levels.
  - balfirevic 8y ago
    Genuine question - how does China fit into this narrative?

zozbot123 8y ago

> The problem with fascism is that its endgame always ends up with its adherents attacking each other. That's also the "endgame" of pure democracy, and of basically every other "pure" form of government. (Classical Western philosophers knew this very well, BTW - they had very detailed models of how these violent crises happen, and how they lead to different forms of government in turn, with their own inbuilt instability.) It's one reason why sustainable government is pretty much always based on a variety of institutions that enable ongoing checks and balances among different organized interests. It's why we have republics, and not pure ("direct") democracies.

natmaka 8y ago
Polybius, 22 centuries ago, already saw at least some of those inbuilt instabilities and a resulting cycle (sequence of anacyclosis) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacyclosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacyclosis IMHO Leopold Kohr enlightened us about all this, "centralized political and economic structures" are the main culprits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#Philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#Philosophy

_iyig 8y ago

China seems to be doing fine. Having survived the Culutural Revolution, the Party seems quite wary of the failure mode you describe.