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comment by nothingleftinside
nothingleftinside  ·  2695 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: DON'T PANIC

I don't know why someone wouldn't fall in to the latter. You heard what the man said, You heard what his policies are. It's fascism, and he is a fascist. His voters support fascist policies.





user-inactivated  ·  2695 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Bernie Sanders ran as a socialist, and netted over 12,000,000 votes, according to realclearpolitics. This number is skewed downwards somewhat by the fact that he did better in caucus states.

And according to the NYT page I had open in the background, around 120,000,000 voted in the general. Probably slightly more, because I just added the D and R votes together, but, still.

Is roughly 10% of the electorate socialist? I don't think so, because I know a fair amount of Sanders supporters who are not. I only know a couple who would identify as such.

I'm one of them.

This is the same reason I don't think that all Trump supporters are fascists. Because I know a fair amount of them. A lot of them are people I have respected for years.

Life is more complex than that.

nothingleftinside  ·  2693 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I dunno. I think if you support fascist policies, you are a fascist. If you support socialist policies, you are a socialist.

user-inactivated  ·  2692 days ago  ·  link  ·  

By and large, people who voted for Sanders voted in the general, though. Stein only got 1% of the vote (admittedly with lesser ballot access) , and while you might be able to make an argument that she supports socialist policies, Johnson, Clinton, and Trump are firmly capitalist.

Most of Sander's supporters have voted for someone who is socialist, and someone who is capitalist within the past year. That's a wild swing of policy support for them to make so quickly.

kleinbl00  ·  2695 days ago  ·  link  ·  

bfv, wasoxygen - I would argue that Trump is more of an oligarch than a fascist but I'm not nearly as versed in the classification systems as you guys. What say thee?

user-inactivated  ·  2695 days ago  ·  link  ·  

There are enough definitions of fascism that you could probably find one that applies, but I think the only sense that really fits is as a pejorative for authoritarian right-wingers in general.

He's certainly an oligarch, being rich enough to fund his own campaign was part of his pitch early on.

user-inactivated  ·  2694 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Only tangentially related I guess, but I've got an article from socialistworker in my rss reader right now drawing a parallel (not as the point of the text, just in passing) between Trump and Berlusconi.

    Thus, the White House, once dominated by old-money ruling class figures and politicians socialized in the U.S. military, will now be occupied by a rogue billionaire. Trump, despite the comparisons some have made to the Italian fascist ruler Mussolini, more closely resembles Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian media magnate who used his money and populist appeals to impose himself on a corrupt, conservative political establishment.
b_b  ·  2695 days ago  ·  link  ·  

There was a poll early in the GOP primary that correlated support for authoritarianism with support for Trump, and the correlation crossed ideologies. Fascist, oligarch, autocrat. The point is kind of moot, IMO, since taxonomy is far less important than the result.