I’d like to address the elephant in the room on this question up front. Didn’t a very liberal alliance of nations side with communists (the USSR) in opposition to fascism in WW2? It’s important to bare in mind a few things. First, the national rivalry and competing revanchist tug-o-war between Germany and France especially was running hot for literal centuries to that point. This was much more characteristic of WW1, which spilled into WW2. Second, the economic ties between USA and the allied nations, Britain especially, was the prime motivator in determining who the US sided with. For years into the war, even while we were officially isolationist and ‘neutral’, we were economically supporting and trading with the allies in a way that Germany couldn’t help but percieve as ‘taking a side’. Finally, it’s most important to note that WW2 was not seen as a choice between communism and fascism, as evidenced by the immediate initiation of the “Cold War” and Truman Doctrine.
Edit: I accidentally confused the Zimmerman Telegram as WW2 rather than WW1.
I’m not saying liberals don’t prefer liberalism to fascism. The accusation is that liberals and fascists shared value of capitalism and its associated heirarchies is more important to liberals than the shared value of purely civil equality they have with leftists. In other words, if liberalism was taken off the table completely (which was not the case during WW2), liberals would prefer to side with fascists to protect capitalism than they would to side with socialists to protect equality.
It’s interesting to keep in mind the flaccid and conciliatory behavior of the Democrats in response to the Trump regime, which is no longer “threatening” to become fascism, but straight up is fascist, and how common it is to see Democrats insist we combat it by pushing themselves to the right and scapegoating leftism, even as the Overton Window currently ranges from Reagan Republican at its leftmost boundary and Nazi Germany at the rightmost boundary.
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I’d like to address the elephant in the room on this question up front. Didn’t a very liberal alliance of nations side with communists (the USSR) in opposition to fascism in WW2? It’s important to bare in mind a few things. First, the national rivalry and competing revanchist tug-o-war between Germany and France especially was running hot for literal centuries to that point. This was much more characteristic of WW1, which spilled into WW2. Second, the economic ties between USA and the allied nations, Britain especially, was the prime motivator in determining who the US sided with. For years into the war, even while we were officially isolationist and ‘neutral’, we were economically supporting and trading with the allies in a way that Germany couldn’t help but percieve as ‘taking a side’. This is why they attempted to secretly recruit Mexico into a plot to invade the US, distract our economic forces away from the allies and toward our own war front to give Germany the upper hand. The interception and revelation of that plan was the immediate cause of our declaration of war against Germany and the axis powers. Finally, it’s most important to note that WW2 was not seen as a choice between communism and fascism, as evidenced by the immediate initiation of the “Cold War” and Truman Doctrine.
I’m not saying liberals don’t prefer liberalism to fascism. The accusation is that liberals and fascists shared value of capitalism and its associated heirarchies is more important to liberals than the shared value of purely civil equality they have with leftists. In other words, if liberalism was taken off the table completely (which was not the case during WW2), liberals would prefer to side with fascists to protect capitalism than they would to side with socialists to protect equality.
It’s interesting to keep in mind the flaccid and conciliatory behavior of the Democrats in response to the Trump regime, which is no longer “threatening” to become fascism, but straight up is fascist, and how common it is to see Democrats insist we combat it by pushing themselves to the right and scapegoating leftism, even as the Overton Window currently ranges from Reagan Republican at its leftmost boundary and Nazi Germany at the rightmost boundary.
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We fight fascism far far more than the leftists who don’t vote or support democrats. They are fascist enablers who pretend they are fighting fascism. It’s embarrassing to be a leftists with all these fascism enablers flooding leftism at the moment.
I’m opposed to authoritarianism, whether it takes the form of fascism or authoritarian communism. But they’re not that different. In practice, they’re both the inevitable failure mode of masculinity in the locally dominant ethnic group.
This is kind of a dumb question. Liberals don’t think they’re siding with fascism – even people right of center don’t think they’re doing that. Trump is black bagging student activists and openly saying he’s considering a “3rd term” and won’t say he’d step down at the end of this term and his supporters still don’t think he’s approaching a dictatorship.
Liberals who are complying in advance rather than standing up to the administration are doing so because they’re facing threats/consequences and they view it as having already tried opposition through just advocacy rather than active action.
Everyone inherently acts in their own best interests. For mainstream liberals, that generally means hiding in the herd rather than becoming an activist and making themselves a target.
No. I’m a staunch liberal and anti-fascist. This “scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds” idea is complete nonsense to protect terminally online leftists from having to engage in actual discourse and the difficult work of forming alliances.
No, and I don’t know where this prevailing “wisdom” even came from. The famous “after Hitler, our turn” line didn’t come from liberals. We see parallels to that line echoed constantly while center-left liberals remain opposed to fascism as they were in its heyday.
I think that this is a silly premise. Of course, nobody is going to say “why, yes, I love fascism!”
More importantly, I don’t understand why those on the far left are so rigid about capitalism and socialism being a binary choice. Pretty much every economy in history has been a blend of private ownership, worker ownership, and government ownership of various industries. The question is what that mix looks like. Liberals are flexible, but we generally don’t like the idea of just forcing everybody into something completely different. That doesn’t bode well for the long-term success of the changes. The average person struggles with major change.
All authoritarianism sucks but gun to my head I’d choose the one that at least tries for equality over the one that’s explicitly based in hierarchy.
I do think this question overestimates how much liberals value capitalism, though.
Not true for me. I will never choose fascism, but I don’t expect to be offered socialism any time soon.
What policy positions are all democrats moving to the right on?
>The prevailing wisdom among leftists is that liberals will ultimately side with fascism over socialism/communism if forced to choose — is that true for you?
No, but…
Leftists sometimes make sweeping generalizations that make such a claim more plausible. For instance, if you think ht at “Kamala’s a cop” and ‘all cops are fascists’ then liberals sided with a fascist cop in November 2024.
If you don’t use such extreme definitions, then it doesn’t seem very plausible.
Did you think the liberals would say they would side with fascism?
Obviously the answer is no. Liberals do not like fascism. The ones who sided with the Nazis within Germany were conservatives, not Liberals, and I will also note that the KPD were accelerationists who supported Hitler’s rise to power because they thought it would be so bad for Germany that it would force Germans to support them next time. Spoiler alert: it was so bad for Germany that the KPD was banned one day after Hitler took power.
Democrats suffer from a lack of backbone, not from liking Trump. The current crop of politicians is extremely focused on process and they are worried that any form of opposition to Trump would infringe on the process. Obviously, this is a bad view, but it’s not the same as supporting fascism
No but you’ve posted how you couldn’t vote for Kamala in November so….
No? I don’t even understand the tension. Socialism isn’t even a subversion of capitalism, it’s just capitalism’s value proposition taken to its logical conclusion.
I would choose fascism over communism though, yes. Fascism is as passionate as it is stupid. It burns bright and fast and it always collapses. Communism is far more ideologically robust.
Who was it that voted for Kamala Harris, and who was it that sat out the vote, loaded third party, or directly voted for the fascist Donald Trump?
I think I’d be cool with market socialism if that’s on the table.
Not that bullshit with a vanguard party controlling everything.
Though that might be a little better than fascism?
The post wwii era was still, at its root, capitalism. Like any ism it all hinges on who is managing it. Post wwii people were more or less united in electing progressives to manage it and as a result we built one of the best post war countries in existence.
But with that came comfort and complacency for the common people while the rich, whose entire sense of self worth relied on controlling others, were chimping out over being robbed of their self worth. They kept pushing to restore their power while the comfortable population tuned it out.
This went on. The incremental shifts, each small enough to tell the left they were overreacting when they complained about it, accumulated to the outright fascism we have today.
I, a liberal, simply accept the reality that there is no way to keep the population engaged enough that they will stand together against every tiny inch of ground on every front that the rich push. So, the realistic choices are to let the rich have everything and then hope people are get mad enough that they dont mind dying in a revolution every hundred years or so. Or, as much as possible, provide some other source of self worth for rich people to pursue. Preferably one that relies on their understanding that the people they have such ridiculous power over are counting on them to take responsibility for their power.
Capitalism can do that in theory but of course so could any other -ism. It is merely what we already have in place and fixing a system is always less work than swapping it out.
I think the real issue here is that the prevailing opinion among leftists is that socialism and fascism are the only ‘real’ end-stage ideologies and that liberalism is sort of a fake middle ground that is destined to fade away as people realize [whatever]. There is no ‘being forced to choose’ or ‘siding with whomever’ – liberalism is its own complete ideology and I reject both communism and fascism, and indeed all authoritarianism.
Naturally, to a communist, the idea that a liberals and fascists both share a value of capitalism is both defining and accurate, but it really isn’t true. What a fascist calls ‘capitalism’ is not at all the same thing as what modern liberalism supports except in the very loosest and most meaningless of ‘private property’ terms. In fact, I’d say that the sort of state capitalism that we see in China, Russia, and Trump’s America is more akin to the command economies of the socialist world than it is to what liberals prefer.