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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsDo They Mean It When They Say Fascism? Because History Tells Us Exactly What Happens If They Don't. - Tad Stoermer
Mar 5, 2026
Establishment Democrats are using the word fascism. Not fringe members the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, sitting senators, the DNC chair. They are telling you that what America faces today is not a bad president or a dangerous political opponent. They are telling you it is fascism.
That word carries a specific historical record. And that record is not ambiguous about what happens when the opposition gets it wrong.
In the 1930s, the parties that tried to fight fascism through normal politics elections, institutions, legislation didn't just lose. They got abolished. The German Social Democrats identified the Nazi danger early and accurately. The French left understood what was happening. What their institutional position wouldn't let them do was take the structural steps that would have undercut it. By the time the choice was unavoidable, it was too late for some of them to make it. A majority of French Radical deputies voted to hand Marshal Pétain full dictatorial powers in 1940.
And then the political fight was over. What came next was resistance with a capital R the maquis, the Italian partisans, the underground networks. A completely different kind of struggle, fought under occupation and dictatorship, at a cost most people today cannot imagine, by people who no longer had the option of normal politics.
That is the history establishment Democrats are invoking when they use the word. Either they know that and are acting accordingly structurally, materially, at real cost to their own positioning or they are using the most consequential word in modern political history to raise money, mobilize a base, and return to business as usual.
They cannot have it both ways. Because if it's actual fascism, we already know what the failure of half-measures produces. And we know what it then takes to fight back.
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Do They Mean It When They Say Fascism? Because History Tells Us Exactly What Happens If They Don't. - Tad Stoermer (Original Post)
ihaveaquestion
16 hrs ago
OP
Mysterian
(6,345 posts)1. Is the USA in its own Weimar Republic era?
Minority leader Jeffries went on TV on Dec. 3, 2025 and praised Trump's immigration policy.
Is this the leadership we need as we face a full-blown fascist republican party?
rampartd
(4,488 posts)2. logical obvious inescapable
whatever this is eventually called, this has aspects of fascism. it also has aspects of reality tv and video gaming and casino gambling mob and all.
we will have elections in november. nothing will change except a few name plates.
the action comes when the star of cult of personality becomes a non person.
jd vance might get the button, but who gets the epstein video tapes. that is the guy who will be pulling the strings.