this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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If you really want to stop fascism, you have to stop it from taking root. The problem is that people think the root is "random bad guy appears out of nowhere and brings about fascism". To truly prevent fascism from taking root, you need to starve it of supporters. Those supporters start with the obscenely wealthy afraid of losing their wealth who fund fascists who then promise the desperate masses relief from whatever ails them. A huge component of that is inequity, largely driven by economic warfare waged by the obscenely wealthy.
This right here is a message that often gets lost in the culture war. It's a mistake to assume that people, especially rural white southerners, support Trump because they sat down one day and thought logically about it and reasoned themselves into supporting Trump. No, if they had done that, they would have ultimately come to the conclusion that Trump is one of the people responsible for the massive inequality that is the root cause of all the problems that American society is facing today.
The wealthy do not care about the man himself, or his ideology, only that he is a convenient puppet who can be controlled with campaign funds to protect their own wealth in the long term. To them, Trump is the most convenient and effective scapegoat ever - he takes all the heat, and they reap the benefits of having regulations peeled away, workers rights erode, and wages stagnate. To that end, they must convince the public that Trump is Jesus and Joe Biden is the Devil
The common folk who are suffering get tricked into supporting him when the propaganda machine funded by the wealthy paints the fascist hero as an everyman who you'd love to share a beer with. Someone who is an simultaneously an underdog whose struggle one might find endearing and relatable, but also a shrewd tactician and a threat to the ephemeral "other" keeping the little man down. Then Trump gets up on stage and says, "These people are your enemies, they are the cause of all of your woes and suffering, and only I can stop them!".
When put into perspective, it's not hard to see why people flocked to him in droves. The only message they were ever allowed to hear, by design, was "Trump's the man, he'll fix everything.".