this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2024
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There's a difference?
conservatives oppose social progress and want to preserve the status quo, but are happy to fight for that within democratic bounds, more or less. Fascists want to subvert democracy and install a completely new status quo
No different than liberals, then.
All institutionalized political power is violently anti-democratic - it's literally why you are forced to pay for violent paramilitaries to police you and protect the status quo from anything that can be called democratic with a straight face.
Fascists are not unique in that regards.
The capitalists that funded Hitler and Mussolini into power did not do so because fascists "install a completely new status quo." The CIA didn't fund fascists into power all over the third world during the Cold War because fascists "install a completely new status quo."
They funded fascists into power because fascists protect the status quo. You know... the status quo liberals and conservatives all love so much?
Liberals can be conservatives. Opposite of conservatives are reformists.
Is voting anti-democratic? Because voting is political institution of democracy.
All conservatives are liberals - that is, until they cross over into fascism territory. The people that get called "conservative" in the US do not disagree with liberalism in any fundamental way - they still believe in basic liberal ideas such as the fetishization of private property, capitalism, the (so-called) "free market," and the ever-present "rule of law" (as dictated by a liberal, capitalist elite).
North Korea has voting. Apartheid South Africa had voting. I don't see any liberals falling over themselves to describe those societies as "democratic" simply because of that... yet the one you exist in must be so simply because your media and your political racketeers told you it is?
The bar for what counts as democracy or not is so damn low you need a deep-sea submersible just to see it.
Fascism is more of an approach than a specific ideology. Its only core value is Strength Through Unity - but to achieve that it needs some populist values to unite the people over - which is how you get different flavors of fascism. The original Fascist Party was using nationalism. Racism is also a popular choice (fascism + racism = Nazism), and it seems like rightist values are more prune to it - but leftist values are not safe either, like we have seen in the USSR which based its fascism around socialism.
Conservatism can be a base for fascism, but like all these other values - it doesn't have to be fascist. The rule is simple: