That’s not true at all. For roughly 70 years, being fully fascist was very much a fringe thing that you’d be shunned by normal people for. Even the most callous paleoconservatives would categorically shun any Nazi or other openly fascist person.
Then decades of gradual and accelerating rightward drifting of the Overton Window (for which the Democrats’ ineptitude as the SUPPOSED opposition party bear a lot of the responsibility) and normalization of outright lying as a political strategy inevitably led to a fascist demagogue like the Mango Mussolini and now fascism is the new mainstream “conservatism”.
It’s also an education problem. Instead of “yay we’re the good guys, we beat the bad guys”, there should have been more understanding of how the bad guys got so bad, and why the USA always had the potential to go down the same road. But if you’re looking at it on a superficial level, you can think you’re automatically safe from that, just because you have different names, different locations, different flags. And because you’re the good guys.
That’s not true at all. For roughly 70 years, being fully fascist was very much a fringe thing that you’d be shunned by normal people for. Even the most callous paleoconservatives would categorically shun any Nazi or other openly fascist person.
Then decades of gradual and accelerating rightward drifting of the Overton Window (for which the Democrats’ ineptitude as the SUPPOSED opposition party bear a lot of the responsibility) and normalization of outright lying as a political strategy inevitably led to a fascist demagogue like the Mango Mussolini and now fascism is the new mainstream “conservatism”.
It’s also an education problem. Instead of “yay we’re the good guys, we beat the bad guys”, there should have been more understanding of how the bad guys got so bad, and why the USA always had the potential to go down the same road. But if you’re looking at it on a superficial level, you can think you’re automatically safe from that, just because you have different names, different locations, different flags. And because you’re the good guys.
I think a big part of it is that too much time has passed since the last bunch were dealt with. Most people who remember that are dead now.
See also polio survivors and the rise of antivaxxers
Don’t forget the ACLU protecting Illinois Nazi hate speech.
Illinois nazis? I hate Illinois nazis.