I gotta get back to blogging instead of doing long tweet threads (@nearzone.bsky.social). I also gotta get better at transferring threads to the blog so they’re not quite so obtrusive. Maybe I’ll set myself reminders.
Anyway, here are tweets about Will Stancil and my theory (which you can check out on Journal of Cogency). I do want to try to keep politics off of this blog for the most part (and I swear I’ll try to do a light thing soon, been working) but it’s a series of tweets so it’s better for the silly blog.
I need to link up with someone who is good at following news and mass messaging. I’ve not been good at it so far. There are things that I can certainly write in theory that I’m not sure I can translate into an “accessible” format. On my mind now is ur-fascism vs. general fascism.
I think right now we are somewhat suffering from ur-fascism, which is to say, the desire to connect everything to fascism. This is the tendency you can find in Eco’s “Ur-Fascism” and, as I said in my “Against Ur-Fascism“, it is too broad a conception.
I know what I just posted about re: vocab but this is actually more inspired by Stancil and liberals. We are both, that is leftists and liberals, fairly obsessed with calling the other side fascists, and I think a lot of that is because we are still thinking in an ur-fascism mindset.
That is to say, we believe that it can breed anywhere, that it can have any characteristics, that it can do and inhabit anything that helps it get ahead. And this is not wrong so much as it isn’t helpful. You can make that point about anything.
The problem with “Ur-Fascism” is that it purports to give specific tools to identify fascism but what it actually does is cast the net broadly enough that everyone and everything comes under suspicion. I don’t know if I’d say that Eco intended this but it is an outcome of his work.
I propose “general fascism” as a way to encompass all fascistic movements regardless of whether or not they are strictly national-fascist along the lines of Germany and Italy in the war years. This definition is also much broader than “literal fascism” but it’s focused mainly on regime politics.
While I don’t believe in making calls for left unity, I think cooperation is better than competition, and one possible stumbling block in cooperation may be that everyone is always looking for other people’s minor mistakes, ready to interpret them as roads to fascism.
At the same time, general fascism makes it easier to identify opponents by their ultimate goals. A lot of times, the people and events who you identify through ur-fascism will be the same as who you find through general fascism, but I think procedurally it’ll be different.
Now that’s all high-falutin’ stuff and what it needs is application. That’s what I’m not good at, bringing it to current events. But what I will say re: Stancil is this. I feel highly attacked by everyone being like “you rubes! you’re trying to rehabilitate Stancil! are you traitor???” No.
I admit I’m not seeing every conversation so I don’t know if anyone was out there really trying to cover over shit, but from what I said myself and what I saw, showing Stancil was about showing how far displeasure with the Democrats was spreading.
It doesn’t have to be read as some kind of failure of judgment to go “whoa stopped clock is right twice a day”. But beyond myself, it’s strange that there’s a backlash against people who saw him briefly agreeing with the “left consensus” just because Stancil remains the same.
It’s a sort of disciplining which is unnecessary.
Now look this probably isn’t the best theory application but I didn’t have anything constructive to say in response to Stancil, I’ve told him fuck you often enough, so this is what I started thinking about.