I have reached the conclusion that holding mutually exclusive beliefs is a core feature of fascism. The only stable belief they have is the belief in their own supremacy and they will take up any other belief that advances their supremacy. History is full of such examples, when the Nazis were a small struggling party they were moaning about the freeze peach of Hitler, when they gained power they violently oppressed any dissenting speech. In my own country, without skipping a beat fascists transitioned from believing that banning corporal punishment of children was “monstrous socialism” to believing that Muslims are savages for beating their children, once they saw popular opinion had shifted.
Liberals will see this inconsistency of beliefs as a weakness, and think they are clever for making gotcha! clapbacks. They’re not. Far from being a weakness, this slippery ideological flexibility is one of the strengths of fascism. Not only are fascists able to appeal to groups of people whose material interests are objectively antagonistic to eachother, believing everything and nothing at the same time makes them pretty much immune to liberal ideals of free democratic debate in the marketplace of ideas. You can’t debate a fascist, if a belief is no longer opportune for them they will always have had the opposite opinion. At best trying to debate fascists is a waste of time, at worst it legitimises them and normalises their supremacist ideology.
I mean yeah Umberto Eco listed this in Ur-Fascism. Fascists are only concerned about power and the ends justify the means of acquiring said power. They revel in lying and being disingenuous.
Insert Levi Jeans polka satire quote here idk do we have a bot for that?
I don’t think they’re actually lying about their beliefs. At least not in a traditional sense of the word. Fascist leaders are as full of shit as any other bourgeois politician but I find it unlikely that everyone’s racist uncle is deliberately weaving a web of lies to conceal his true power level. That is simply too much effort to put into it.
It is more likely that they actually believe what they say they believe, even though it is completely internally contradictory. They have a more or less conscious conviction that they ought to enjoy status and privilege above those who are not like them and as a consequence they gravitate towards adopting whatever position that advances this conviction because it feels good to them.
I don’t know if there’s much use for this kind of psychoanalysis but at least to me this is yet another argument why trying to talk reason to fascists is futile. They did not arrive at their fascism through reasoning but rather through gut feelings and half-realised opportunism.
I think we’re saying the same thing. Maybe “lying” is the wrong word? I think you’re right that they say what makes them feel good. I think they know they don’t have consistent beliefs but they try and rationalize this by whatever rhetoric they can.
I’ve just ran into too many fascists who became fascists through sheer contrarianism I guess lol
