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.

The confederates had their “blood stained banner”