Yes, Virginia, There Is A Problem With Brevity

I feel like to many people don't recognise fascism because they think fascism will arrive selling oppression and tyranny, but if you're part of the privileged group fascism is selling you safety, normalcy, and tradition

— Byron C Clark 🍠 (@byroncclark) November 3, 2022

I clicked on this because it said there was a "thread," and I thought surely there is more to this than the one bald and overly broad assertion. But no:

Click "view hidden replies" to see people proving the point

— Byron C Clark 🍠 (@byroncclark) November 4, 2022

The non-hidden replies are a bunch of people saying how "smart" this tweet is.  But fascism is "selling you safety, normalcy, and tradition"?  Sounds like the Eisenhower administration, to me.

I mean, I know that's overly simplistic, but so is the statement.  Anything can be sold to you as "safety, normalcy, and tradition," and a lot of it is good old-fashioned American politics.  When FDR sold his New Deal, he didn't sell it as a radical transfer of wealth from the rich to the deserving poor and the best way to reconstruct the middle class in America and save us from anarchists and fascism (which arose in Germany and Italy precisely because of the conditions of the worldwide economic collapse).  He sold it as "safety, normalcy, and tradition."  Americans take care of business, help each other out, work hard.  Most of the New Deal involved government programs like the CCC and the WPA which put Americans to work with little more than shovels.  It was hard, manual labor, and lots of it.  That was "tradition."

When LBJ sold the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, he sold it as a matter of safety and the tradition of American equality (a tradition more honored in lip service than actual service) and charity (i.e., normalcy).  Same with Medicare, aimed at taking care of the elderly (we aren't brutes, we aren't animals; charity and support of the old are "traditional.").

This ain't rocket science.

Christianity offers safety, normalcy, and tradition.  Sometimes within the confines of a given culture (it's an international religion), sometimes within the strictures of a set of doctrines (again, an international religion, without "one church" over all).  You can't exactly offer danger, chaos, and novelty.  Appealing as that may be to younger people, nobody wants to be in a revolutionary state forever.  Sooner or later the charms of safety, normalcy, and tradition win out.  And besides, the Hebraic vision of the 'holy mountain' and the claims of the basiliea tou theou are all about establishing true safety, normalcy, and the tradition that keeps those two states perpetuated.  And it's the dead opposite of fascism.

I wouldn't even pause to notice this except of the replies praising that tweet as wise and insightful, when it's nothing more than a reductio ad absurdum.  Oppression and tyranny is never executed on the people fascism (or any government oppression) is sold to.  We oppressed non-whites and non-Brits (all other European immigrants to this country earned their "whiteness") since this country became the USA.  We never thought of ourselves as oppressors, even though Mark Twain saw it clearly in the 19th century, and it was made clear to us (and we by and large rejected it) in the mid-20th century.  Nobody remembers Twain as an anti-imperialist, either.  We prefer to ignore that, and carry on with our imperialism, er...making the world safe for democracy.  Liz Cheney may be right about Donald Trump, but she's also very comfortable with American imperialism.

I'm not sure you can fit a coherent explanation of that idea into 240 characters, though.  Maybe it is a good thing that Elmo is running Twitter into the ground....