From dKosopedia

Related Memes:  Republicans Are Racist   Republicans are War Mongers

Taxonomy

• Liberal Memes that Backfire
  • Alienating Rhetoric/Overgeneralization

Status

Unknown. Perhaps it may be uttered in anger or frustration by people who know it to be false.

Quality

Extremely poor; counterproductive to liberal/progressive/left discourse.

Origin

Unknown.

Talking Points

It's not clear what the statement "Republicans are Fascist" actually means--unless the statement is simply an ill-considered expression of disgust.

If it does mean something, then Fascism cannot be intended in its historically specific sense. Nor does it help to substitute Nazism for Fascism in this regard.

If it is intended as a hyperbolic expression of the view that Republicans Are Racist, then it is simply an even more strident expression of that counterproductive meme; likewise if it is intended as hyperbole for the view that Republicans Are Warmongers.

Someone may intend as a crude way of saying that neoconservatism is fascism. But not all Republicans are neoconservatives, and while neoconservatism and Straussianism have their anti-democratic aspects, it is dubious at best to equate them with fascism.

Umberto Eco's essay "Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt" is instructive and provides more material for parallels between Fascism and modern-day Republicanism.

David Neiwert's "Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism: An Exegesis" is an essay on exactly this topic: is there a Fascist movement afoot in America?

Counterpoints

While claiming that Republicans are Fascists is not a self-refuting statement, it does cast such doubt on the speaker as to make it functionally self-refuting.

Analysis

There are extremist groups in the Republican party that bear careful watching and that could, without exaggeration, be characterized as proto-fascist, where fascism is taken to mean "an ideology that seeks to regenerate the social, economic, and cultural life of a country by basing it on a heightened sense of national belonging or ethnic identity" This definition, by the historian Roger Griffin, is taken from journalist/weblogger David Neiwert's essay, "Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism: An Exegesis." But Neiwert's essay is as much as careful consideration of how Republicans are not fascists as it is an analysis of the "groupuscles" within the party that display these tendencies. He is also adamant about the use of the word "fascism" as a blanket term of opprobrium: "'Fascism' has come to be a nearly meaningless term in the past 30 years or so. In many respects, leftists are most responsible for this degradation..."

That there are groups within the Republican party that display the tendencies Neiwert describes should be better known; the blanket claim that Republicans are Fascists actually impedes this. Furthermore, the relationship between the Republican party as a whole--if one can speak of such an entity as if it were unproblematic--and these groupuscles is far from straightforward. It is a cause for concern, and an object of serious study. It should not be trivialized.

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