The underlying post is moronic and tendentious. “Fascism” is not the “this one goes to 11” of state systems. The system of paramilitary and state violence that undergirded the Jim Crow system was quite bad. And it had unique characteristics which are specific to the United States.
Bonus points for making me have to look up the word “tendentious.” It’s a good one! Gonna start using it.
I think @tlecaque.bsky.social explained the other day that historians are taught to view and debate based primary sources. Y'all are going to be busy.
Spent time researching “nationalism.” Was troubled by categories that kept scholars from considering what is more like a mutating, adaptive organism capable of mimicry than a checklist. What all share is propaganda built on grandiosity, victim status & scapegoating as a mask for new power grabs.
Weigel remains ridiculous
I am not a historian, but the personalist focus on the president as supreme leader seems a novel element distinct from Jim Crow.
Jim Crow was not about White Supremacy, but black sub-humanism. What we are seeing now is the supremacy of white, able bodied men over everyone else (all other races, plus white women and those with disabilities) which takes it closer to fascism than segregation.
Jim Crow was a facet of white supremacy. At the time and places it was implemented, African-Americans were generally the only substantial minority population by race. Please also note that white women also faced discrimination during the same period, although that antedated Jim Crow.
So thats my point. Jim Crow was a direct response to slavery and the civil war. Misogyny predates slavery by a looooong time. But Jim Crow isn't fascism as that involves an economic structure, eugenics and autocratic power. The eugenics and autocracy are indicative of 'white supremacy'.
Jim Crow responded to freed slaves - who were black. Didn't cover other races, women who weren't black or disability. It was a way of dealing with freed livestock, to be blunt. Thats a very different situation. Terrible, not better or worse, but very different.
And don't 'please also note' people when they already 'noted'.
The whole debate is dumb and a distraction from opposing it - whether you call it fascism or not. I'm surprised how many left-wingers prefer to spend time discussing the fine points of a dictionary.
Surprised? Really?
It's not even a substantive debate. It's literally over the definition of words - and neither set of words are "wrong" just one might apply slightly more than the other to the current situation (which isn't the exact situation either set of words was originally coined to describe). Dumb debate.
Typical, almost characteristic, of leftists.
Clear even before 2021: “[Trumpists] descend politically from the racial nationalists who established Jim Crow segregation — which the Nazis admired… We don’t necessarily need to find parallels abroad…we just need to see the continuities in our own history.” lareviewofbooks.org/article/hist...
Few people realize just how violent and revanchist Jim Crow really was. It was in many ways a continuation of the Civil War, but turned against the population at hand instead of the Union.
Just one data point: I grew up in Northeastern Oklahoma, and never heard of the Tulsa Race Massacre, one of the largest and deadliest pogroms against the black population ever perpetrated, until one of my mom's university students mentioned it to her when I was 17.
That significant history was actively suppressed--to the point that someone had removed the damning newspaper editorial that played a big role in setting it off from library archives, not just in the area, but to the point that researchers only have one second-hand source left.
It's like those Greek texts that we only know from quotes of critical responses. Except this happened in 1921.
Trumpism is its own uniquely bad thing. We keep trying to map it onto concepts we know, like Fascism, or Jim Crow, or the Japanese Internments, but it's like the six blind men describing the elephant. It's all of those, but something else, besides.
I would add that those paramilitaries and state sponsored oppressors, have historically been virulently anti-left wing as well as racist.
It’s interesting to tease out fine distinctions and historical precedent, but also it’s fine to just call Trump fascist. Or a white supremacist. Or a fascist white supremacist. Whatever works.
And Jim Crow was literally the model for the Nuremberg Laws AND South African apartheid.
Mississippi had a fucking *spy agency* dedicated to propping up Jim Crow, and it wasn't disbanded until 1973.