I think it's stupid to say they have always been fascist, but people definitely don't grasp what fascism is, they think it's people marching in nice grey uniforms on the street and concentration camps out in the open and if you try to call anything that's not that they call you stupid and overreacting
Would you say it might apply to an openly genocidal state conquering its neighbors?
How about when that state also has up to 30% of its population by region in racial chattel slavery?
How about when the genocide is done and the slavery ended but it still enforces apartheid politics?
How about when it overthrows the government of any neighbor it disagrees with?
Invades other countries and kills millions?
But, hey. It's not technically fascism as long it's white men voting to do that, right? They usually weren't even Italian! It's stupid to call it fascism when it doesn't come from Rome!
Those are definitely trait you'd expect from fascism, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient to be fascist. Fascism is not just doing a bad thing. It's a very specific set of traits, which the US does not meet —in my opinion and any other informed opinion that I've seen.
I don't disagree that fascism has been part of the US always but it has been everywhere, it never went away, but it really came out with trump whether you think Trump is a fascist or just a useful idiot/ opportunist capitalist is up to debate imo. But his following has a large group of fascists.
They worship trump to an almost religious degree, they use fascist symbolism, they are predominantly white and believe they have a right to rule and be on top just because, they accept minorities and some lgb (not T) people as long as it lets them get into the position of power, then turn on them ( as seen by the many leopardsatemyface posts about gay republicans)
Fascism is a specific political ideology that has some telltale signs not just a collection if evil deeds, what's the point of using words if we bend the definition to whatever we want to say?
Best not to use to academic language when dealing with those that Academia has failed so thoroughly. Or the ones who already know and don't care cuz they got enough of a kickback from kicking down.
I am pretty sure England allowed the Anschluss and for Germany to take parts of Czechoslovakia before WW2, because they thought that would be enough for Hitler, so does that mean England was fascist?
Why do you conflate two different things --both bad-- but cant distinguish the definitions for each? There's a reason we have separate words for Imperialism and fascism? There's a weird fetish for this word here and you are very intent on applying it for some reason.
I can distinguish the definition for each, which is why I'm applying the label. I'm just using a different definition than you.
To perpetuate supremacy and keep an in group and out group amongst all it's colonies and populations, something that they found necessary in order to be able to extract colonial goods and maintain property, they had to build a hierarchy. That hierarchy was partially based on race. The US was a colonial state and actively engaged in the genocide of the native americans, both before and after, so much so that hitler took notice and said, gimme a slice of that. This happened with basically every colony that England took, even their first ones, like ireland, where now a very slim population actually speaks irish. I don't really feel bad in calling that kind of behavior to be like, prototypically fascist.
Maybe if you were to define fascism as integrally privatizing other public goods, like mussolini and hitler did, then that might swing things a little bit, but america and england both went and did that later on and historically have had no problem with doing that. There's really not a good definition of fascism that I've ever heard that doesn't apply to america or england, other than "oh, well, those countries were super authoritarian", and then somehow they don't recognize, say, that america has 1% of the world's prison population and a massive police state, and the level at which we propagate authoritarian governments globally in order to further our own interests. The semantic argument that people try to hash out over definitions of fascism, it's not the real crux of the issue there, it's just a kind of obfuscation of the real talking point, which is that people aren't realizing the massive amount of bullshit the imperial core has been engaging in on a near constant basis for like the past couple hundred years, and precisely how bad it really is.
Why are we creating our own definitions for words? Fascism is a term used to describe a very specific form of governance characterized by elements not included in your description. Chief among them is ruling by a dictatorship and exclusive single party.
The things you described are indeed bad things, some which have been adopted and implemented by fascist regimes as well. But just because two people engage occasionally in the same practices it doesn't make them twinsies by definition. Sometimes me and my buddy wear the same shirt, but he's a communist and I'm a liberal. Just because we wear the same shirt sometimes it doesn't suddenly make him liberal or me communist.
Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement,[1][2][3] characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race
There is a strange fetishization of this word online and it has since lost any meaning it used to originally have because now every bad thing has become a fash. It's meaningless.