“Fascist” Politics?
Deeply conservative, non-inclusive, anti-democratic attitudes have been embedded in both American and Australian societies since the beginnings of their colonisation.
That disposition is not new, but it has arguably shaped how both of our societies have evolved over several centuries, and why neither of them are as inclusive, progressive, socially just as most other western societies have sought to be. Nobody is inclined towards a particular reactionary view for the sake of it: it mirrors anxieties, but when we write about these political trends, nobody is analysing our societies on those deeper levels, nobody is asking how as societies we could change and confront those anxieties. Why not?
When we call them “fascist”, we are ignoring the fact that fascism had enormous popular support, sometimes from the vast majority of populations, and that was for a reason, but we are now ignoring those reasons and ourselves only painting that tendency in paranoid terms.
The far more dangerous and fundamental problem here isn’t just about gender: it’s about why any human society reverts to an illusory idealised past in order to protect itself against perceived current threats, and what those perceived threats really are? Modern Islamic fundamentalism did exactly the same.
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