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Saint Charlie is no Saint Ronnie as GOP keeps trying to re-Red Scare America [1]
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Date: 2025-09-13
Thank Jeebus Charlie Kirk’s killer turned out to be who we thought he was, a Gen-Z Groyper or Boogaloo Boy, making him further right-wing than Trump Derangement. Hanging around with Nick Fuentes was a bigger benefit for Trump in the campaign, but now it’s serious. The initial attempt to frame the Kirk killing as somehow left-wing combines the sublime and the ridiculous, complete with JD Vance providing quasi-military honors in the transportation of Kirk’s casket and the media treatment of Kirk’s widow like Jackie O.
Is there a more fundamental, ideological resonance between far left and far right? Again, only in the vaguest sense that both challenge the liberal-democratic status quo. But they do so for very different reasons and with very different aims. When fascists reject liberal individualism, it is in the name of a vision of national unity and ethnic purity rooted in a romanticised past; when communists and socialists do so, it is in the name of international solidarity and the redistribution of wealth.
Given the basic implausibility of the horseshoe theory, why do so many centrist commentators insist on perpetuating it? The likely answer is that it allows those in the centre to discredit the left while disavowing their own complicity with the far right. Historically, it has been “centrist” liberals – in Spain, Chile, Brazil, and in many other countries – who have helped the far right to power, usually because they would rather have had a fascist in power than a socialist.
Today’s fascists have also been facilitated by centrists – and not just, for example, those on the centre-right who have explicitly defended Le Pen. When centrists ape the Islamophobia and immigrant-bashing of the far right, many people begin to think that fascism is legitimate; when they pursue policies which exacerbate economic inequality and hollow out democracy, many begin to think that fascism looks desirable.
If liberals genuinely want to understand and confront the rise of the far right, then rather than smearing the left they should perhaps reflect on their own faults.
theconversation.com/...
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