As others have mentioned, they didn’t fail to learn it. Broadness and vagueness is the point. It’s a weapon, and broadness makes it a sharper tool to suppress anyone and everyone. Membership isnt a thing. So worst case scenario, they can easily say, “they called trump a fascist, and antifa literature has stated they aim to fight what they call fascism. Therefore they’re enemies of the state.”
At what point is crying fascism going to actually scare people? Because shit like this is definitely scary. They want a reason to arrest you? They look back at your social media and say in 2020 you posted pro-BLM remarks, supported the protests and defended property destruction: antifa.
Fucked up.
Oh, absolutely. It’s a boundless problem. It happens with left wingers as well. It’s a disease in the way people think and engage with the world around them. Ideologies are badges now. They’re uniforms people wear. Similar to mental disorders on TikTok, Instagram, or, previously, on tumblr. That’s why I think the common link is social media. I know tribalism isnt a new phenomenon whatsoever, but widespread, more foundational tribalism on every single topic, kind of is.
People are arguing about reality. As soon as the right drifted away into fantasy politics, the bottom dropped out on discourse altogether. When about half the people are just straight up questioning long-known facts, the reality we all shared and could agree on suddenly became much more shaky and full of holes. Not that reality has changed, obviously, but when the discourse surrounding what we consider facts is questioned on this kind of scale, arguing that facts do, actually, exist just opens a sinkhole. And it’s not getting smaller. Because what are facts to everyday people if not something that we discuss and generally agree upon?
And the fact that this kind of magical thinking is spreading is more than troubling. It’s straight up doomsday shit.
So in a world where all of this is true and people invent an entirely new version of themselves to put online (and then lie to themselves that it’s actually them), pinning the “I’M A PROUD [democrat, Republican, communist, etc.]” to their chest is step one before they actually learn shit. They pick an identity and then look at every issue through that lens. Because they’ve found people online that belong to it and they choose that identity. Instead of learning and then realizing their ideology, they choose a team and then learn usually as little as possible to appear as if they belong. And get defensive and argue online with the “other” side, with wholly incomplete and usually inaccurate information that they looked up specifically to belong to an ideological group.
Fuckin crazy. You see problems like this, look at the state of discourse and really wonder…is there any coming back from this? How do we even start? Well, education. Obviously. But we all know that’s not gonna happen. We’re moving in the opposite direction as fast as we possibly can. (Because that serves the ownership class).