Yesterday’s Heather Cox Richardson essay focuses quite a bit on Facebook and how its algorithms sent conservatives straight into the arms of QAnon. It’s technically true, in the same way that the “Russian interference” narrative was also technically true. These are both narratives that are extremely popular among liberals, and the point seems to be to take the blame off of conservatives by painting them as victims of a sinister, obscured force. Liberals need this narrative because they are conservatives; they are conserving the status quo of capitalism. They want to preserve this system with billionaires having power over the rest of us while we only have rights — rights that can be worked around by the people in power.
The truth of conservativism, though, is that it always tends toward fascism unless you actively stop it. It’s not enough to broadly criticize the Russian government or Facebook for its participation because criticizing them isn’t the same as stopping them. If we are criticizing fascism and not preventing it, we are tolerating fascism — and that brings us back to the Paradox of Tolerance. In essence, the Paradox of Tolerance states that unlimited tolerance of intolerance leads to a fascist society wherein intolerance rules. This is exactly what happened in the Weimar Republic (pre-Nazi Germany) and what is happening here in the US. Fascists love an environment of tolerance and will actively pretend to favor tolerance, quite often lamenting how the other side is being mean to them.
Has the German policy of intolerance toward fascism worked? There is some indication that it might have at least helped. Twitter studied algorithmic amplification in 7 countries and found that, “Tweets posted by accounts from the political right receive more algorithmic amplification than the political left when studied as a group” — but this effect did not occur in Germany. Of the 7 countries, Britain was the worst; so at least the US wasn’t the worst.
While Facebook algorithms did become unwitting participants in fascism and the Russian government did purposefully nudge the US toward the chaos of Trump-style fascism, this shift from conservativism to fascism is natural and some other vehicle would have transported conservatives there had it not been for Facebook or Russia. They are quite literally desperate to travel down that road. The entire reason fascism happens is because a privileged group is desperate to maintain their privileged status — and willing to do anything to maintain it. A privileged group is effectively the same as a conservative group; the only thing conservatives want to conserve is their privilege.
Liberals are also conservatives — albeit, conserving a different system from the one far right conservatives want to conserve. The far right is looking to conserve an older, more traditional form of society whereas liberals are just looking to conserve this current capitalist system. I think we’re all familiar with the privileges that right wing conservatives are conserving, but what privileges are liberals conserving?
If you consider the ways in which life in the US is better than life in other places, you’ll find that the good conditions here are created by destruction elsewhere. Similarly, the good conditions in our upper middle class suburbs are balanced out with destruction in other areas of our own country. Trump used middle class anxiety about these geographical disparities when he spoke about danger to suburban neighborhoods in the context of immigration policy, but interestingly, liberals do not want more open borders and are quite happy to provide the police with an ever-increasing budget. Similarly, liberals do not favor a rational response to climate science because it would affect their lifestyle — they are willing to preserve their current lifestyle at the expense of the future of the human species. Liberals are conservatives, and the only thing conservatives want to conserve is their privilege.
This all adds up to liberals being unwilling to be anti-fascist. They want to tolerate fascism — not for the sake of tolerance, but rather to provide a balance that prevents change and conserves their privilege. That won’t work, though, because fascism is coming for them, too.