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Comment by pgcj_poster | Hacker News Reader

“Fascism, sitting on the right, could also have sat on the mountain of the center” —Benito Mussolini

Can you explain what this means?

Mussolini essentially saw the left-right spectrum as useless. I think he was correct about this. The fact that both fascism and anarcho capitalism are classified as being on the right indicates the spectrum is a gross oversimplification.

Fascists and Anarcho-Capitalists have certain abstract philosophical differences, but in practice, their actual behaviors are almost identical. Most (Fascists|Anarcho-Capitalists) are young, white males who use the internet way too much and either don't vote, or vote Republican. Even among their intellectuals, there's a lot more overlap than you would assume: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Hermann_Hoppe.

The left-rights spectrum isn't supposed to capture the details of everyone's ideology: a spectrum that did that would be some kind of 20-dimensional hypercube. It's just supposed to capture who take who's side when it comes to that.

> young, white males who use the internet way too much

What does "use the internet way too much" mean?

It means they don't socialize, are not pragmatic, have little understanding of the issues most people actually care about, lack the capacity to empathize with people with radically different life experiences.

Apart from "don't socialise", you've described literally everyone, everywhere.

Fascists have a long history of presenting their movement as a third way, neither right nor left. In fact "ni droite, ni gauche" was a slogan of the far-right French political party Front National, whose founder is on the record having defended the Nazi occupation government.

I don't think Damore is a fascist. However, it seems clear to me that, he, along with a lot of other right-wing figures today are using the exact same tactic as fascists once did by presenting themselves as "centrist." If you don't believe me, check out this Twitter account: https://nitter.net/a_centrism.

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