Political Humor

Yeah, I’ve read Eco’s Ur-Fascism, the full nine-page essay everyone likes to name-drop as proof we’ve hit fascism 2.0. It’s not a checklist where you can tick a few boxes and yell “we’re fascist now.” Eco’s whole argument is that fascism isn’t a single coherent system; it’s a messy collage of emotional instincts that can appear anywhere, left, right, religious, secular. He even calls it “a fuzzy totalitarianism,” meaning it has no fixed core.

If you actually line up his 14 points against the U.S. in 2025, the comparison doesn’t hold. There’s no cult of tradition or sacred national myth, America is perpetually arguing about what to change, not what to preserve. There’s no rejection of modernism; we’re obsessed with technology and innovation. We don’t live in a culture of permanent warfare or heroic martyrdom; most Americans recoil from both. There’s no state-mandated Newspeak or enforced ideology, if anything, the problem is too much speech, not too little.

Sure, some traits echo faintly: populism, conspiracy rhetoric, social polarization. But those exist in every democracy during high-stress periods. Populism isn’t fascism; nor is cultural stupidity the same as dictatorship. Fascism, as Eco lived it, required one-party rule, abolished dissent, outlawed unions, censored the press, and built a cult of death and war. None of that defines the U.S.

So when you insist we’ve gone “full fascist,” you're not channeling Eco, you're contradicting him. He warned against moral laziness, against turning “fascism” into a universal curse word. Reducing every political decay or populist movement to fascism doesn’t enlighten anyone, it just proves how little critical thinking you've retained from the man’s essay in the first place.

And as for the part about not assuming people here are “politically uneducated”? You don’t need to assume anything, it’s self-evident when someone quotes Eco like scripture while missing the entire argument. Dressing it up in intellectual language doesn’t make it any less shallow