Regarding the comment on the government being a religion, people do expect it to solve all of their life's issues. There's an expectation that the government should give people prescriptions on how to live their lives, especially in times of the pandemic, and prop them up for some reason. have about 97 new permutations of the word "justice" and the federal government is supposed to pursue all of them simultaneously - justice doesn't need an adjective put in front of it, and yet here we are. Couple that with debt forgiveness, from student loans all the way to medical treatment cost forgiveness and it's, slowly but surely, starting to resemble a nanny state that's intended to tend to your every need. I can understand the argument for debt forgiveness - the government bails out Wall Street all day, let's get a bag too. I simply think the conclusion is wrong - perhaps the government *shouldn't* bail out anyone. It's not the government's business, and neither is social engineering.
The government serves the people, as it IS (or at least should be) the people or a representation of what they want.
If the government can prevent people from drowning in student loans or medical debt without risking collapsing in debt itself, there are zero good reasons for it not to do so.
"Nanny state" is basically just a conservative snarl word for "the government spends time and effort helping everyone, and as I don't need said help myself and have no sense of socioeconomic empathy, I'm going to automatically believe said time and effort is a pointless waste and not a step in the right direction."
There's a prevailing sentiment that Republicans at large, or conservatives in general, are fascists. This sentiment has now reached new heights in recent history as now even libertarians, who de facto dislike the federal government, are considered to be "authoritarian", which is the antithesis of their being.
I don't know where you got that general of a statement, but that's not what we think.
Conservatives in general have economic and societal ideas that boil down to selfishness, but not to fascism.
However, Trump's tendency to:
-lie his ass off and basically claim he's the best at X, for
many values of X
-immediately label anything remotely negative of him as "fake news"
-systematically fire and/or lash out at anyone that says something he doesn't like or disobeys him at any point, including his own Vice President for not doing something he
did not have the legal power to do
-hold numerous personal rallies that boil down to him spouting vacuous statements and receiving cheers from a mindless crowd
-do whatever he can to keep himself in power, up to and including indefinitely lying about having won the election
pegs him as having ambitions of egocentric dictatorship a la Kim Jong-Un, as well as:
-his repeated insistence that he would only accept election results if he won
-keeping that promise for once and refusing to accept the results of the 2020 election, as mentioned above
-trying to strong-arm officials into handing him votes that did not exist
-getting his base to try to demand entry to where votes are counted because of his baseless fraud claims
-inflaming his base with rhetoric of how they must fight to "stop the steal" and doing everything short of outright saying "shoot up Congress for me, will ya?"
-watching as his stark-raving-mad followers stormed the Capitol, tweeting a verbal attack on his VP when staff told him said VP was at risk of being attacked by the rioting mob, and refusing to send help or denounce the attacks for
days
all boils down to him and his armed mob of idiots demanding access to the counting of votes and the reversal of a rightful election victory because
he didn't personally like the results, and if that isn't practically the definition of fascism then I don't know what is.
Republicans in general aren't fascists. Conservatives in general aren't fascists.
Trumpers in general are either fascists or complicit in Trumpian fascism thereof.
