Is there any point to maintaining separate Fascism Watch and Culture War Update categories?

Straight up question: is there even a point to maintaining a line between the Fascism Watch and the Cultural Warfare Updates in this environment?

I honestly don’t know. The old dividing line was pretty clear – you had authoritarians doing authoritarian things, and you had the fundamentalist movement doing its things, and while there was overlap, and while the fundamentalists were very authoritarian, it was in a different style, and the relationship often didn’t go the other way. They were still distinguishable, overall, and didn’t necessarily buy into each other’s bullshit – the authoritarians often held the fundamentalists in varying degrees of open contempt, and the fundamentalists would go at the authoritarians as inadequately godly and all that kind of bullshit.

And that’s basically over.

They aren’t yet all the same impulses. You’ve got the Republicans whose main focus, still, is turning their states and the entire country into single-party Orban-like mini-dictatorships. First and foremost of these is Florida, where Republicans are literally introducing bills banning the Democratic Party, and other bills requiring people who write about the government to register with the state. Those aren’t historically Cultural Warfare issues – they really aren’t. Particularly not the latter. As much as I loathe and despise them, they weren’t those kinds of authoritarians.

At the same time, you’ve got – more broadly – Republicans trying to legislate LGBT people out of existence, mostly starting with trans people. But not always; see again Florida expanding its “Don’t Say Gay” bills and other Republican states queuing up to implement their own versions. And while the non-fundamentalist authoritarians would’ve been genuinely okay with that, it was distinct and frankly less of interest to their general hatred for and despising of all women.

And while they didn’t actually believe it, despite – or more likely, because of – their segregationist origins, the fundamentalist right leadership spent a lot of time pretending they weren’t about racism. I mean, they were, but they tried real hard to pretend they weren’t. The fash, by contrast, revel in it.

But that line is getting harder and harder to find – much less navigate – as the fundamentalists have become more overt in their racism over the last few years, and I’m wondering if there’s anything really separating it anymore other than how big the posts get and the tradition I’ve maintained of having both, one usually more active than the other at any given time.

Hence some items appearing in both updates – they can’t be separated out.

And I’m presuming that – as I’ve been saying for some years now – it’ll get worse until it can’t.

I don’t expect to have a good answer, and for the moment, I’m keeping separate categories. But if it gets too much more difficult to figure out… I’m afraid it’ll end up all rolled into one.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.