[ExI] Protest

[Dan TheBookMan]

Italian fascism wasn’t majoritarian in any meaningful sense. In fact, early on, the parliament passed a law guaranteeing the party with the plurality equal to or greater than 25% got two thirds of the seats in parliament. This meant getting 25% of the deputies actually garnered 67%. This law was tailored to allow the fascists to play at elections yet safely never face an actual challenge to their power. The fascists merely had to prevent any other single party from getting enough votes. (This sort of thing only works in a multiparty system — which is what Italy had back then. Were it a two party system, no doubt, the Italian fascists would’ve sang a different song as their goal was to obtain and keep power — not to beholden to any particular law regarding elections.)

That’s very different from majority rule — where in order to get a majority of seats in a parliament, you’d have to win a majority of seats and not apportion them more to some plurality. Thus the call to have direct elections for president in the US is not at all like the fascist election law.

Also, Italian fascism was ‘defined’ in the 1920s. That’s when the party took power and also when the election law was passed. (The law was passed in 1924. That was the last competitive election in Italy until after the war. No doubt, had Italians had competitive elections during the 1920s and 1930s, fascists would’ve lost power. That was a risk they weren’t going to take.)

Regards,

Dan
   Sample my Kindle books at:
http://author.to/DanUst

> On Jun 8, 2020, at 3:07 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
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> From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat
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> >…New terms and new uses for old terms arise all the time. Standardization happens when a term or new use of a term gains ground. That's just part of normal language change. (Don't believe me. Look up how the terms 'girl' and 'silly' changed over time.) Does this mean _you_ will eschew using any new terms or using any old terms in new ways? I doubt it….Dan
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> Dan it isn’t terms.  There are underlying assumptions also written into these kinds of essays which are very foreign to plenty of us.
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> But since you bring up fash, we have a term antifa, which we are told means anti-fascist.  Sure, OK.  But the way the term fascist (and perhaps fash) is being used today is for any political view with which the speaker disagrees.
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> To me historic Fascism is defined by the 1930s Italian revolutionaries, where the majority overruled everything.  In that sense, the call in the USA to eliminate the electoral college is fascist, for it would mean the majority of the voters would always get their way.  The minority states would have little say.  It would fail to protect minorities.
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> In my view, the heavy lifting in governance should be done at the state level, for states have a lot more options for raising money than does the federal government.  The rights of state government is preserved by the electoral college, which historic fascism does not need or want.
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> spike
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