The sinequanon of American consumer culture is style over substance.
Want to be a Nazi? Buy this flag.
Want to be a Communist? Buy this beret.
Never mind seeing what the ideology actually stood for. That would require an uncomfortable, and possibly dangerous, amount of thinking.
>And there are plenty of college students who genuinely believe in communism.
No there aren't. There are plenty of college students who like social democracy, there are very few who want to empower the working class American - fat, white and 40.
> That would require an uncomfortable, and possibly dangerous, amount of thinking.
About, what? Slaughtering everyone not part of the master race? Yeah, tons of thought there, all of it stuck in the stone age.
You are viewing "American consumerism" through a very narrow lens, and an incorrect one at that. The people that buy nazi stuff here generally drink the koolaid. I don't know what you're reading but naziism is still taboo here.
I find the people who think there is such a thing as an American Nazi movement are the ones whose idea of what a Nazi is comes from Marvel comics' Hydra.
A simple question: have you actually read Mein Kampf or the Communist Manifesto?
I think that there are way more than 500 Nazis in the US.
I also think that they have as much power as witches did in Salem, for largely the same reasons.
That said don't expect the moral panic to calm down any time soon. It's odd seeing the side of politics I identified with until recently become a larger danger to democracy than the side I was sure would implement a theocracy.
Fascism is an authoritarian nationalist death cult which glorifies in violence and war, believes in strict competitive social hierarchies where some people are born inherently and disposably inferior to others, and is deeply threatened by non-conformity.
Fascism is also pro-corporate and anti-localist. And it's fundamentally Romantic and emotional, and deliberately anti-rational.
Nazis were a subset of fascism. The US and Russia both show many signs of same in embryo but without the goose stepping and the silly helmets.
1. There's a clear continuity of goose-stepping in Russia from a time that long predates Putin.
2. We have goose-stepping in the United States, too, that long predates Trump, and will almost certainly outlast him. It doesn't look like weird one-handed salutes, it looks like a daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.
