Donetsk, Ukraine: 1 year ago.

There was "only" one questionable election I know of, which was Bush vs Gore. Disdain for intellectuals ("the elite") and obsession with crime and punishment isn't a US cultural thing, but "only" significantly represented with fundamentalist Christians, right wingers, and then there's the prison industrial complex.

There's clear corruption, labour power is suppressed, the military is supreme (although one might argue that there's a difference between a global hegemon spending that amount vs a small country which has to maintain a much smaller network). There's also powerful nationalism, although people now are pretty tired of war and although there were strong anti Iraq war protests.
I do not believe that US media are controlled in the same way Russian media are controlled. They're largely self censoring for reasons of retaining "access", as well as drama mongering for quotas. Independent media in the US are not systematically being shut down.

I don't think there's strong disdain for human rights or sexism. I'm not sure how religion and government being intertwined compares between the US and Russia. The US is officially secular, and although it's unthinkable for for atheists to win the presidency, it's less ceremonial (or just in a different way) from the way Putin is courting orthodox religious officials, which also play into the image of Russia being the third Rome, successor of Byzantine, etc.

 

With all that said, I think the US may be somewhere between 40-60% fascist. I had a much easier time checking these points for Russia. But I'm not sure how much of that comes down to my own ignorance and closer unfamiliarity with Russia. Russia, imo, is very cleary fascist. It makes no attempt to aspire to freedom of the press, democracy, etc.
The US on the other hand "only" has that American exceptionalism problem (different from Russian nationalism which seeks to rule) as well as corruption and cronyism that's inflated due to the size of the economy. Fix money in politics and that should be largely gone. Russia is a lot tougher.

How would you compare the two, point by point and on a 0-100 comparative scale?

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