Offhand, I'd say a good 85% of my posts over about 20 years here have received crickets. Mussolini wasn't even the most important fascist to die in this week in 1945 (Hitler was up in a couple days) so this is undercard shit, at best.

But I can tell you why I care about it.

The first reason is historical. Americans like to flatter themselves that our liberal, democratic order prevailed over fascism in WWII. Obscuring the sacrifices and success of communists during this period is intentional, as it is meant to additionally obscure a lesson that (to me at least) is revealed in the story of Mussolini's death: that the desire for political power is both libidinal and more common than we imagine. People intuit that the state is nothing but a relationship, and that makes us ultimately responsible for our own freedom. Fascism rises when capital and nationalism collaborate to steal political power from the people.

Our good, liberal democracy is not fascism in shape or size, but it does commit the same theft by slowly narrowing the scope of legitimate political involvement. Over the past few decades we've seen a large scale decline in avenues for regular people to collectively realize political power. Union membership and action have declined. Wealthy people use philanthropy as a shield against having to participate in the successful administration of the state on the same grounds as the rest of us. What you have left is a vote, which we rhetorically privilege as an act of free expression and then deflate as a strategic expression of surrender to one view of the state-as-relationship or another.

That's not some grand evil. Voting is an act, and one that reinforces our collective obligation to each other. But I think that even though we've tried our asses off to describe our current, minimal political participation as calm and even and rational, we're still Milanese working people, waiting for a body to spit and piss on. And that's where socialism as an ideology has something to offer that liberalism doesn't: actual, chaotic political power given to real people and rather than a thin sliver of DC people.

And to be clear, I grew up in the DC area (MoCo) and live in the district now after leaving for fifteen years. Both my parents worked for the federal government when I was growing up, and my father continued to do so until the Bush administration. They're good people who want the best for Americans, but not if it comes at a loss of control for our educated liberal betters. That's the one thing that they'll never cough up.