GOD i am trying so fucking hard not to read into the fact that tom repressed the shit out of how he actually felt when he learned he probably won’t go to jail and then when he went to greg, he could. express it. you know. he could be himself. i really hate so much what i read into it BECAUSE I SHOULDN’T BC I KNOW WHAT HAPPENS LATER AND I SHOULDN’T TRUST THIS SHIT BUT ARHJARHA HOW CAN I NOT WHEN HE’S REPRESSED ASF PER USUAL BUT THE MOMENT HE GOES TO GREG OR IS ALONE WITH GREG HE EXPRESSES HIMSELF FULLY, HIS RAGE, PAIN, [MANIC] HAPPINESS, AFFECTION. I HATE THIS SO MUCH. AND GREG IS IN THE CORNER COWERING BC HE DOESN’T UNDERSTAND THAT THE REASON TOM ACTS THIS WAY AROUND HIM IS. no. i Refuse to read That into it. but yall get what i’m saying right. 

AND THEN THIS

are you fucking kidding me. like was that really fucking necessary.

i feel like one thing i didn’t like this ep was the implicit belief of kendall/shiv that jimenez was better than mencken for the american republic or whatever. like yes on some superficial level sure. but the critique of democrats as equally involved in violence and empire was not there to me, unless i’m missing something. i know that’s probably just the politics of the writers room but it feels like any allusion to how democrats are bad in this show is like, oh, they’re bad bc they’re involved with the far right a la gil and logan or nate and kendall. but there doesn’t seem to be an acknowledgment that dems would be bad even in their own right, even if they weren’t sitting at the table with the fascists. i know that sort of critique is a lot to ask of mainstream tv but i’m not sure if there’s something i’m not picking up on in the writing that is making those claims about liberal democrats, bc i do think the show in general is interested in the perils of neoliberal capitalism. but like, is it really, or only when said neoliberal capitalism interacts directly with fascistic ideology?

the show isn't saying that liberalism is bad because it interacts with fascism. it's saying that liberalism, because it is capitalist, inherently leads to and becomes fascism. so, there is no 'pure' liberalism untainted by fascism; the fascistic thinking is always already present in the democratic party and in other expressions of liberal ideology. this is why, for example, the episode ended with mencken using the language of hygiene, directly echoing the siblings calling each other "a piece of dirt" and "filthy" this episode, but even moreso echoing shiv's ongoing hygiene fixation (the hand sanitiser incident, refusing to drink from the taps in 4x02, etc). like, i get where you're coming from, but the suggestion here is that there simply is no such thing as liberalism that doesn't already contain the seeds of fascist thinking and eventually become fascist. historically speaking this is because fascism and liberalism are both essentially capitalist, and because fascist ideology developed as a capitalist solution to the internal contradictions of liberal democracies.

we know pretty much nothing about jimenez save for his potential amenability to large tech mergers, which is its own kind of damning (like, shiv doesn't even pretend to make arguments about his actual politics this episode; her position is Establishment Dems Good). however, we can see hints of the liberalism -> fascism argument with gil, not just because he made a deal with logan but because the very first glimpse we get of him is in that campaign ad where he talks about a "war on poverty", framing his democratic socialism as echoing both lbj's "war on poverty" rhetoric but also the straightforwardly imperialist "war on terror" framing.

the argument also comes through in comparing shiv to matsson: both believe in hierarchy, specifically in meritocratic achievement that is really just a way of identifying those they see as biologically fittest on the grounds of athleticism, 'intelligence' defined with its inherent class and racial baggage, etc. these beliefs are tenets of shiv's progressivism as much as they are of matsson's fascistic thinking. fundamentally capitalism relies on this type of competition, social-economic hierarchy, and designation of certain people and groups as 'better' or more 'worthy.' shiv and matsson are in no way ideologically opposed, nor are liberalism and fascism; it is capitalism that forms the link and that causes the rhetorical shift from lofty liberal ideals to openly exclusionary fascist rhetoric, though this transition does not entail an actual change between modes of production & if anything fascism is simply more nakedly capitalist in certain ways.

the satire of democrats comes in most heavily with the pierces. kendall's not any kind of liberal (like, he has basically no political beliefs; he's just a capitalist) and although shiv is, she's always been able to operate in conservative contexts in a way the pierces mostly don't deign to. yet pgm produces élitist cultural products, the pierces also rely on housestaff they condescend to and see as lesser in a particularly patronising way, and pgn is operating the same way as atn ("the business synergies are there"), just like, more boringly. nan even has that line about believing the berlin wall fell because of pierce news cameras or whatever---clearly echoing logan's known use of foreign political meddling, only nan frames it as a moral good because it's exporting american democracy, yadda yadda. this goes to the way liberal and fascist rhetoric can appear to have a huge ideological gulf between them but are in fact operating off much of the same logic already, with fascism simply embracing certain inequities, including racial thinking and racism, that liberalism prefers to pretend it's going to 'overcome' despite those being necessary elements of capitalism.

fundamentally liberal or neoliberal capitalism already tends toward fascistic thinking and certainly toward the economic and material conditions that allow for outright fascism to take hold. logan himself is a good demonstration of this. his beliefs in hierarchy, rule of force, brute competition, &c are not just coeval with him being a capitalist; they are the ideology that directly results from, naturalises, and justifies capitalism. the entire spectrum of political ideology espoused by characters on this show is constrained within the in fact very narrow window of being capitalist; all defences of the american republic are capitalist; and it is capitalist economics that manifests as liberalism's ideology. this is true as much of neoliberalism like what kendall was born into as it is of 19th-century liberalism like the social darwinism logan espouses.