We are having a revolution. It's a right wing one. Maybe 4 more years of Trump will cool their angist. Not sure but if I had to bet on this election I wouldn't put my money on Biden. What happens Paul if 3rd party candidates prevent an electoral college win. No one candidate gets the number required. What ever that number is.
Just asking, did their respective politics transmogrify to fascism because of the Guilded Age’s noblesse oblige running on empty? Or, to quote Gore Vidal, “Now the despots are firmly in the saddle.”
Both embraced complete inward and outward expansion of power, as is a staple of fascism.
Nightly fireplace talks with a patriarch, rationed economy, drafting all able bodied men, and of course mass media propaganda.
But is most evident in the parties foreign policy. Again outward expamsion and monopolizing control of the material world are features of a fascist system. We may not have been as warmongering as the Germans or Italians, but for the 80 years our military has sat on standby for any player unwilling to allow us to control them through the expansion of our economic system. In other words, force has always underlied the softpower the United States claims allowed it to achieve hegemonic power.
Both political parties were all too willing to participate.
No remotely serious historian or analyst on Earth thinks the New Deal was fascist. Only a Maniac could possibly propound such profoundly preposterous nonsense!
With all due respect, Paul, Maniac Joe is CORRECT to the extent that the FDR regime was willing to cooperate with fascists - not unlike Stalin - to save the nation state.
Who are the fascists I refer to?: the 'Dixiecrats',* i.e., the white nationalists who (still) held political power in the former confederate states during Roosevelt's ENTIRE presidency.
One of the the dirty deals*, aka, 'compromises' FDR made with those fascistic, racist terrorists, and aiders & abetters of terrorism, in order to get their support for the New Deal, was to deny domestic workers and farm workers fhe benefits of New Deal legislation. Those benefits would not be extended to non-white people until the 1960s.
This is not to overlook the complicity-to-fascism of more than a few Republicans (the party of Lincoln!).
A principled, dialectical analysis can't overlook these irrefutable realities.
*Part of an ignominious tradition of dirty deals which include the 3/5ths Compromise and the Hayes/Tilden Compromise
Well Paul, I have some information that might shock you.
Sheldon Wolin (political philosopher at Berkeley and Stanford) posited exactly that in his book Inverted Totalitarianism.
The beauty of American fascism is that it denies it is such and purports itself to be the opposite, a thriving democracy.
Another mechanism of American fascism is that it claims to be a meritocracy, when in fact the academic institutions have all been coopted by the corporate oligarchs running the show.
So your denial actually fits snugly with Wolin's theory, exactly because any analyst who correctly identifies the system for what it is will be filtered out. Sounds fairly fascist, no?
Wolin isn't the onlt intellectual supporting this idea. Harvard al
Yes, I'm familiar and have channeled a lot of that over the years but only the 2010s+ GOP has really crossed over into the real deal fascism captured in the RF definition I gave in the piece --- ready, willing, and perhaps able to shut down what's left of bourgeois electoral, rule of law, parliamentary, and civil democracy. There's a break, a crossover with the Tea Party then Trump GOP. No you cannot seriously imagine the dismal Weimar Dems unleashing a mob to attack the US Capitol to prevent Trump's EC certification on January 6, 2025 (LOL!...compare and contrast with Gore's surrender in 2000-01 as the election was actually stolen form his sorry neoliberal ass!) or Dem militias threatening precinct workers in red districts in November this year(right, you betchya) ...etc... Many other examples. So, yeah, like, yes but no.
The 'despotism' began during the colonial period and was consolidated and nationalized with the creation of the U.S. nation-state. The latter required, first and foremost, the ruthless displacement, dispersal and dispossession of hundreds of indigenous communities. Coupled with the emergence of a slavocracy, based on the commoditization of enslaved labor -- this could EASILY be characterized, imo, as a form of fascism (among other things) even before the term gained popular usage in the 20th century.
Whatever limited-democracy which has emerged, in the U.S. has been INSPITE of and/or in outright OPPOSITION to overall ruling class intentions, not at its behest. As Street , and others, have consistently said, the founding 'fondling' fathers were, as a group, DIAMETRICALLY opposed to democracy.
I find it interesting that liberals will generally overestimate the political PRETENSIONS of democracy, most conservatives will remind us - correctly, btw - that the word democracy is NOT mentioned once in the U.S. constitution.
And Noam Chomsky reminds us that the MOST totalitarian space/place in capitalist society is the workplace
I find that a bunch of often older lefties tend to throw the F word around quite recklessly to mean just about any and all forms of despotism and oppression and authoritarianism. Fascism is much more specific than that. My book "This Happened Here" may have gotten too elaborate in its definition but I highy recommend it nonetheless. If enough people buy it perhaps I can avoid a return to the hidden abode of capitalist production :)
Incisive piece, Paul!
We are having a revolution. It's a right wing one. Maybe 4 more years of Trump will cool their angist. Not sure but if I had to bet on this election I wouldn't put my money on Biden. What happens Paul if 3rd party candidates prevent an electoral college win. No one candidate gets the number required. What ever that number is.
counterrevolution.....well, then it goes to the House under the 12th Amendment, no? And each state gets one vote in the House. Bad for Genocide Joe.
Dems and Republicans have been fascists since FDR.
Just asking, did their respective politics transmogrify to fascism because of the Guilded Age’s noblesse oblige running on empty? Or, to quote Gore Vidal, “Now the despots are firmly in the saddle.”
Both embraced complete inward and outward expansion of power, as is a staple of fascism.
Nightly fireplace talks with a patriarch, rationed economy, drafting all able bodied men, and of course mass media propaganda.
But is most evident in the parties foreign policy. Again outward expamsion and monopolizing control of the material world are features of a fascist system. We may not have been as warmongering as the Germans or Italians, but for the 80 years our military has sat on standby for any player unwilling to allow us to control them through the expansion of our economic system. In other words, force has always underlied the softpower the United States claims allowed it to achieve hegemonic power.
Both political parties were all too willing to participate.
No remotely serious historian or analyst on Earth thinks the New Deal was fascist. Only a Maniac could possibly propound such profoundly preposterous nonsense!
With all due respect, Paul, Maniac Joe is CORRECT to the extent that the FDR regime was willing to cooperate with fascists - not unlike Stalin - to save the nation state.
Who are the fascists I refer to?: the 'Dixiecrats',* i.e., the white nationalists who (still) held political power in the former confederate states during Roosevelt's ENTIRE presidency.
One of the the dirty deals*, aka, 'compromises' FDR made with those fascistic, racist terrorists, and aiders & abetters of terrorism, in order to get their support for the New Deal, was to deny domestic workers and farm workers fhe benefits of New Deal legislation. Those benefits would not be extended to non-white people until the 1960s.
This is not to overlook the complicity-to-fascism of more than a few Republicans (the party of Lincoln!).
A principled, dialectical analysis can't overlook these irrefutable realities.
*Part of an ignominious tradition of dirty deals which include the 3/5ths Compromise and the Hayes/Tilden Compromise
Apologies on my phone...
Harvard alum and former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges has also been a vocal supporter.
Well Paul, I have some information that might shock you.
Sheldon Wolin (political philosopher at Berkeley and Stanford) posited exactly that in his book Inverted Totalitarianism.
The beauty of American fascism is that it denies it is such and purports itself to be the opposite, a thriving democracy.
Another mechanism of American fascism is that it claims to be a meritocracy, when in fact the academic institutions have all been coopted by the corporate oligarchs running the show.
So your denial actually fits snugly with Wolin's theory, exactly because any analyst who correctly identifies the system for what it is will be filtered out. Sounds fairly fascist, no?
Wolin isn't the onlt intellectual supporting this idea. Harvard al
Yes, I'm familiar and have channeled a lot of that over the years but only the 2010s+ GOP has really crossed over into the real deal fascism captured in the RF definition I gave in the piece --- ready, willing, and perhaps able to shut down what's left of bourgeois electoral, rule of law, parliamentary, and civil democracy. There's a break, a crossover with the Tea Party then Trump GOP. No you cannot seriously imagine the dismal Weimar Dems unleashing a mob to attack the US Capitol to prevent Trump's EC certification on January 6, 2025 (LOL!...compare and contrast with Gore's surrender in 2000-01 as the election was actually stolen form his sorry neoliberal ass!) or Dem militias threatening precinct workers in red districts in November this year(right, you betchya) ...etc... Many other examples. So, yeah, like, yes but no.
The 'despotism' began during the colonial period and was consolidated and nationalized with the creation of the U.S. nation-state. The latter required, first and foremost, the ruthless displacement, dispersal and dispossession of hundreds of indigenous communities. Coupled with the emergence of a slavocracy, based on the commoditization of enslaved labor -- this could EASILY be characterized, imo, as a form of fascism (among other things) even before the term gained popular usage in the 20th century.
Whatever limited-democracy which has emerged, in the U.S. has been INSPITE of and/or in outright OPPOSITION to overall ruling class intentions, not at its behest. As Street , and others, have consistently said, the founding 'fondling' fathers were, as a group, DIAMETRICALLY opposed to democracy.
I find it interesting that liberals will generally overestimate the political PRETENSIONS of democracy, most conservatives will remind us - correctly, btw - that the word democracy is NOT mentioned once in the U.S. constitution.
And Noam Chomsky reminds us that the MOST totalitarian space/place in capitalist society is the workplace
Marx wrote about the sheer "despotism" of capital in "the hidden abode of production."
I find that a bunch of often older lefties tend to throw the F word around quite recklessly to mean just about any and all forms of despotism and oppression and authoritarianism. Fascism is much more specific than that. My book "This Happened Here" may have gotten too elaborate in its definition but I highy recommend it nonetheless. If enough people buy it perhaps I can avoid a return to the hidden abode of capitalist production :)