Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

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Re: Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

Postby brainpanhandler » Fri Aug 24, 2012 10:22 pm

C2W wrote:Free speech zones are profoundly objectionable. But they aren't the only available venue for political protest. Furthermore, it's still possible to engage in sustained, public, explicitly oppositional political protest in defiance of the law (Occupy, IOW) without engendering reprisals that are any different than they've really ever been in any free society on earth.


Maybe so and pepper spray and nightsticks aren't a death sentence but for all practical intents and purposes the effect is damn near identical.

C2W wrote: The question (at least as I understand it) is whether or not the state makes the pursuit of political and personal freedom -- such as autonomy/choice wrt what you say and do -- systematically impossible. By some and/or any means. Because if it does, it's definitely totalitarian and possibly fascist. And it it doesn't, it's not.


That then is clear and probably serves in place of the list. I'm not sure why you want to place the bar that high. It seems to me that post wwII the fascists would need to find a kinder, gentler but possibly no less fascist way of holding onto power and privilege and oppressing anyone and anything that threatens that.

C2W wrote:I mean, how do the people positing that it's presently impossible to pursue political and/or personal freedom in the United States because the government systematically prevents or prohibits all attempts to do so account for the Tea Party? It hasn't been around very long. It's explicitly very hostile to established interests and powers. But it not only hasn't been suppressed, it's actually made some significant gains on a national level.

Fascist states just don't allow that type of thing to happen, unless I'm missing something. So what am I missing?


I'll let you respond to Jack on this one, but I'll mention that perhaps this is where the more sophisticated cultural engineering comes in. I think today's fascists learned something from the successes and failures of their predecessors.
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Re: Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

Postby compared2what? » Fri Aug 24, 2012 11:33 pm

brainpanhandler wrote:
C2W wrote:Free speech zones are profoundly objectionable. But they aren't the only available venue for political protest. Furthermore, it's still possible to engage in sustained, public, explicitly oppositional political protest in defiance of the law (Occupy, IOW) without engendering reprisals that are any different than they've really ever been in any free society on earth.


Maybe so and pepper spray and nightsticks aren't a death sentence but for all practical intents and purposes the effect is damn near identical.


I'm sorry, but I really just can't agree with you on that. One results in death.

C2W wrote: The question (at least as I understand it) is whether or not the state makes the pursuit of political and personal freedom -- such as autonomy/choice wrt what you say and do -- systematically impossible. By some and/or any means. Because if it does, it's definitely totalitarian and possibly fascist. And it it doesn't, it's not.


That then is clear and probably serves in place of the list. I'm not sure why you want to place the bar that high. It seems to me that post wwII the fascists would need to find a kinder, gentler but possibly no less fascist way of holding onto power and privilege and oppressing anyone and anything that threatens that.


Honestly, now I'm confused. How is everyone and everything that threaten the holders of power and privilege oppressed? Are they silenced? Taken political prisoner? Do they lose their jobs? Health? Family? Teeth? What?

Revolution is hard. Always has been. That's not what I'm talking about.

C2W wrote:I mean, how do the people positing that it's presently impossible to pursue political and/or personal freedom in the United States because the government systematically prevents or prohibits all attempts to do so account for the Tea Party? It hasn't been around very long. It's explicitly very hostile to established interests and powers. But it not only hasn't been suppressed, it's actually made some significant gains on a national level.

Fascist states just don't allow that type of thing to happen, unless I'm missing something. So what am I missing?


I'll let you respond to Jack on this one, but I'll mention that perhaps this is where the more sophisticated cultural engineering comes in. I think today's fascists learned something from the successes and failures of their predecessors.


Please present a case for sophisticated cultural engineering having occurred, if that's your claim. I'll address Jack separately, but on a quick read-through, it's not his.
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Re: Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

Postby compared2what? » Sat Aug 25, 2012 12:59 am

JackRiddler wrote:
compared2what? wrote:I mean, how do the people positing that it's presently impossible to pursue political and/or personal freedom in the United States because the government systematically prevents or prohibits all attempts to do so account for the Tea Party? It hasn't been around very long. It's explicitly very hostile to established interests and powers. But it not only hasn't been suppressed, it's actually made some significant gains on a national level.

Fascist states just don't allow that type of thing to happen, unless I'm missing something. So what am I missing?


You really lose me here and show a lack of sophistication that's quite unusual for you.


The funny thing is -- and I really do mean that I find it funny, as I hope you do -- that I think the exact same thing about you. WRT the extreme, neo-fascist and/or fascist right, though, not in connection with the Tea Party, specifically. However, I kind of assume that you don't mean it's limited to that with me in your eyes, either.

Sweet.

:lovehearts: :lovehearts:

The "Tea Party," now pretty much defunct as a factor in US politics, was a successful effort by the Republican Party right-wing to rebrand itself as a secular economic justice movement in the wake of the 2008 election, so as to take Congress in 2010.


I wasn't really thinking exclusively about the movement that went under that name in 2010. I equally well might have said "the Patriot movement," or "the "Libertarian" movement," or "the recent rise of the extreme right in American, which has quite rapidly become very influential nationally on a populist, electoral, and media level, after having been dead as a dodo outside of a handful of local precincts for the better part of half a century or more, and which is very much in the picture in a way that's making a very real difference for congressional races all over the country this year."

Or something of that nature.

It partly owes its success thanks to the incoming administration's intentional dissolution of the movement that had brought it into power; its total capitulation to the zombie bankers; and its creation of a Neo-Clintonian cabinet with nothing but neoliberals and vetted national-security wonks at the helm of the key departments. That created the vacuum for allowing a right-wing counterpopulist movement to present itself as the new opposition to tyranny in a country that had just repudiated the Bush agenda and shifted a few feet to the left.


I think you're vastly underestimating the phenomenon to which the Tea Party belongs. You can't just return the return-of-the-repressed to storage when you're done using it for leverage. (Not "you, JackR"; I mean "you, the stupid mainstream right.")

Prior to the inauguration, the "Tea Party" was little more than the Ron Paul 2008 campaign.


Again, I think you're vastly underestimating the movement in question. The Ron Paul 2008 campaign wasn't just about 2008, or even (imo, which is based on his campaign expenditures and activities) primarily about 2008. He used his presidential campaigns to fund-raise for and build the great, big third-party national political machine, for which he acts as a figurehead: Campaign for Liberty/Young Americans for Liberty. And unlike him, they have no plans for retirement. On the contrary, they're still very actively recruiting, training, and fielding staff and candidates.

Those lone two (c)(4)s obviously don't have enough money to compete with the Big Two all on their own. But you know what? In reality, they're not all on their own. They're part of what you might call a vast right-wing consortium of such interlinked organizations, most of which keep a low profile while doing stuff like engaging in the byzantine and difficult-to-track exchange of funds and otherwise banding together for what look very much like impossible-to-verify-as-prohibited efforts in the political-campaign-intervention arena, generally.

Seriously. No part of that terrain is really discrete from the rest of it.

And yes, it does do business regularly with the GOP. But personally, I wouldn't say that it appeared to be party-controlled. The other way around, if anything.

It gets a lot done, though. A depressing lot. Citizens United is, for some reason, the first example to spring to mind. (The court case, I mean, although the organization does depressing stuff, too.)

Afterward, some dick on CNBC who didn't rant about the bank bailouts ranted about the (bogus) mortgage modification program, HAMP, as if it was a socialist atrocity, and this was treated by the rest of the corporate media like Bastille Day. The most ideologically fascist ruling class elements in this country (Kochs et al.) paid a couple of hundred million dollars to promote the "Tea Party" as a supposed third party movement that just happened to be led exclusively by long-familiar Republican politicians and campaigned for Republican candidates. FOXNEWS turned into Tea Party Channel and the rest of the corporate media gave absolute free ride, if not ideologically, then by covering these developments as if a legitimate third party had arisen, and as if its largest demonstrations (twice about 80,000 people in Washington) ran into the millions.

The ideology is Republican to the core, with a fascist bent. Freeloaders and immigrants and privileged blacks and America-hating liberals drove this country into debt and moral depravity! Now the Real Americans must take it back. In concrete policy terms, this means cutting everything public, privatizing everything, and completely deregulating whatever corporate crime is left to deregulate. The hostility you see to "established interests and powers" is the traditional right-wing delusion of revolt directed against the imagined power of "liberal media" and education and the currently African-American imperator. Of course it wasn't suppressed! It was a goosed-up expression of reaction with fascist tendencies. How can you imagine this was an opposition movement?


I don't imagine it. I don't think you're seeing the whole picture.

Talk about conspiracies.

Also, I ask that you go back to the last page and read my long post on the various usages of the word fascist. It was in large part written in response to your earlier posts.

.


Okay!
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Re: Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

Postby compared2what? » Sat Aug 25, 2012 3:00 am

Project Willow wrote:The network into which I was born and to whose violence I've been subjected my entire life is fascist. Their captive population is not at will to pursue personal or political freedom. Their clandestine activity subverts democratic and judicial processes, and they are funded by the state.


I understand. And appreciate your having made the point.

I don't think we're really in disagreement about anything, though. I mean, I certainly don't disagree wth you. State-funded clandestine activities that prevent the pursuit of personal and/or political freedom subvert democratic and judicial processes. At best. And it's not a minor or incidental concern, even then.

But....Wait. I guess that on consideration. I'm not sure whether you're saying, "Don't blithely discount real fascist acts committed by the American state," (in which case I'm saying, "I don't!") or whether you're saying, "It's a fascist system, don't kid yourself," (in which case, I think we differ).

Or you might be saying some whole other thing. Of course. Please enlighten me.
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Re: Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Aug 25, 2012 8:32 am

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They could still get him out of office.
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Don’t forget that.
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Re: Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

Postby 2012 Countdown » Sat Aug 25, 2012 10:21 am

Canadian_watcher wrote:
JackRiddler wrote:This country is highly compartmentalized. Fascism, like war, is everywhere and nowhere. I go to the supermarket, I hang out - where's this perpetual and global war we're supposedly in? Okay, I'm far removed from the hostilities, but where's the homefront mobilization? I can completely ignore it. It doesn't need very many dedicated supersoldiers willing to charge into death for god and country. It needs button pushers and technicians. It needs taxpayers. It needs the 80% or more of non-essential personnel to be apathetic. My own assigned role in this war machine is to be powerless in changing it, and to see how my opinions against it serve merely to validate that we're supposedly a democracy and a republic and a really good nation. Since I can express these opinions, after all - some would say at exorbitant length!

US institutions evolve smoothly into different stages while avoiding open breaks. I doubt there will ever be an explicit military or fascist coup d'etat, as that would wreck the most important illusions we have. Didn't we already have a literal coup d'etat, meaning the execution of the chief executive on behalf of a military cabal, in 1963? Wasn't that followed by some pretty explicit assassinations of dangerous opposition figures, and I'm not just talking about the justly celebrated heroes but the death squads put out on local leaders like Fred Hampton? And what are MK and its presumed successor programs, if not part of a post-fascist establishment using lessons learned from classical fascism?

Such realities are kept on a need-to-know basis. We may not have the world's biggest population but we do have the biggest economy, which makes a lot of space for niches. The fascist toolkit and, as you say, explicit fascist ideology are prevalent in many realms, even as the great bulk of the people have less reason to see it, or can get by with some reassuring observation that, hey, as long as I can write these words on the Internet, the system is not yet fascist, or even that none of its many compartments should be described as such.

This is the special talent of America, in contrast to other regimes that expose their repressive nature too readily, even though most of them don't manage to imprison anything like the proportion of the population imprisoned here. We make sure that our Single Corporate Party state has two perpetually warring right wings, to paraphrase Gore Vidal, and that truths are not suppressed but drowned out by hurricanes of noise and bullshit. We don't kill whistleblowers, we break them in the press or bankrupt them in courts, and only save the prison and the torture for a select few, like Bradley Manning or the other Brad, the one who exposed massive tax evasion activity at UBS and was the only one who was punished for it! We destroy the "middle class" in salami slices, not a meat grinder. The wise among the ruling elite would like to let us keep the right to blab our complaints to each other without effect forever. It's only necessary to repress and to roll out the sophisticated crowd control tech and to make up false plots and to kill us when we organize and start showing an effect. Fascism in America is soft. It's selective. It's niche-based. It's subtle, and usually avoids the appearance of ideology. It moves slowly. Its passionate outbreaks are only occasional, and these are dressed up as something terrible that happened to us - the Russians having a bomb, the Iranians seizing an embassy, the entire angry Islamic world somehow implicated in an irrational attack on our freedoms out of pure religious spite. It works by threatening potentials - the ability to nuke the world, for example - as much as by direct manifestation.
.


Jack, this ^ is brilliant. i bolded my favourite parts. :oops:


Going to co-sign this as well. Much better than his entry preceding it. This is the perfect answer.
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Re: Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

Postby chump » Sat Aug 25, 2012 11:53 am

I like that one too Jack.

I recently read this passage from PK Dick's The Man In The High Castle, a "science fiction" story set in an alternate reality in which the fascists won WWII:

Baynes, who is secretly of Jewish descent, converses with Lotze, a German businessman, on a high class rocket ship as they land in San Francisco, CA:

The Man In The High Castle, p.40, PK Dick -


"What's that enormous structure blow?" Lotze asked. "It is half finished, open at one side. A spaceport? The Nipponese have no spacecraft, I thought."

With a smile, Baynes said, "It is finished. That's Golden Poppy Stadium. The baseball park."

Lotze laughed, "Yes, they love baseball. Incredible. They have begun work on that great structure for a pasttime, an idle timewasting sport-"

Interupting, Baynes said, "It is finished, That's it's permanent shape. Open on one side. A new architectural design. They are very proud of it."

"it's looks," Lotze said, gazing down, " as if it was designed by a Jew."

Baynes regarded the man for a time. He felt, strongly for a moment, the unbalanced quality, the psychotic streak, in the German mind. Did Lotze actually mean what he said? Was it a truly spontaneous remark?

"I hope we will see one another later on in San Francisco," Lotze said as the rocket touched the ground, "I will be at loose ends without a countryman to talk to."

"I'm not a countryman of yours," Baynes said.

"Oh yes; that's so. But racially, you're quite close. For all intents and purposes the same." Lotze bagan to stir around in his seat, getting ready to unfasten his the elaborate belts.

Am I racially kin to this man? Baynes wondered. So closely so that for all intents and purposes it is the same? Then it is in me, too, the psychotic streak. A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power. How long have we known this? Faced this? And — how many of us do know it? Not Lotze. Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or. you are becoming sane, finally. Waking up. I suppose only a few are aware of all this. Isolated persons here and there. But the broad masses . . . what do they think? All these hundreds of thousands in this city, here. Do they imagine that they live in a sane world? Or do they guess, glimpse, the truth . . . ?


But, he thought, what does it mean, insane? A legal definition. What do I mean? I feel it, see it, but what is it?


He thought, It is something they do, something they are. It is -their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. Their not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing. No, he thought. That isn't it, I don't know; I sense it, intuit it. But — they are purposely cruel . . . is that it? No. God, he thought. I can't find it, make it clear. Do they ignore parts of reality? Yes. But it is more. It is their plans. Yes, their plans. The conquering of the planets. Something frenzied and demented, as was their conquering of Africa, and before that, Europe and Asia.


Their view; it is cosmic. Not of a man here, a child there, but air abstraction: race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honorable men but of Ehre itself, honor; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Güte, but not good, this good man. It is their sense of space and time. They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life; there was once only the dust particles in space, the hot hydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again. This is an interval, ein Augenblick. The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into the granite and methane; the wheel turns for all life. It is all temporary. And they — these madmen — respond to the granite, the dust, the longing of the inanimate; they want to aid Natur.


And, he thought, I know why. They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. They identify with God's power and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness. They are overcome by some archetype; their egos have expanded psychotically so that they cannot tell where they begin and the godhead leaves off. It is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate — confusion between him who worships and that which is worshiped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.


What they do not comprehend is man's helplessness. I am weak, small, of no consequence to the universe. It does not notice me; I live on unseen. But why is that bad? Isn't it better that way? Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small . . . and you will escape the jealousy of the great.


As he unfastened his own belt, Baynes said, 'Mr. Lotze, I have never told anyone this. I am a Jew. Do you understand?'


Lotze stared at him piteously.


'You would not have known,' Baynes said, 'because I do not in any physical way appear Jewish; I have had my nose altered, my large greasy pores made smaller, my skin chemically lightened, tife shape of my skull changed. In short, physically I cannot be detected. I can and have often walked in the highest circles of Nazi society. No one will ever discover me. And-' He paused, standing close, very close to Lotze and speaking in a low voice which only Lotze could hear. 'And there are others of us. Do you hear? We did not die. We still exist. We live on unseen.'


After a moment Lotze stuttered, 'The Security Police — ' 'The SD can go over my record,'


Baynes said. 'You can report me. But I have very high connections. Some of them are Aryan, some are other Jews in top positions in Berlin. Your report will be discounted, and then, presently, I will report you. And through these same connections, you will find yourself in Protective Custody.' He smiled, nodded and walked up the aisle of the ship, away from Lotze, to join the other passengers.


Everyone descended the ramp, onto the cold, windy field. At the bottom, Baynes found himself once more momentarily near Lotze.


'In fact,' Baynes said, walking beside Lotze, 'I do not like your looks, Mr. Lotze, so I think I will report you anyhow.' He strode on, then, leaving Lotze behind.
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Re: Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

Postby dada » Sat Aug 25, 2012 12:53 pm

Yeah, good stuff, Jack.

I think tazmic's statement is important as well:
tazmic wrote:Whenever I find myself entertaining an elitist attitude, I think, that's the fascist in you, that's the easy blindness that comes from not wanting to look, and I remind myself of the only principle that has served me well in life, without fail, and find myself at last humbled.


Thanks to this thread I was inspired to go back and read through The Mass Psychology of Fascism again. Found a few quotes that illustrate my feelings on the topic, but decided against taking them out of context. Still very relevant today though, I would say. Link to pdf: The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich

On the last day of a job I had as manager of a dog day care, the boss came and told me that I was a bad manager. It pissed me off at the time, especially in light of all the extra hours I put in, and extra crap I did for the guy. The customers loved me, the dogs loved me and didn't get into fights when I was around. At first I thought it was his way of saying I didn't do enough to get more customers, make more money. But after a few days I realized what he really meant was that the shift workers liked me; I was too nice, too fair to the people below me on the totem pole. He was just being the little fascist prick that I always knew him to be, and berating me for not being as big of a little fascist prick as he was. And I saw that when it bugged me to be called a bad manager, it was bugging the little fascist prick in me. Now I am proud of it, I think its an honor to be called a bad manager by a little fascist. It makes me think of Gurdjieff in Meetings with Remarkable Men, when he says his father was a bad businessman. He meant pretty much the same thing, though he was saying it affectionately. In haggling with customers, he would always give them a break. Bad businessman. Not very fascist of him.

So I would say how to recognize fascism, is first recognize it in yourself, and you can see what it is and recognize it around you.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

Postby American Dream » Sat Aug 25, 2012 1:31 pm

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Outside New York City Criminal Court building, 1963.
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Re: Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

Postby Canadian_watcher » Sat Aug 25, 2012 1:49 pm

compared2what? wrote:
Honestly, now I'm confused. How is everyone and everything that threaten the holders of power and privilege oppressed? Are they silenced? Taken political prisoner? Do they lose their jobs? Health? Family? Teeth? What?


That's such a Limbaugh thing to say. It kind of skips around the meat of the problem in order to pretend that there is no problem. After all, says Limbaugh, if X is getting away with it, we can ALL get away with it. it isn't so. Just ask:
Bradley Manning.
Julian Assange.
Sybel Edmonds
Random scientists all over the place who end up losing their jobs, health & families or just have / also have their characters assassinated. (wait, maybe that one is not happening in the US as much as it is in Canada, come to think of it)

As Jack pointed out, we peons are free to debate all we want publicly and loudly. 'Cause you know, we are limp dicks really. But - someone with a big fat hard one (like any of the above named people who are just a skimming of the recent revelators I can think of) get cut down, threatened subtly and not so subtly and yes, they do lose - big time. All the stuff on your list plus more. (and don't use the Limbaugh out, here, which would be to derail the whole context by saying that Manning et al still have their teeth)

But that's all. i'm leaving the thread now - probably the board - not forever, but just for a while. real life begs me.. JOKING. I'm not leaving. I only wrote it because I think I heard that somewhere once (or fifty times) on RI.
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Re: Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Aug 25, 2012 4:05 pm

.

I await c2w?'s response to my first post on this thread, because I think that by establishing proper usages of the term, and by understanding that fascism does not describe a single form but a continuum, or continua within different contexts, we may resolve most of our apparent differences as misunderstandings.

We should separate out the concepts of the fascist drive or mentality; fascist ideology; a classical fascist system; post-fascism as a tool-kit of lessons learned and applied; soft-fascist or fascistoid rhetoric; and neo-fascism as attempts at hard ideological revival.

However, I think we should now be able to show that our differences about the "Tea Party" lie mainly in misunderstanding. The part of your thinking that I thought was unsophisticated was in seeing the "Tea Party" as being in opposition to the system, or as something that fascist elements within the system would ever want to suppress. On the contrary, it tends to fascism, and that should explain why it met with so much favor and accommodation, rather than suppression. Again, why would you imagine that a fascist system would ever want to suppress such an outbreak? The Tea Party was encouraged and steered.

When you argue that the right is powerful, I agree, and when you argue that they have become more extreme and dangerous, I also agree. You created the initial confusion for me by referring to them simply as the "Tea Party," which is only a brief manifestation within a long history and was indeed a Republican Party campaign front, or was successfully shaped into one. (Although in your second post you write, "I wasn't really thinking exclusively about the movement that went under that name in 2010," you had contradicted this in your initial post and added to my confusion by writing of the "Tea Party," "It hasn't been around very long," which again implies you were talking about the particular manifestation under that name and not the long history of the right - which is hardly recent. I remember a post from you long ago dating it back to Brown vs. Board, though its predecessor forms have been around a lot longer, destroying Reconstruction, decrying the New Deal, etc.)

When you argue that it's not the Republican Party running the right but the right running the Republican Party, I don't disagree, or rather agree that these are nowadays manifestations of the same beast. The former "conservative" or right wing of the Republicans is the Republicans, with a small top-level appendage of super-rich and Bush mob spooks running policy when they are in power. The latter are in much the same spirit but a touch more pragmatic about how to get their way (and very successful at it, to the point where the successor Democratic administration has in the main consolidated and legalized the ground they gained).

Here again I am confused:

compared2what? wrote:after having been dead as a dodo outside of a handful of local precincts for the better part of half a century or more, and which is very much in the picture in a way that's making a very real difference for congressional races all over the country this year."


Really? Half a century would put us back at 1962, "or more" in the so-called McCarthy period. Yet they were at their most powerful electorally in the 80s, and in the 90s they got the Gingrich Congress, and right now the same Gingrich still caters to them. They are particularly extreme and deranged and dangerous right now, as I'm sure you agree, because the long-term historical trend is going against libertarian capitalism (due to its persistent tendency to crash and fail to deliver on its claims), fundamentalist Christianism (because the population has become more tolerant of the things it demonizes), America as God's nation (because the empire is in decline relative to the rest, if far from over), and white supremacy (because "whites" are going to be the minority within a foreseeable future).

I think you're vastly underestimating the phenomenon to which the Tea Party belongs. You can't just return the return-of-the-repressed to storage when you're done using it for leverage. (Not "you, JackR"; I mean "you, the stupid mainstream right.")


Hmm, this may be the nub of it. You think there is an extreme right represented by the Tea Party and a "stupid mainstream right" represented by the Republicans. I think it's the same thing. I doubt I'm underestimating its power, relative to you. Again, what I found unsophisticated was simply why you would ever think the latter would want to suppress the former.

But as for underestimating: not at all. In fact, you may be underestimating the power of fascism in this country by ascribing it only to an "extreme right" as opposed to a "stupid mainstream right" that is any less extreme. Surely the current election campaign is showing there's precious little distinction to make there. What could the movement right-wingers say or do that supposedly mainstream Republicans wouldn't defend, if not embrace? Romney's case of distancing himself from Akin looks lonely to me.

me wrote:Prior to the inauguration, the "Tea Party" was little more than the Ron Paul 2008 campaign.


you wrote:Again, I think you're vastly underestimating the movement in question. The Ron Paul 2008 campaign wasn't just about 2008, or even (imo, which is based on his campaign expenditures and activities) primarily about 2008. He used his presidential campaigns to fund-raise for and build the great, big third-party national political machine, for which he acts as a figurehead: Campaign for Liberty/Young Americans for Liberty. And unlike him, they have no plans for retirement. On the contrary, they're still very actively recruiting, training, and fielding staff and candidates.

Those lone two (c)(4)s obviously don't have enough money to compete with the Big Two all on their own. But you know what? In reality, they're not all on their own. They're part of what you might call a vast right-wing consortium of such interlinked organizations, most of which keep a low profile while doing stuff like engaging in the byzantine and difficult-to-track exchange of funds and otherwise banding together for what look very much like impossible-to-verify-as-prohibited efforts in the political-campaign-intervention arena, generally.


All true, but even worse: In reality, they are not a third party, and they won't be founding one. They are the controlling spirit within the Republicans.

.

PS - We should note that "Weimar," which you've cited, was not simply a republic that the Nazis destroyed. It was also the republic that spawned the Nazis. Long before the Nazi seizure of power, the Weimar state displayed an extremely differential treatment of left and right, including in its reaction to street protests and street battles. Leftists were imprisoned and surveilled far more often than rightists. The government showed increasingly dictatorial tendencies, especially after 1931 when there was a state of emergency, and by the time Hitler became chancellor the Nazis were already in power in the largest state, Prussia, where they had initiated extreme repressions under Goering. Of course, it was the Weimar elites who chose to back Hitler at the key point in January 1933. Of course, the Weimar Republic's early history was bathed in the blood of communists after the Spartacus revolt, which saw SPD politicians in alliance with the Freikorps. This is a longer discussion, but the German form of fascism (the term is actually too mild in the German case, which is why one always speaks of National Socialism instead) arose not only as a destroyer of democracy but thanks to the fascist tendencies within the republic.

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Last edited by JackRiddler on Sun Aug 26, 2012 12:37 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

Postby barracuda » Sat Aug 25, 2012 5:02 pm

I have a hard time viewing the Tea Party as fascist in any meaningful sense, if only from an aesthetic viewpoint. Where's the pageantry? The exaltation of the virile? Where's the ecstatic subsumation of the masses to the will of the figurehead representing the sacred fatherland?

Image

Fascism just ain't fascism without choreography, people.

Fascist aesthetics include but go far beyond the rather special celebration of the primitive to be found in The Last of the Nuba. More generally, they flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain; they endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude. The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry: the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication or replication of things; and the grouping of people/things around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader-figure or force. The fascist dramaturgy centers on the orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets, uniformly garbed and shown in ever swelling numbers. Its choreography alternates between ceaseless motion and a congealed, static, "virile" posing. Fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death.


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Re: Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

Postby dada » Sat Aug 25, 2012 6:15 pm

Sounds an awful lot like Hollywood.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Aug 25, 2012 6:45 pm

barracuda wrote:I have a hard time viewing the Tea Party as fascist in any meaningful sense, if only from an aesthetic viewpoint. Where's the pageantry? The exaltation of the virile? Where's the ecstatic subsumation of the masses to the will of the figurehead representing the sacred fatherland?


Like others here you may be making the mistake of being too specific in what you expect of the term. These are manifestations of a full-blown ideological fascist state from the "classical" period. By the way, didn't Bush's landing on the aircraft carrier aim for each of those? (Never mind that it's hard to see any aesthetics in it.) Right down to the codpiece?

Anyway, "fascist" isn't the term most usefully applied to the Tea Party, who have entered here only through the curious observation by c2w? that a fascist system would not have tolerated this "challenge." Although, to use the terminology I've argued for (and might argue against, tomorrow, that's the nature of academic debate), they are a mob largely steered out of the post-fascist playbook, classically baying as populists for their own worst interests and for whatever's best for the plutocrats (or "liberal elites") they think they're opposing.
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Re: Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

Postby compared2what? » Sat Aug 25, 2012 11:32 pm

Regrettable ill-temper deleted.
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