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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.
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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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