In comments, [name redacted] asks What do you believe are the keystones of fascist rule, and how are they measurable? As I was slow to respond, he wrote a longish but cogent analysis of our own system, and how it matches up to fascism. Well, here I am at last, responding.
Digression: No, Your Humble Blogger didn’t redact the name of the commenter. I have no idea whether the commenter is one of the Gentle Readers who often comments here, making a point with a new handle, or a Gentle Reader new to this Tohu Bohu. Heck, for all I know, this one really is Neal Asher. Either way, he or she is welcome, and welcome to use that pseudonym. I can’t imagine I will ever judge it useful to redact the name of a commenter, but if I do, I’ll let you know. End Digression.
Anyway, [name redacted] begins, sensibly enough, with a definition of fascism, to wit:
Fascism. A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism. �American Heritage DictionaryUnlike [name redacted], I will point out the irony of the source’s title. Anyway, this definition has three aspects and a fourth typical aspect. Typically, YHB will take these four separately.
First, centralization of authority. Yes, the current system is far more centralized than Madison anticipated (I appear not to have ever mentioned in this Tohu Bohu how thoroughly mass communication upended the basic assumptions about federalism underlying Madison’s genius, so I’ll let that go for now), but much less centralized than, say, Napoleonic France. Or the United Kingdom under John Major. Just to point something out, without getting in to the details, the President and all his cronies are having their hands full just keeping one comatose woman alive. Clearly, all the power didn’t wind up in their hands. That’s a silly example, but there are lots more. The President wants to default on loans made from one part of the government to the other, and the Legislature won’t let him. The Judiciary, as hobbled as it is, has overturned a variety of executive rules in the last three years, and more in the four before. One state has legalized gay marriage, and the central government has not yet (as far as I know) refused to grant married status to the married couples for tax purposes. I’m sure that for each of these examples, any Gentle Reader could come up with three or four far more serious examples of power transferred from the states to the federal government, or from the Legislature and Judiciary to the Executive. Centralization is, of course, relative, which is why [name redacted] asked for milestones. I’m not sure I can give them, in this case. An independent Judiciary would be one (I know, it’s under attack), but even there, I don’t what the milestone would be. Probably, if the Central Power is unable to remove a judge or Justice, then you don’t have working fascism. How’s that?
Second aspect: stringent socioeconomic controls. [name redacted] suggests that the narrowing options (Starbuck’s or Dunkin’ Donuts? No, as a career) available to a growing percentage of us, exacerbated if not created by legislation and executive policy which protects the wealth of the wealthy. I can’t argue with the narrowing options part, but I’m unconvinced that this constitutes the stringent socioeconomic controls of the definition. Most of the commerce in the country is only very loosely regulated; the lang-term effect of that is narrowing choices for the average citizen, which is a problem I can’t call fascism. A stronger argument for fascism would be the growing socioeconomic power of the military, but even that is not to the point I would call fascistic. I haven’t even remotely the vocabulary to name a milestone in this region, but I would say that we aren’t close to whatever I might someday be able to name.
Third: suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship. You know, despite Ted Kennedy getting stopped at the airport when his name turned up on a terror watch list, I don’t see this happening to any great extent. Well, no, that’s a misstatement. There are dozens, possibly hundreds, of cases of dissenters (that is, an opposition), being suppressed, through terror (of various kinds) and censorship. On the other side of that balance are the 59 million people who voted for John Kerry without any mistreatment by the government (and the half-million or so who voted for Ralph Nader or some other opposition candidate). Add to that people such as our aforementioned Liberal Lion, or Sen. Graham, or Sen. Byrd, or Rep. Lee, or Rep. Kucinich, even Michael Moore or Al Franken or Tom Robbins or Duncan Black or Your Humble Blogger or any of a hundred others I could name off the top of my head who oppose the policies of Our Only President and his cabal of incompetents and crooks. Your Humble Blogger can more or less define a milestone for fascism: if you can broadcast the information that the Leader’s Cabinet is a cabal of incompetents and crooks and get a million viewers or listeners, you are not living under fascism. It’s possible, it may be likely, that the fascists in that cabal want to change that, but they haven’t yet.
Finally, the typical aspects of belligerent nationalism and racism. I don’t deny that the country is, on the whole, a racist one, but I do deny that it is more racist than, um, let’s give three: France, Japan, and ... oh, Brazil. Are those fascist states? No, seriously, are they? Japan, I believe, has far more stringent economic controls than the US, as well as much more centralized power, and standards for censorship not far looser than our own. Oh, its nationalism is less belligerent (at least by most direct definitions of belligerence), that’s true. But is it fascist? My sense is that it isn’t. More generally, I don’t think either racism or belligerent nationalism are hallmarks of fascisti, particularly, more than of other scoundrels and other diseases of the body politic. Was Stalin a fascist? Was Pol Pot a fascist? Was Teddy Roosevelt?
Now, having responded with a decisively high-handed and negative tone to the very reasonable comments of [name redacted], I’ll stand aside and give him (or her) the last word, with which I entirely agree:
Our Constitutional safeguards are critically important in keeping us from fascism. We need free speech and a free and independent press, strong states, a Presidency whose powers are balanced by the rest of the government, an independent judiciary, and rotation in legislative representation rather than an entrenched political class. I'm glad our Constitution provides all of that, but the Constitution does not enforce itself. And sticking pretty names on damaging policies doesn't actually change their nature, though it may fool us into changing ours.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
One state has legalized gay marriage, and the central government has not yet (as far as I know) refused to grant married status to the married couples for tax purposes.
Actually, they have.
the President and all his cronies are having their hands full just keeping one comatose woman alive
1. It’s a convenient distraction from the 2nd anniversary of the Iraq invasion. B. The Republicans see political gains in making it a big fuss.
like a lot of people at the time madison et al didn’t see the writing on the wall – corporations and industry were about to turn the whole thing upside down. mass communications certainly shifted power around but i think, before that, things had already shifted so that, up and down the ladder, dollars were more important than votes. cash creates enormous power. in madison’s time wealthy people couldn’t walk away from their constituents because their constituents were their wealth.
i mean i think it’s pretty plain in the various documents that the folks working on the constitution thought the economic system placed limits on government and private behavior – assumptions about things people were likely to do, likely to want. the industrial middle class itself maybe was more than the constitution was prepared for, in terms of ensuring equity for all citizens and keeping a lid on greed.
not that anyone with half a brain couldn’t have predicted that the freed slaves would be blamed for their own problems and would end up in massive ghettos.
So the world has changed in important ways, and a strict or literal reading of the founding documents no longer provides a good or complete guide to how to live together while avoiding many of the pitfalls that people are prone to leap towards. As a Conservative Jew, rather than Orthodox, this sounds rather familiar. And it’s why Justice Scalia’s “originalist” approach to the Constitution feels so alien — it’s an orthodox approach. The parallel to different approaches to the Torah might also provide some new language or ideas for examining and understanding the Constitution. How do we make the Constitution real for our lives today, rather than letting it be reduced to a ritual of flag-waving and tefillin?
go out and shake a lot of hands, listen to a lot of problems. in this particular political environment organizing to make big changes in the law is really dangerous. power has tipped way into the hands of the unscrupulous.
to me, winner-take-all is the most difficult thing to apply fairly in the current distro of economic power. for tens of millions of people there’s a disincentive to vote – they can’t hire/install/support a candidate of their own, who really cares about their situation and wants to change it, they’re forced into constant lesser-evil decisions that just taste really bad after a decade or two. this means that they have to pick out of the trash their chance at shaping economic policy, and they end up begging “their” representative, instead of having a real and deserved seat at the table.
the court system is similarly skewed – economics can predict both crime rates and trial outcomes. the education system. virtually everything. i wouldn’t know where to start.
Two points: first, I’m not suggesting that things are great, or that we live in an egalitarian utopia. I’m just saying we’re a long way from fascist rule. Yes, in a capitalist system, the wealthy are more powerful than the poor, and our current corporate capitalism exacerbates, rather than minimizes, that problem. That’s a problem of a capitalist democracy, though, not a problem of fascism.
Second, if the disincentive for participating in the process is that it tastes bad, I can’t have much sympathy. Particularly in local government, we have the actual chance to participate, vote on a secret ballot, and are neither jailed nor shot for supporting fringe candidates, much less opposition leaders. The lesser-evil holds no weight with me, unless you are suggesting (as some of Our Only President’s supporters do) that we vote for angels, rather than for men.
Thanks,
-V.
I’m just saying we’re a long way from fascist rule. Yes, in a capitalist system, the wealthy are more powerful than the poor, and our current corporate capitalism exacerbates, rather than minimizes, that problem. That’s a problem of a capitalist democracy, though, not a problem of fascism.
Three responses.
1) I agree that we are not living in a fascist state, although the current government clearly has fascist tendencies/aspirations.
2) The fact that the threat of fascism in America even has to be discussed is an indication that the dysfunction in our politics has become severe.
3) Given the current global and cultural context, I can’t see Fascism in what might be called “classic form” developing in the United States. That doesn’t mean, however, that the danger of certain elements of classic fascism isn’t there. That doesn’t mean that the dangers of a corporate plutocracy that uses pages from the fascist playbook isn’t as severe or more severe than the dangers of a classic fascism.
I think our democracy is in trouble. The fact that the corporate leadership of the country has the power to do tremendous global environmental damage that may take centuries or millenia to be remediated makes their greedy, short-sighted regime as dangerous to human and non-human life as any ever seen.
Putting the problem in that large context doesn’t help to solve it, of course. The course to a solution remains political.
Second, if the disincentive for participating in the process is that it tastes bad, I can’t have much sympathy.
If you want to get people back into the process, then some sympathy for the _discouraged_ voter is needed, I think. Most people know little about how politics works, and the one thing that working-class people used to be able to count on — voting for the Democrat would protect their interests, hasn’t done much good for the last 30 years or so. Power to make change increasingly lies at the Federal level, where individual votes make least difference and where Congressional districts are so gerrymandered that few elections have a hope of being competitive.
I’m not saying we should give up, but I am saying that for people who lack the time/knowledge to commit to heavy involvement in the political process, the conclusion that voting is useless is not an unreasonable one for them to reach.
The limitless greed of the plutocrats is on its way to making people suffer enough that political change takes priority over making ends meet (the bankruptcy bill is going to hurt a lot of people terribly), but we’re still far from a working-class/middle-class alliance that would throw the plutocrats out of power.
people are involved at the local level. people are involved at regional and state levels even. the problem at the moment is that these economies are stalling and overloaded with debt, with which they were saddled at the national level, through various tax changes and the socialization of industrial revenue loss.
there has been a conspiracy at the federal level to shift to the public the burden of costs from foreign competition, industrial inertia, environmental damage, etc. state legislatures, governors, mayors etc can’t veto a congressional decision to reduce the corporate tax rate or a federal failure to watch over corporate malfeasance.
i’m not trying to use the lesser-evil argument against the democrats. i’m openly arguing that the democrats have been using the lesser-evil argument themselves to cover up a widespread abandonment of a core liberal value: that government serves to keep capitalism honest and to make sure that economic growth serves the whole population and not just a few or some shabbily-measured plurality.
i’m fairly radical. i believe that people are essentially good and want to help each other and given the chance, will work together to improve everybody’s situation. too many so-called liberals have chosen to believe in competition as a sole model for economic growth, signing off on various vertical monopolies that can’t be penetrated, domesticated, or taxed.
i’m also radical in that i believe this to be a core problem of capitalism itself. the temptation to remain powerful and wealthy is very strong, the temptation to close down an open system so as to maintain your own position. it’s not human nature, it’s human-nature-as-relates-to-money.
in closing i want to note the chrysler bailout. billions of dollars of help given, and the result is that this “saved” company is not only now majority owned outside the country, it builds most of its domestically-sold product outside the country. this is the conspiracy. that money could have been used to help make the changes that were needed to make american factories competitive and forward-thinking (which would include environmental sustainability and flexible retooling, and also much new training, child care, and socializing health care to help create more diverse local economies) but it was handed to a dying company to help it leave the country.
i don’t blame the democrats for that example. instead i offer it to them to think over as far as their current devotion to the stock market. the NYSE does not reflect the health of the american economic base.