In comments, [name redacted] asks What do you believe are the keystones of fascist rule, and how are they measurable?<\/I> 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.\n
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.\n
Anyway, [name redacted] begins, sensibly enough, with a definition of fascism, to wit:\n
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. \ufffdAmerican Heritage Dictionary<\/blockquote>\nUnlike [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.\nFirst, 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?\n
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.\n
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.\n
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?\n
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.<\/blockquote>\nchazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2728"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2728\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17347,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2728\/revisions\/17347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}