Fascism in America is neither pure conjecture nor irresponsible name-calling. Its presence is manifest in numerous ways, from the Executive Power of a president to fight a two-front war on behalf of global domination, at home, unprecedented massive surveillance on the American people (with the chilling effect, slowly taking form, of silencing or narrowing the bounds of dissent), and abroad, itself two-pronged, a geopolitical paradigm, backed by (also unprecedented) military power, designed to weaken drastically both Russia and China through encirclement, containment, finally, economic and diplomatic neutralization as a factor in world politics.
Preeminence/hegemony has never been enough, since perhaps the conclusion of World War 2, for this global status had to be enjoyed unilaterally AND in a way that is intended to humiliate all potential or actual challengers, conveniently set against each other in a political-ideological dichotomization of the international system. The Cold War is largely America’s creation to achieve these purposes, inaugurated in the Pacific, months earlier, with the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan (itself a warning to Russia in Manchuria and indigenous Left forces in China), and, in Europe, as set against a nearly prostrate Soviet Union amidst a Continent of devastation and rubble, the politicized use of food aid and economic assistance, culminating in the Marshall Plan two years later, to defeat indigenous Left forces in that region.
By 1950 America like previous Imperial historical ascendancies entered its own Age of Counterrevolution as the logical and necessary step to its consolidation of power, a reactive/defensive posture integral to seemingly progressive determinants of growth. Trade-and-investment expansion, cultural-ideological influence, a reputation for democracy, freedom, and social justice (never earned or justified in practice), all combined—the shadow of military prepotency hanging over the whole, except for the Korean War and countless smaller-scale interventions bringing it into the open—to give the impression of dynamism so often linked in popular thought with liberalism and Progress. A reverse dynamism is more like it, as though to be active is per se to be on the side of humanity (and deeper still, dynamism conveys force), which prejudges the content of action, assisted by the numbing and authoritarian consequences on the public mind that force induces in the personality, what Adorno and others showed in The Authoritarian Personality (1950) to be the character of authoritarian submission. The timing is significant, a prescient analysis in the take-off period, where liberalism wraps around an increasingly fascistic industrial-military structure, giving it democratic credentials and a clean bill of health as it seeks world dominance.
In this regard, McCarthyism and generalized anticommunism (which includes xenophobia and, with Taft-Hartley, the assault on labor organization) during the period and carried forward to the present under various guises, causes, and labels, is secondary and reinforcing to the main stem of repression and ideological closure in America, liberalism, loosely construed to embrace corporatism in American finance and industry, while the Right, thoroughly unsophisticated in the ways and needs of advanced capitalism, rebels at the regulatory framework monopoly capital erects for its protection via government-business interpenetration.
Today, Obama is the liberal champion of fascism, American-style. Massive surveillance is a surrogate for the concentration camp. Glenn Greenwald in No Place to Hide states what should have been said at the start in the reporting of Snowden’s disclosures: the chilling effect of surveillance on the American people as perhaps the primary intent of the NSA program, with counterterrorism a pretext for immobilizing the will for authentic democratic social change.
POTUS provides the rug under which is swept every noxious element of public policy, from deregulation, wealth concentration, and protection of business illegality and worse, in domestic affairs, and in foreign affairs an aggressive world posture of confrontation, intervention, regime change, and assassination, coupled with or accompanied by commercial-financial agreements for the maximization of US capitalist expansion. Pacific-first strategy and TransPacific Partnership, shoring up EU/NATO and precipitating conflict in Ukraine, these are the more obvious pursuits of a unitary policy of the militarization of the political economy for the totalization of America’s global power.
To illustrate the essential hypothetical, permeation of the fascist mindset in America, permit me to indulge in conjecture (itself the essence of hypothetical reasoning) in which, I believe, the foregoing is an accurate historical base from which the projection of fascist trends in society and the body politic is not unreasonable. My purpose is not satire (an easy escape from hard analysis) but an imaginative scenario of what portends if the military-financial trajectory of American capitalism is followed, as now seems to be the case. (...)
although molynuex isn't original, he has certainly helped draw attention to nap, property rights and child abuse/spanking
never understood the defoo critique on his position
catholic school, then public
there were several reasons (alcoholism, dysfunction, rebellion, etc.)
i'm not necessarily anti-gov or anti-tax, i'm anti-violence, anti-aggression and anti-coercion, anti-fraud, etc.
if it were up to me i'd replace violence and aggression with voluntary exchange and peaceful negotiation as much as possible
regards
His (pop-psychology) solutions that involve deFOO are cultist, much along the lines of scientology, where family members who criticize their close-knit in-group behaviour get shunned, i.e. deFOOed. When kids are impressionable, had some bad experiences with their parents (and I'm guessing most of us do at one point or another to a lesser or larger degree), and are being manipulated by some on-line group(think), is that still voluntary? Also the guy isn't a psychologist, he just tries to play one on YouTube/his radio show (probably with the help of his wife who lost her license because of that arrangement).
They probably are (of the Canadian variety), just as I am (though not of that particular variety).
Since that seems to be another (anti-government, anti-tax) burr of yours, am I to assume you were home-schooled? Or are you merely playing Molyneux' defoo-ed sock puppet?
no sock puppetry for me
although molynuex isn't original, he has certainly helped draw attention to nap, property rights and child abuse/spanking
never understood the defoo critique on his position
catholic school, then public
there were several reasons (alcoholism, dysfunction, rebellion, etc.)
i'm not necessarily anti-gov or anti-tax, i'm anti-violence, anti-aggression and anti-coercion, anti-fraud, etc.
if it were up to me i'd replace violence and aggression with voluntary exchange and peaceful negotiation as much as possible
I teach politics, political theory and philosophy. Two years ago, I offered my students a choice between material well being and democracy. They chose materialism. For them, democracy is word that means vote every 4 years or so. They would rather support a government that gives them iPads, holidays in the South, access to creature comforts. If that is a military government that is OK. It is upon this foundation that fascism thrives.
Wouldn't be such a bad thing, IF it was equal access for all...meaning someone wasn't being exploited to get those creature comforts.
That's a mighty big IF, but since it's a military government, you likely wouldn't get to see the exploited anyway, so don't worry your pretty little head about it, and be happy with what you've got.
are these children products of government schools?
They probably are (of the Canadian variety), just as I am (though not of that particular variety).
Since that seems to be another (anti-government, anti-tax) burr of yours, am I to assume you were home-schooled? Or are you merely playing Molyneux' defoo-ed sock puppet?
I teach politics, political theory and philosophy. Two years ago, I offered my students a choice between material well being and democracy. They chose materialism. For them, democracy is word that means vote every 4 years or so. They would rather support a government that gives them iPads, holidays in the South, access to creature comforts. If that is a military government that is OK. It is upon this foundation that fascism thrives.
Wouldn't be such a bad thing, IF it was equal access for all...meaning someone wasn't being exploited to get those creature comforts.
I am not quite sure what to say about Lofgren’s essay, because while I agree with much of it in pointing to the anti-democratic tendencies undermining democracy in the U.S., I find the language too constrained and the absences too disturbing. The notion of the “deep state” may be useful in pointing to a new configuration of power in the United States in which corporate sovereignty replaces political sovereignty, but it is not enough to simply expose the hidden institutions and structures of power. What we have in the United States today is fundamentally a new mode of politics, one wedded to a notion of power removed from accountability of any kind,and this poses a dangerous and calamitous threat to democracy itself, because such power is difficult to understand, analyze, and counter. The collapse of the public into the private, the depoliticization of the citizenry in the face of an egregious celebrity culture, and the disabling of education as a critical public sphere makes it easier for neoliberal capital with its hatred of democracy and celebration of the market to render its ideologies, values, and practices as a matter of common sense, removed from critical inquiry and dissent.
With privatization comes a kind of collective amnesia about the role of government, the importance of the social contract, and the importance of public values. For instance, war, intelligence operations, prisons, schools, transportation systems, and a range of other operations once considered public have been outsourced or simply handed over to private contractors who are removed from any sense of civic and political accountability. The social contract and the institutions that give it meaning have been transformed into entitlements administered and colonized largely by the corporate interests and the financial elite. Policy is no longer being written by politicians accountable to the American public. Instead, policies concerning the defense budget, deregulation, health care, public transportation, job training programs, and a host of other crucial areas are now largely written by lobbyists who represent mega corporations. How else to explain the weak deregulation policies following the economic crisis of 2007 or the lack of a public option in Obama’s health care policies? Or, for that matter, the more serious retreat from any viable notion of the political imagination that “requires long-term organizing—e.g., single-payer health care, universally free public higher education and public transportation, federal guarantees of housing and income security? The liberal center has moved to the right on these issues while the left has become largely absent and ineffective.
i quickly gleaned this...
i don't think corporatism/fascism is new
there are more than enough rules and regs on the books to prosecute
they're just not enforced (see bill black on the real news, npr or on pbs with moyers)
while i can agree with some of what lofgren and giroux say, i probably disagree with the solutions (esp giroux)
I teach politics, political theory and philosophy. Two years ago, I offered my students a choice between material well being and democracy. They chose materialism. For them, democracy is word that means vote every 4 years or so. They would rather support a government that gives them iPads, holidays in the South, access to creature comforts. If that is a military government that is OK. It is upon this foundation that fascism thrives.
i wonder how that happens?
are these children products of government schools?
A 10-year-old U.S. boy was suspended from school for three days for pretending his finger was a gun and pointing it at another student's head, the principal said.
The boy's father says it's the adults who are acting childish for suspending the boy from his school in Columbus, Ohio, last week.
Since zero-tolerance policies were adopted following school shootings around the United States, Columbus schools have disciplined students for violations including firing a Nerf brand foam-dart gun at school. A similar policy was cited last year when a Maryland school suspended a seven-year-old boy who had chewed a Pop-Tart into a gun shape.
The Ohio boy said he was "just playing around," but school district spokesman Jeff Warner told a local newspaper that Devonshire Principal Patricia Price has warned students about pretend gun play numerous times this year, and everyone should know the rules by now. He said warnings have been included in three newsletters sent home with kids.
Warner says the boy put his finger to the side of the other student's head and pretended to shoot "kind of execution style."
"The kids were told, 'If you don't stop doing this type of stuff, there would be consequences,"' Warner said. "It's just been escalating."
The boy's father said no one felt threatened. The other student didn't see it happen, but a teacher witnessed it.
"I was just playing around," said the fifth-grader, who had never been in trouble before. "People play around like this a lot at my school."
continued (for the pleasure of some libertarians and tea partiers alike)...
(...) I would suggest that what needs to be addressed is some sense of how this unique authoritarian historical conjuncture of power and politics came into place, especially with the rise of Ronald Reagan’s anti-government policies in the 1980s and Margaret Thatcher’s announcement that there is no such thing as society, only individuals and families. This was the beginning of the war on responsible government and the elimination of the welfare state and the celebration of a stripped down radical individualism motivated by an almost pathological narcissism and self-interest. More specifically, there is no mention by Lofgren of the collapse of the social state which began in the seventies with the rise of neoliberal capitalism–a far more dangerous form of market fundamentalism than we had seen since the first Gilded Age. Nor is there a sustained analysis of what is new about this ideology. How, for instance, are the wars abroad related increasingly to the diverse forms of domestic terrorism that have emerged at home? What is new and distinctive about a society marked by militaristic violence, exemplified by its war on youth, women, gays, public values, public education, and any viable exhibition of dissent? Why at this particular moment in history is an aggressive war being waged against not only whistle blowers, but also journalists, students, artists, intellectuals, and the institutions that support them? And, of course, what seems entirely missing in this essay is any reference to the rise of the punishing state with its massive racially inflected incarceration system, which amounts to a war on poor minorities, especially black youth.
What is not so hidden about the tentacles of power that now hide behind the euphemism of democratic governance is the rise of a punishing state and its totalitarian paranoiac mindset in which everyone is considered a potential terrorist or criminal. This mindset has resulted in the government arming local police forces with discarded weapons from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, turning local police into high-tech SWAT teams. How else to explain the increasing criminalization of social problems from homelessness and failure to pay off student loans to trivial infractions by students such as doodling on a desk or violating dress code in the public schools, all of which can land the public and young people in jail. The turn towards the punishing state is especially evident in the war on young people taking place in many schools, which now resemble prisons with their lockdown procedures, zero tolerance policies, metal detectors, and the increasing presence of police in the schools. One instance of the increasing punishing culture of schooling is provided by Chase Madar. He writes “Though it’s a national phenomenon, Mississippi currently leads the way in turning school behavior into a police issue. The Hospitality State has imposed felony charges on schoolchildren for “crimes” like throwing peanuts on a bus. Wearing the wrong color belt to school got one child handcuffed to a railing for several hours. All of this goes under the rubric of “zero-tolerance” discipline, which turns out to be just another form of violence legally imported into schools.”
Zero tolerance policies are only one example of the rise of the punishing and surveillance state which has transformed everyday life in the United States into a war zone. John Whitehead captures the militarized culture of everyday life well in arguing that how Americans are now treated by government officials has taken a dangerous turn. He writes:
You might walk past a police officer outfitted in tactical gear, holding an assault rifle, or drive past a police cruiser scanning license plates. There might be a surveillance camera on the street corner tracking your movements. At the airport, you may be put through your paces by government agents who will want to either pat you down or run scans of your body. And each time you make a call or send a text message, your communications will most likely be logged and filed. When you return home, you might find that government agents have been questioning your neighbors about you, as part of a “census” questionnaire. After you retire to sleep, you might find yourself awakened by a SWAT team crashing through your door (you’ll later discover they were at the wrong address), and if you make the mistake of reaching for your eyeglasses, you might find yourself shot by a cop who felt threatened. Is this the behavior of a government that respects you? One that looks upon you as having inviolate rights? One that regards you as its employer, its master, its purpose for being?
Central to the new authoritarianism that Lofgren hints at but does not address is the culture of fear that now rules American life and how it functions to redefine the notion of security, diverting it away from social considerations to narrow matters of personal safety. In a post-9/11 world, fear has become the reigning organizing principle in the United States. Fear is now embodied in the militarization of everyday life, the rise of the surveillance-mass, the notion of permanent war, the expanding incarceration state, and the crushing of dissent. Shared fears have replaced any sense of shared responsibilities. And much of this has taken a racist turn. For instance, the war on drugs and terrorism has been joined by the war on dissent and has become the new face of racial discrimination and the destruction of all viable democratic public spheres. In this instance, a culture of surveillance, punishment, and repression have become the bedrock of a new mode of authoritarianism while collective modes of support are increasingly vanishing from public life.
Similarly, any viable challenge to the “deep state” and the new mode of authoritarianism it supports needs to say more about the notion of disposability and a growing culture of cruelty brought about by the death of political concessions in politics–a politics now governed by the ultra-rich and mega corporations that has no allegiance to local politics and produces a culture infused with a self-righteous coldness that takes delight in the suffering of others. Evidence of such a culture is on full display in the attempts by extremists to cut billions of dollars from the food stamp program, lower the taxes of the rich and corporations while defunding social security and Medicare, passing legislation that openly discriminates against gays and lesbians, the attempts to roll back voting rights, and women’s reproductive rights, and this is only a short list. The war on poverty has morphed into a war on the poor, and human misfortune and “material poverty into something shameful and repellent.” (...)
In order to agree with this, one would have to embrace it as beyond a CT. This is the site map of the Rabbit Hole.
The advent of Social Networking Media and data mining makes this a fate acompli. If Target can figure out that a woman is pregnant before she herself knows, what can the NSA and similar orgs figure out from mining FB, tweets and texts ?
Simply put, the powers that be can anticipate trends, attitudes, shifts in morals, or ultimately what it can get away with and when and even how to do it. The ,gov has figured out that it can decide what laws to enforce and not enforce and get away with it.
For decades in my life I have railed against selective enforcement of law(s) and for the few years I have been here as well. When I was young, establishing selective enforcement of a law was grounds for aquittal in criminal proceedings. Now we have the AG telling states what laws to enforce and which to ignore. Effectively, the Rule of Law is dead. And as the author mentions, few are opposing the demise of Law and Order.
Those who have been trying to discuss this stuff over the years have been dismissed as paranoid, fearful and much worse. If the most recent actions of Eric Holder (telling which laws are to be enforced and which are to be ignored) and Obama declaring that he will ignore Congress don't get you riled up, then I don't know what to say to or think about you (whoever you are) other than your (whoever you are) apathy will lead to our collective demise.
Standing up to this is what one should be willing to chain themselves to the fence of the WH for. Allowing selective enforcement to stand means that we are at the bottom of the Slippery Slope.
Eat, drink and be merry ...
We now return you to the tiny screen 12 inches in front of your nose.
Mike Lofgren, a former GOP congressional staff member for 28 years with the Senate and House Budget committees, has written an essay for Bill Moyers & Company titled “Anatomy of the ‘deep state’.” The notion of the “deep state” has a long genealogy and serves to mark the myriad ways in which power remains invisible while largely serving the interest of the financial elite, mega-corporations, and other authoritarian regimes of commanding power. The form the “deep state” takes depends upon the historical conjuncture in which it emerges and the forces that drive and benefit from it can either be at the margins or at the center of power and control. The notion of the “deep state” also points to different configurations of power. President Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex is one example of the elements of the “deep state”that emerged in the post-World War II period. Another register can be seen in the coming of age of corporate power in combination with various forms of religious, military, and educational fundamentalisms in which war becomes aligned with big business, corporate power replaces state-based political sovereignty, religious extremism shapes everyday policies, and the punishing state works in tandem with the devolution of the welfare or social state.
Lofgren argues that the “deep state” “has its own compass regardless of who is in power.” This suggests that democracy itself and its modes of ideology, governance, and policies have been hijacked by forces that are as deeply anti-democratic as they are authoritarian. One instance of the undermining of democracy is evident in the overreach of presidential power by Obama is not only on full display, as Lofgren points out, in the power of the government to “liquidate American citizens without due processes, detain prisoners indefinitely without charge, conduct dragnet surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant and engage in unprecedented—at least since the McCarthy era—witch hunts against federal employees (the so-called ‘Insider Threat Program,” but also in the failure of Republican and Democratic party members, with a few exceptions, to raise their voices in opposition to this not so invisible form of authoritarian rule. The silence of the political and intellectual clerks speaks to more than a flight from moral, social, and political responsibility, it speaks directly to the political extremism that has imposed a new and savage order of cruelty and violence on vast members of the American public.
I am not quite sure what to say about Lofgren’s essay, because while I agree with much of it in pointing to the anti-democratic tendencies undermining democracy in the U.S., I find the language too constrained and the absences too disturbing. The notion of the “deep state” may be useful in pointing to a new configuration of power in the United States in which corporate sovereignty replaces political sovereignty, but it is not enough to simply expose the hidden institutions and structures of power. What we have in the United States today is fundamentally a new mode of politics, one wedded to a notion of power removed from accountability of any kind, and this poses a dangerous and calamitous threat to democracy itself, because such power is difficult to understand, analyze, and counter. The collapse of the public into the private, the depoliticization of the citizenry in the face of an egregious celebrity culture, and the disabling of education as a critical public sphere makes it easier for neoliberal capital with its hatred of democracy and celebration of the market to render its ideologies, values, and practices as a matter of common sense, removed from critical inquiry and dissent.
With privatization comes a kind of collective amnesia about the role of government, the importance of the social contract, and the importance of public values. For instance, war, intelligence operations, prisons, schools, transportation systems, and a range of other operations once considered public have been outsourced or simply handed over to private contractors who are removed from any sense of civic and political accountability. The social contract and the institutions that give it meaning have been transformed into entitlements administered and colonized largely by the corporate interests and the financial elite. Policy is no longer being written by politicians accountable to the American public. Instead, policies concerning the defense budget, deregulation, health care, public transportation, job training programs, and a host of other crucial areas are now largely written by lobbyists who represent mega corporations. How else to explain the weak deregulation policies following the economic crisis of 2007 or the lack of a public option in Obama’s health care policies? Or, for that matter, the more serious retreat from any viable notion of the political imagination that “requires long-term organizing—e.g., single-payer health care, universally free public higher education and public transportation, federal guarantees of housing and income security? The liberal center has moved to the right on these issues while the left has become largely absent and ineffective.
Lofgren’s conception of the “deep state” is a certainly useful concept for exposing the dark shadows of power but it does not go far enough in explaining the emergence of a society in an era of failed sociality, one in which the state has not only become suicidal and violent, but also cruel to the extreme. This a state dedicated to governing all aspects of social life, rather than just commanding economic and political institutions. Americans now live in a time that breaks young people, devalues justice, and saturates the minute details of everyday life with the constant threat, if not reality, of state violence. The mediaeval turn to embracing forms of punishment that inflict pain on the psyches and the bodies of young people is part of a larger immersion of society in public spectacles of violence. The Deluzian control society is now the ultimate form of entertainment in America, as the pain of others, especially those considered disposable and powerless, is no longer an object of compassion, but one of ridicule and amusement. Pleasure loses its emancipatory possibilities and degenerates into a pathology in which misery is celebrated as a source of fun. High octane violence and human suffering are now considered consumer entertainment products designed to raise the collective pleasure quotient. Brute force and savage killing replayed over and over in the culture now function as part of an anti-immune system that turns the economy of genuine pleasure into a mode of sadism that saps democracy of any political substance and moral vitality, even as the body politic appears engaged in a process of cannibalizing its own young. It is perhaps not farfetched to imagine a reality TV show in which millions tune in to watch young kids being handcuffed, arrested, tried in the courts, and sent to juvenile detention centers. No society can make a claim to being a democracy as long as it defines itself through shared hatred and fears, rather than shared responsibilities. Needless to say, extreme violence is more than a spectacle for upping the pleasure quotient of those disengaged from politics, it is also part of a punishing machine that spends more on putting poor minorities in jail than educating them. As Michelle Alexander points out, “There are more African American adults under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.” (...)
I teach politics, political theory and philosophy. Two years ago, I offered my students a choice between material well being and democracy. They chose materialism. For them, democracy is word that means vote every 4 years or so. They would rather support a government that gives them iPads, holidays in the South, access to creature comforts. If that is a military government that is OK. It is upon this foundation that fascism thrives.
Everyone knows about the military-industrial complex, which, in his farewell address, President Eisenhower warned had the potential to “endanger our liberties or democratic process” but have you heard of the “Deep State?”
Mike Lofgren, a former GOP congressional staff member with the powerful House and Senate Budget Committees, joins Bill to talk about what he calls the Deep State, a hybrid of corporate America and the national security state, which is “out of control” and “unconstrained.” In it, Lofgren says, elected and unelected figures collude to protect and serve powerful vested interests. “It is … the red thread that runs through the history of the last three decades. It is how we had deregulation, financialization of the economy, the Wall Street bust, the erosion or our civil liberties and perpetual war,” Lofgren tells Bill.
Lofgren says the Deep State’s heart lies in Washington, DC, but its tentacles reach out to Wall Street, which Lofgren describes as “the ultimate backstop to the whole operation,” Silicon Valley and over 400,000 contractors, private citizens who have top-secret security clearances. Like any other bureaucracy, it’s groupthink that drives the Deep State.
In conjunction with this week’s show, Mike Lofgren has written an exclusive essay, “Anatomy of the Deep State.”
(...) Crouch sees the history of democracy as an arc. In the beginning, ordinary people were excluded from decision-making. During the 20th century, they became increasingly able to determine their collective fate through the electoral process, building mass parties that could represent their interests in government. Prosperity and the contentment of working people went hand in hand. Business recognised limits to its power and answered to democratically legitimated government. Markets were subordinate to politics, not the other way around.
At some point shortly after the end of the Second World War, democracy reached its apex in countries such as Britain and the US. According to Crouch, it has been declining ever since. Places such as Italy had more ambiguous histories of rise and decline, while others still, including Spain, Portugal and Greece, began the ascent much later, having only emerged from dictatorship in the 1970s. Nevertheless, all of these countries have reached the downward slope of the arc. The formal structures of democracy remain intact. People still vote. Political parties vie with each other in elections, and circulate in and out of government. Yet these acts of apparent choice have had their meaning hollowed out. The real decisions are taken elsewhere. We have become squatters in the ruins of the great democratic societies of the past.
Crouch lays some blame for this at the feet of the usual suspects. As markets globalise, businesses grow more powerful (they can relocate their activities, or threaten to relocate) and governments are weakened. Yet the real lessons of his book are about more particular forms of disconnection. (...)
