Why no scare of becoming fascist?

I disagree. No matter how much you object to Bush, and I would no doubt agree with much of your critique, he wasn’t trying to implement a fascist programme.

He did not try to initiate a campaign of internal racial cleansing. He did not try to implement a redemptive campaign of violent purification, without ethical or legal restraints - (let’s put aside the question of international law and extraterritorial violence for the moment). It is a complex issue, and he tried to justify it with norms. But come on, Bush is poised on the point of a peaceable handover of power to an administration of a different political party. That is not fascism.

There is much that is broken and dangerous about Bush and his fellow travellers. Their political and moral philosophy, their economic programme, their jurisprudence, their bioethical positions, their modernity defying views, their religious encroachment on the public sphere, their approach to governance, their politicisation of the public service, their attitude to science and undermining naturalist views for political gain, their relationship to the military industrial complex, the paucity of their view of the rule of law, their foreign policy and impoverished views of diplomacy and statecraft - all of it is utterly suspect and has been a disaster for America.

See, I’m not trying to diminish the problems and abuses of the Bush Administration and the neo-conservatives. For this, I feel that they deserve to be exposed and alienated in the strongest terms possible, and to not equivocate about the dangers and failures of their programme. But they’re still not fascist. We devalue the term by using it so loosely.

Simply put, there’s no serious threat of fascism in the United States because there is no serious threat of socialism coming from the working class in the US.
I don’t remember the exact quote, but Trotsky summed it up best when he said that fascism is the price the working class pays for only playing at revolution.

Let’s take the three biggest examples of fascism in interwar Europe: Germany, Italy, and Spain. Germany and Italy had been ruined economically by WWI and Spain, though neutral, experienced rising economic instability and a disastrous and expensive war in Spanish Morocco. By the 1920s and 1930s all three had seen labor disturbances to the point where radical parties (or the workers themselves) had actually taken power in parts of the country. These were all serious threats to the capitalist order.

Fascism arose as a response to this - not from the capitalists themselves, but from the middle class. They saw the rising instability, the increased militant action on the part of the organized sections of the working class, and the unwillingness or inability of the ruling classes to do anything and took that task upon themselves. This is how Hitler and Mussolini emerged as leaders in the fascist movements. They gained the backing of the ruling classes only when they proved themselves able to counter the rising tide of workers’ revolt - a task they were helped in by the stupidity of communist leaders who listened exclusively to Stalin and refused to organize or participate in the wider fightback.

Slapping the label of ‘fascist’ on anything right-wing that moves is irresponsible. (IClaudius is right on the money here.) Granted, there are people on the neoconservative and extreme right who could emerge as fascist leaders under the right circumstances but George W. Bush isn’t one of them. His incompetence in responding to the biggest crises of any President excepting Lincoln and FDR show him incapable of that role. He’d be one of the people supporting the fascists with money (and the army if he were still President) when the shit hits the fan.

In the same vein, a country or state that adopts fascist methods of maintaining power is not necessarily fascist. The example of the erosion of civil liberties here in the US, for example. This arises because of the class nature of capitalist society - ruling classes and the classes they rule are in conflict, whether that’s openly admitted and recognized or not. Hence the Soviet Union, which under Stalin adopted extremely repressive measures against its own citizenry and had no problem in accommodating genuinely fascist regimes but was itself not fascist. This is because the revolutionary working class that had made the Russian Revolution and supported the Bolsheviks had been destroyed during the Russian Civil War, leaving the CPSU without the base of support it had risen on. Isolated in a world still operating competitively under capitalism and disadvantaged economically as a result of the civil war, Stalin chose the path of aggressive domestic economic development at the expense of the working class and adopted repressive measures sufficient to maintain power and control over said class. This situation was not a result of communist doctrine or philosophy but a complete violation thereof and the accusation that fascism can also come through the left is (as has been pointed out) baseless.

From “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius,” by George Orwell (1941):

Look around the world at all the countries where things in general go as well as, or better than, in the United States. One thing you won’t find in any of them is minimalist government. Minimalist government is what you’ll find in failed or disordered states like Iraq.

The kind of Libertarians who want to reduce government to approximately what it was in America in the 19th Century are fighting a cause far less relevant to today’s world than Marxist-Leninism, and far more hopeless, and far less likely to produce desirable results wherever it should triumph.

Alright, now this sentiment is just silly. A government cannot genuinely be called “small” if it has the power to use military force to make citizens give its officials kickbacks and bribes. It may provide fewer social services, but it would be far more intrusive in everyday life than one in a developed country.

If we’re talking about a country where the rule of law is respected and the government is genuinely small, then it doesn’t really matter how inefficient or lazy the government is. In fact, that is the entire point of reducing the size of the government, i.e. because it is always inefficient and lazy. In a truly minarchist government, the state would be made as small as possible, to cover only national defense and law and order, with the rest left for the free market to manage better than the state ever could.

Valete,
Vox Imperatoris

Unpossible. You never wear jackboots aboard a helicopter - they snag the safety harnesses.

For a start corruption is not government,even if members of the government or government organisations are involved in the corruption.

It is not a part of their official policy so is as irrelevent to the debate as much as if members of the army go out and rob a bank.

Situations like that are much more likely to arise from there being minimal governing controls rather then vice versa.

Their crime is intrusive in peoples everyday lives just as much or as little as any other crime commited by any other criminal.

You haven’t given any examples of these minimalist governments that are apparently so popular with their citizens so I’ll assume that for the moment that they are purely hypothetical.

So you believe that outside of Law and Order and defence everything else should be left to market forces?

Could affect your having a skilled workforce if only people with money can send their kids to school,dont think that will help the economy much.
And the education that IS supplied,well theres no government regulation of standards,might be good in some schools ,not so in others…
Or maybe those who have jobs could send their kids to school when they’re in work but any job gaps the kids stop attending.

I dont think that will bother them too much because they’ll be more preoccupied with their starvation and living and sleeping out in the open.

Nice little opportunity for employers though,they can get their labour dirt cheap.
No money but you’ll get food and board, if you dont like it then you’re out on the street.
Of course when the people get too old to work then thats a virtual death sentence,no money,no pension…

If you live that long that is,no regulation covering dangerous machinery, workplace chemicals,practices and no financial incentive in it for the employer.

So you’re out of work for short while but unfortunately get run over by a car,well you just die then because your market forces mean that you cant afford to pay the hospital and theres no law to compel the hospital to treat you.

Likewise you do have a job but its a low paid one,you incur a serious medical condition thats going to cost bigtime if you are to get it treated,well thats you dead then.

Pollution in your rivers,lakes,coastal waters and air?

Nothing to do with the government and its going to cost industries money with no profit in it for them so we’ll just have to put up with it then shan’t we?

Fine art,classical music,museums?
A few people might be prepared to pay for it but it isn’t going to be a big earner so thats going to be mostly a dead letter.

Wildlife conservation?

Over fishing resulting in inability of the fish stocks to regenerate?
Well the fishermen will just have to go into a new line of business wont they.

Unregulated forestation?

Parks?
OOh I dont think so!No money in them.
Historic monument on land that could be more profitably used to build a money earning factory on…

I could go on…

Your ideas for minimalist government sound incredibly like civilisation going backwards.

And a nation run on market forces alone except for your two provisos would make the rich very,very rich and very,very powerful and put the rest of the population into a survival existance with by the looks of it virtually no quality of life.

Rather like medieval serfs or parts of the poorer third world.

. . . then we are talking about a country that does not exist anywhere on Earth, and will not within your lifetime or mine.

Why no scare of becoming fascist? Because most of the things associated with fascism simply have no realistic chance of happening. Racism? Does anyone really think that even a return to pre-Civil Rights Act discrimination will ever happen, much less a race war to purge the “mud races”? Women’s roles? If Sarah Palin is the paragon of the conservatives view on women’s roles, women have little to fear. Militarism? The US, supposedly the world’s only “hyperpower”, has shown that two guerilla insurgencies are as much as it can handle, and at that the US is slowly going broke trying to maintain a level of spending it can’t possibly sustain. A corporate state? At this point, we’re almost seeing Socialism enacted as the government takes controlling interest of key financial sectors.

About the only thing even vaguely fascist today is/was the neocon’s attempt to institute what I privately refer to as “Totalitarianism-Lite”: trying to institute a permanent Republican rule without resorting to actual fascism such as assassinating political oppenents or suspending elections. Unlike regular totalitarianism, which deals in “hard” power such as secret police, death squads and coup-de-tetes, Totalitarianism-Lite is the belief that a party, movement, or government can retain power indefinitely in a nominally democratic system through ideology and propaganda; and above all else having an almost Orwellian devotion to the idea that the purpose of power is power, and that the key to always winning is to be a ruthless bastard who never for a single instant doubts oneself.

Many people on the left have the notion that the Bush Republicans wanted power in order to enact some sort of conservative or reactionary agenda. In fact, the Republicans have done a splendid job of co-opting the truly radical right while never doing anything that might actually provoke a backlash. The notable thing about such proposals as flag-burning amendments and restricting abortion is that they were basically tests: tests to see what the majority of the public would accept. And when it became clear that actually pushing for these things would cost them elections, the 'Pubs backed off, gave the ultra-rightists the same old “someday” speech and retrenched. And at that, Bush & Co. stuck their necks out too far. The debacle in Iraq was too big a disgrace to explain away, and the banking crisis probably will turn out to be the final nail in the coffin.

Actually, the “corporations” of the Italian Fascist state were not corporations in the sense you are thinking of. See Corporatism.

I like that. It’s food for thought, eh. Thank you for posting it.