Politics Discussion Thread (Heated Arguing Warning)

[Bacchus]

>> the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe

>> it reports on a panel discussion at Princeton in 1965

At first I thought -- this coming right in the middle of the civil rights movement is as white, insulated and self-congratulatory as it gets, complete with smug chuckles. Then I went to check out more about that Princeton conference, and guess what, that quote is from a literal Waffen-SS officer! Fancy that!

I think you've misread the link.  It's true that Gunther Grass was at the discussion, and his description of life in Nazi Germany was used by Wolfe as evidence - but the quote was Tom Wolfe, not Grass.  I suppose you can claim that a participant in fascism wouldn't know anything about how fascism works or looks, if you want to dismiss Grass' comments.  I don't think you can claim Wolfe was wrong, though.  There have been fifty more years of non-fascist US history after he made the quip, after all, complete with fifty years of fearmongering that fascism is right around the corner.

We both misread, Wolfe is quoting, but from Revel, not the discussion at hand. Grass knew enough about fascism to avoid talking about his own service for it, even while directly opining on it. So, yeah, definitely a source you can go to for a full and candid assessment of the subject.

As for 50 MORE years of 'non-fascism' that's quite amusing. My point was exactly that US could only really lay a claim to being free of fascism from about 1964, and that's just on formal criteria. Prior to that, it took a good jab at becoming a democracy during the Reconstruction, but never really got there. In the first half of 20th century it formally adopted precisely the kinds of racist and corporatist policies that are normally associated with fascism. If you were black in 1935 and lived in the South, you lived in a fascist state, there is just no way around it. Not a particularly nasty fascist state, especially if you were not getting uppity, but not a particularly pleasant one either. You could be sentenced to death for having the wrong kind of literature, for example, albeit it's unlikely you would actually be executed (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelo_Herndon). There was, of course, violent, occasionally murderous supression of organized labour (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Hunger_March), not to mention all sorts of other extra-judicial violence both by police and parastatal actors (of the Southern Democratic sort). So yeah, claiming that no fascism touched the bright shores of the US, based on the experiences of Princeton professors and their cultural milieu is pretty quaint.

As for the years that followed... After the War on Drugs began in earnest, US has been basically treading the line of 'how far can we push democracy without quite stepping outside of it'. Pretty far, it turns out! Having the highest incarceration rate in the world by some margin is an impressive achievement, even before you note that >90% are convicted without a trial. A beacon of liberty the United States is not. 

Which is pretty weird, because if you are the right kind of person, the US is great, there are really few countries where you could be quite as free. But lose the lottery and you might as well be in a much warmer Russia.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

For all the rhetoric about fascism in America, we've got basically none of it going on. ... it's really just a lot of people throwing around the nastiest insult they can think of.

This is correct. Trump and his administration are so fascist, that literally nobody is afraid of speaking out against them on any platform whatsoever.

Oh OK. Nothing to worry about, let Trump and co take all the power and authority they want, let them give unlimited power to police and DHS and DoD, let them brutalize african americans and muslims and hispanics, let them snatch migrants in hospitals and schools, let them strip all labor rights from employees, let them strip mine all the national parks and pump out as much pollution they like, let them kill people outside their borders with impunity. It's not sufficiently fascist enough for T-Hawk, so you can safely concede Trump all the ground he want. Shut the fuck up T-Hawk.

[ipecac]

Maybe it's different in Europe, maybe y'all have the real thing, but here, it's really just a lot of people throwing around the nastiest insult they can think of.

Second-nastiest, surely. 'Nazi' doesn't stick as a general insult, but 'fascist' is sufficiently ambiguous to be mindlessly thrown about.

[T-hawk]

Shut the fuck up T-Hawk.

Nicolae, speaking as a moderator, this is the second time I've had to warn you about uncivility.  I will take no action myself in a thread I'm participating in, but any more and I will ask another mod.

Oh OK. Nothing to worry about, let Trump and co take all the power and authority they want, let them give unlimited power to police and DHS and DoD, let them brutalize african americans and muslims and hispanics, let them snatch migrants in hospitals and schools, let them strip all labor rights from employees, let them strip mine all the national parks and pump out as much pollution they like, let them kill people outside their borders with impunity. It's not sufficiently fascist enough for T-Hawk, so you can safely concede Trump all the ground he want.

Do you understand what's missing from that?  You're describing authoritarianism, not fascism.  Fascism involves forcibly maintaining control.  That's simply not happening.  Nobody is trying to censor criticism of the administration.  The administration is not going to ban the Democratic Party, or cancel democratic elections, or silence the free press.  (Trump may wish he could -- which is why we have the three branches of checks and balances.)  The bedrock of American democracy and free speech is still present and strong.

It is the liberal side that actually wants to illegalize speech they don't like.  Your "shut the fuck up" is telling -- you want to silence my opinion, while I have no objection to you expressing yours.  (If you can do it respectfully.)

You are right that some of those points signify authoritarianism, and we are wise to maintain vigilance against that.  But hyperbolically describing the situation as something it isn't does your argument no favors.

Finally, I could also go point-by-point and point out that most of that is merely enforcing existing laws.  (There is a very easy way to not be "snatched": don't enter the US illegally.)  But you wouldn't care.

[Mardoc]

As for 50 MORE years of 'non-fascism' that's quite amusing. My point was exactly that US could only really lay a claim to being free of fascism from about 1964, and that's just on formal criteria.

This is really a perspective thing - it seems to me that you're sweeping up isolated bad incidents and the entirely unrelated evil of Jim Crow into a unified banner of 'fascism'. You're also exaggerating them: your example of 'sentenced to death for having the wrong kind of literature' specifically shows an initial sentence of imprisonment, overturned upon appeal and ultimately ending with the law being struck down. It's true that the man was maltreated, but it looks like an example of progress, not regression, given the changes as a result.

Similarly, the Ford Hunger March sounds like a case of police panicking, rather than an organized scheme for 'suppression of labor unions'. Certainly if they were intending to suppress unions, they accomplished the exact opposite...

Perhaps you could share your formal criteria?

[MJW (ya that one)]

Everything is just a tool to use. You take what you want and make stuff up after the fact. There is no ideology in the first place. Because of this the best you can do is call something unacceptable. I don't think this is going anywhere.

[Bacchus]

Perhaps you could share your formal criteria?

Sure. One is a legal framework, which designates a group of second-class citizens and restricts their rights based on an ideology of a hierarchy of groups is the formal sign of fascism. The more central this excercise in legalization of hierarchy is to a state, and the more pronounced the restriction of rights -- the more fascist a state. Another is corporatist management of the economy, which is what the first New Deal was, whose leaders explicitly praised Mussolini (albeit that's an informal criterion; for proof see, for example, Whitman, 1991 -- of Corporatism, Fascism, and the First New Deal).

As for matters of perspective -- I think it becomes a matter of perspective if you have a predetermined picture of what the US is and have to excuse these episodes in light of it. I presume you also believe that Jim Crow was somehow an aberration, and deviation from what US 'really is'. Otherwise I don't see how you can possibly see it as 'entirely unrelated' to a) numerous other ways blacks were systemically mistreated, b) numerous other ways in which US perpetrated violence against the 'wrong' people. For a history of violent labour supression, you can start here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-uni...ited_State, or here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_...r_disputes

Yeah, the police panicked, lol. Poor police. And four US Supreme Court Justices ruled that death sentence for improper literature is quite within state rights, but it's an exaggeration to point to that as a serious problem, because by a majority of one the view that hey, maybe you shouldn't kill people for that won out. Progress!

I mean, sure, you are quite right, US did make a lot of progress since 1933. I'm just pointing out exactly from how far down that progress was being made. US is one of the few countries which actually machine gunned worker strikes.

[Bacchus]

Switching to modern US, need some American help here -- is this a real or an Onion-like text: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/14/style...ilege.html. I thought it's real, but doubt has since been sowed.

[Commodore]

Switching to modern US, need some American help here -- is this a real or an Onion-like text: https://www.nytimes.cotm/2018/08/14/styl...ilege.html. I thought it's real, but doubt has since been sowed.

There is a long and honorable tradition of Yale students writing in fake questions to these kinds of advice columns, so it reads like that. It's also not unheard of for advice columnists to write their own questions for themselves. I'd rate the probability of that question being real as very low.

The answers are probably not parody, though.

[Mardoc]

Sure. One is a legal framework, which designates a group of second-class citizens and restricts their rights based on an ideology of a hierarchy of groups is the formal sign of fascism.  The more central this excercise in legalization of hierarchy is to a state, and the more pronounced the restriction of rights -- the more fascist a state.

Really.  So Mussolini, the inventor of fascism in the standard account, wasn't fascist according to your formal criteria?  Even though there was no such thing as a second-class Italian until Italy was taken over by Germany?

Meanwhile, things like removal of the franchise, focus on a single leader, nationalism, emphasis on military virtues and the military itself, forcible suppression of any opposition, suppression of religion and speech, requirement that everything happen through the state, nothing outside the state...these are all tangential?

Another is corporatist management of the economy, which is what the first New Deal was, whose leaders explicitly praised Mussolini (albeit that's an informal criterion; for proof see, for example, Whitman, 1991 -- of Corporatism, Fascism, and the First New Deal).

Yes, the New Deal was inspired by Fascism, although it was tempered by our checks and balances and also took inspiration from socialism and the generic impulse of Something Must Be Done.  It was the wrong direction for our country to go but at least we stopped before pushing it all the way.

As for matters of perspective -- I think it becomes a matter of perspective if you have a predetermined picture of what the US is and have to excuse these episodes in light of it. I presume you also believe that Jim Crow was somehow an aberration, and deviation from what US 'really is'.

Yes, essentially.  The US is the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the traditions of common law and Lockean enlightenment that preceded and inspired those documents.  To the extent those principles were followed, we were more American...to the extent they weren't, we weren't.  I don't think it's a coincidence that the Civil War marked the transition from describing ourselves as residents of our state to residents of the US...it became a lot less important to note that you were a Pennsylvanian at that point.

The South was less American than the rest of the country, which is why we ended up in the Civil War.  That seems mostly resolved at this point, though.

Otherwise I don't see how you can possibly see it as 'entirely unrelated' to a) numerous other ways blacks were systemically mistreated, b) numerous other ways in which US perpetrated violence against the 'wrong' people.

Fascism is a mere subset of ways to set up mistreatment.  It's the subset that focuses on having things done by the national government, in the name of but not consulting the people, in a military fashion with complete control of every aspect of life.  Slavery was mostly done by individuals and by the state governments, varied a lot from master to master, wasn't very military at all.  Had a lot of control of the slaves' lives but not much control required on the rest of society.

This whole discussion, though - I feel like I'm arguing that the patient doesn't have cancer and you're responding with 'but look at the way he's having trouble breathing, he's overweight, has an infection, you can't claim he's healthy!'