the difficulty with defining fascism comes from the fact that it has been nothing but a series of variations--spain was not like prtugal was not like italy was not like germany, etc....and bushworld, which does share many features of the general ideology, may at some point end up being seen as another variant. the similarities are obvious---
fascism operates within a state of emergency. it is about the ability of a Leader to react in situations when "democracy" (the american versions requires the scare quotes) is understood as inefficient. that bushworld has used the sense of a state of emergency, and created a scale that would make it easier to slide into a legal state of emergency are both evident. bush did not create this relatively cavalier attitude toward the state of emergency, however--this is a legacy of ronald reagan. that bushworld has contempt for democracy (not the word, but the reality) is evident---the idea shared by bush and ashcroft and maybe others that they are on a mission from god grounds this contempt.
fascism articulates itself around a nationalism embodied in the figure of the Leader; arguments about a national destiny get wrapped in military symbols; the nation is defined around predicates that do not admit of conflict, of history (bush is all about this, but then so are a lot of american politicos, whence the problem with the term fascism...)....
fascism is about war against an enemy that is both within and without (it seems to me that the present situation with reference to islam in the states is a weak variant of the more extreme and systematic model--but given features like the legal black hole into which "enemies of the state" can be tossed, it is a matter of degree rather than of kind...).
endless war is a device to unify the people.
that the core constituency for this ideology is petit bourgeois (lower middle class) is another parallel--witness the audience for the limbaughs of this world---this kind of nationalism becomes a surrogate community that allows for a sublimation of anxiety about social and economic status. i would argue that neocon ideology in the broad sense is about little more than anxiety provoked by globalizing capitalism and its implications for the (increasingly obsolete) category of the nation-state---and that the iraq war is the theater of the conflict as the neocons see it between transnational mechanisms for steering capitalism and the nation-state.
the suppression of dissent had been largely rhetorical so far. the slide from rhetoric to reality is worrying at moments of real or manufactured crisis. on the other hand, i do not see the transition from rhetorical to real violence, from arguments that systemtically work to delegitimate dissent to the reality of actual suppression of dissent as being automatic. sometimes i find this comforting, other times not....
i wonder about how a future analysis of bushworld will deal with the role of television in all this. remember that fascism in general has used the leading edge of mass media to package itself and its vision of the nation....
divergences include the creation of a parallel state (in the german case)--the absence of an organic theory of the division of labour (the italian case). also, i think that regardless of how close bush and his minions have drifted to fascism since 911, a big difference is that the slide has been largely ad hoc, seat of the pants--the implications of some elements of conservative ideology have emerged across the response to bush's manner of framing the attacks. if bush were really a fascist, the ideology would have been clear from the start.
on a more historical note, fascism made the americans really nervous after 1945---they worried about it discrediting nationalism altogether (which of course it should have) you can see the conflicts play out if you look at the history of denazification==which is instructive to do. one symptom of this discomfort, which does not require a conspiracy theory to explain, is the way nazism in particular has been staged in films about the war--not as a function of an ideology, but rather in terms of a western film, fascists being the bad guys designated by their black hats, funny accents, evil intentions, unseemly affec tion for leather for straight men and ability to die in great numbers at the hands of the grizzled everyman american soldiers.
to freak yourself out, if this is possible, watch reifenstahl's "triumph of the will" and the framing programming shown around the 2001 super bowl one after the other.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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