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powerclown:
two or three quick points (maybe):
1.
i qualified what i meant pretty clearly in the posts above--what i guess i would say is the following--that the elements of bushworld i pointed to are variations on options that seem to be constantly available within american political discourse. it is always possible that any administration could find itself confronted with something like 911--it is lilkely that any administration would have operated on a state of emergency footing thereafter. it is not obvious that another administration would have chosen the same path that the bush squad did after 911--the particularly simple-minded response to the attack, the refusal of any coherent analysis of it, the reversion to a particular style of hypernationalism, the instrumental use of war (afghanistan, iraq), the clamping down on dissent (mercifully confined mostly to the cultural level), the contempt for law (iraq being the most obvious example), for democratic process (here bushworld is but a particular symptom), etc.
it is also not obvious that another administration would have operated in such a tight relation to a media apparatus like that the right has developed--which is impressive as a formation, no matter what you think of the contents disseminated there.
2. even if you strip away all the qualifications above, there would still be problems: i dont see fascism as a state of affairs--it is a process, like any other ideological formation is. so the full-blown phenomenon would only gradually become present, and in significant ways would not be fully present (except analytically). ideological shifts unfold across time...it is not as though you simply flip a switch somewhere and turn fascism on and off like a light in the bathroom. so the idea that one is "in" fascism now and that sometime after bush and his pals fully enter into the ash-heap of history suddenly we would be "out" again is absurd.
3. what makes bushworld alarming is not so much the administration proper--it is this administration and its mode of ideological coordination with a wider conservative media apparatus. folk like to think that earlier forms of fascism were imposed entirely by force--which of course makes the system impossible--while elements of the german system relied on phsyical violence, the ideolgy that enabled/shaped that violence was lrgely disseminated via radio, which was the main mass media of the period. now it's tv. that is a problem.
4. bushworld is a variant on possibilities that seem structural, given the nature of american mass political disourse. in other words, bushworld invented almost nothing in terms of signifiers, but the administration and its correlate in conservative media have developed particular ways of framing signifers that are persistant aspects of american politics. but you could say the same of almost any political order that uses nationalism as a mobilizing tool. the states simply has a funny relation to nationalism--you see a kernel of it in the absurd providential history that you run into in elementary school which presents the entire history of the united states as if it metastisized from the puritans--city on a hill blah blah blah. this notion of privdential nationalism is key for any variant of fascist ideology. but the reverse does not necessarily hold--that anyplace which retains such an ideological element is necessarily fascist. it simply is a way of talking about a possibility. particular agents made particular choices that use this signifer for their own ends--these ends is what matters, not the presence of the signifier.
5. capitalism at this point is becoming a basic enemy of nationalism in general. the type of response particular to bushworld is a reaction against this tendency. when you get down to it, the main ideological problems the neocons have with clinton is that he was too willing to enter into multilateral agreements, too willing to participate in the main dynamic of globalizing capitalism--in short clinton was insufficiently nationalist for them. american mass politics is not talking about contemporary capitalism in anything like a coherent way. bushworld has no way to do it, frankly--they can cheerlead the system as a whole.treat it as an unqualified good, etc.--but the fact is that in the longer run, nationalism is outmoded and will eventually collapse. the structures that will become more visible in the context of teh global capitalist order once the fog of nationalism begins to dissipate is far less responsive to any type of democratic pressure than anything which has preceded it--how responsive to pressure from citizens is the wto? the world bank? the imf? the eu?
one thing marx was right about is that capitalism is a most revolutionary formation. all that is solid melts into air.
bushworld is not a coherent response to developments that have unfolded over the past decades in the organization of capitalism--it is a way of running away from them, even as the ideology they embody can do nothing but cheerlead these developments.
so in this case, the question of bushworld and capitalism are seperate.
more generally, capitalism requires a minimum level of social stability in order to operate. unleashing the fiction of free markets on people without some type of mediation is a way to bring about massive social destruction--left to itself, capitalism as a system would not long survive. but it is never present as a discrete system, it is always also a politics, a social policy, a system of social reproduction, etc etc etc. for about a 150 years, nationalism has been an important signifier in the production of this requisite social stability. that signifier is slowly collapsing.
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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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