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actually, you could make a serious analytic argument about the similarities between the discourse of the american petit bourgeois right and its fascist antecedents...if i were going to do this myself, however, i would prefer to do it in an upper-level university undergraduate seminar so i could assign some texts along side it so as to provide maximum intepretative latitude for the students.
the standard text for discourse analysis of fascism is jean-pierre faye's "le discours totalitaire"--which i think is in english, but i am not sure---it is a word count-base statistical modelling experiment geared toward outlining the constants in fascist speech.
another, shorter work that repeats the same operations, but which relies on faye to define/weight terms is pierre bourdieu's "the political ontology of martin heidegger"--which is a very interesting book that tries to argue for a correlation between the conceptual development in being and tmie and heidegger's attraction to--and recycling of---elements drawn from national socialist discourse. the argument=that rehearsing the discourse has effects that are recapitulated (unwittingly?) in heidegger's philosophical work.
i think that contemporary america nconservative discourse--the stuff you run into on right media--is a variant of fascism.
period.
this does not include all positions that would identify as conservative, nor does it mean that everyone who uses that discourse is necessarily a fascist---rather, the discourse itself--its mode of staging signifiers, its choices regarding central questions that are used to define all others, etc. is squarely within a fascist tradition. most political discourses that try to elevate the notion of nation/community/"us" to a transcendent register and then to operationalize a continuous process of reinforcing a sense of belonging by defining and excluding an enemy that is within and without, etc. would fall under that rubric. fascism is simply a variant of nationalism that elevates the notion of nation to a transcendent status. bushspeech is all about that. so it all contemporary convservative media discourse.
but this is why i find the bush=hitler thing to be simpleminded.
superficial and hyperbolic, all it does is enable the folk who really SHOULD worry about the degree to which their politics are shaped by an avatar of fascism to dismiss the entire question.
on the other hand, it is sometimes clear that what the extreme right in the states hates is the word fascism, not the fact of it.
as for the topic raised in the op--i am ambivalent on this. for the most part, i deplore the action of the population of this town. on the other hand, i think you need to be much more careful than this guy was in framing the questions he wanted to address.
the question only gets worse if you are careful about how to set it up.
and it is always better to present information to students, let them fight with it and work out interpretations for themselvs based on actual information than it is to simply tell them stuff from the lect-urn.
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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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