|
what is overlooked, host, in the above is simply that fascism in its older forms was a mass movement. so it was not only a top-down affair, a dictatorship grafted onto and otherwise functional status quo--it was the mobilization of people in defense of that status quo, and in that respect was a change in its nature. in particular, american commentators have tended since before world war 2 to make strange analytic separations which enable them to frame fascism as something Other than an expression of capitalist social relations in a nation-state context which has a media apparatus capable of more-or-less real time opinion co-ordinatinon. radio was fundamental to fascism...i don't think the reliance on a mass media can be overstated. if that's the case, the you can have a range of variants on a basically fascist situation, not all of which require a dictator...--i think you are working with an overly rigid notion of fascism and that notion leads you to characterize cowboy george in ways that simply are not at this point accurate. as much as i oppose it, the addington type arguments about expansive presidential power are well inside the status quo ante, are not a break with it, and do not in themselves represent the emergence of a dictatorship--rather they show that within the normal run of the american system, the space exists for a quite extreme concentration of power in the hands of el jeffe without constituting a break with the system itself--so no state of emergency, so i think the bush people are exploiting a structural weakness *within* the american system, and are not a break with it--and the way in which teh have been trying to exploit these weaknesses seem to me to point to the need to rethink the organization of that system itself. in other words, as much as i oppose the administration, they are still **inside** the constitutional order--they have not and at this point (barring something catastrophic, which is possible) cannot suspend the order itself.
one of the standard interpretations of fascism is that its core constituency is petit bourgeois and that it exploits that class-fractions sense of socio-economic precariousness by offering its inverse, a festishization of the "normal" class order.--which would functionally undercut the problems of precariousness--because the class order would be written into a notion of natural hierarchy. typically the interests of the fractions within the holders of capital who collude with fascist regimes are quite different from that--in those cases it's more often order for its own sake--but where the interests intersect at the level of form is across an idea of natural class order.
all this to say that i don't think kirkpatrick germaine here.
more later....time for a beverage.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|