I wanted to get the source for the "dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe," so I tracked it down to Tom Wolfe's "The Intelligent Coed's Guide to America," republished in Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine (1976). In the process, I found a more extended discussion that struck me as worth repeating. Here's the relevant excerpt, from pp. 115-17 of the hardcover edition; it reports on a panel discussion at Princeton in 1965, in which the participants included Paul Krassner, editor of The Realist magazine, Günter Grass, and Wolfe:
The next thing I knew, the discussion was onto the subject of fascism in America. Everybody was talking about police repression and the anxiety and paranoia as good folsk waited for the knock on the door and the descent of the knout on the nape of the neck. I couldn't make any sense out of it. . . . This was the mid-1960's. . . . [T]he folks were running wilder and freer than any people in history. For that matter, Krassner himself, in one of the strokes of exuberance for which he was well known, was soon to publish a slight hoax: an account of how Lyndon Johnson was so overjoyed about becoming President that he had buggered a wound in the neck of John F. Kennedy on Air Force One as Kennedy's body was being flown back from Dallas. Krassner presented this as a suppressed chapter from William Manchester's book Death of a President. Johnson, of course, was still President when it came out. Yet the merciless gestapo dragnet missed Krassner, who cleverly hid out onstage at Princeton on Saturday nights. . . .
Support [for Wolfe's view that fascism wasn't coming to America] came from a quarter I hadn't counted on. It was Grass, speaking in English.
"For the past hour, I have my eyes fixed on the doors here," he said. "You talk about fascism and police repression. In Germany when I was a student, they come through those doors long ago. Here they must be very slow."
Grass was enjoying himself for the first time all evening. He was not simply saying, "You really don't have so much to worry about." He was indulging his sense of the absurd. He was saying: "You American intellectuals — you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!"
He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.
Not very nice, Günter! Not very nice, Jean-François! A bit supercilious, wouldn't you say! . . .
But in all economic distressed situations, battles took place between Communism and Fascism. The United States supported fascists pretty much everywhere, as the lesser of two evils. Communism won out in Eastern Europe due to the influence of Russia.
But the reason why the US has never turned fascist is that the one time since fascism became a political ideology that the economic situation was ripe for political revolution, the revolution was naturally leftwards moving. It has nothing to do with innate American greatness or moral superiority, nor to do with the concern over fascism (if you don't think they're concerned about fascism in western europe, you're probably not politically in tune there, particularly Germany and Italy).
However, today, the two major western countries "closest" to fascism is Russia (by a long shot) (and many of their former soviet socialist republics as well), and the United States. While the United States is a long way off from Italian styled fascism, we've *never* been this close to it in the past, and one does not have to live under Mussilini to be concerned about an executive-strong oligarchy with unlimited powers over its citizenship.
So, Eugene, how about giving us all a definition of fascism? You'd be filling a real public need.
In that same book, Mauve Gloves and Madmen, there is a hilarious story of a successful NY writer who finds his lavish lifestyle of vacation homes, catered parties, etc. has left him nearly broke.
Realizing he needs immediate cash, he sits at his typewriter and types his opening sentence: "Recession and repression, police state America and the Spirit of '76".
Mussolini morphed his early Marxism into Italian Fascism. Mussolini was a dedicated Marxist throughout the first decade of the 20th century who provided both the primary intellectual leadership (e.g., he was a formidable social theorist and agitator, spoke seven languages fluently) and subsequently the leadership in terms of praxis and governance. Fascism grew out of Marxism.
Although Mussolini was initially marxist, I don't think it's fair to conclude that fascism grew out of marxism. Each is a totalizing conception of state authority, but derived from different principles -- the marxist state is a necessary transition to communal self-government; the fascist state is the mechanism for furthering the interests of the "race" (the volk, or nation, as distinct from the state).
I confess, though, that I know little about the real origins of fascism.
I just have two questions:
1) You write:
"But the reason why the US has never turned fascist is that the one time since fascism became a political ideology that the economic situation was ripe for political revolution, the revolution was naturally leftwards moving."
Why was the revolution in the U.S. naturally leftwards moving? Because the conservatives were "running the country during the leadup" to the Great Depression? I guess that is one possible explanation. I suspect, though, that the truth is more complex than that, and, per de Toqueville, probably did include some component relating to differing cultural norms.
2) I completely fail to understand your assertion that the U.S. has "*never* been this close to [fascism] in the past." Given that, in previous eras, American society had far narrower conceptions of civil rights, and presidential administrations implemented relatively draconian measures restricting them, I'm curious as to how you justify that statement.
- jc
To say that Fascism grew out of Marxism is certainly a highly truncated way of formulating a complex historical topic, not a multi-volume explication of that thesis which explores other roots of Mussolini's Fascism. The degree to which Fascism "grew out of" or was "morphed out of" Marxism can certainly be debated and differently approached and analyzed. But Mussolini was in point of historical fact a highly committed Marxist - intellectually/theoretically and in terms of social praxis - for well over a decade and he formulated his Fascism out of Marxist praxis and other Marxist and non-Marxist elements.
The reason the American Left keeps crying facism is to because they see theirselves as heroic fighters against evil. There really isn't any evil forces with any power in this country so the evil needs to be manufactured. Thus the frequently conjured images of jackboots at the door. Its not that the right doesn't try to manufacture its own fantasies of impending leftist doom, but they don't seem to be as repetitive or unimaginitive.
Justin said that US "*never* been this close to [fascism] in the past" only to prove Wolfe's point.
Go to left wing blogs and you'll hear about stories the timid media isn't reporting; go to conservative blogs and you'll hear about the liberal media piling on conservatives.
Grass came from outside the bubble that he was addressing, so he could call them on their little game with insight and moral authority.
I wonder if Goodwin's Law could be generalized from Hitler to Fascism/Totalitarianism.
I take your silence on the issue as your tacit approval of the jailing of dissidents...
Michael B - while Mussolini and other italian fascists were originally marxists, they rejected the parts of marxism that makes it a feature of the left (foundations of equality and labor), turning it into an nonegalitarian, corporatist movement. Thus, regardless of Mussolini's student leanings, his movement was a rightwinged authoritarian movement, Jonah Goldberg ramblings aside.
Alaska Jack (point 1) - as to the Tocqueville cultural norms aspect, I can't be sure. The "Republicans in charge so Democrats take over" position is primary, so our anti-fascist culture wasn't tested. We simply don't know, empirically, what would have happened had Wilson stayed in charge after World War I, keeping a golden age of Democrats, and allowing the fringe right of the Republican party to take over in 1932. Tocqueville would posit that they would be tempered by individualism and localism, but that doesn't seem to be the case in regards to FDR, so it's an open question. I didn't mean to assert this hypothetical situation wouldn't have been prevented by cultural norms, only we don't know.
As to (2) - while civil liberties in fact have been curtailed in the past (during FDR and Lincoln, most notably) to greater extents than currently, no incident as a whole was closer to FASCISM - which is not simply authoritarian or lacking individual liberty in nature, but a complex ruling scheme that involves those traits as well as corporatism and statism over either equality or individuality.
What makes this, from a purely authoritarian view, more worrisome than the previous two situations is simply the fact that the threat is relatively minimal, and the response so unproportional. In other words, while I've taken notice of the "but FDR" and "but Lincoln" responses from the Right, the obvious answer is that FDR and Lincoln each had threats that were serious and significant, whereas the threat that we face now, though not insignificant from an absolute standpoint, is the type of blip in American foreign relations that we've lived with throughout our existance (be it the Cold War, the threat of German expansionism, the threat of Native Americans agaisnt our own expansionism, our hostility with Mexico, our hostility with England and Spain, etc.). It only seems massively significant for the set of people whose political awakening happened after the fall of the Cold War, during Bush I and Clinton's "Pax Americana".
To those, particularly on the right who are disdained to give Clinton any credit, this was not an exceptional period of peace, but the norm, ruined by "9/11" (which, as a New Yorker, I can say is a culture-changing moment, but not nearly in the way Pearl Harbor, Korea, Russia getting the bomb, Vietnam, or the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union was). That mistake...that 1992-2000 was the norm and what we have now is an exceptionalist period of warfare....is a mistake that threatens to leave our country PERPETUALLY with the freedom restrictions during World War II and the Civil War, a position intolerable to and not compatable with a Tocquevillian society of liberty and locality.
Gulags vs. Concentration Camps, take your pick.
That's item #1 on a long list of items.
Sure, that this is the closest we've been to fascism is relevant evidence of our susceptibility generally. But, for the reasons I've posited, it isn't particularly helpful evidence, since we've never really had the mixture of events that typically allow fascism to prevail.
If you want to score cheap political points, please go elsewhere. Unless you can show yourself to have a serious point, I will not respond again, and the last word is yours.
"While the United States is a long way off from Italian styled fascism, we've *never* been this close to it in the past, and one does not have to live under Mussilini to be concerned about an executive-strong oligarchy with unlimited powers over its citizenship."
He evidently didn't read or else didn't comprehend this:
"You American intellectuals — you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!"
Concerning "cheap political points," take a long look in the mirror. In this thread I've pointedly addressed verifiable historical/empirical facts and have rationally/reasonably argued on the basis of those facts.
Take your own advice and take your cheap and highly presumptive ad hominem slights elsewhere. Or don't.
Do you mean like these jackboots? There is a creeping authoritarianism in the U.S., but of course it is uniquely American in flavor.
Re, your added comment, it's a strawman and highly misleading.
I didn't equate Fascism with Leftism in some type of simplistic or mathematical sense. Most pointedly, see this post on Mussolini/Marxism/Fascism, upthread.
If you are going to respond, first quote me, then argue from that quote.
Roosevelt was actually quite conservative. An honest comparison of his and Hoover's policies shows little if any substantive difference. Roosevelt saved this country from left-wing fascism in such forms as Hughie Long's "every man a king" and Father Coughlin's brand of Catholic socialism with a hearty dash of anti-semitism.
The left in this country has had a masterful success in rewriting history.
I'm not a noted commentator on human rights, on China, or on search engines, so your phony outrage at my silence on the Yahoo story is neither here nor there. Prof. Volokh and company are noted commentators on the right to bear arms, and all I was doing was noting that they don't seem to have commented on the Cheney story.
I do see that the Left still apologizes for Communism and defends it against attacks from the Right while the Right tries to put as much distance between itself and Fascism as is possible. When I was in college, it was still quite fashionable to have communists in the faculty and their presence was vigorously defended by the Left. I am not aware of any self-described Fascists on college faculties and, if they were there, I would support their removal.
Fascism today is primarily a label thrown at the Right by the Left. It now apparently means "against socialism".
I always though the primary difference between the Fascists and the Communists was that the Fascists had better uniforms.
am going hunting later this week. I might get shot. But I am much more likely to die in a car accident on the way there or back. These things are usually handled in civil court if at all. Friends still in some parts of this country do not sue friends and espically family. Now in MA who knows. Maybe you should go pick up a shot gun and at least shoot one once. Education is everything.
I assume that getting shot while hunting is not an assumed risk in the way that, say, getting hit by a foul ball at a baseball game is. It's at least conceivable that two people would go hunting together and one would intentionally shoot the other. (Not that I'm even implying that that happened here.) Similarly, I assume (but someone correct me if I'm wrong) that ordinary laws against manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide are not suspended with regard to hunting accidents. For example, I assume that if a hunter is drunk and fires wildly and kills his companion, he may have to answer for that in a criminal court. I would hope that if you and I went hunting, and you shot me in the face and I died, the police would spend more than an hour or two looking into the circumstances before dropping the matter, just to determine whether a crime (even a crime of omission) may have been committed. I would hope that the same would be true regardless of your title, wealth or status. My question was, simply, whether the police have the power to investigate, and whether a state grand jury has the power to indict, as sitting VP. I don't really follow your references to MA--is that Massachusetts? I'm not from there--I don't think I've spent more than about 5 days of my life, total, in that state.
Lenin was perhaps the first and certainly the most prominent among the first to make this rhetorical association in his speeches and elsewhere. He did this, in general terms, because Mussolini's emerging social theory was gaining popularity and adherents and was viewed as a competing and heretical initiative vis-a-vis Marxist/Leninism. More specifically Lenin, within his oratory and general rhetoric and because it dovetailed with Marxist dogma and theory, indicated that Mussolini's Fascism was a natural evolutionary step of capitalism and a further indication of capitalism's predicted crises and demise.
Btw, when Mussolini formally began to take over the government in Italy, circa 1922, he took it (gradually, from that point forward) in large part from the Italian monarch, the most traditional form of governance on "the right" as judged by the left/right dichotomy originating from the period of the French Revolution.
http://www.la-articles.org.uk/fascism.htm
Another point -- the "corporatist" economics of fascism are often cited as a reason why fascism is "inegalitarian" or "of the right". Yet the word "corporatism" as understood by Mussolini and his contemporaries had almost nothing to do specifically with business or industry. The Wikipedia entry on corporatism does a good job of explaining this common confusion:
"Historically, corporatism or corporativism (Italian corporativismo) is a political system in which legislative power is given to civic assemblies that represent economic, industrial, agrarian, and professional groups. Unlike pluralism, in which many groups must compete for control of the state, in corporatism, certain unelected bodies take a critical role in the decision-making process. These corporatist assemblies are not the same as contemporary business corporations or incorporated groups.
The word "corporatism" is derived from the Latin word for body, corpus. This original meaning was not connected with the specific notion of a business corporation, but rather a general reference to anything collected as a body."
(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism)
On the conservative side we used to have a large segment of Birchers or similar that pulled the whole movement down. It wasn't until Ronald Reagan came along with a viewpoint praising what was good and proper and should preserved that the conservative movement was able to get traction and become the dominent political movement in this country. Thank God the leftists have taken the John Bircher conspiritoral doom and gloom mantle as their own. And thank you Justin for doing your part.
Kazinski wins.
Boys and girls, labels and cerebral exchanges are fine so long as you remind yourself every hour on the hour of these four realities:
1. There are millions of people out there who want to kill my grandchildren and who are likely to be impatient with discourse.
2. You and each of you have an obligation to protect the lives of my grandchildren
3. And yes, in spite of the culture war, we STILL have an obligation to preserve what is good here including the bill of rights, not just from our sworn enemies but indeed, from "fascism" and "communism".
4, but it didn't get any easier on 9/11.
In the question and answer period, one of the South American press representatives asked whether we had faced any threats, intimidation, or menace from the government for the work we did. A couple of the other members of the panel stretched and exaggerated to try to show how brave they were to stand up to the government on policy issues. At that point, I had to tell my story.
I work with DCWatch, a local good government organization that concentrates on the local city government of Washington, DC. In the election of 2002, the incumbent mayor of Washington, Anthony Williams, filed nominating petition sheets for reelection that were filled with fraud and forgeries -- over eighty percent of the signatures he submitted were forgeries, and there weren't enough legitimate signatures on the sheets to qualify him for the ballot. DCWatch filed a complaint with the DC Board of Elections and Ethics and, after a rather contentious hearing, the Board withdrew the mayor's name from the ballot. It was highly embarrassing for him, and he had to run a write-in campaign to get reelected.
And in retaliation, I said, nobody from DCWatch has been invited to the mayor's annual birthday parties again. That's been the extent of it. The journalists and government officials from South and Central America, who knew regimes where that kind of opposition to an incumbent politican could get them exiled or killed, laughed in appreciation. In the US, with very rare and isolated exceptions, politics hasn't been dangerous, and fears of fascist repression have been nothing but paranoid fantasies.
There's a careless tendency to equate fascism and national socialism. There were significant theoretical differences between them, and often significant practical differences as well. The Italian Parliament continued to meet, and had opposition political parties in it, right into the middle of World War II. They were allowed to argue only because they had no chance of changing anything. (Parliament changed the election rules shortly after Mussolini formed a government to guarantee that the dominant party would completely control results.)
Where Hitler's national socialism was focused on race, Mussolini's fascism focused on nationalism, and this is part of why Jews only had a lot to worry about in Italy as German power over Italy strengthened.
The "National Socialist" of the NSDAP party's name was not originally dishonest or manipulative. There was a strong socialist component to the party, and leaders like Gregor Strasser and Ernst Roehm (who led the highly homosexual Sturmabteilung) were part of that wing of the party. They lost their role, and their lives, because Hitler was fundamentally an opportunist, who saw a chance to ally his party with industrialists who feared that Germany's only real choices were Communism, and an ersatz version, National Socialism.
There's a sizeable literature on the overlap between the Communists and the National Socialists, with both parties attempting (with some success) to lure in both proletariat and lumpenproletariat who were disillusioned with capitalism because of the Depression. Of course, as William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich points out, Hitler was quite successful at getting at least the tacit support of academics and school teachers, many of whom were partial to his nationalism and contempt for capitalism.
The lowering of the voting age in Germany in 18 in 1932 also plays a significant part in Hitler's rise to power. Young people facing the prospect of unemployment as they left school were readily persuaded by the idealism of the NSDAP's 1932 slogan, "Gemeinnuetz vor Einnuetz"—"Common needs before individual needs." If there's anything that you learn as you get older, it is not to believe every idealistic slogan that a politician throws at you.
The Cheney is is terribly off topic but somehow it is tied in with leftest paranoia about the "dark night of facism". Whether or not Cheney is Vice President, the Sheriff or, if Whittington somehow dies, Medical Examiner will make a brief inquiry and rule the hunting accident as a hunting accident and that will be that. Whittington is of course able to sue.
As for the gun control issue, I didn't know that even the most extreme proponents of gun control had extended their aims to encompass a 28 guage hunting shotgun which would have to be about the last gun they would come for. If that is the case maybe I should be paying more attention.
(And nobody gets bonus points for pointing out they were controlled by Democrats)
1. The South didn't want to exterminate its black population; they needed their labor long-term. To the Nazis, labor camps were simply a method of extracting a bit more work out of people that were going to die anyway.
2. Lynching was a tool of control, using terror to keep blacks in their place. The Nazis had no similar interest.
You will notice that the entire Jim Crow system is now gone. It was wiped out at some significant cost, but nothing like what it cost to stop the Holocaust (which effort, unfortunately, was only a side effect of defeating Germany).
Finally we are getting somewhere, the definition of Facism means "stuff I don't like". I thought it meant an ultra-nationalist Statist government without freedom of the press or meaningful elections. The South was a bastion of institutionalized racism that trampled on minority rights. But it was not facist, there was a robust freedom of the press, there were contested elections, (white) people were safe in their homes and property and the rule of law did apply. In fact things were so bad for blacks because of majority rule, and offices were held by responsive elective officials that would be thown out of office if they didn't conform to public seniment. For words to have meaning they have to have some constancy. Facism is a society ruled at the top with little or no regard for public sentiment, that was never the case in the American south.
Will we ever know if Cheney was drunk? You seem certain that any investigation will lead to nothing. What is that based on? All the facts we have about the incident come from (1) a lobbyist who was present; and (2) the White House press secretary, who obviously has other interests to protect.
Well you are equating the Jim Crow South with the worst fascist nation. Remember that the other two major fascist nations (Spain and Italy), while repressive, never took their regimes to the extremes that Hitler did. Hitler even had to occupy Italy when Mussolini quit the war and Mussolini was never very enthusiastic in his anti-semitism. Spain managed to maintain it's status as a fascist nation until death of Franco during the first season of Saturday Night Live (where the death of Francisco Franco was a running joke on Weekend Update).
But it was not facist, there was a robust freedom of the press, there were contested elections, (white) people were safe in their homes and property and the rule of law did apply.
Well, I would disagree with the contention that there was robust freedom of the press. An editorial advocating the end of segregation, voting rights for blacks, or condemning the Klan would certainly put you in risk of life and limb and almost certainly guarantee a brick an torch through the front window of your newspaper offices with absolutely no help from the authorities.
As for the rule of law. It is a strange "rule of law" when the law is used as a tool to suppress and intimidate 30% of the population and will not help those who fight the status quo. And I am not just talking about the written laws that institutionalized the petty indignities. The law never prosecuted the crimes committed against the minority population, even when entire towns were burned to the ground or the entire black populations of counties were chased off. The law was used to punish people, often with long sentences or even the death penalty, simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, looking at a white woman the wrong way, or just being an "uppity nigger".
The law and the political system of the old south was used to intimidate and suppress a significant part of the population in the name of maintaining the existing social structure, society, order and a twisted notion of morality. If that isn't a good definition of fascism, I don't know what is.
Facism is a society ruled at the top with little or no regard for public sentiment, that was never the case in the American south.
I don't know where this notion comes from. The Nazis and Hitler were popular almost until the end. And if you were a good German, the legal system still functioned quite well. The society still functioned quite normally for those who did not fall into suspect categories.
I don't think that a centrally controlled economy is a necessary element of a fascist state. Nazi Germany certainly never had one, neither did Italy or Spain. I think that was added on by the right wing at a later date when they tried to equate fascism with being a left wing movement, when of course it was the exact opposite, as it rose out of opposition to communism.
The operation of the slave labor system alone would have been a basis to class Nazi Germany as a centrally controlled economy; they rented slave laborers out to private corporations. One of the most disturbing parts of William Manchester's The Arms of Krupp is a discussion of when the SS fined the Krupp firm for abusing their slave laborers. Can you think of anything more disturbing than relying on the SS to protect you as a worker?
Mussolini's "corporatives" were, in theory, for the benefit of the whole society--workers, business owners, and government representatives operating for the common good--rather like the "National Economic Planning" that was so popular with American Democrats in the 1970s. In practice, these cartels worked for the benefit of business owners, to the detriment of the masses. The regulatory system established in the U.S. in the 1930s for some industries has a similarity: the Civil Aeronautics Board regulating airfares to prevent competition; the National Recovery Administration (which the courts nixed); the natural gas price controls of the Federal Power Commission; farm price supports; minimum retail prices for milk--a whole host of programs that were similar in style and effect to economic programs in Fascist countries.
This doesn't make FDR a Fascist. It is a reminder that the difference between FDR's style of liberalism and Mussolini's Fascism was primarily with respect to political dissent. FDR didn't murder his opponents (of course, he didn't need to).
When I talk about a centralized economy, I am referring to an economy like that in the old Soviet Union, where almost all major industry is directly controlled and owned by the government and there has been massive nationalization of the means of production. Fascist governments simply didn't do this.
The fascist nations in the thirties and forties had economies that were as or less centralized than those of the western allies. Were they more centralized than the current economy of the U.S. or most of Western Europe before the depression? Of course. But it was no more or less centralized than any of the economies in the world in the thirties and forties? Of course not. In fact, the lack of centralization seriously hurt the war economy of Germany (granted, much of it was do to incompetence and corruption rather than a lack of desire to centralize the economy).
A "socialized" economy was seen as a solution to the economic excesses and uncertainty of the teens and twenties by a whole range of political systems. As you indicate yourself, many of the programs in this country (which you are arguing has never been a fascist country) are very similar to those implemented by the fascists and they are still present in many of the current social democracies in Europe. How then, can they be a distinguishing characteristic of fascism?
There were I'm sure many cases of unpopular opinions putting people at risk in the south, but there were also many instances of people openly speaking their minds too. I don't think you can point to any cases of systematic govenment political censorship in the American South that in anyway compare to the practice in totalitarian facist or communist dictatorships. Unpopular opinions were always being aired even if they were disaproved.
And as Clayton and others point out, you really are showing your ignorance of the subject by saying the facists didn't have centrally controlled economies. While many corporations did remain in private hands, they were only privately controlled as long as they followed the strict orders of the central planners. This was the situation even pre-war in Germany and Italy. National Socialism was no mere slogan, its aim was the consolidation of all power to the state.
Our founding documents are based on the Age of Reason in Europe. So it is most certainly a "European" (and dare I say French--can you say Voltaire) movement. As for "modern American Conservatism" being based on the founding documents, that is a dubious claim it best, if for no other reason than there is no single "American Conservatism". It is hopelessly confused. Libertarians certainly don't care much for the founding documents. Neither do the new social conservatives who want religion to guide the operation of the government. About the only conservatives who may claim that are the true small government, traditional Republicans, who are often sneered at nowadays as "RINOs".
Name one non-Jewish owned Corporation in Nazi Germany that was nationalized by the Nazis.
And the same can be said of Ford, GM and Boeing during the war in this country. There was, after all, a war on.
I can't recount the entire first 1000 pages of Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" right here. But I have read it, and it does recount in dizzying detail how National Socialism exercised complete contorl of the economy and why Schacht, Hitler's economics minister, was tried as a war criminal even though he was out of power by 1938 before the first shot of the war had been fired or the first death camp opened.
I should have said Schacht was no longer economics minister by '38, he was still head of the Reichsbank until '43.
I think this could be an arguably reasonable statement only if you equate "libertarians" with "anarcho-capitalists." Most libertarians seem to me to care more for the founding documents than the average Republican or Democrat.
While many Fascists &National Socialists advocated certain goals/objectives that what we would now consider leftist/liberal, It seems the forces of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and similiar regimes were primarily concerned with bulwarking Leftist idealogies. They arose during a period when the crisis of confidence in capitalism was quite high, and though they seem to take the criticisms of capitalism of the day at face value, their main concern was trying to keep their states from being subsumed by marxist influences &idealogy.
In certain ways, the economic views of the fascists were similair to those of the teachings of the Catholic Church at the time in Rerum Novarum. The effect of "Laissez-Faire Capitalism sucks and workers have it bad, but Marxism is evil and we must find a third-way between the two."
Fascism, bluntly, isn't an obviously bad thing in all respects. The NLRA, for instance, was strongly influenced by corporatist thought. Harmony between business and labor supported by regulation to encourage the smooth flow of commerce is arguably a good thing. Fascism was a "third way" between Capitalism and Communism. I'm pretty hard-core freemarketeering, with the only serious barriers to trade that I support being stuff like uranium sales to nutty dictatorships. Still, the move away from Vegelahn v. Guntner and air strikes and organized warfare being a part of labor relations was, on balance, a positive thing. American thought in almost every arena is based on adversarialism, and is hence inherently unsuited to totalitarian rule, but a little solidarismo to soften the edges can help everyone. Maybe unions are too powerful, but very few people want to go back to an unregulated wholly laissez faire labor market.
Fascism as a whole is an evil doctrine, but the suggestion that the only fascists were pals of Hitler (as some imply) ignores regimes like the Greek Colonels, the survival of regimes like the Portugese Estado Novo into the late sixties and the continued popularity of continental fascist parties (le Pen in France, Haider in Austria, and so on). This narrow view of the doctrine as roughly meaning "hatred of jews and civil rights" gives rise to ridiculous arguments like "shooting and smoking bands are bad because Hitler wanted them".
Not every idea that fascism supports is a bad one. Enthusiastically not being communist, for instance, is a great idea. It's true that almost every way in which fascism differs from democratic capitalism is a way that fascism is inferior, but that's true for a lot of political doctrines, albeit not always as true (middle of the road socialism sucks, but rarely as murderously as fascists until the end of the cold war tended to be). Still, there's an argument that Fortuyn's "list" wasn't the worst party in the EU. It's not just fascism, but a broad repression and a lack of civil rights generally that hits Europe rather than the US. Gaullism, Petainisme, Maoism, Marxism and Fascism cover the bulk of the major French political players, to which Islamism is trying to make an addition. Americans should recite the pledge daily, and mean it.
If you think there were many white people speaking out against racism you are mistaken.
Yes, lots of people openly spoke their minds, but it was people who supported segregation. Those who opposed it generally did not, out of a wholly justified fear of the kind of reaction Freder describes.
I'm not a big fan of arguing about definitions, so I'm not interested in whether the Jim Crow South was "Fascist" or not. I do know that Freder's 4:45 description of conditions was pretty accurate.
Libertarians do care a great deal for the founding documents. The problem is that they tend not to understand their historical context very well--it tends to be a literalist reading of the Bill of Rights, not understanding the meaning of "right of the people" in the Second Amendment terribly well.
Religious conservatives are actually quite close to the Founders on religion and government, although a bit more liberal than them. Look at the state constitutions adopted in the Revolutionary and early Republic period. The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 requires the legislature to pass mandatory church attendance laws, and fund churches from taxes where local congregations won't do so voluntarily. Many of the state constitutions limited officeholding based on religion. Some limited it to Protestants (New Jersey Cosntitution of 1776); some allowed the state to limit officeholding to Christians (for example, Maryland). The federal government as late as the 1820s was still in the business of endowing churches in Ohio by giving one section of each township for the support of whatever church the township picked.
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So far as I can tell, even if Butler (and Van Zandt, Glazier, and French) was telling the truth, all he shows is that one well-connected businessman was plotting a coup. I don't think that that comes close to saying that the coup was likely. MacGuire doesn't appear to have been amazingly competent. FDR was hugely popular in '34 (472 electoral votes in '32 and 523 in '36). You compare the situation to Spain, but Franco only got his initial success because Spain was already falling apart. Azana was no FDR. It doesn't just seem unlikely that the start of the revolution would have happened, but bordering on impossible that it would prosper.
Mr. Cramer, reading the article, it doesn't look as if you believe that the revolution was likely to happen.
So far as I can tell, even if Butler (and Van Zandt, Glazier, and French) was telling the truth, all he shows is that one well-connected businessman was plotting a coup. I don't think that that comes close to saying that the coup was likely. MacGuire doesn't appear to have been amazingly competent. FDR was hugely popular in '34 (472 electoral votes in '32 and 523 in '36). You compare the situation to Spain, but Franco only got his initial success because Spain was already falling apart. Azana was no FDR. It doesn't just seem unlikely that the start of the revolution would have happened, but bordering on impossible that it would prosper.
My brother was one of the committee for a Stop The War Coalition meeting dominated by Socialist Workers Party a couple of years back. They eventually spent most of their 4.5 hours talking about their plan to storm the houses of parliament and thus take over the country. My brother and other voices of reason failed to impress on them that successfully standinging the Commons and Lords wouldn't mean that people obeyed the new laws that they were debating passing (very important part of any pie in the sky revolution, the discussion of the details of the things you'll never do). To my mind, it's the sign of a healthy democracy that it can live with all sorts of groups believing that they have a chance of taking over by coup, planning on doing so, and never really getting there. Some, like the IRA or the Symbionese Liberation Front make it as far as murdering people and dealing drugs, but no one in the Anglosphere bridges the gap to other traditional governmental functions (like teaching math and building roads). They're less civilised, but part of the burden of being cautious with regard to the civil liberties violations you're willing to tolerate.