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December 26, 2007
I know little about Rudolph Giuliani, one of the current Republican candidates, apart from him having been the very successful mayor of New York City. He appears to be the frontrunner to be the next Republican presidential nominee. He's a social liberal in a socially conservative Republican Party and he appears to have surrounded himself the extremist foreign policy team with an unquenchable quest for "Forever War."
Giuliani is seen by the old American Right as a fascist and the image cover of the current issue is a pretty controversial one. I find it hard to see how Giuliani being a liberal Republican---“I’m pro-choice, I’m pro-gay rights”--makes him a fascist.
The American Conservative represents the traditionalist, anti-war and paleoconservative voice against the dominance of what it sees as a neoconservative media establishment. So it is opposed to President Bush's interventionist foreign policy as well as his immigration and trade policies.
Paleoconservatism refers to an anti-communist and anti-authoritarian right wing movement based in the United States that stresses tradition, civil society and classical federalism, along with familial, religious, regional, national and Western identity.It is critical of social democracy, which is often referred to as the therapeutic managerial state.
Why then is Giuliani seen as a fascist?
Tom Piatak's article in the magazine is of little help. Pitak says:
By demonstrating how unimportant social conservatives had become to the GOP, Giuliani’s nomination could well transform American politics. Millions of Americans vote Republican in spite of the party’s economic views, not because of them. There is no doubt a Giuliani candidacy would alienate many of these voters, pushing some to their ancestral Democratic home, some to a possible pro-life third party, and some to stay home on election day. Those who remain in the GOP would be part of a party that viewed the war on terror as the premier social issue, as Jonah Goldberg has argued it now is. Quite a descent from 1980.
That may be so, but fascism it does not make. However, Glenn Greenward's article in the magazine does. It refers to Giuliani as the authoritarian mayor with the ultimate challenge to impose order on New York city that was widely assumed to be ungovernable. Greenwald says that America in 2008 presents an authoritarian president with the ultimate fantasy: the ability to wield more power than any other human being in the world, with the fewest real limits in modern American history. He then adds:
A President Giuliani would inherit an office bestowed with such dark powers as indefinite detention, interrogation methods widely considered to be torture, vast warrantless surveillance authority, and an impenetrable wall of secrecy secured by multiple executive and judicial instruments. Set all of that next to a submissive and impotent Congress and an equally supine media—to say nothing of the prospect of another terrorist attack to exacerbate every one of those factors—and it is hard to imagine a more toxic combination than Rudy Giuliani and the Oval Office.
Greenwald's argument is that the US political landscape has now tilted so heavily in favor of unchecked presidential prerogatives that a newly elected, shrewd, and inherently aggressive Giuliani, whose certainty about his own rightness is matched only by his contempt for those who disagree, could easily run roughshod over any attempts to constrain his actions.
He adds that during the nomination campaign Giuliani has enthusiastically endorsed virtually every one of the most controversial Bush/Cheney assertions of presidential power. He wants to keep Guantanamo open and mocks concerns over the use of torture, even derisively comparing sleep deprivation to the strain of his own campaign. He not only defends Bush’s warrantless surveillance, but does not recognize the legitimacy of any concerns relating to unchecked government power.Giuliani has confirmed that he believes that the president should have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens, on U.S. soil, and detain them with no review of any kind.
So the fascist image is warranted is it not?
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Gary,
that's a striking image. But they got the wrong guy. It should be George W. Bush. He's the authoritarian who stands on excutive dominance and has a contempt for liberal democracy.