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July 4, 2010
The Contemporary Condition is an interesting academic weblog. The latest post--What was Fascism? written by William E. Connolly raises the issue of fascism. He argues, following Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation, that fascism in the 1930s was a reaction to the failure of unfettered capitalism.
This raises a problem for the contemporary Right today, given that unfettered capitalism causes global warming and the Right's insistence that a minimally regulated economy is the only way to avoid the danger now of a major recession or depression caused by the global financial crisis. If neo-liberalism has been a hegemonic class project, to restore profitability to corporations (and it was successful in this), then its hegemony is now being undermined by the global financial crisis and climate change.
Connolly says that the Right in the US are engaged in historical revisionism. Jonah Goldberg, for instance argues that those who place fascism on the right side of the ideological spectrum are wrong, since fascism is really a phenomenon of the left.
Jonah Goldberg in Liberal Fascism now redefine it [fascism] to mean any large intervention of the state into the economy, even if it is to reduce poverty, respond to recession, regulate capital more carefully, or respond to global warming. Keynesianism, the New Deal, anti poverty programs, are now placed under the umbrella of “liberal fascism”, even though these developments in the thirties actually helped to ward off the fascist potential simmering in several states
Social democracy is equated with fascism---a caricature of reality, given that fascism was overwhelmingly an anti-liberalism with an antipathy to all things leftist. Its polemics structured around stereotypes not scholarship.
Golberg's is an old theme---totalitarianism and that all totalitarianisms (fascism and communism) are essentially the same. To say that liberalism is a totalitarianism and a fascism--the assumption here is that statism is fascism--- is to ignore that Fascism is a specific species of totalitarianism, and it's best understood not by the things it has in common with other forms of this phenomenon, but what distinguishes it from those other forms.
To say that liberalism is a totalitarianism and a fascism---rather than liberalism is a statism--- is to inhabit the outer rim of the conservative wingnut territory around National Review and the Tea Party movement, who ignore the real American fascism---skinheads, neo-Nazis, the Klu Klux Klan, white supremacists, nativists, the Montana Freemen and right wing militias etc --lurking in the Right's closet.
The increasing turn to austerity (fiscal contraction) and structural adjustment means a contraction in demand whilst the assumption that the private sector will pick things up and become the engine room of recovery is questionable. The economic shockwaves are going to continue for some time from the failures of an unfettered financial capitalism, and so the Right are going to contaminate the shift to government intervention and an expansion of the welfare state to deal with unemployment and social unrest with state repression, tyranny and dictatorship.
The implication is that anything that enhances the power and reach of the state is bad. Only the state threatens us--not rogue corporations or Wall Street.The economic strategy is to bail out the banks, pay off the bond traders, keep the basic infrastructure working, and make the poorest bear the cost through welfare cuts in phrased steps.
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The Tea Party Movement and Fox News see Obama as a black socialist out to destroy the Constitution.