Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> But it's wrong to say the U.S. is a
> fascist state; if you do the word loses all meaning, and contributes
> to the indefensible and damaging idea that bourgeois civil liberties
> count for nothing.
>
Why the "But"? You just got done quoting me to the effect that the U.S. is NOT a fascist state.
I agree -- but immense numbers of people still think that "non-fascist" means "good." Bourgeois democracies are _very_ capable of slaughtering, starving, torturing huge massesd of people, including their own people. Also it is rather offensive to argue against the idea "that bourgeois civil liberties count for nothing." That comes is objectively a lie. Who on this list has made any such claim? What significant number of leftists anywhere in the U.S. has made that claim.
You are setting up a dummy opponent -- and attacks on that dummy opponent become in effect apologetics for the brutality of the U.S. state. Dickens becomes relevant here. If in a country of almost 200 million 3000 people are brutalized by the police in one year, what's the percentage? "Nothing." "Girl No. 20, what do you mean nothing?" "Nothing to those who are brutalized."
Those bourgeois civil liberties mean a lot, and it is certainly worthwhile to fight to preserve them. But they are double-edged, and it criminally obscures that fact to babble on about mostly non-existent leftists who say they mean "nothing." Civil rights for most of us most the time can obscure the really threatening absence of most of those rights to large numbers of people some of the time.
Shooting fish in a barrel does not contribute to clarity in political discussion.
Carrol