>So Doug, if reality was determined by everyone you know, bell hooks
>would be President.
I think I'd prefer Al Sharpton myself. I've got issues with symbolic lower-casing of proper names. I was happy when Jill Johnston gave it up.
"Fascism" is a dicey classification. I think the Nazis gave it a bad name, if you know what I mean - by being so violently exterminationist they obscured other fascist regimes' affinities to what you call rapacious capitalist imperialism.
A lot of the things Umberto Eco says about ur-Fascism - in the piece you helped format <http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_blackshirt.html> - sound a lot like the American Way, especially its current moment - the worship of tradition mixed with a love of technology, the rejection of modernism, "the cult of action for action's sake," the treatment of thought "as a form of emasculation" and culture "[a]s suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes." "Disagreement is treason," the feeling of being "besieged [and] plotted against," "pacifism is trafficking with the enemy," "life is permanent warfare." "Selective populism." "Newspeak." Eco says: "Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes."
You prefer to tar Buchanan & Co with the fascist label, and I don't think that's fair. He's a bigot, for sure, but not all bigotry is fascist, is it? I don't see how you can have fascism without some kind of imperialism and militarization of society; Buchanan's not about that. He's a nativist who'd like to seal the U.S. off from the outside world and return society to the racial and sexual norms of the 1840s. Vidal has a lot in common with that. They're not as anti-intellectual as Bush & Co either.
Doug