[lbo-talk] USA 2003

[Alan Jacobson]

Fascism was fundamentally a product of the revolutionary period after WWI, I
don't think the particular building blocks that created the fascist
movements in Germany, Italy, Spain, (and the wannabes in other countries)
will come together the same way again. Germany of 1932 was the product of
1921-3 and 1917-8; there's no point in looking for that here.

"Fascism" in the US will be with a smile and a slap on the back, rather than
jackboots. It will call people to look to non-democratic institutions to
supplant (nominally) democratic ones, which in the American context would be
fundamentally anti-statist in its rhetoric. And it will have a large dose of
Protestant religious imagery, redemption and purification, but the means to
that purification will be the fascist agency. I hesitate to see that as a
"party" but more as an anti-party, organizing people politically _against_
politics, if that makes any sense.

I think people can look and honestly see components in US politics and
culture that could facilitate a fascist movement. But that doesn't a fascist
movement make. If enough things go wrong, some of these elements could
coalesce into something really bad. Having said that, I'd rather not give
Cheney, Ashcroft and Rumsfeld another four years to test this theory.

Alan J