Curtiss Leung wrote:
>
>
> Regarding calling the Straussians fascists (or proto-fascists): what
> *can* we call an ideology whose exponents support a push to limit our
> formal freedoms, an emphasis on some kind of shared and essential
> national Identity, and an expansionist and militarist foreign policy?
> Of course it is not Nazism or Fascism yet: we do still have our freedoms,
> and there is no positive American type to which we're all to aspire (or
> else.) It may never get that far--but so what? How else can one
> characterize such a position?
We do need a name, but it is important (I think quite crucial) NOT to call it fascism or nazism, states (and more importantly, _organized_ mass movements) that share only generic (or even only a familial) traits with the kind of authoritarianism which you describe here. And resistance must be to the specific authoritarian threat, not merely to generic features of all such threats. I think a comparison I dreamed up a year or so ago remains apt. Suppose the SPK and the KPD had shared the view that the greatest threat was the reestoration of the Kaiser -- and on that basis _joined_ not to oppose Hitler but to join _with_ him to oppose the threat of a Wilhelmine restoration. Those fearing "fascism" in today's USA are, I think, just as silly, as would have been the SPD and KPD in my imagined scenario.
Fascism is a dead bogeman which on the one hand blinds to real threats to what democracy we have in the U.S. and on the other hand urges us to give up our own goals to unite ("temporarily," everyone says) with the DP.
Carrol
P.S. The only u.s. political leader of the last 50 years who _might_ under the right circumstances have represented a threat actually analogous to if not identical with the Fascist threat was Jerry Brown. Carrol
>
> Curtiss
>
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