Patrick, interesting piece, but I am not sure that I agree with the conclusion that
> What happened? Simply this: the urban poor and working-class were cheated.
> The rural poor were intimidated into supporting a government whose costs
to
> them now far outweigh the limited benefits (for 130 000 households) of the
> ineffectual land redistribution strategy that began in 2000. And the
> regional super-power collaborated to the full.
>
I think we are facing the age old problem of some comrades that the people can do no wrong, so if bad things happens, it must be either intimidation or conspiracy. They refuse to accept that people can actually see fascism as a more attractive alternative to socialism.
A recent article by Hyeon-Ki Kwon "Associations, Civic Norms, and Democracy: revisiting the Italian case" in _Theory and Society_, 2004, 33(2):135-166 is quite instructive in this case. Kwon argues against the neo-Tocquevilleans (like Putnam) who see civil society invariably as a democratizing force, and point pit that fascism won in 1921 in Italy in areas with the strongest civil society i.e. in the North. He further argues that these are the areas where socialists and catholic populists initially won popular support, especially the working poor, but then switched over to fascists because fascist programme appeared more attractive than the socialist one. Its main attraction was mixing nationalism and law and order - which in 1921 resonated in the Italian working class which was overrepresented in the armed forces during WW1 (and thus felt a need for vindicating that effort) and who were weary of chaos crested by strikes, factory takeovers and civil strife following the WW1.
I find Kwon's piece quite convincing, and consistent with my own theoretical stance viewing civil society as a tool in a broader political struggle (see our piece "Social Origins of Civil Society: An Overview" at http://www.jhu.edu/~ccss/pubs/cnpwork/ or "Institutional Roots of Volunteering: Toward macrostructural theory of individual voluntary action" in Dekker and Halman (eds) _The values of volunteering_ Kluwer 2003). 'The people" have no political orientation on their own - that orientation is given to them by institutions, from "vanguard parties" to civil society organizations of various stripes, to organized religion to the state.
It seems like Mugabe's (and Mbeki's) crass pandering to popular fears and stereotypes, scapegoating of unpopular minorities and foreigners, and creating an illusions of law and order by the projection of brute force and suppression of dissent - a typical fascist mix - worked well once again to win the hearts and minds of enough people to stay in power.
Wojtek