--snip
> These are not exactly arguments for the non-fascism of the Bush regime.
The
> Bushites would be denouncing the Nazis as "liberals" ! Incredible ! This
> really justifies my calling the Bushites social fascists ! I'm going to
> save this article and use it in these arguments over the use of the term
> "fascistic" to refer to the rightwingers in the U.S. today.
Emmanuel Todd (_after the empire_) makes a similar argument about the US - namely that the entire US population benefits from the imperial plunder of European, Asian and Latin American economies in the form of free trade. He is using the US trade deficit longitudinal wage data by social class to support his claim. He is using an analogy to the Roma empire in which the pauperized artisan class turned into plebeians appeased by the imperial spoils (even though the patricians raked in lion shares of them). I have to admit that his argument makes a lot of sense.
However, he also argues that Germany and the US have very different anthropological bases (by which he refers to certain pre-modern family structures which were selectively institutionalized in the modern state) - which makes Germany much more susceptible to fascism than the US is. He argues that Germanic family structure was authoritarian and hierarchical, which make authoritarian regimes more acceptable to the German "soul." By contrast, the English family structure was much flatter and disconnected, which translates into a market based rather than authoritarian state.
Again I think his argument makes sense, but certainly does not tell the whole story.
Bribing the population with populist rituals and the illusion of economic stability has certainly been used by many governments - not just the Nazis or the US - to maintain its power. The x-USSR and its satellites or Argentina under Peron are other examples.
This is, btw, what anarchists are incapable of understanding - a bird in hand is better than two on the bush. A semblance of power and stability now is much more appealing than vague promises of people's power and ownership of the whole economy at some nondescript time in the future. That is why the fascists always beat them at their own game of rabble rousing.
Wojtek