First, a response to CB, then WS, then MG.
1. To CB. Yes, I see your points. One might point out that, unlike Hitler or Mussolini, a Republican president in the current US doesn't really have to absorb any part of a socialist or communist social-political agenda in order to win over the 'working class' faced with economic and social crises. Nor is there any political left to defeat electorally or by putsch. One key core Republican working class constituency, btw, either works directly for the federal government (mostly military facilities and bases, including many overseas, subsidised by foreign governments in the US system) or for companies highly dependent on federal contracts, most importantly defense-security-intelligence contractors.
On the other hand, a presidential placation of a middle class, as you say, parallels how the Nazis kept their own middle class happy. Both Mussolini and Hitler were quite class conscious, an understanding of society that is not limited to socialists or communists in parts of the world outside the US.
One argument that gets made quite often about the Nazis is the 'totalitarian' nature of their state and rule. But that can be shot down quite easily. It was never that totalitarian (another hermetically sealed term anyway, incapable of any sort of empirical examination) for the privileged classes, though things got inarguably desperate at the end, when it was 'total war' for survival in the face of total destruction of Germany and imminent invasion from two fronts. So the privileged could sit around on meagre rations and make Hitler-Himmler-Goebel jokes about ersatz products until the next firebomb raid got them.
2. WS writes:
>>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.>>
A standard and long-standing argument made central in a lot of 'critical discourses' in all sorts of western academic disciplines. You'll even find a weak, weak form of it in World Bank blather from the late 1980s. From the safest of places comes the bravest of words.
>>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. >>
But seems in your summary here to ignore the desperate situation of a lot of impoverished in the US. Let's just take a look at one part of them, immigrants. Even developing country immigrants to the US present a distorted picture. For a start, a lot of immigrants can't vote. And if they form that part of the connected, politically supported immigrants, they might vote conservative (if it was Republicans who helped them to get their citizenship and the right to vote, which is something that happened throughout the 80s and 90s).
But back to the immigrants (who come, work, and go). The US dollar weakens against OECD economies but remains strong or even strengthens against a lot of developing economies, so when they export their savings to their own country, it gives the appearance that America is still this country where everyone does better than much of the rest of the world. Also, many immigrants (like the Calabrians and Sicilians in 1900), just as they always did, stay only temporarily and move elsewhere, where they hope the society is easier for non-anglos. While in the US, they work long hours, receive salaries that are part of the underground economy (and so can be higher, since things like tax payments, social security, or health insurance deductions are not taken out of the sums), and don't retire in the US (so don't really add to the millions living on inadequate fixed incomes and insufficient health insurance before they die). Interestingly you said , I think, Roman empire (though it was spelled 'Roma') and what is interesting in that case is how absolute power was grabbed but also given over by the politically enfranchised in a Republic, an exchange for what, an assurance of still yet more social and economic privilege?
>>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. >>
Another unoriginal and unsupportable argument that has long been in circulation--ever since a bunch of amateurish 'anthropologists' got hired by the US government to explain the 'German' and 'Japanese' mind in order to better justify destroying them and then 're-engineering' their societies in the Occupation period (they then went on to plague the State Dept and newly founded grad schools, and their babyboom offspring now form a lot of the professorship of well-established grad schools, which provide 'expertise' to the State Dept and to countries in the sphere of US influence). European post-mos fell for this too, looking for 'fascist microstructures' in Italian and German families.
>>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. >>
Which makes it difficult to explain America, with all its conservative German and Scandinavian families. I think nowadays most anthropologists, ethnographers and sociologists would LAUGH at this stuff.
>>Again I think his argument makes sense, but certainly does not tell the whole story. >>
Makes me wonder who vets such stuff.
>>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. >>
Or US-controlled, 'reconstructed' Germany and Japan? As for how the Germans changed, not all of it was for the better. One only needs to look at the US-backed, German elite's mostly uncritical support of a militaristic, undemocratic Germano-Slavic Jewish (Ashkenazi) settler state in Palestine in the post-war period.
>>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.>>
Anarchists=colourful sounding straw men with imputed collective thoughts like 'two birds in the bush' will ultimately be better than 'one in hand'.
Wait, isn't where MG or someone enters and says that because 'rabble rousing' isn't limited to fascists, you aren't talking about real fascism, which is, I guess, some form of metaphysical fascism? I think the historical question for Germany is more like: was a political collapse of the left and left centre in Germany inevitable, given all the powerful factions and individuals who lined up behind the Nazis?
3. For MG. As always, thanks for the substantive exchange, for which you have written the perfect conclusion. F
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