Back in the early 1970s John Wiener and then-Marxist Alan Wolfe wrote quite complementary articles relating to the above. Wiener's article (which appeared in Dissent if memory serves) was entitled "The 18th Brumaire of Richard Nixon." Wolfe's piece (published in the Review of Radical Political Economics) was entitled "Waiting for Righty." The nods to Marx and Clifford Odets are obvious.
I'm reminded of these articles from time to time, often when the topic of fascism comes up on an e-list, but sometimes when reading a book or essay. In this instance Jeff Lustig's commentary "Is America Going Fascist?" in the current issue of New Political Science (and let me put in a plug for the journal and the Caucus that publishes it) sparked my memory of the Wiener and Wolfe articles.
Lustig suggests that increasing allusions and references to fascism indicate that folks sense the US government is moving away from its constitutional foundations. He indicates that we face a form of tyranny but he declines to use the fascist label (as did Wiener and Wolfe over three decades ago). So, in Lustig's view, what's up?
First, he points to the diffculty of pinning fascism down, citing what Umberto Eco has called a "set of fascist familily resemblances." Observers differ in their focus: anti-Semitism and racism, police-state repression, blackshirts in the streets, technological rationality, root irrationality, monopoly capital's tendency towards corporatism, mass psychology.
Lustig's use of Marx's "18th Brumaire" is more apropos than was Wolfe's, in part because certain parallels between Louis Bonaparte and Bush 43 - charlaton, immaturity, inexeperience, superficiality, fraudulence - make for a better analogy (all analogies are suspect, some more than others). But Lustig notes that Marx's analysis transcended the individual in its consideration of the modern republic that signified "...only the political form of revolution of bourgeois society and not its conservative form of life."
Marx pointed to contradictions between despotism and freedom in mid-19th century France. Lustig holds that in doing so Marx was the first to see the fascist potental in modern politics. Lustig then points to similar circumstances in the U.S and some similarities are striking: executive pre-emption of legislative authority, expanding state power, increasing militarism, strengthened church-state relations, among others.
As I indicated above, however, Lustig demurs when it comes to concluding that the US is going fascist. He maintains that the new US tyrants do not "measure up" to fascist statism, fascist appeal to collective values and citizen obligations, fascist mobilization of the public, and fascist parallel institutions. Perhaps most importantly, he points out that the new US tyrants are not trying to dismantle the existing system but to expand its dominance. They've no need of storm troopers because they're already on the inside. Accordingly, Lustig argues that:
They don't require a new party and mass movement to thwart republican institutions.
They don't need to form parallel institutions or organize a party military, because the
old institutions have shifted over to their new duties as well. Our authorities can
slough off constitutional restraints and retain public support in the process because
the methods of corporate organization and mass advertising have shown them how
to do it in the short term.
Our corporate elites don't care about totality. They are less interested in controlling
the common than in stripping them, less desirous of governing the people than in
gulling them, less intent on mobilizing citizens than on forsaking them by retreating to
gated cities.
Lustig's characterization shares kinship with a condition that Bertram Gross called "friendly fascism" (a somewhat too-cute term the irony of which probably precluded it ever catching on) some three decades ago. More recently, Sheldon Wolin has called the new US tyranny "inverted totalitarianism" (an improvement over the phrase "post-modern totalitarianism" that he was using) in that it turns the concept as conventionally understood upside down, subordinating the public to the private and the state to corporations.
Neo-liberal market cheerleading or criticism (as with both Lustig and Wolin) notwithstanding, present-day US politics is actually quite statist in certain ways ("homeland security" and all that entails, Halliburton corporatism, militarized "public safety", judicially restricted labor rights). However, the term "national security state" used by Chomsky and others fails to capture the entire picture.
What appears to exist is neither the subordination of the private to the public nor that of the public to the private. Rather, we face a situation in which the two realms have become fused. There's probably a better word for identifying the social field that has emerged, one in which it is increasingly anachronistic to speak of and refer to the public and the private as separate entities (if they were ever separate to begin with).
Lustig calls what we have witnessed the rise of "stealth tyranny" (another term that is unlikely to catch on). More significant than what he calls it is that Lustig points out that struggle against the new US tyrants will have to confront established authority rather than what he terms "a gang of freebooters from the streets." Mark Twain was probably correct: "History does not repeat itself, though it does sometimes rhyme." Michael Hoover