I think I said something like, 'given the balance of forces at present, probably fascism'.
Of course, we'd all hoped for the kind of 1890s-style multi-racial working-class based movement against financial tyranny that, when I last lived in the US (1989), an interesting crowd - Jane D'Arista, Bill Greider, Jesse Jackson, Tom Schlesinger, Larry Goodwyn and a few others at the Financial Democracy Center, as well as National Peoples Action, Acorn and the Industrial Areas Foundation for inner-city residents, and also Fantu Cheru, John Cavanagh, Carol Barton, GeorgeAnn Potter and a few others in the Debt Crisis Network, as well as a few in organised labor (like institutional investor and corporate campaigner Bill Patterson) - tried to build against S&L and NY bank bailouts, at the expense of taxpayers, inner-city defaulters and Third World people/environments. They tried hard and failed, which I think partly explains why resistance to the current crisis is so very very lame in the US.
When Leo asked, during a York sabbatical in 2003, I wouldn't have guessed that warmed-over Clintonite neoliberalism would prevail... and maybe it won't in the medium term, if the contradictions are way too severe for Obama's weak economics team to handle. Do you smell the fear that the dollar will finally get the beating it's long deserved?
What bugs me still is that our attempts to project the limits to capitalist crisis displacement into popular politics (e.g. in a 1990 Capital and Class article and many since) won mainly scorn from Doug, Leo and Sam. I think their consistent misreading of the crisis - Leo says it began in 2007! - was ultimately disempowering to analysts who should have seen in the US financial system vulnerability, not just power. (At least a healthy debate raged at York, where many people like Doug addressed Leo's 'Empire Seminar' over the years and tested their lines.)
Recall that in 1910, Rudolf Hilferding thought that the German banking system was extremely strong, and drew a misguided - reformist-reformist - political strategy from his Finanz Kapital analysis. So translating from a tough analysis of crisis, contradictions and the limits of displacement, into practical radical politics, is not easy. I always trust Sam and Leo for a sense of how to develop deeper arguments about capitalist control at the point of production and about restructuring processes, which resonate with North American workers.
Yet some of the more obvious battles against accumulation-by-dispossession which should be at the top of the political agenda aren't readily recognised when such an extreme emphasis is put on Washington's power and Wall Street's dominance.
And by downplaying the multifaceted struggles against neoliberalism that come from a sense of capitalist vulnerability, Leo, Sam and Doug miss the most exciting politics underway now.
I just did a paper for Development Dialogue on this topic - i.e., developing political strategy from a more realistic assessment of the resurgent neoliberal period ahead (not some fantasy post-neoliberal era posited by Krugman and others) - and am happy to send it to anyone interested.
Cheers, P.