``...an authoritarian state of a species we do not have a name for. It is extremely dangerous to blur the reality by shouting fascist.''
Carrol
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The thread wondered off into the usual direction of attempting to dissuade usage of the term xxxxx. Okay, they were Italians, so they were different, and?
That wasn't really the intent of the question. So I'll repeat it.
``.. I want to ask you to explain, why you don't think a (xxxxx) threat comes from the Bush administration? I am serious. In my view they are not just horrid or icky, they are dangerous..''
Everybody seemed to immediately focus on the term xxxxx and why it didn't apply, but nobody came up with answer or supplied a name for this concrete threat.
How to sum this up as succinctly as possible? I am more worried about laws and lawless actions by the state that subordinate the individual to the state, than I am about mass movements that approve and encourage such laws and actions by the state. We have both. But my focus has been on the state and theories of state, not the people. I think of xxxxxx as a process and a dialectic that moves between these to poles working in tandem. So I don't depend on fixed definitions, although I admit they help. If everybody wants to reserve xxxxx for the popular side of the equation, okay, fine by me. But give me a word for the other side, the state side of the equation.
One aspect of this state threat that makes me look at words like xxxxx or nazism for that matter is the race conscious aspect of many of these excesses of executive power. So-called illegal immigrants, hispanic `looking' immigrants and just about anybody of `middle eastern' descent are targeted and potentially effected. It is pretty easy to imagine, if I were either of these, this country would look a lot more like a race based police state, especially if I hadn't been `Americanized' enough to pass.
In any event, what makes us vulnerable isn't about what who or what Bush, Cheney, et al, are. What makes us vulnerable to the arbitrary whim of executive power and its possible targets and excesses is that there are few checks or balances left to stop it. And there is the implied or hidden assumption that regular `white' people are guaranteed to be left uneffected, so `we' need not worry. Move along folks, nothing to see here?
And there is a kind of building public paranoia going on over where all this concentration of executive power and the ineffectual checks on it are going. For example, a few months ago I went on some rant about violence. I can't remember the details now, but some on the list got pretty upset. Chuck0 left for awhile. Doug noted verbodden. Andie N said something to the effect, shit happens, so watch out... All of that was just a little too much public nervousness not to be remembered, and a chill on open anti-state speech.
So rather than argue over xxxxxx, it would nice to figure out other names for it.
CG