1) How is today's threat a significant departure from more than a century of American political violence? To say that the Klan is some kind of incipient fascist movement is to drain the term of any specific meaning. But over the last 100-150 years, we've had savage repression of labor through public and private means, like national guard units, cops, and Pinkertons. We had lynching. We had serious suppression of civil liberties during and just after World War I. The Panthers were essentially wiped out with death squads. I can understand why mainstream liberals don't want to admit that U.S. history is full of repressive crimes, and want to see George W. Bush or Sarah Palin as some kind of scary departures, but that doesn't characterize subscribers to lbo-talk, does it?
2) Why should we worry more about the fascist threat than some real, imminent dangers like a) a turn to fiscal and monetary tightening (Obama's deficit commission, which could give him cover to cut Medicare and SS; the Fed's signaling that it's ready to begin withdrawing its extraordinary stimulus) that could sink us back into recession; b) Obama's friendliness towards offshore drilling and nuclear power; c) the incapacity of the U.S. political system to do anything at all about climate change, even something as corp-friendly as c&t; d) escalation in Afghanistan, and with it an enormous increase in civilian deaths; and e) tightening the screws on Iran, possibly leading to some sort of utterly mad military strike. These are all initiatives either led or supported by a Dem president and Congress, not some scary possibilities that some possible future Rep president and/or Congress could perpetrate. Doesn't all the worrying distract from those realities?
Doug