[lbo-talk] Bruce Bartlett: " I think it is only a matter of time before the Tea Party morphs into unapologetic fascism"

Marv Gandall marvgand2 at gmail.com
Tue Nov 12 09:22:05 PST 2013


On 2013-11-12, at 9:55 AM, c b <cb31450 at gmail.com> wrote:


> Bruce Bartlett is a former Reagan Administration official. He is not a
> Democrat nor does he say this to promote voting for Democrats. This is
> a viewpoint from inside the Republican Party.
>
> There is no premature anti-fascism. Of course, the current rightwing
> in the US is not identical to the fascists of the 1930's. duhh. But if
> you had warned against "fascism" in the 1930's , it would not have
> meant anything to anybody. "Fascism" was a new thing, unknown. You
> would have had to warn against "tyranny" or some other historically
> previous form of state. But of course fascism wasn't tyranny in the
> literal sense of that state form from ancient Greece anymore than tea
> Republican are "fascists" identical to the fascist of the 30s. Use of
> the term is necessary to raise the appropriate alarm in people's
> minds. They are like fascists, fascist-like.

As you know, we've discussed this issue many times, Charles.

The development of a fascist movement depends on whether the capitalists perceive a threat to their power and property from below. This was clearly the case in Italy, Germany, Spain and elsewhere in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and during the Depression, when leading industrialists and financiers looked to the fascists, with their mass anti-Communist base, as the only available means of halting the advance of the left and of restoring social order.

That's not the case today, not even in Greece, where Syriza is the only left party anywhere poised to take political power. It's certainly not the case in the US, where the upper bourgeoisie remains committed to the political system which has served it well and where the popular exercise of democratic rights has never seriously challenged its hegemony.

The fact that the Republican Establishment and its corporate patrons, far from encouraging the growth of the tea party, now see it as an electoral liability rather than an asset and are bent on purging it, is the surest indication of which way the political wind is blowing. In short, the bipartisan ruling class doesn't presently need a mass fascist party to discipline the masses; it is well able to do this by itself. And it's not necessary, IMO, to "alarm" the people that the tea party is an incipient fascist threat. Most have no historical memory of fascism but this has not prevented at least two-thirds of the population from comprehending that the tea party is inimical to its interests and from rejecting it on other grounds.


> On Sun, Nov 10, 2013 at 2:19 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>> There are many problems in raising the cry of "Fascism," but the most
>> serious result is to deflect understanding the immense repressive power of
>> ordinary capitalist democracy, in all its varieties. One need only walk
>> through an airport, register at a hotel, leaflet in a Mall, or cross either
>> the Canadian or the Mexican border to realize that the u.s. ruling elites
>> have no need for "fascism."
>>
>> Carrol
>>
>> P.S. Perhaps the most omni-present icon of the authoritarian state is the
>> photograph on your driver's license.
>>
>>
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