Fascism and Democracy
Two threads of dialogue that have been going on are beginning to converge. One is around Oil and Iraq (here, here and here). The other is around the concept of liberal fascism. They converge, because for me they both revolve around the concept of corporatism (which was Mussolini’s first definition of fascism)–the notion that the collective power of industry groups, working in cartel form, have vast influence over government.
Thus, for example, a steel corporation would be a cartel composed of all the business leaders in the steel industry, coming together to discuss a common policy on prices and wages. When the political and economic power of a country rests in the hands of such groups, then a corporatist system is in place.
Goldberg’s point of view in Liberal Fascism
If corporatism and propagandistic militarism are fascist, then Woodrow Wilson was a fascist and so
were the New Dealers. If you understand the right-wing or conservative position to be that of those who argue for free markets, competition,property rights, and the other political values inscribed in the original intent of the American founding fathers, then big business in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and New Deal America was not rightwing;it was left-wing, and it was fascistic. What’s more, it still is.
I agree with Jonah that President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to enter the war “to make the world safe for democracy” set in motion a kind of messianic foreign policy of American Exceptionalism, which echoes in the righteous speeches of President Bush today. As Henry Kissinger once observed, “It is to the drumbeat of Wilsonian idealism that American foreign policy has marched since his watershed presidency, and continues to march to this day.” I also agree that the Palmer Raids, Wilson set off against the Left were fascistic. Today similar degradations of our civil liberties are taking place under the guise of war. Although contemporary politicians have used the shattering events of September 2001 to explain that everything has changed, their neoconservative mentors know the real story. “America did not change on September 11,” Robert Kagan wrote. “It only became more itself.” He went on to note that “over the last six decades, it is an objective fact that Americans have been expanding their power and influence in ever widening arcs.”
What I will argue is that contemporary neoconservatism is the direct descendant of the path Wilson put us on–a path we must now reexamine. The effective result of Wilsonian thought was a permanent militarization of American policy in a way that now puts us in peril economically and culturally. This peril really increased since 1980. Can anyone honestly not believe that the corporate “cartels” of Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Media, Big Insurance and Big Banking have had more influence on the deregulatory direction of America since Reagan’s election? Since that time the American political ruling ideology has been based on the twin poles of the Neoconservative philosophy first elucidated by Irving Kristol in The Public Interest in 1965: in domestic affairs the national government should shrink its revenue base (by cutting taxes and business regulations) and in foreign affairs the government should grow its budget (by becoming the world’s sole military superpower). This philosophy has brought us to the present crisis in Iraq which is part and parcel with the present economic crisis in America.
Goldberg believes his faith in free markets is “anti-corporatism”, but I respectfully disagree. Everyone of the big cartels has gotten the Republican led congress to do their bidding by removing all corporate regulation since the Contract for America was signed. And when the lack of regulation gets them into trouble, like what is happening to the banking industry , they use their same government connections for a federal bail out.
Over the last two decades, few industries have lobbied more ferociously or effectively than banks to get the government out of its business and to obtain freer rein for “financial innovation.”
But as losses from bad mortgages and mortgage-backed securities climb past $200 billion, talk among banking executives for an epic government rescue plan is suddenly coming into fashion.
A confidential proposal that Bank of Americacirculated to members of Congress this month provides a stunning glimpse of how quickly the industry has reversed its laissez-faire disdain for second-guessing by the government — now that it is in trouble.
Now I am well aware that many of my readers who have defended Liberal Facism are not neo-conservatives but see themselves as libertarians. In that stance, I find a great deal of solidarity with them. I have tried to raise the notion that centralized federal power is not the answer to our present crisis.
But the consensus I hope we can forge (including Morgan, Doop, Jack Sprat and Peter D) is a new politics that uses the devolutionary bottom up power that we all believe exists, to lead us out of this trap that corporatism has led us into. I know that Dick Cheney really does believe that what’s good for Halliburton is good for America. But its a lie.
The potential realignment of political forces where economic and libertarian conservatives work with social progressives to battle large centralized bureaucracies and create an economically sustainable networked form of local democracy is just over the horizon. The question before us all is; will it take an economic crisis to move us down the path of renewal or can we shake off our apathy and make the political choices now, before a catastrophe?
[...] Daniel Downs wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptTwo threads of dialogue that have been going on are beginning to converge. One is around Oil and Iraq (here, here and here). The other is around the concept of liberal fascism. They converge, because for me they both revolve around the concept of corporatism (which was Mussolini’s first definition of fascism)–the notion that the collective power of industry groups, working in cartel form, have vast influence over government. Thus, for example, a steel corporation would be a cartel composed of all the business leaders in the steel industry, coming together to discuss a common policy on prices and wages. When the political and economic power of a country rests in the hands of such groups, then a corporatist system is in place. [...]
Not to disturb this conversation piece on your table, Jon, but honestly I can’t join the fun because I just don’t have the same grammar. Frankly, this politicalesque nomenclature belongs to journalism—and specifically to the new media—and not to political science or historiography. I believe that it has valence in economics (far from my corner of the Quad), but it wouldn’t really get traction in international relations either.
My grid is a historical one I’d have to apply as a kind of sieve or classifier, throwing your nouns and their denotations into the hopper to see how they would shake out. “Neo-conservative”, “corporatist”, “fascist”—these all have meanings different from your uses, and Goldberg’s, here. That Hitler knew that he needed the bankers and the Ruhr manufacturers doesn’t make him a corporatist. The seminal fascists—and their weekend reenactors since—were natty dressers too, but should we construe them as Stylists?
Some of what lately is called “corporatism” is simply capitalism. In other instances, as in your piece here, “corporatism” re-badges oligopoly. Similarly, most figures identified these days as “neo-conservatives” are simply conservatives; they do not belong to the small number of unduly influential, genuine neocons whose heydey in any event was brief.
So I’d need to run a kind of Berlitz operation on this vocabulary, Journalism-to-Social Science, before I could join the conversation. And that would be tedious in the extreme.
But the biggest barrier to my following this line of thinking is the frightfully elastic application of the word “liberalism”. Classical Liberalism, the economic school, aside, the liberalism that impinges our electoral season is liberalism that is essentially meliorative, social instrumentalism in pursuit of notions of collective progress. Strictly speaking, it is a species of Perfectionism. Like “dialectical materialism”—indeed, like all theories of history—it is an exercise in secular eschatology. It’s a metaphysical speculation.
And I simply doubt that you or your correspondents would want to go there; and by “there”, I mean to treat liberalism as civil religion.
When first I saw the title of Goldberg’s book I assumed, incorrectly, that it was a history of the early battles of the “Culture Wars” of 20-25 years ago, the battles over Western Civ and campus speech codes. So I must’ve been wearing my historical anthro cap that day—the one with the sociological tassel—instead of someone else’s green eyeshade.
We might start by considering that a one-dimensional Left/Right metric is too simplistic to capture the reality we are dealing with. It may be that we need something like the Nolan chart to talk about the relative positions of the different groups we are talking about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_chart
Absolutely agree, but the chart not only is tendentious, it’s historistic. It’s already an artifact. So, in dealing with this immediately current “reality”, how could we add dimension to the dualism you and I reject?
Stumps me, frankly. This might help, though: as an Americanist I’m accustomed to interpreting texts—in the broadest conceivable sense of that term—by first locating them on interpretive grids along which lie the subcategories of the main analytical unit of the field of Anthropology; that is, culture. One could do the same subcategorization of e.g. economies, societies, the psyche, the polity or else system of governance, etc., for the other social sciences.
I dunno.
So Hughvic, your conversation is really just a lecture on the politics of this current dialectic, is that what you’re saying? I think you do yourself a disservice since I found your conversation with both Jon and Edwacer both clarifying and edifying. Meanwhile, it seems to me that we have to look at Goldberg’s book as an attempt at clarification by obfuscation. By turning the definitions back on themselves, he can move the pea of his real intent under any shell he so chooses. It’s similar to calling the attack on the Twin Towers an act of war and then using Bush and McCain’s own words to prove that they actually approved of the attack since they so clearly believe in acts of war.
Use of labels without clarification as to what particulars are being referenced makes it easy t o simplify the whole dialog into a name calling/flag waving mess. I think there are good populist ideas and good libertarian ideas, good liberal ideas and good conservative ideas- but without reviewing any particular case and relying only on the general concepts, we simplify the debate to an either/or which is sometimes impalatable.
Capitalism is not a perfect system. With the exception of the Austrian school and the objectivists, most people recognize it almost from the start. There are times when it needs a tap, times when it needs a shove, and times when it needs to be turned around. It all has to do with our priorities. There is a sense of balance between the revolutionary values of liberty, equality, and fraternity. These virtues cannot be had to excess- rather, it is the lack of their fellows which give us the horrors such as the fraternal but unequal and enslaved fascists of the mid century.
But there can exist a society without tolerable amounts of each. America began to lose liberty due to wartime restrictions, equality as debt overwhelmed the citizens, and fraternity as we came to realize how our pride had blinded us into giving away the first two.
Each case needs to be reviewed by itself. There are solutions coming from every side, but we must ask what the price will be. And where we find ourselves lacking in funds, we must refuse.
I’m reminded of one of those Larsen cartoons with a person talking to a dog. One balloon shows the words the person is speaking, the other what the dog understands.
Goldberg [and the erudite folks assembled here] are doing a lot of intellectual fast-talking, but he knows perfectly well what he wants the audience to take away:
Contemporary Democrats =
Liberals =
Fascists =
Hitler
Yeah, you can parse interesting historical debates about Father Coughlin’s proper coordinates on some abstract political spectrum and this can be quite an entertaining game. But Goldberg’s real message is quite simple. He nets it out for us with his two word title.
We need to figure out what parts of the New Deal to keep (aren’t you glad we have FDIC just now?). Making facile FDR = Hitler analogies is just an underhanded way of saying we should trash the whole Deal.
[...] Fascism and Democracy « Jon Taplin’s Blog [...]
I have to admit you guys are considerably above my level of scholarship. I’m a retired newspaper columnist with a lifelong interest in history, not an academic.
The only reason I dived into the original discussion was that I had recently read and enjoyed the book and didn’t think people who had not read it should comment on what it contains.
With regard to what STS posted, for example; one of the points Goldberg emphasizes — often — is that fascism does NOT equal Hitler, whether the object of the characterization is conservative or liberal. He (Goldberg, not Hitler) praises some of the things he considers fascist, including parts of the New Deal.
In surfing the various blogs (a retiree has a lot of time to waste) I’ve been struck by the virulence of the criticism of the book and by the proportion of criticism that comes from people who clearly are not aware of what’s in it.
It’s entirely possible that in choosing a title guaranteed to attract attention — it comes from H.G. Wells, who was kind of a progressive icon, by the way — he chose a title that was also guaranteed to alienate and repel a lot of people.
If you judge the book by its cover, you can reasonably assume it equates liberals with Hitler.
Maybe we need some new definitions. I cannot imagine denying Fidel Castro is a fascist, based on any reasonable criteria, but I’m sure a lot of people would find that a ridiculous statement because in their minds, a leftist cannot be a fascist.
Goldberg postulates that although “1984″ is most often cited as what a fascist future might hold, a more likely society would be something like “Brave New World.”
Fascism with a smiley face.
[...] PratikG.com |Celebrity Gossips|Hollywood Gossips|Bollywood Gossips wrote an interesting post today on Fascism and DemocracyHere’s a quick excerpt…backed securities climb past $200 billion, talk among banking executives for an epic government rescue plan is suddenly coming into fashion. [...]
I’m greatly frustrated by definitional debates. We don’t need a new vocabulary. Our old one works just fine.
When we speak of big government, we do not mean “big armies,” we mean higher taxes for things other than military incursions.
Finding fascism then in the bossy forces of the left is as easy as finding it in the bossy forces of the right. The “want to control to your body” fascists are just as bad as the “want to control your paycheck” fascists. They find their roots in submission of the individual to the state- they are ALL fascists.
If Goldberg wants to engage in definitional debate to remind us the liberals are fascists, he’d do so MOST easily by constantly repeating outloud that the body moralists (in his club) are fascists too.
BUT,
Jackbooted thugs protecting the free flow of our life blood in foreign lands for our own benefit are NOT fascists. They are protecting our capitalism. Our armed forces are the one inch we budge philosophically. A strong military is the only acceptable use of government’s obligatio to ensure a free market.
But we are sacrificing blood and treasure to protect the free flow of oil and we will continue to do so… it follows then that we each personally have a moral obligation to seek to reduce our need of oil – with our votes (tax cuts) with dollars (spending). All of us should be cutting back on the dollars we seek from the government. Patriotism is giving up social programs. Patriotism is buying local food. Patriotism is investing in alt.fuel technology. Patriotism is joining the military. Patriotism is putting your hand back in your own pocket.
Wow!-This just keeps getting better.
Hughvic- I agree-don’t do yourself a disservice by underestimating the power of your commentary. One of the things that first attracted me to Obama’s candidacy was a small meeting I had with him a year ago when he said he wanted to go beyond left-right models of thinking towards “common ground”. That’s what you are talking about in the classic definition of liberalism and what Eadwacer and the Giant snail are suggesting. However Eadwacer, unless we are all ready to sign on to the anarchist creed, I’m not sure that putting Libertarianism at the pinnacle of the chart right now is realistic.
STS-I think your point is well taken. The right is so tired of the term “fascist” being applied to them whenever their more authoritarian posture emerged. Goldberg is trying a bit of Orwell’s “Newspeak”-up is down, right is left, war is peace.
Doop-Don’t worry. Your critique did force me deeper into Goldberg’s and I have more appreciation of some of his argument, despite my continuing big argument.
I also must confess that I am in no way in the same league as the authors and contributors above. I’m a high school dropout with no higher education. My vocabulary is minimal, and often misused, my grammar and punctuation lacking, and without a spell-checker I’d be completely unintelligible.
Having said that, I tend to look at the world, and topics like these, through more grass-level sight, or what I would consider common sense interpretation more than anything else. At face value.
Talk about semantics, and various definitions for the same terms only confuses me. Mostly because I don’t understand these nuances so well.
But I believe that I can see and understand the basic topic at hand here, and without taking ideological sides in terms of Right or Left, express what I see in more simplistic forms.
Call it Fascism, or Classic Fascism, or Liberal Fascism or Hitler or George Bush Fascism or whatever. I mean, isn’t that kind of splitting hairs here? Aren’t we all still talking about the same thing in terms of big money interests influence over, and strategic relationships with, government.
The quest for greater wealth and power seems to me to be inherent in the human nature. And those who gather large amounts of it nearly always want more. And in most cases, the ones who want it the most seem to have less concern for what the rest of us end up with. It’s a very selfish quest.
Indeed, in any given environment there’s a finite quantity of resources to go around, so the more one person takes, the less it leaves for the rest to share in.
Furthermore, people (or worse, non-human entities such as corporations) will use their existing wealth and power to secure more. To capitalize on their already advanced status by exerting their influence where it will return the most.
For a wealthy individual or corporation to try and buy favors from governments, or even become an integral part of the government for their own selfish reasons is only natural.
Considering the vast amount of wealth at stake as a consequence of regulations and a vast tax base to tap into, it can be a virtual windfall of profit and power if one plays their cards right.
Money talks and quid pro quo is the nature of the business in big government as much as anything else. It naturally evolves due to human nature.
I can think of fewer better examples than the current state of affairs here in the U.S. where money has completely corrupted the political process. Money runs everything and you can’t even get a seat at the table if you don’t have an obscene amount of it, or the power to bring it in one way or another.
Politicians pander to the greater public during election cycles because, fortunately, there is still something to the voting process and they also need that to get, or keep, their seat at the table. But once in office, virtually nothing of benefit to the masses is ever done. To the contrary, deals are made and legislation is passed that benefits only those who have purchased those benefits through enormous funding of the process, and those playing the game. And, I might add, at the sacrifice of the greater good.
Corporatism seems to be a good term right now here in the U.S. because it is the corporations that appear to have virtually seized control of what our government does, and for their selfish profit potential. Indeed, many of our most powerful government officials have vested interests in these same corporations. Cheney and Halliburton anyone? How about the Bush family, an it’s personal oil industry interests, and it’s personal defense industry interests. Heck most of our elected Congress are business people invested in businesses doing business with, or affected by, their very government. What we have here folks is a major conflict of interest.
Take for example, NAFTA and similar trade deals (not surprisingly embraced by both sides of the political aisle). Crafted and purchased mainly by multi-national corporations, it greatly reduced, or eliminated, tariffs allowing them to fire a well-compensated working class in America, move manufacturing out of the country where they could capitalize on low wages (to put it nicely), lack of expensive regulations, as well as tax laws allowing them to sell their own products to themselves at artificially booked profit scales virtually eliminating their tax liability to the U.S. government. All to improve that next fiscal year’s bottom line.
So, now we’ve have this decades-long process of completely decimating America’s manufacturing base — which is what made this country the economic superpower it is, or soon to be once was — so that multi-national corporations could make more profit. And the consequences of this has been a slow but steady bleeding of wealth from the middle class, redistributed to the most upper class, and leaving fewer and fewer “living wage” jobs left for our society. Not to mention what “record trade deficits” ever since actually means; money leaving this country instead of the other way around.
Add to that skyrocketing health care costs (again primarily affecting the the middle class) and you end up where we are today. People can’t pay their mortgages, or credit cards and we’ve got an economy in serious peril. In short, due to the lack of good paying jobs for the working class in this country.
All the while, the rich have been getting richer, and it’s all been enabled by wealthy and powerful interests essentially buying from our government what they need to get richer.
Capitalism, as I understand it in theory, is and can be a great system. Unfortunately, the not-so-nice side of it (greed) will always take control of the process and corrupt it.
Capitalism must be regulated. The playing field must be kept level and fair, or it will self-destruct in the long run.
Of course, regulation is just what capitalists don’t want, and they buy that away from the government so they can make more money, and the cycle continues and things get worse.
Unregulated, so-called “free market” capitalism does not work, and never has, because of greed. There are always people, entities, that want, and can take, too much for the greater good of the society. So called “Free Trade” is just one of those euphemisms for creating a set of rules, or lack thereof, which allow excessively greedy corporations to exploit global resources for their own profit, but always at the expense of the common people in all nations involved.
“Privatization” is also little more than a euphemism for directing obscene amounts of public tax money into the pockets of well-connected businesses, or so-called “Crony Capitalism”. No bid contracts anyone?
NAFTA, Health Care, Bankruptcy laws, etc., all essentially written by those who will benefit by those changes, and it ain’t you and me in most cases.
Our elected officials in the U.S., for the most part are, beholden to big money interests that get them elected, and then reelected, and these interests expect something in return for this. And they get it. And the rest of us pay for it.
The U.S. economy is currently poised to self-destruct, but it’s only here because of decades long trade policies that were written by corporate interests, enacted by bought and paid for politicians (on both sides of the aisle), and is best categorized as unregulated, free market capitalism at work. It has no social ethic. It cares not what happens to those who will suffer the consequences of these actions. Millions killed, maimed and/or displaced in Iraq for these very free market capitalist quests.
Millions of kids without health care in this country due to these very free market capitalist quests.
Millions of American’s fired from their ‘living wage’ jobs, and an entire manufacturing base killed off in this country due to these very free market capitalist quests.
It simply doesn’t work. Greed perverts the process every time. Capitalism must be regulated to keep the paying field level and fair. The only alternative is what we see today. The rich get richer, and wealth gets more concentrated, and everyone else falls by the wayside.
That’s Fascism alright. Corporatism. Whatever you want to call it, it’s greedy people, with no social ethic, doing what ever they need to do to acquire more wealth and power. Government is simply the most attractive and potentially rewarding path to go, and in no small part for the reasons of regulation and the enormous tax base to feed at.
So, we can call it what we will, but it’s still the same thing; greed…money…power…corrupting governments.
And it’s the rule rather than the exception.
In the U.S., I hesitate to say that I see even darker times ahead as this long term cycle continues to only get worse. Without a fundamental change in the way the game is played, i.e, taking the money out of the political process, I can’t imagine how things could change for the better. Big money is only getting more influential in our system with each passing year.
Paradoxically, it’s the very individuals who are the only ones vested with the power to change the rules — our elected officials — who benefit the most from the current system. Those who currently feed off the gravy train of wealth and power that their positions bring them.
Who of these people is going to bite the hand that feeds them and change the rules for the better of society at large, rather than their own personal wealth. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
The U.S. government is strongly opposed to admitting that large scale pollution of our environment (by huge corporations) could have devastating effects on the human race in the future. And big business says that “global warming” is a hoax. Of course they say that. To otherwise accept this theory means more expensive business practices to reduce pollution and thus their bottom line. Big business cares more about next quarter profits than the future of humanity, and they have the power over our government to ensure that our government is slow to move in the right direction on this issue, if at all. It’s all about the money.
Fascism, corporatism, free market capitalism. It’s all essentially the same thing in this regard. The human quest for greater wealth and power corrupts the system.
These are, of course, my opinions only, though I may tend to state them as fact, because that’s what I believe. However, I would also argue that the very facts in front of us, as well as history behind us, tend to bore out these logical conclusions. It’s not rocket science to see that money and power corrupts. It’s happened throughout history, and as we should all know, those who don’t acknowledge history are doomed to repeat it. Or however that saying goes.
Thanks for providing this forum for people like me to express their opinions.
By the way, I found this blog via a recent link over at BoingBoing.
I’d like to address each—or perhaps all—of you, in reverse order, if I may. Cufford, I’m about the farthest you could ever get from a credentialist; I just appreciate the clear, bright light you shed on Jon’s conversations. Be very careful with that, by the way; as at Livermore they have light that can wreak havoc, so I conclude that your kind of light may be unwelcome. (I left you a note a ways back.)
Jon, my guess is that Obama needs to moot the Left/Right dichotomy simply because he is a neo-Marxist committed to The Struggle. His subordination to doctrinaire Marxists in Hawaii and with Marxist Pan-Africanists while at Oxy hints at this, but not as much as his obfuscatory rhetorical vagueness and his bracingly specific trillion-dollar spending package do. I feel sorry for your colleagues in the American Professoriat: for decades now they’ve taken a shotgun approach to grooming young Marxists in the hope that one of them might someday be President, and now they’re going to get one and he’s running as a Democrat. Poor tweedheads.
Morgan, I agree with you about the banality of definitional debates—which is why I thought to beg off in the first place—but I have seen repeatedly, and over the course of decades, how the thinking person’s power maniac knows the importance of gaining definitional control. Case in point: school dropout. Who controls the definition of “dropout” controls the stats that drive the money and the power flowing therefrom—and all at the expense of children, of course.
So I think that rhbee displays a keen sense for the jugular in pointing immediately to this definitional lever of control. (Though, rhbee, a lecture’s what I was trying to avoid by sending instead my regrets.) And thegiantsnail likewise is helpful in explaining why our accepting other people’s idiosyncratic word choices simply greases a slippery slope to a hard landing upon the angry conclusion that, by accepting the author’s definitional premises, you had been taken at the outset.
And Doop, fantastic! Just look at what you bring to the table: a professional-grade BS detector; a lifetime of undertaking democratic projects with democratic tools, such as American Plainsong—transparent prose; a proven commitment to the Constitution; a healthy cynicism; a wealth of knowledge drawn from the past—from your own and from History’s.
OK. The other night John McCain unveiled his core apologia contra Obama: Barack is the Pied Piper beckoning voters to take with him “a vacation from history”, in flight from ideas thoroughly and tragically discredited by past experience. In short, Obama’s on the wrong side of history, and it is he, the youthful candidate, who ironically is Old Hat.
Put that into your pipes and smoke it, won’t you?
Doop:
“Goldberg emphasizes — often — … that fascism does NOT equal Hitler”
So why does his logo have a Hitler mustache?
My basic point is that the book is generic filler (largely unoriginal “research”) underneath an agit-prop title.
Morgan W:
“Jackbooted thugs protecting the free flow of our life blood in foreign lands for our own benefit are NOT fascists. They are protecting our capitalism. Our armed forces are the one inch we budge philosophically. A strong military is the only acceptable use of government’s obligatio to ensure a free market.”
Ouch! I for one, strongly disagree with this characterization of our military as “jackbooted thugs.” They have been sent on a fool’s errand, but they are NOT the equivalent of Nazi thugs. The casual FDR as “fascist” line also introduces a dangerous moral equivalence between murderous thugs and a guy who at worst got somewhat carried away with central planning.
Also, the military is NOT the only legitimate function of the federal government. The administration of justice domestically is just as important. We may have gotten over-involved in social engineering at times, but I believe social insurance (properly designed) is a profoundly natural function of government. The trick is how to design it to avoid moral hazard. The fact that this is difficult is no argument against it. It’s hard to maintain the balance of powers among the three branches of government too. That’s not a reason to adopt semi-elective dictatorship by the White House.
Cufford- Screw the college education. You put many of us academics to shame. Your analysis is right on the mark and that’s what I was trying to say. We live in a corporatist state. Unfortunately this state of things continued through 8 years of Clintonism, so if Goldberg had used the Title “Liberal Corporatism” I probably wouldn’t have got my knickers in a twist.
Hugh-As usual, you bring us back to the verities. I must say that your thought that Obama is a Marxist, is somewhat off the mark, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have agreed with this Quote from Karl. “Within the capitalist system,all methods for raising the productiveness of labor are brought about at the cost of the individual laborer”
Of course the very conservative Chief Economist of Morgan Stanley said much the same thing a couple of years ago-“The extraordinary stagnation of earned labor income reflects a fundamental breakdown of the relationship between worker pay and productivity”
Talk about cognitive dissonance.
Jon, while it’s true that the various cartels have fought tooth and claw to deregulate the government restrictions over they way they can run their industries, they are a far cry from seeking or even desiring a ‘free market’ as this is usually understood, so we could check Goldberg and see if this isn’t what he meant.
For an example of what I mean, take the oil companies, who fight against the environmental regulations that restrict where and how they can drill, but they are more than happy to take government handouts in the form of tax breaks and special depreciation rules.
Television networks don’t like submitting to the FCC ‘decency’ fines and decrees, but they are dead-set against opening up the airwaves and allowing just anybody to start broadcasting.
Pharmaceutical companies and health insurance companies regularly inveigh against public-health initiatives as ‘flat out socialism’ but they are more than happy to write Medicare laws that increase government spending on their drugs and services with no checks on the prices they can charge.
I do think the root here, getting away from the ‘socialist-facist’ name-calling, involves how heavily the government interferes with our lives, and who gets to decide on the extent and reach of that interference. It seems to me the big Fortune 500 firms, especially those whose historic business has been so regulated that they have grown up dealing with the government regulators even more than with their own customers (take broadcasting or the telecommunications industries for examples), now readily accept that government should be involved, that it should be involved at the national level, and that they should be consulted and even deferred to in setting policies.
The rest of us, the ‘voters’ and ‘citizens’ are left out of the process.
Going more local seems the best solution to this problem. But alas, many of our problems can’t be solved locally, in particular everything to do with the physical commons: the environment. That is a global set of problems and can only effectively be dealt with on the global level.
The other big problem I see is lack of transparency. Everything, and I mean every thing, any government does, should be open and public. No secrets! This is another horrible legacy President Wilson left us with, the State Secrets Act, one of the current administration’s favorite tools for evading judicial scrutiny.
I am flattered, but as a columnist I was a BS producer, not detector.
I think I’m looking at this a lot more simplistically than most of you. Having been both a liberal (gave a week’s salary to McGovern) and a conservative (now), I’ve always thought that if you had to illustrate the difference in a single thought, it would be that the liberal wants government to regulate everything except sex, and the conservative wants government to regulate sex and nothing else.
More seriously, that the liberal thinks people should serve the state and conservatives think the state should serve the people.
Liberals don’t put it that way, of course, and I’m sure would be offended by that characterization. Instead of “the state” the liberal might say “the greater good” or “society.”
But it’s basically the same thing, because it involves government making decisions for individuals about their personal lives.
So when I read Goldberg’s definition of fascism, it isn’t hard for me to make the leap he wants me to make. It doesn’t have diddly to do with Hitler or anti-semitism.
After all, what does “Ask not what your country can do for you, etc.” mean if not what I just said? That doesn’t mean I think it’s a bad idea; far from it. But it’s a short trip from asking what you can do for your country and being told by the country what you have to do for it.
With all this said, I think we are successfully back to the Political Compass:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_compass
Let’s please not get confused about labels again.
Jon, I think it is obvious to many of us, that Obama as the “most liberal” of the US Senate falls much closer to the Marx side of the compass than does the bond market (Greenspan). Do you really disagree with this analysis?
It seems to me, that you need to put your own self out there – do you really think there is some “new way” that many intelligent folks don’t see?
I’m able to overlook your insistence of a new way, because I figure you, like Obama, want the same old thing, you are just trying to sell it in shiny packaging to a group of people who’ve never yet heard it before. Said another way, I don’t mind a crass attempt to manipulate others in your interest, but I’d be weirded out if I thought you really believed there was something new under the sun.
Morgan- I’m happy you brought out the Political Compass. I use it in my own teaching. I would place myself firmly in the bottom left square. I have one problem with the Libertarian philosophy, which is that belief that just getting the government out of the way of business leads to stuff like Predatory lending, Savings and loan fraud, Vioxx, etc. There are still to many greedy corporate actors willing to game the system and so the state has to look out for the citizen who doesn’t own a lobbyist.
To you and Doop–the new politics I am trying to conceive says they we really do have an inherent bias towards cooperation for some higher purpose. With new tools (social networks, online resources) the cost of cooperation, which Adam Smith thought was prohibitive, goes down. That allows a new politics that is neither coercive, nor a relentless race of self interest to the bottom.
Is predatory lending anything like legalizing drugs and requiring people control themselves? Isn’t a source of that control based on seeing other people who can’t control themselves?
Of course we have a inherent bias towards cooperation – notice the prisoner’s dilemma, it proves itself most dramatically in the face of government threat.
Prisoner’s dilemma proves out the best course is to lie, obscure the truth, to protect yourself from government punishment.
The market itself is more complicated, when to cooperate in the market is simply one strategy of competition. Either way, you shouldn’t use “cooperation” as proof of a desire for government.
The problem with libertarianism is that as good as it sounds in theory, people (even conservatives, for the most part) are human beings. I can make a strong argument for not helping someone who has brought disaster upon himself by making poor decisions, but I’m not going to let the s.o.b. starve to death.
I’m re-reading “Atlas Shrugged” now for the first time in maybe 30-35 years. It’s the 50th anniversary of its publication. Rand is wacko, but she makes some points.
Jon, I’m all for cooperation between the parties, as long as neither has to abandon principle. What I fail to understand is why the Obamaniacs are so sure he will produce it. He never has in the Senate, or even shown a willingness to go along with others who have. For heaven’s sake, even Leahy voted for John Roberts, for example, but Obama didn’t. I don’t think there’s a single contentious issue on which he has reached across the aisle, or even grasped a hand that reached across to him.
No Republican has voted with his party as frequently as Obama, who has been more in lockstep with the party leadership than people considered incredibly partisan, like Kennedy.
Why, in the words of Al Gore, should we expect a zebra to change its spots?
Doop-Obama worked with Republican’s on his Ethics reform bill and also worked closely with Lugar on the Nuclear proliferation legislation.
All I know is there are a lot of Republicans going to vote for him in the fall.
Jonah Goldberg responded to the original post. You can see it here:
http://liberalfascism.nationalreview.com/
I think he handles your points quite nicely.
Well, I fold, as I happen not to fall anywhere on that compass, and know of too many people, dead and living, who don’t belong on it either.
Totalitarianism, for example, belongs in place of Authoritarianism, but the model won’t allow for that because of its boundary between Left and Right, which, as Arendt said, merge in Totalitarianism. When Orwell delivered his climactic line, “The Party seeks power for its own sake”, he meant ANY party.
Politics is dominated by power maniacs, petty and grandiose, for whom ideology is a mere stalking horse.
If the definitively Liberal term “social instrumentalism” seems obscurantist, then let’s just say “social engineering”. People such as yerztrooly want to know where rulemakers mark that crucial line. It’s not on the compass either. To the extent that people’s fingertips are proudly stained with blue ink, economic systems or corporate structures or trust-busting or monopolization—and all social institutions— are mere instrumentalities of power, benign or (usually) not.
One radical—I won’t bother parsing that dear word—alternative to this politics-as-powermongering is an active politics of Love. That may mean to one person the lovely teachings of His Holiness the Dalai Lama; and to others a Hippie ethic, or a Judeo-Christian one, or a secularized version thereof, e.g. the feminist Ethic of Care. In the recent State of the Black Union conference, it was given many explicit expressions, replete with practical examples.
Not on the compass.
I keep getting back to diagrams of history: cyclical? Linear? Neverending? A beggining, middle and end? Upslope? Downslope? Hiccups? Mark Twain’s “stutter”?
Tell me what someone’s conception of history is, and that’s all the information I require to decide whether we can work together toward a political objective. For example, if someone truly regards herself as a “Progressive”, then I’m out the door.
Blowing the labels completely away, the question simply gets at where you are on the tension between the individual and the State.
If you subscribe to the idea of a small number of Smart Folks (SF) calling all the shots, then you’ll answer one way, and if you are confident in individuals, then you’ll answer another.
Seven chapters into LF, Goldberg seems concerned that the SF have indeed played a shell game with the terms.
To quote Page Hamilton in “Pure”, it’s a ploy to
“Blur the details
of your hand
anything your
barren conscience
can’t defend”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPYvl5Alt7s
I dig the Helmetunage, and sure, it’s legerdemain, but I can’t boil it down to the tension between Individual and State. The reason I can’t is that when it comes to the label of “liberal fascism”, the giant turd in the middle of the room is the Academy in America.
Your dualism does work really well where state action is involved. It explains, for example, why Church/State conflict, as the case law shows, tends to play out on public school sites, where individuals are by force of law to surrender their individual children to the _______ [fill in blank] of the State. In this context, I think your “tension” would produce this kind of question: What is the State? Where does it live? Why does it insist on eating children for breakfast?
But it breaks down with the Academy, since the Higher Ed biz is run on status factors set by mostly private “elites”—schools, such as USC, in which there is no clear state actor; in which, actually, there is no clear actor at all, but only ideology and the contests for control of that ideology.
Free Speech [FS] vs.[/] Speech Codes [SC];
Western Civ [WC] vs. Political Correctness [PC];
Academic Freedom [AF] vs. Cultural Relativism [CR];
Freethinking Academy [FA] vs. Liberal Fascism [LF]; so:
FS/SC + WC/PC + AF/CR = LF
Remember that Professor Martin Heidegger, before he dismissed the Jewish faculty of Freiburg University, first changed his academic title from Rector to Fuhrer.
Remember also that building the University of Virginia was Thomas Jefferson’s proudest accomplishment.
The University matters, immensely.
Not sure if this adds anything to the conversation, but Jon’s earlier comment about Marx reminded me of this quote from Kjell Nordstrom, co-author of Karaoke Capitalism (I interviewed him for a piece in 2005):
“Karl Marx was right. In Das Kapital, he argued that the workers should own the critical resources of production. If you look at the modern economy, most of what we do in business is intellectual – meetings, emails, discussions, concepts – and we call it work. But our minds are not the property of the shareholders. So Marx was, in fact, right – we are all self-owned. Neither economics nor business administration is made for this. The models, tools and theories we use in the West were developed decades ago for an industrial society. They were useful at the time, but many are not as powerful today, because the underlying assumptions – about ownership, employment and so on – are just not true any more.”
Food for thought, anyway.
Jon,
I probably should have phrased my comment about Obama more tactfully. I apologize.
Having said that, I specified “contentious” in saying he had no record of accommodation. The two examples you cited are the response I always get when I mention this, and they reinforce my point.
Yes, he joined with Tom Coburn to introduce the ethics bill. But it had 43 sponsors and passed the Senate 100-0.
To my knowledge, he has never been willing to get crosswise with his party or its leadership. I would be more impressed if he had, for example, joined the Gang of 14 to block filibustering on some judges.
He may well be able and willing to work across party lines as president. I certainly hope so. But I don’t see anything in his record that would support that.
A pal of mine pointed me to this forum and I’m finding it fascinating. My comments will probably seem unfocused because I just read the whole two threads today, but here goes:
To Jon: I just about bailed out when I saw a reference to Eric Hobsbawm. I’ve read some of his stuff. Anybody who thinks it was a major tragedy that the USSR collapsed doesn’t have much credibility with me.
To Hughvic: I agree that most neoconservatives today are simply conservatives. I occasionally kick up a fuss by describing myself as “one of those blankety-blank neocons”. By that I mean I was born and brought up a flaming liberal, but the slow acid of the 70′s made me change my mind. To way too many people on all parts of the spectrum a neocon is “a Jew whose foreign policy views I don’t like.”
To thegiantsnail: Exactly what wartime restrictions are you citing? The Alien and Sedition Act in the early 1800s? Lincoln’s supension of Habeas Corpus? The hair-raising restrictions of the Wilson administration? If nothing else Jonah Goldberg deserves praise for highlighting them. I’d heard of the Palmer raids, but didn’t realize they were just the tip of the iceberg.
To STS: Maybe I’m just a nasty person, but I’ve gagged at the Smiley Face since I first saw it decades ago. It’s always deserved that mustache and I’m glad someone finally pasted one on it!
[...] Comments Jonah Goldberg, the author of Liberal Fascism, has posted a lengthy reply on his blog to my post on his book. Since the National Review, which hosts Jonah’s blog, does not allow citizens to reply on a [...]
Goldberg is too good a writer to be genuinely misunderstood by erudite people. The priests of the academy are pretending to find him confused or confusing simply because he is writing truths that they were taught, in the interest of their careers, to ignore.
Historians have the most cause for complaint, but really all the Social Sciences are shown up by his book. Liberalism, which is precisely the ideology of Progress that he says it is, is the orthodoxy of the academy, replete with cosmological elements. Liberalism is indeed a civil religion, and it is America’s civil religion.
That makes Jonah Goldberg nothing less than a blasphemer. He should not waste his time taking his book tour to the campuses. One does not explain water to a fish.
@Hughvic. The priests of the academy are pretending to find him confused or confusing simply because he is writing truths that they were taught, in the interest of their careers, to ignore.
If you are actually in the academy and are making these judgements, you are in a low quality school. My colleagues are innovating in ways that make Goldberg crazy. Because it is a new form of “collectivism” , the one word that has got Goldberg as fearful as his other fav, “Fascism”. What do you think Linux or Apache or Firefox are but “software collectives”. These tools that run 80% of the world’s web servers, were built by the community with sweat equity, are maintained and improved by the community and have allowed people like the Google founders to make billions that would have gone to Bill Gates for Servers by using free software.
Good grief, Jon, I don’t want to get into a pissing match as to whose school is more elite or some such thing. I’m the antithesis of a credentialist anyway.
I happen not to be in what anyone would deem a “low quality school”, but I agree with you that I would have to be in one to write the stuff that Goldberg writes. As a doctoral student 20 years ago I was warned, by the chair of my faculty senate and by a rival of his with three doctorates, not to go where Goldberg has gone.
I see the gist of his book as something other than an economic thesis. It’s actually anthropological, and falls specifically into my odd baliwick, historical anthropology. Because the subject of his book is not economies; it’s religion. Civil religion.
Whoever said in these strings that Goldberg doesn’t deliver on Nazism really is off the mark. That’s exactly where Goldberg goes to show what can become of ideologies when they pretend to theories of history—all of which, as he says, are inevitably theologies of history.
People like Woodrow Wilson and Barack Obama want to write history using you and me, and our students and children, as replaceable nibs. If you happen to prefer economics, then consider Human Capital Theory, Jon. We are not that for which resources and capital exist; no, we are the resources, the capital. What’s the erstwhile personnel department at ‘SC called, may I ask?
You and I are rendered, by what JG rightly identifies as a pseudoreligion, as instruments. Our schools—indeed our perverse contemporary notions of “education—are but instrumentalities of an ideology that IS social instrumentalism par excellence.
If publishing that, in depth, at USC won’t get you fired, then you Trojans aren’t as hot as I know you to be.
Didn’t Huey Long say, “Fascism will return to the U.S. most likey brought about by anti-Fascists”?
Jon, allow me to cut to the chase on this one: were Jonah Goldberg a student in USC’s Sociology Department, his treatise should suffice as a dissertation satisfying your university’s Ph.D. requirement. Were he a doctoral student there, he ought to be able to assemble a dissertation committee that would hold his feet to the fire and make him defend his work, and appreciate the extent of his mastery and the warrant for his interpretation.
He ought to be able to do that, but in the real world he can’t—for a host of reasons. And this is not a knock on USC in particular. On the contrary, I think USC is seeing its best days yet (and certainly the Annenberg School is doing). I’m actually thrilled to see the current size of the University’s war chest, and for that and other reasons I happen to hold Dr. Sample in the highest regard. But USC is itself a text of sorts, and in my hypothetical it’s an apt stand-in for the American academy.
Liberalism is an ideology of Progress. Its principal instrumentality is human husbandry. “Education” is its favored instrument.
Nowhere is that more apparent than in the United States. No student or faculty member can sustain an academic career by stating these fairly plain truths. Such statements are suicidal not because they are false, but because they are demonstrably true.
Goldberg can say what he says only because he says so from outside the academy.
Liberalism needs to own .edu… what’s the saying? If you aren’t a liberal in your 20′s you have no heart, if you haven’t gone establishment in your 30′s you have no brain.
It doesn’t take much to “correct” liberalism. IT DOESN’T WORK. It simply fails. Foreign economies are more liberal, they do not work. I keep saying this, but since 1980, deficits have stopped “progressive liberalism” in it’s tracks.
Then even in academia, one only needs a little rightness to solve the problem. In college, I spent a bunch of time with Austan Goolsbee (Obama’s economic adviser), he’s no liberal. He gets “low taxes” means growth. Dr. Robert Mundell (of Nobel and Letterman fame) single handedly has forced Europe to stop deficit spending (the Euro), and I imagine is doing the same in China.
It doesn’t take much. Free markets aren’t pretty, emotionally they wreck your “heart,” but they alone work and nothing else does.
Yeah, Morgan, that’s an apt charicterization of what I’m saying—that liberalism needs to “own” education. Yes, because from the beginning of the use of that surprisingly new word, “education” has been a liberal project. To a true conservative, “education” is acculturation; to be educated is to be cultured, to be cultured, educated. But “educators” never have been satisfied with this definition.
I’m “heartened” by your tips on Sen. Obama’s economic advisors, and agree with your view of the tragic necessity for market economies. However, I’m anthro, not econ, so when in the Roman agora, as it were, I defer to the Romans.
Hughvic-There are many of us in the University trying to get beyond the old solutions and labels. I spent five hours yesterday afternoon at the USC Law School working with an amazing array of academics from all over about removing the legal barriers to innovation in a world of collaborative and peer production.
There wasn’t a bit of old style top down thinking for the whole five hours. I guess I’m kind of optimistic that we can get beyond this Liberal-conservative dialectic. We certainly are trying on this blog.
Yay, Jon! And three cheers for USC! I have such admiration for your university, including its law school, and I salute your interdisciplinary efforts there. When Chuch Young tried it across town a few years ago, it was to him a mere administrative convenience—fiscal streamlining. Sigh…
Twenty-five years ago I had one hell of a time selling my deans, undergrad and esp. grad, on the wisdom of multidisciplinary work. Took years of petitioning, and whollotta moolah that came out of my Top Ramen stipend from working campus jobs. When I received my bachelor’s degree, I was the only student of 35K+ to have a multidisciplinary major (instead of major + double-minors). Now, at that school, well over 1,000 students/year graduate with them.
So please keep up the good—if long & tedious—work, and keep the Trojan end up in so doing. And you’re right, it is happening on this blog; not least because you had the guts to debate young Mr. Goldberg democratically, instead of autocratically or, worse still, educratically. (yuck!)