To distinguish fascism from other right of center political beliefs, and to counteract the obfuscations of the New York Times and others, a reality-based conceptual framework needs to be established.
As I have long argued, the question of political terminology in the English language has a vast importance which is frequently ignored. The media use of the term “conservatism” is the most egregious of these abuses. For the media, everything right of center is conservative, thus lumping together raving reactionaries and fascist hooligans together with the very few actual conservatives, despite the fact that each of these terms means something incompatible with the others.
Fascists, who are themselves fanatical extremists devoted to the most radical and savage retrograde transformations of thought and society, are understandably eager to present themselves in the guise of conservatives. But fascists do not want to conserve anything of importance, often preaching palingenesis, meaning a radically new form of humanity itself.
The benefits of refusing to camouflage fascists by pretending they are conservatives could be immense. My personal estimate is that a new style book policy along these lines for Democrats, progressives, liberals, teachers, reporters, professors, intellectuals, sociologists, historians, and everyday Americans of good will could easily generate a bonus of 3% or more in the popular votes cast for the Harris-Walz ticket. This in turn might be enough to decide the election.
In any case, there is absolutely no reason to persist in the folly of obeying our domestic fascists when they demand to be called “conservatives.”
In a total world crisis like the present one, mass psychology often depends on the public perception of which contending political force is the stronger.
Letting fascists hide under the euphemism of “conservatives” communicates nothing but contemptible weakness and confusion. This is the inevitable subtext of the current misguided left of center stylebook.
The benefits of refusing to camouflage fascists by pretending they are conservatives could be immense. My personal estimate is that a new style book policy along these lines for Democrats, progressives, liberals, teachers, reporters, professors, intellectuals, sociologists, historians, and everyday Americans of good will could easily generate a bonus of 3% or more in the popular votes cast for the Harris-Walz ticket.
This in turn might be enough to decide the election. In any case, there is absolutely no reason to persist in the folly of obeying our domestic fascists when they demand to be called “conservatives.”
In a total world crisis like the present one,
mass psychology often depends on the public perception of which contending political force is the stronger. Letting fascists hide under the euphemism of “conservatives” communicates nothing but contemptible weakness and confusion. This is the inevitable subtext of the current misguided left of center stylebook.
A relevant factor here is that since about 1900 the United States has historically been most anti-fascist country in the world. The most distinguished anti-fascist of the 20th century and the leader of the anti-Hitler coalition was President Franklin D Roosevelt. Unlike Italy, Germany, Spain, Vichy France, and so many other nations, the United States never succumbed to a regime of domestic fascist dictatorship.
The United States never became an active ally of the fascist powers, unlike the Soviet Union, which functioned as an indispensable ally for Hitler between August 1939 and June 1941 under the auspices of the Molotov-Ribbentrop or Hitler-Stalin pact. Unlike Britain under Sir Neville Chamberlain or France under Daladier at the September 1938 Munich conference,
the United States never engaged in a systematic policy of appeasing fascism. This is the powerful historical tradition of opposition to fascism waiting to be mobilized in opposition to anti-constitutional political forces that have been convincingly identified as fascist.
Among the very few conservatives active today, we can cite former federal Judge Luttig.
If a stock market panic, economic depression, or today’s breakdown crisis of globalization has made the status quo intolerable for conservatives, many of them become REACTIONARIES. The word originally referred to people in Europe who wanted to turn the clock back to before the French Revolution, meaning monarchy, feudal nobility and aristocratic rule. In the United States,
reactionaries are often nostalgic for the way wealthy planters ruled the slave society of the American South before the Civil War. Reactionaries want to destroy labor unions, take away economic rights like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, minimum wage and child labor laws while degrading the status of women, limiting the right to vote, imposing brutal economic austerity, and discriminating against minorities.
Reactionaries, however, generally pursue these goals within the framework of established governing institutions as positions of strength, preserving the illusion of formal democracy and representative government as long as representatives of the traditional ruling class can be kept in power.
FASCISM can emerge when the economic breakdown crisis deepens, as after World War I. The ruling class and its supporters in the upper middle-classes may turn to violence and systematic political terrorism, carried out through gangs of hooligans, goons, and strikebreakers they hire to impede government functions or to smash opposition parties and labor organizations. Minorities are violently scapegoated
as part of a divide and conquer strategy to keep opposition to the regime fragmented and impotent. Concentration camps and slave labor are increasingly instituted. Deportation is a favorite tactic.
This gives rise to fascist movements, meaning that fascism is not exclusively a top-down dictatorship, but has an indispensable bottom-up radicalized mass component which is cultivated among guttersnipes, criminals, and other victims of a society ravaged by economic breakdown.
The mass movement is what makes fascism fundamentally different from a traditional police state or other form of authoritarian dictatorship. Under fascism, working people are gaslighted and manipulated into attacking and oppressing themselves based on false consciousness.
Although fascism in Italy and Germany between the world wars is most widely studied,
You mean except during the McCarthy era?
@MichaelTalon Thank you for this post. The vocabulary shifts in the media as you noted are troubling, indeed.
@MichaelTalon Yes. The radicalized mass component is part of the bundle of sticks, the fascia. That's the essence of it is, all the sticks tied together, everything under one bundle of control.
Typically presented as preventing/fighting corruption, while actually locking in impunity, so the system is fully corrupt from the get-go.
@MichaelTalon sorry, michael. just no.
what conservatives want is 'reassuring to old white men. possibly young white men'
it is not to non-men and non white people.
conservatives wish to hold onto power, their entitlement and the privileges of colonialism that uphold white supremacy.
i don't care if it's far right or just right of centre.
conservatism is not okay or reassuring to those of us not born white and likely not born cis het male.
@singlemaltgirl I know. SMG.
@MichaelTalon @singlemaltgirl I have begun to understand that the average US born citizen has no idea what the word actually fascism means. Given that world history is not taught in US public schools, that is hardly a surprise.
CONSERVATIVES are often economically comfortable people devoted to traditions and the status quo. Reactionaries tend to reject the status quo and want to turn the clock back to some more primitive form of society, where they hope to be better off. The term conservative has to do with the desire to keep, preserve, or conserve beliefs, institutions, and practices. On a superficial level, it is not threatening but rather it sounds somewhat reassuring.