Thomas wrote:
No. I am saying that their influence is limited as people will eventually vote on their record,
George Bush is a really, really, really bad president, Tom deLay is a dangerous ideologue, Karl Rove is a very effective smearmaster -- but neither of them is a fascist fanatic.
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Not Fascists? Simply a bad President? Will be voted out on their record? You might consider the following.
Bono's New Casualty: 'Private Ryan'
Frank Rich
Published: November 21, 2004 New York Times
As American soldiers were dying in Falluja, some Americans back home spent Veteran's Day mocking the very ideal our armed forces are fighting for freedom. Ludicrous as it sounds, 66 ABC affiliates revolted against their own network and refused to broadcast "Saving Private Ryan." The reason: fear. Not fear of terrorism or fear of low ratings but fear that their own government would punish them for exercising freedom of speech.
For complete article see:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/arts/21rich.html
Give Nixon credit for George W's 2004 election victory
You have to credit Richard Nixon for George W. Bush's election victory in 2004.
During Richard Nixon's first successful campaign for the presidency in 1968, he went around the country making very militant speeches attacking the Warren Court, especially some of the criminal justice decisions. He railed against the forces of peace and the forces of crime that were in war against each other. The Warren Court, he claimed, preferred the criminals and not the tax-paying, God-fearing, law-abiding people of America.
Nixon's pitch was fairly simple. He said that if you elected him president, he would nominate a very different kind of justice of the court. He would have judicial conservatives on the court and not this liberal crowd of Warren Court activists anymore. Nixon was elected and it was a close election and then history played into his hands.
Justices are on the court for life and good behavior. Some of them hang around for a very long time. There have been 109 justices in the over two centuries of American history. That means that, if they retired evenly, there would be a vacancy about every two years. But court vacancies tend to bunch. For example, Jimmy Carter was president for four years and there were no vacancies.
On the other hand, when Nixon was elected as president, in the first term of Nixon's presidency, there were four vacancies. One short of a majority on the court. The country was on the edge of their chairs waiting to see what Nixon would do.
Nixon started off with what he called his "Southern Strategy" to lock-up southern votes in the next presidential election. So he appointed Clemon Hainsworth, a very eminent justice from the fourth circuit who was defeated. Then he reached even further into the bottom of the barrel and nominated G. Harold Carswell, who was not fit to be on the lower bench, much less on the U.S. Supreme Court. His nomination was defeated.
But Nixon's two nominations of Southerners, whose nominations he knew would fail but would inflame conservative voters, succeeded beyond his highest hopes. Nixon's "Southern Strategy" prevailed and Southern voters abandoned the Democracts and became and voted Republican---then and since.
In case you doubt it, review the locations of the Red and Blue states on the Electoral College Map. Then look back at the Electoral College maps of the states prior to and after the Civil War. Slavery and States Rights shaped those maps. The new States Rights issue is the separation of Church and State, which is not defined in the Constitution nor in the Bill of Rights.
Then comes the RAFs, the subject of this thread.
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Just What Was Nixon's Southern Strategy
Liberal Politics: U.S. Blog
January 02, 2004
Howard Dean's controversial remark about his desire to appeal to white Southerners with Confederate flag decals on their trucks has put Nixon's "Southern Strategy" in the spotlight some 36 years after it was first articulated.
But just what is the Southern Strategy and how has it helped Republicans to erode Democratic support in the South.
In a Los Angeles Times commentary, author Mark Kurlansky says this about Nixon and the Southern Strategy:
"In discussing the campaign ahead, Howard Dean has said on several occasions now that the Republicans will "do what they've been doing since 1968." But what exactly is that? As far as I can tell, what they've been doing is winning presidential elections. They have won six of the last nine if you count the last one that they did not exactly win.
Of course, that's not exactly what Dean meant. He meant that for him to win in 2004 he has to defeat a system established in 1968 by Richard M. Nixon. Never one to mince words, Dean has described that system as one of "coded racism." And its key code phrase was "states' rights," an old Southern favorite going back to the right to own slaves.
Nixon, always known more as an opportunist than an ideologue, assessed the political landscape when he ran for president in 1968, a time when Republicans had lost every presidential election since the Depression, except for two by Dwight D. Eisenhower. Like Dean today, he asked why are we losing and how can that be changed?
Nixon saw his opportunity in the decline of the great civil rights movement and the killing of Martin Luther King Jr. He judged that the South, a solid Democratic bloc that had never forgiven Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans for the Emancipation Proclamation, was furious about 10 years of civil rights progress and was ready to turn on the Democrats, who had received faithful Southern support since before the Civil War. In the end, Nixon defeated the Democrats not because of their worst disaster, Vietnam, but because of their greatest accomplishment, civil rights."
Noted firebrand Pat Buchanan adds some interesting commentary to the debate from an article he wrote in 2002. He criticizes neoconservatives for claiming that the Southern Strategy was based on race. Buchanan writes in The American Cause:
"The charge that we built our Republican coalition on race is a lie. Nixon routed the left because it had shown itself incompetent to win or end a war into which it had plunged the United States and too befuddled or cowardly to denounce the rioters burning our cities or the brats rampaging on our campuses.
Nixon led America out of a dismal decade and was rewarded with a 49-state landslide. By one estimate, he carried 18 percent of the black vote in 1972 and 25 percent in the South. No Republican has since matched that. To see Kristol colluding with the Times to rewrite that history to make liberals heroes and Republicans villains tells us more about him than about the era.
And where were the necons, when Goldwaterites and Nixonites were building the New Majority? Going all the way with LBJ."
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Lola wrote:Quote:Are we also going to talk about the atheist left as well?
No we're not. Start another thread, Baldimo. This one is about the FAR.
If you are not willing to consider this phenomenon in the whole context in which it operates, including the forces which it opposes; if you are not willing to consider the possibility that the behaviors you so denigrate in the "FFARR" are duplicated by analogous groups on the other side of the philosophicaL spectrum, including some held up here as exemplars of liberal thought and right action; if you are not willing to examine the subject except in the light of the prejudices so evident in the posts so far on this thread -- then I will choose to exempt myself from this convention of close-minded bigots who seem blissfully unaware of the degree to which they themselves duplicate the intolerance and narrow-mindedness they so energetically deride in others.
Wow.
I realized a while back that this thread isn't so much a tool in which to "examine and learn" as much as a kind of "therapy". A "Weeping and Gnashing II" if you will.
Quote:No. I am saying that their influence is limited as people will eventually vote on their record, and they don't like the lion's share of that record. Unfortunately, people like some of their record. For example, much of their anti-gay agenda will pass because a broad majority of Americans supports some of it. But overall, the New Right's success at pushing its agenda will be limited.
On this we agree. I was saying this before the election over the last year. Many of my friends considered me to be naive. Unfortunately I had to agree with them that they were right. I guess I was too hopeful for this election. What you and I may disagree about is how much harm the New Right will do before the voters recognize what is going on. How much harm will be necessary before the press will finally begin to focus on it. From the looks of what's happened in the last two weeks, it won't be long. However, in two years how well will the voters remember? How far will they have to inch up on us before the voters and press finally notice the distance travelled?
I'm not one who believes the problem is voter idiocy. I believe the problem is voter ignorance. And it's our task to answer our own questions about what's taking place and bring the current abuses into the light of day.
Quote:For example, it would be interesting for me to see how much of their agenda they have implemented in Texas since George Bush became governor.
The outrageous goals contained in the 2000 Texas Platform were national issues. Obviously they couldn't be implemented in Texas. But observe who is president. George Bush. Who is House majority leader? Tom DeLay. How many New Right Congressmen do we have? An alarming number. And in the last two weeks we've seen them at work.
Quote:Quote:Lola wrote:
A few fascist fanatics here and there are harmless.
No. More like: My one grandfather was a real fascist fanatic, my other grandfather fought real fascist fanatics, in a time when Germany was ruled by real fascist fanatics. George Bush is a really, really, really bad president, Tom deLay is a dangerous ideologue, Karl Rove is a very effective smearmaster -- but neither of them is a fascist fanatic.
There are obviously varying degrees of fanatical fascism. But fanaticism is fanaticism and fascism is fascism. Because they are less fanatically fascist than the Nazis makes them not fascist? That's a huge mark. They're now simply a really really really bad president, a dangerous ideologue and an effective smearmaster? It's true the world was turned upside down by the Nazis and we all suffered, some of us more than others. Are you saying that until we have a political force as horrible as the Nazis we have no fascism? Really, Thomas......surely not.
Quote:Moreover, I disagree with your conclusion that "We have to beat them at their game." I have seen -- not with my own eyes, but by eywitness accounts of acquaintances -- what the "beat them at their own game" meme did in Yugoslavia. In a similar fashion, I have seen what the "stay on the high road" meme did in eastern Europe. I've decided for myself that the "stay on the high road" meme works better. If it is effective enough to remove the creators of the Gulag, it's effective enough to remove the creators of Guantanamo Bay.
I'll have to address this later, I have to go out right now.
Quote:If you are not willing to consider this phenomenon in the whole context in which it operates, including the forces which it opposes; if you are not willing to consider the possibility that the behaviors you so denigrate in the "FFARR" are duplicated by analogous groups on the other side of the philosophicaL spectrum, including some held up here as exemplars of liberal thought and right action; if you are not willing to examine the subject except in the light of the prejudices so evident in the posts so far on this thread -- then I will choose to exempt myself from this convention of close-minded bigots who seem blissfully unaware of the degree to which they themselves duplicate the intolerance and narrow-mindedness they so energetically deride in others.
So then, george, I guess this means you don't want to talk about it. Too bad.
Lola, do you really consider George Bush a fascist?
I think he has tendencies, but I'm more worried by the people around him. Remember, America is not likely to replicate the European experience. It is a different place and a different time. What you have to look for is the underlying similarities such as manipulation of fear, a following the feels its self under siege from overwhelming outside forces of change, claims of an insidious but hidden enemy,, hyper nationalism, economic program that favors cooperations, and an intolerance and demonization of the opposition.
Lola wrote:
So then, george, I guess this means you don't want to talk about it. Too bad.
More than willing to discuss the subject Lola - I checked in to the thread in response to your invitation with just such a discussion in mind. However not on the terms established here.
I mean no personal offense to you or anyone here Lola, however those are my views of the situation, and I believe those thoughts needed expression.. We disagree, but we are still friends - as far as I am concerned.
george,
We are most certainly still friends as far as I'm concerned too. However I must respond more fully to your post. Ovr the last year or so, you have had three responses to my attempts to write about or study this subject. The first one is:
"You have an irrational hatred for Christians. You don't understand that all Christians are not fanatics."
2. "You're over reacting. There aren't that many of them. Don't worry, it'll be ok."
3. "The liberals are just as bad."
What I've asked you to do is put aside the first two objections and to look at the phenomenon with as open a mind as you can. You've said yourself that you don't like these fanatical Christians. And as for your third objection, it has nothing to do with the subject. Whether there are others just as bad or not is not the question.
I agree there are fanatics on both sides. But your fanatics are highly organized and moving in. That's the difference. But even if the liberal fanatics were as organized as the Right Wing are, wouldn't you want to look at both groups separately to understand their differences and similarities? To understand the dangers in both camps?
If we do what you want to do, we won't be looking at the New Right anymore. We'll be arguing about who is worse. I don't object at all if you want to start a thread about the liberals, what ever aspect of them you want to understand. I'll join you there and we can look at that. And I promise you that every work off my keyboard will not be, "oh yeah, well what about you?" or "you just don't like liberals."
I'm not calling you a bigot even though by your criteria I could. "Oh yeah, well you're a bigot too."" How far would we get with that?
I see that you're reluctant to look at the New Right as a subject for scrutiny, i.e., who are they, what do they believe, how well organized are they, what are their goals, how close are they to achieving their goals, how dangerous to our democracy are they? You don't have to participate on this thread. I just thought you might be willing to give it a try. But if not, then I'll love you anyway.
Quote:Lola, do you really consider George Bush a fascist?
I consider it most unlikely that George Bush is capable of being a fascist, I don't think he cares that much about anything but his fragile self image. It's the machine that uses and supports George Bush I see as so dangerous.
Lola wrote:
I agree there are fanatics on both sides. But your fanatics are highly organized and moving in. That's the difference. But even if the liberal fanatics were as organized as the Right Wing are, wouldn't you want to look at both groups separately to understand their differences and similarities? To understand the dangers in both camps?
They're not my fanatics
I see little to distinguish the conflicting groups in terms of the degrees to which they are organized.
Like the poles in a magnet, these polarizing influences cannot be meaningfully analyzed separately - they are defined by their conflict. The choice to "analyze" one or the other implicitly involves choice - and a distortion of the analysis.
Quote: . But if not, then I'll love you anyway.
Who can resist that? Always a sucker for mermaids. Here is a post of mine from another thread that further explains my views - the context there was how the Democrat party might rebound from their recent defeat. Thomas has just pointed out that the gulf between religious people and the so called 'progressive' wing of American politics was of recent origin and could conceivably be eliminated,
"Thomas' proposition that the social policies advocated by most Christian churches, and, more importantly, many of the essential beliefs of Christianity, are entirely consistent with many of the historical views of the Democrat party, is accurate to a point. It is also true that the Republican Party's creation and initial growth was closely associated with a largely Christian Abolitionist movement in the Northern states. Overall the historical and contemporary associations are decidedly mixed.
Unfortunately over the last several decades a handful of social/political issues have seriously polarized the body politic on both sides of this issue. The Democrat 'progressive' elements in our society have morphed from active participation of religious groups to something quite irreligious and finally to something rather anti-religious in both content and prevailing attitudes. Unfortunately at the same time the self-proclaimed spokesmen of 'religious' views have more and more come to represent only a segment of the spectrum, an uncompromising fundamentalist, evangelical segment of Protestantism. All this was happening amidst a general decline in the practice of religion by Americans - perhaps not to the degree found in Europe, but significant nonetheless. Moreover the Catholic Church hierarchy was rather thoroughly (and justifiably) discredited by a long tolerance of abuses, mostly of teenage boys by homosexual priests. As often happens in such polarized circumstances a perverse application of Gresham's law of currency takes hold -- radical, intolerant, uncompromising attitudes on both sides drive out more sensible, moderate ones. "
Intolerance, ignorance and prejudice are more or less the same at both ends of the spectrum. I see no merit in joining either side.
Quote:They're not my fanatics
They're controlling a larger segment of your party year by year.
Quote:I see little to distinguish the conflicting groups in terms of the degrees to which they are organized.
If you would settle down, george and look, you'd see that the New Right is highly and effectively organized. They are ahead in organization by 20 years. Liberals were caught not watching. And for years we've been ignoring an increasingly difficult problem. If only the liberals were as organized we might be more effective in counteracting the extremism of the New Right. At the moment, we're still catching our breath and recognizing the dangers for what they are.
I have no quarrel with the fundamentalists of any religion as long as they are not trying to control me. They can believe as they want, and live as they want. But this is the problem. No liberal organization is trying to force others to live or believe in a certain way. The New Right is only concerned with control.
Quote:Intolerance, ignorance and prejudice are more or less the same at both ends of the spectrum. I see no merit in joining either side.
I don't suggest you join either side. I suggest you resist the intolerance, ignorance and prejudice on both sides. Fight it wherever you find it. The New Right is breathing down your neck and while you are not intolerant, ignorant or prejudiced yourself, you are complicit.
Lola wrote:Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14-defining characteristics common to each:
(1) There are differences in degree between those Regimes and American Republicans, even Texas Republicans, that are large enough to be differences in kind.
(2) If you apply Dr. Britt's "fanatic fascism" test to Stalinist Russia, it scores 13 for 14. (Everything except "Rampant Sexism".) This suggests that we're not dealing with a specific test for fascism, but with a pretty generic concept no more precise than "bad guys".
Perhaps the esteemed Doctor Britt will be kind enough to provide us with his list of the 14 distinguishing characteristics of horseshit. However, I dooubt that will improve our ability to detect the substance.
Facism is merely a metaphorical (Italian, I believe) term used to describe the result of uniting the various organs of government, the society, and the economy under the presumably benevolent control of some actor or group.
ok ok.........I won't call the hor$esh!t bad guys fascists anymore.........although the term used metaphorically.......well, it works for me.
However, labels are beside the point. Bad guys are bad guys by whatever name.
Just a note. When I tell the guys who have had the privilege of being on the inside of some of these New Right organizations that some of the members of this forum don't believe how well they're organized and how effective they've become.......they laugh spontaneously, out loud. Of course, I don't tell them I think they're fascists. They wouldn't understand the metaphor. Now that I think of it.......... horse$h!t bad guys......... I think they might get that one. I'll try it. See what happens.
Thomas wrote:Lola wrote:Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14-defining characteristics common to each:
(1) There are difference in degree between those Regime and American Republicans, even Texas Republican, that are large enough to be differences in kind.
(2) If you apply Dr. Britt's "fanatic fascism" test to Stalinist Russia, it scores 13 for 14. (Everything except "Rampant Sexism".) This suggests that we're not dealing with a specific test for fascism, but with a pretty generic concept no more precise than "bad guys".
Quote:Why is fascism such an elusive object of inquiry? As Robert Paxton notes at the outset of his study ('The Anatomy of Fascism', Knopf), the image of fascism has a deceptive clarity:
"Everyone is sure they know what fascism is. The most self-consciously
visual of all political forms, fascism presents itself to us in vivid
primary images: a chauvinist demagogue haranguing an ecstatic
crowd, disciplined ranks of marching youths, colored-shirted mil-
itants beating up members of some demonized minority..."
But it has proved uncommonly hard to define the nature of fascism, to determine how widely the notion can usefully be applied, or what differentiates it from other political movements and regimes...
New York Review of Books, paid subscription only
Thomas
Of course, there are differences of degrees between anything happening in America and that which happened under Hitler or Mussolini. Large enough to be differences of kind? There one has the definitional problem noted above. And another potential problem too, that of categorization in black and white such that a sapling is seen to be quite other than an oak tree. Let's note too that Italy and Germany were not at all identical.
Quote: Military dictatorships and authoritarian monarchies were not an invention of the 20th century. But fascism was something else, something new and disquieting in its ability to mobilze enthusiasm and dedication, a form of modern mass politics....
Fascism, like the nationalism from which it sprang, exalted the primacy of the particular -- national or racial -- over the universal. So while communist movements could refer to a common body of dogma, however modified in practice by local circumstances, fascism appealed to different national myths, traditions, and prejudices...
the appeal to a primordial source of national being and values, endangered by the disruptive forces of moral individualism, pluralist democracy, and international capitalism, was a common and central feature of all kinds of authentic fascism, although it is not necessarily enough to distinguish it from earlier forms of nationalism...
the peculiar virulence of the fascist assault on the "internal enemy" derived from the fear of national disintegration...
Paxton is perhaps unduly limited in his approach by his thesis that fascism can only flourish where it has a democracy to fight. This leads him to the paradoxical, though not unsupported, conclusion that the only two states outside Europe where fascism is to be feared today are the United States and Israel...
(final paragraph) Hunting after instances of fascist revivals or attributing fascist characteristics to right-wing movements which go by another name can be a fruitless and paranoid exercise. The recent growth in movements of the radical right in Europe is more alarming as an index of impartience with conventional party politics and of urban degradation and anti-immigrant feeling than really dangerous, except in particular localities. Robert Paxton's book should help us to be sane and flexible, but also vigilant, in recognizing threats to democracy.
What political term makes the best fit with the present US government is something time and historical research will tell us...Nixonian, totalitarian-light, whatever.
But one has to be a bit credulous, or nationalistically blind, or perhaps just overly hopeful to avoid recognition of fascist or totalitarian impulses in the subject to hand.
Blatham --
Not to turn this into a contest -- but yes, my fascists are indeed bigger than yours. And they are bigger by such a ridiculously large margin that I can't take it serious when I hear the rhetoric about the far out Republicans being fascists. David Duke -- yes. The KKK -- sure. But not DeLay, Rove and Bush. Words do have meanings, and "fascism" is a word whose meaning I'd prefer to leave unblurred.
