Fascinating Rhythm Nation

On the whole, I think Michael Rosen has it right here.  The trouble is that many people, even ostensible non-fascists, think of Nazis as having the coolest look: uniforms, shiny jackboots, medals, riding *gasp* crops, precision marching corps.

Which is why this video from the 1980s has always disturbed me:



I'm not going to say that uniforms, boots, etc. are necessarily, essentially fascist, but the look here is not good, to put it mildly.  Are you lost, broken?  We will teach you the steps, and make you one of us.  Don't ask questions, there's no time for your doubts.  Join us now before it's too late.

Those Who Think They Remember History

A friend posted this to Facebook today:

Oh myyyy, as George Takei would say (but probably wouldn't, since he likely agrees with it).  Like I haven't heard liberal Democrats saying basically the same things about the media whenever they didn't like what the media were reporting.  If Hitler did denounce "the lying media," it wasn't because he was a Nazi, it was because he was a politician.  Like I haven't heard liberal Democrats demanding laws which would allow (require) the government to rule on whether the news being reported was "true," and to punish unruly media for "lying." (Meaning, again, saying things that the liberal Democrats didn't want to hear. As often as not, those things were true, like the revelations about Hillary Clinton during the campaign. But the truth hurts. And "lie" doesn't mean "what I don't want to hear.")

And like the media haven't discredited themselves by collaborating with the government, acting as stenographers for the powerful, passing on Bush's and Obama's (and their predecessors') lies.  I have to admit, though, the widespread unpopularity of the media in the US has little or nothing to do with the media's dishonesty or corruption; I'm not sure exactly why the media are unpopular -- which doesn't keep people from tuning in to them, either. But it hasn't got anything to do with their "corruption." Most Americans, like most human beings, are perfectly comfortable with corruption, at least the corruption of their own factions and buddies, and from what I see, most Americans wouldn't know whether what they saw in the news was true or not.

The same friend also shared this meme today:

My first reaction was that this was an accurate description of mainstream American politics over the past century and more.  It describes conditions under the Obama regime no less than under his predecessors or successor.  Outside our borders, American politicians and corporate leaders have liked, praised, supported, and protected right-wing dictatorships, including those with fascist or even Nazi leanings.  The US war with Nazism was an anomaly; at that, it wasn't until Hitler actually attacked the US that our elites were willing to fight him.  After World War II was over, the US supported Nazi, Fascist, and Japanese collaborators, using them to crush the socialists, Communists and Jews who'd led and fought in the resistance.  (Which is one reason why seeing the word "resistance" used by liberals to refer to their opposition to Trump sets my teeth on edge.)

Then I realized why the meme seemed oddly familiar to me: It was very much like, and perhaps even based on the "Communist Rules for Revolution" things that the fascist American right circulated when I was growing up.  We didn't have memes and Facebook in those days, but we did have mimeographs and photocopiers, and the propaganda mills of the Right took advantage of the available technology.  I'm often amazed, in fact, when I remember that the available media included the mainstream corporate media, but corporate bigwigs have always been happy to subsidize right-wing wackery.

Here's one version of the Communist Rules, allegedly codified by the Reds and discovered by Our Boys in Uniform in Germany in 1919:

1. Corrupt the young, get them away from religion. Get them interested in sex. Make them superficial. Destroy their ruggedness.

2. Get control of all means of publicity.

3. Get people's minds off their government by focusing their attention on athletics, sexy books and other trivialities.

4. Divide the people into hostile groups by constantly harping on controversial matters of no importance.

5. Destroy the people's faith in their natural leaders by holding the latter up to contempt, ridicule and obloquy.

6. Always preach true democracy, but seize power as fast and as ruthlessly as possible.

7. By encouraging government extravagance, destroy its credit and produce fear of inflation with rising prices and general discontent.

8. Foment unnecessary strikes in vital industries, encourage civil disorders, and foster a lenient and soft attitude on the part of government toward such disorders.

9. By specious argument cause the breakdown of the old moral virtues, honesty, sobriety, continence, faith in the pledged word, ruggedness.

10. Cause the registration of all firearms on some pretext, with a view to confiscating them and leaving the populace helpless. 

Like whoever composed the Early Warning Signs of Fascism, whoever wrote this simply made a list of current trends they disliked, and attributed them to the official enemy they wished to attack.  It could be seen as a subset of apocalyptic literature, in which someone attributes an account of recent history to a prophet who lived centuries before.  Here's another recent example, with the element of projection brought to the forefront:

Let’s say somebody were [in the White House] and they wanted to destroy this nation. I would create division among the people, encourage a culture of ridicule for basic morality and the principles that made and sustained the country, undermine the financial stability of the nation, and weaken and destroy the military. It appears coincidentally that those are the very things that are happening right now.

In any case, the resemblance between the incipient Trump regime and the supposed characteristics of fascism is due to fascist and proto-fascist sympathies and trends in America that have always been with us.  Those sympathies and trends have also always been opposed and fought, but that opposition has mostly been against the American mainstream, as exemplified by its leaders, business elites, and official media.  Donald Trump is frightening because he wants to extend and confirm those trends, but in so many respects -- his hostility to media, his love of big business, his disregard for civil liberties and civil rights, his embrace of state violence, and so on -- he represents continuity with his recent predecessors, including Barack Obama, and his defeated opponent Hillary Clinton.

One doubt nags at me, though: Do people really need to know accurate history in order to oppose and work against Trump?  I suspect not.  Sometimes I think that lies motivate and mobilize people more effectively than truth.  Could people oppose Trump effectively if they admitted the ways in which he simply continues many of Obama's policies, as Obama continued so much of the legacy of George W. Bush?  I don't know.  Maybe it makes no difference, but I think it could make a difference in what the Resistance would do if they defeated him: a kinder, gentler, less uncouth Trumpism, most likely -- but that means Obama and Clinton.

Meritocracy in Action, Episode 5487

Yesterday I wrote that "people who make large amounts of money in business or finance often think, and are thought by some, to know how the government should be run, or even just the economy.  Aside from the huge business and fiscal disasters over which such people have presided, their public statements since the re-election of Barack Obama should have disabused most people that they're not even qualified to decide their own salaries: they routinely think they're worth a lot more than they are."

New examples keep turning up.  The other day, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey made headlines when he claimed that the Affordable Care Act was "like fascism," marking himself out as a blustering fool.  So of course he quickly attempted to rewrite the record, digging himself in even deeper, as public figures from Todd Akin to Barack Obama usually do when they try to make it all better.

Mackey conceded that the word "fascist" wasn't the most felicitous choice: "it's got so much baggage attached to it ... Of course, I was just using the standard dictionary definition."  It's hard to see how the ACA fits with the dictionary definition of fascism; maybe Mackey took "Obamacare" literally and thought that Obama just wrote the law himself and signed it without going through Congress?  There are all kinds of objections that have been made by rational people to the ACA, but it is not an example of a strong autocratic government led by a dictatorial leader, etc.

"We no longer have free-enterprise capitalism in health care," he said. "The government is directing it. So we need a new word for it."

Mackey defined it later on HuffPost Live. "I think I'm going to use the phrase government-controlled health care. That's where we're evolving to right now," he said.

 Of course this is raving, pure and simple.  Arguably we haven't had "free-enterprise capitalism" in health care since the insurance companies took it over a few decades ago.  Almost no doctors are independent small-business owners anymore, as many were when I was a kid; most now work for the HMOs.  Corporate capitalism is not free-enterprise capitalism, and the American health care system is not 'directed' by the government, it's directed by giant corporate entities.  Which, as been pointed out at tiresome length in the past few years, is why our health care system is so wasteful, inefficient, and overpriced, with poorer outcomes than other industrialized nations.

The very limited regulation of the insurance companies mandated by the ACA isn't "government-controlled healthcare", anymore than food inspection is "government-controlled food production."  If you're going to talk about government 'direction' of health care in the US, you could talk about state licensing of medical practitioners, or federal oversight of drug safety, or Medicare.  I think most Americans would agree that if Medicare is fascism, fascism isn't so bad after all, and we could use a good deal more of it.

Of course our neighbor to the north has what Mackey would probably also call "government-controlled healthcare", but few would call Canada fascist because of it.  England's National Health Service goes even further in that direction, but again, it isn't fascist.  (Mackey previously compared the ACA to socialism in a 2009 Wall Street Journal op-ed, according to the HuffPost article I've linked here.  But you can't blame a man for evolving; he was so much younger and less mature then.)  Most developed countries have government involvement in the health care system to keep costs down and manage outcomes, for that matter.  Our corporate-controlled system is the main reason why Americans' health is so much worse than citizens of other First World countries.  And don't forget, President Obama and his core supporters find it hilarious or outrageous that anyone should think Canada's system might be a good example for us.

Richard Dawkins has railed against clergy and theologians being allowed to participate in public discussions.  They couldn't be any worse, and often aren't, than our corporate elites.  Which doesn't mean I want business types to be silenced; better they should be allowed to remind us, as often as necessary, how dumb they really are.

Conniption Accomplished

RWA1 has returned, with a link to a Washington Post column by George Will denouncing Obama's celebration of the American military in his State of the Union speech. "Americans are not bloody likely to be marching in lockstep with our aspiring Mussolini this fall. the continuum from Teddy Roosevelt to Mussolini is not as far as American 'progressives' like to think," RWA1 commented.

My jaw literally (by which I mean "figuratively," of course) dropped when I read that. I guess it has been long enough now since the shooting of Gabby Giffords that the Right can start calling their opponents fascists again. Why, it was almost exactly a year ago that RWA1 was whimpering, along with his fellow-travelers, "It is time to retire analogies to Nazis and fascists once and for all." Even then, though, it was clear that this stricture applied only to Democrats and liberals, not to the Republican fringe. And anyway, that was then, this is now.

Still, I'm amazed by the Right's attack on Obama for indulging in some very routine military-stroking. Stuff like this:

At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations. They’re not consumed with personal ambition. They don’t obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together. Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example. Think about the America within our reach.

Compared to Bush's Commander Codpiece performance on the USS Abraham Lincoln, or his chest-bumping with Air Force Academy cadets, Obama's just going through the motions. (If he hadn't praised Our Troops, the Right would have attacked him for that.) Roy Edroso did a post this weekend on the right-wing legacy blogger Jonah Goldberg's attack on Obama's remarks. I imagine that with George Will also on the case, we'll see more of it. As with Republican criticism of Obama for using a teleprompter (a Reagan standby), it makes no sense, since Republicans have never hesitated to drape themselves in the flag and hide behind our fighting men, who got hurt protecting our right to dissent, which is why we should just shut up. (Which, again, means that we should not criticize Republican presidents. Sheer banshee howling against Democratic Presidents, including those who are Republican except in name, is okay.)

Elements of the Right have been stumbling on the mandatory worship of Our Troops lately, though. It's okay to hate them openly if they're sons of Sodom, for example. As with Newt Gingrich's sex life, this is only of interest because of the hypocrisy involved. I don't really care how many wives or mistresses Gingrich has had; what I do care about is the way he expects others to overlook his tomcatting while he continues to attack other people, gay and straight, for screwing around.

As for the rest of RWA1's remarks, I'm not a fan of Teddy Roosevelt, who was a blood-and-soil racist. (For anyone else besides TR, though, RWA1 protests that they're just trying to defend their culture.) Yup, it's true that Democrats and progressives have been big boosters of American imperialism (a term you'd better not use around RWA1 and others of his ilk), as shown by Richard Seymour in The Liberal Defence of Murder (Verso, 2008); hell, Noam Chomsky has been describing and condemning for years the American progressive push to get the United States into World War I, and their pride in spearheading the propaganda campaign to bring it about. But I never heard a peep from RWA1 or most of the Right about Bush/Cheney's militarism and trampling on civil liberties at home; I guess it's only bad when Obama does it. Bush's critics were denounced by the Right as the Islamofascists' fifth column, or their "useful idiots." Now Obama's apologists attack his critics in similar terms, which is a reminder that Partei -- oops, party loyalty and leader worship are the deciding factors here.

For all of that, though, RWA1, like the Right generally, can't bring himself to criticize Obama's actual policies and practice, not surprising since they are mainly Bush's policies and practice. Such criticism -- like serious criticism of Obama's SOTU militarism -- is the province of the Left. I don't recall RWA1 posting anything about Obama's arrogation of the power to kill and detain Americans without due process; nor could he bring himself to oppose the NATO intervention in Libya. What he thinks about Iran I don't know; I suppose that like most of the American Right and "center" he toes the Bush/Obama propaganda line about Iran as nuclear threat, but that's just it. Instead of going after specific cases, which he probably approves -- or will approve, as soon as we can get a Republican president into office -- he picks on some comparatively innocuous boilerplate in a State of the Union address.

As for "Americans are not bloody likely to be marching in lockstep with our aspiring Mussolini this fall," that has to be whistling in the dark. I suspect that for most Americans, the sentiment is bloody likely to echo our attitude during the Clinton sex scandal and impeachment: we know that the Republican candidates -- our aspiring Hitlers, I'll call them just this once, since RWA1 has brought the analogy out of retirement -- aren't attacking Obama because they care about ordinary citizens or the nation. It's primarily because he's a Democrat, second because he's black, third because he remains popular despite (or because) of the vitriol the Right throws at him. (I mean, look at me: I'm defending Obama against Republican attacks, and not because I support Obama but because the Republicans are so blatantly dishonest.) The sheer derangement of their accusations is a signal that not only that the Republicans should not be trusted with political office, it's a wonder they can find their way out the door each day. The scary part is that Obama's Democratic defenders, instead of responding sensibly, generally prefer to echo the Republican dementia.