Fascism is a Concept
(not an epithet)
(not an epithet)
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from Eckart Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: a Systematic Reconstruction (Harvard, 2012)
. . . concepts have their
basis in functions, by which Kant understands “the unity of the act of
bringing various representations under one common representaton.”
(A68). A concept is a rule for combining certain representations
(and thus also a principle for excluding certain others). Thus
the represesntations’white’, ‘grainy’, ‘saline’ are combined and
ordered in the concept ‘salt, while the representations ‘colorless’,
‘liquid’, ‘tasteless’ (say) are not. In this way a concept is a
rule allowing me to unite certain representations and to bring them
under a higher representation, i.e. the concept. (pp. 22-3)
Cognition does not consist merely in the collecting of phenomena; rather we strive to forge conceptual links between them and to grasp the laws of nature that are valid for specific classes of objects as cases of yet more general laws, whereby we are guided by the ideal of a unified explanation of nature. (p. 38) “To make concepts out of representations one must be able to compare, to reflect, and to abstract, for these three logical operations of the understanding are the essential and universal conditions for the generation of every concept whatsoever. I see, e.g., a spruce, a willow, and a linden. By first comparing these objects with one another I note that they are different from one another in regard to the trunk, the btanches, the leaves, etc.; but next I reflect on that which they have in common among themselves, trunk, branches, and leaves themselves, and I abstract from the quantity, the figure, etc., of these; thus I acquire a concept of a tree.” (pp. 250-51) |
Max Weber's ideal type
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from Max Weber,
An
ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more
points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete,
more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual
phenomena, which are arranged according to those onesidedly emphasized
viewpoints into a unified analytical construct.
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a Concept of Fascism 1/2
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from Robert
O. Paxton, The
Anatomy of Fascism (Alfred
A. Knopf, 2004): The
legitimation of violence against a
demonized
internal enemy brings us close
to the heart of fascism.
p. 84
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. p. 218
The United States
itself has never been exempt from fascism.
Indeed, antidemocratic and xenophobic movements have flourished in
America since the Native American party of 1845 and the Know-Nothing
Party ofthe 1850s. In the crisis-ridden 1930s, as in other
democracies, derivative fascist movements were conspicuous in the
United States. The Protestant evangelist Gerald B. Winrod's
openly pro-Hitler Defenders of the Christian Faith with their Black
Legion; William Dudley Pelley's Silver Shirts (the initials "SS" were
intentional) . . . . Much more dangerious are movements that
employ authentically Amerian
themes in ways that resemble fascism functionally.
The Klan
revived in the 1920s, took on virulent anti-Semitism, and spread to
cities and the Middle West. In the 1930s, Father Charles E.
Coughlin gathered a radio audience estimated at forty million around an
anticommunist, anti-Wall Street, pro-soft money, and---after
1938--anti-Semitic message broadcast from his church in the ouskirts of
Detroit. For a moment in early 1936 it looked as if his Union
Party and its presidential candidate, North Dakota congressman William
Lemke, might overwhelm Roosevelt. . . . p. 201
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Randall Collins and Max Weber on Patrimonialism
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Randall
Collins, "Patrimonial Alliances and Failures of State Penetration: A
Historical Dynamic of Crime, Corruption, Gangs, and Mafias,"The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 636, Patrimonial Power in the Modern World (July 2011), pp. 16-31
Classically, patrimonialism
was organization based on private households, plus alliances among
them. Patrimonialism wields political power in the form of personal
loyalty and arbitrary discretion, tempered only by tradition. The
archetype of this kind of personal power is the family, but a
patrimonial household is not limited to kinship per se. What makes
patrimonialism capable of wielding large-scale power is that some
households expand beyond kinship and become extremely large by
including a large number of servants, armed guards, retainers,
hostages, and houseguests; the bigger the entourage of the head of such
a house, the greater his power.
It is important to distinguish, as Weber (1922/1968) did, between patrimonialism and patriarchy. Rule by the father (literally) or male dominance generally - patriarchy - can take place in many different kinds of organization; it occurs even in bureaucracy, although bureaucracy historically has been the main ally and organizational weapon of resistance to patriarchy. Patrimonialism is something more. Patrimonial power involves personal loyalty, but it is also fraught with conflicts, betrayals, and treason—Shakespearean plots are virtual textbooks of patrimonial politics. . . . patrimonialism and bureaucracy are not bare organizational forms but sites for constructing moral visions; proselytizers for expanding bureaucratic state penetration are moral entrepreneurs as well as expanders of organizational domains. The struggle between patrimonialism and bureaucracy takes the form of rival moralities, althoug one side rarely recognizes this about the organizational form they oppose. And this, from Researchgate: What are patrimonialism and neo-patrimonialism? |
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Altough Anatomy of
Fascism
was published in 2004, it describes
the
anti-Obama Tea Party uproar of 2009 with uncanny prescience--the Youtube video below
(click on link below screenshot) is a good example.
from Anatomy of Fascism: Today
a "politics
of
ressentment" rooted in authentic American piety and
nativism sometimes
leads to violence against some of the very same "internal enemies" once
targeted by the Nazis, such as homosexuals and defenders of abortion
rights. . . . The
languge and symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of
course, have little to do with the original European models.
They
would have to be as familiar and reassuring to loyal Americans as the
language and symbols of the original fascisms were familiar and
reassuring to many Italians and Germans, as Orwell suggested. . . .
No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes
(or
Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but
mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance [one minute and 45 seconds
into the video above right]. These symbols
contain no whiff
of
fascism
in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them
into obligatory litmus
tests for detecting the internal enemy. p.
202 (Emphasis
added) |
1. An Objective Observer Would Know that ID and Teaching About "Gaps" and "Problems" in Evolutionary Theory are Creationist, Religious Strategies that Evolved from Earlier Forms of Creationism
The history of the intelligent design movement (hereinafter "IDM") and the development of the strategy to weaken education of evolution by focusing students on alleged gaps in the theory of evolution is the historical and cultural background against which the Dover School Board acted in adopting the challenged ID Policy. As a reasonable observer, whether adult or child, would be aware of this social context in which the ID Policy arose, and such context will help to reveal the meaning of Defendants' actions, it is necessary to trace the history of the IDM.
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from Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 16:
Let us add at once that . .
. the existence on earth of an animal soul turned against itself,
taking sides against itself, was something so new, profound, unheard
of, enigmatic, contradictory, and pregnant with a future that the
aspect of the earth was essentially altered. Indeed, divine
spectators were needed to justice to the spectacle that thus began and
the end of which is not yet in sight . . . . From now on, man . .
. gives rise to an interest, a tension, a hope, almost a certainty, as
if with him somethin were anouncing and preparing itself, as if man
were not a goal but onl a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise.
from Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 22: Oh this insane, pathetic
beast--man! What ideas he has, what unnaturalness, what paroxysms
of nonsense, what bestiality of thought erupts . . . from Timothy R. Pauketat, An Archaeology of the Cosmos: Rethinking Agency and Religion in Ancient America (Routledge, 2012), p. 30All this is interesting, to excess, but also of a gloomy, black, unnerving sadness, so that one must forcibly forbid oneself to gaze too long into these abysses. Here is sickness, beyond any doubt, the most terrible sickness that has ever raged in man . . . . There is so much man that is hideous!--Too long, the earth has been a madhouse! Indeed, this is the very basis of the Western world, with religions that profess beliefs while simultaneiously disciplining bodies and purging them of their desires. |
| from Jacquelyn Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jesse Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching (Columbia, 1993), p. 150 The imagery of lynching—in literature, poetry, music, in the minds of men—was almost inescapably erotic. . . .
Rape and rumors of rape became a kind of acceptible folk pornography in the Bible Belt. As stories spread, the attacker became not just a black man but a ravenous brute, the victim a beautiful, frail, young virgin. The experience and condition of the women. . . were described in minute and progressively embellished detail: a public fantasy that implies a kind of group participation in the rape of the woman almost as cathartic as the subsequent lynching of the alleged attacker. . . . The small percentage of lynchings that revolved around charges of sexual assault gripped the southern imagination far out of proportion to statistical reality. In such scenes, described in the popular press in strikingly conventionalized words and phrases, the themes of masculinity, rage, and sexual envy were woven into a ritual of death and desire. |
| from Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (1949. Norton ed. 1994)
. . . the lynched Negro becomes not an object that must die but a
receptacle for every man’s damned-up hate, and a receptacle for every
man’s forbidden feelings. Sex and hate, cohabiting in the darkness of
minds too long, pour out their progeny of cruelty on anything that can
serve as a symbol of an unnamed relationship that in his heart each man
wants to befoul. That, sometimes, the lynchers do cut off genitals of
the lynched and divide them into bits to be distributed to participants
as souvenirs is no more than a coda to this composition of hate and
guilt and sex and fear, created by our way of life. 162-3
In the name of sacred womanhood, of purity, of preserving the home, lecherous old men and young ones, reeeking with impurities, who had violated the home since they were sixteen yers old, whipped up lynchings, organized Klans, burned crosses, aroused the poor and ignorant to wild excitement by an obscene, perverse imagery describing the “menace” of Negro men hiding behind every cypress waiting to rape “our” women 145 |
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from
Wikipedia:
(Lee
Atwater's Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy)
As a member of the
Reagan administration in 1981, Atwater gave an
anonymous interview to political scientist Alexander P. Lamis. Part of
the interview was printed in Lamis's book The Two-Party South, then
reprinted in Southern Politics in the 1990s with Atwater's name
revealed. . . . Atwater talked about the Republican Southern Strategy
and Ronald Reagan's version of it:
Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now you don't have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster. Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps? Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a by-product of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger." |
| Donald Trump says: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” |
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from Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella, Echo Chamber: Rush
Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (Oxford Univeristy
Press, 2008), p.p. 188-89. (Emphasis added.)
Limbaugh's attempts at gender-based "humor" are of the
locker room variety. As the California gubernatorial recall was
heating up, Limbaugh informed his folowers that Lieutenant Governor Cruz
Bustamante--"whose name loosely translates into Spanish for 'large
breasts'--leads the Terminator by a few pionts" (August 18,
2003). A photomontage on the Limbaugh website shows a photograph
of Schwartzenegger's head and shoulders from his Pumping Iron days as a
body builder. A naked woman has been transposed onto his
shoulders. Over her breasts is a sign reading BUSTAMONTE.
When Madonna endorsed General Wesley Clark, Limbaugh reported that she
had "opened herself" to him. Why the vulgarity in this message
does not alienate the churchgoing conservatives in his audiences is a
question for which we have no ready answer.
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