The committed “alt-right” identitarian leftists will hate this essay. They’ll commence w anti-Semitic remarks, bc “the Jew” as a species is their enemy. I — a committed and vocal conservative Constitutionalist — am their enemy. Why is that?
In engaging me so they’ll prove my point and out themselves. They can’t help it: it’s an opportunity to say “kike” without getting sideways looks. It empowers them.
Please note that much of this will happen on conservative sites who use Disqus. This is where the white identitarians who pretend to be conservative coalesce.
"Dopy Opie" (reference to a classic Andy Griffith Show episode) - they surely got that one right all those years ago. I really liked Ron Howards acting career, loved some movies he directed (Splash in particular), and he was in 'The Shootist' - John Waynes last move. But to call the 'Lefty Land' he has drifted into anodyne, infantile and hackneyed, that is an understatement. That is letting him off too easily. Ron Howard seems to 'hate' all with the temerity to disagree with his clueless narrative. Buy I guess that is what one must do to survive in Hollywood. Like many 'leftist' - projection seems to be a big thing for him. I hate to break it to 'Opie,' but 'fascism' was and is a 'leftist phenomenon - a Marxist heresy if you will. Communism and Fascism, fraternal twins, much different 'means,' but the exact same 'ends.'
You see, Mr. Howard is part of the 'leftist chorus' called the 'Gleichschaltung.' And yes, there are some real 'White Supremacists' out there, but one could get them all into a medium sized auditorium, and they are universally reviled. But as they really don't exist in any meaningful sense, Leftist Progressive like Mr. Howard just have to 'make them up.' Far out man. And I still love the Andy Griffith Show. Yep, Opie was the same age as me. Sad. All the best. But hey man, he got to team up with a young Morgan Brittany, before she changed her name, in a classic AGS episode. It's just sad, as a kid, I really identified with Opie Taylor - oh well.
You are most welcome, and a most gracious response on your part! :-) It's nice to know that all that reading I did a lifetime ago when I was majoring in poli sci hasn't been a total waste... ;-)
BTW I had to look up "phatic." So you have the unusual distinction of having used a term I didn't know! :-) I guess we do really learn something new every day... :-)
You concluded your very sensible essay with this peroration: "I am not a Nazi. But they do exist. And we should despise the fascist worldview that drives them regardless of how they look or how polished they appear."
It may seem much ado about nothing, but National-Socialism and Fascism aren't the same thing, and the terms should not be used interchangeably.
This is not to say that Fascism does not have some important connections to socialism--Mussolini himself was a Socialist before turning away from them and forming his own movement. But Fascism--which Mussolini referred to as /corporativismo/, or as we might say in English, "Corporatism," is not a racialist or even particularly nationalist ideology. What it *does* share with National-Socialism--and of course with Socialism without modifiers--is that it is a profoundly *statist* ideology. As Musso summed it up, "All for the State, everything within the State, nothing outside the State."
The underlying concept of fascism--or corporatism--is a class and occupationally-based version of what we call nowadays "identity politics," but it was largely /organizational/ rather than /individual/. Each occupation or class--the farmers, the workers, the small businessmen, the professoriate, and so on--were to be represented in a quasi-legislature, the Fascist Grand Council. The logic was not dissimilar to the electoral structure of Republican Rome, where each of the 32 "tribes" (for want of a better term) had a single, unitary vote and the consuls were elected by the "tribes."
This concept--corporatism--is still alive and well in the contemporary age, and indeed was described almost exactly in those terms by the political scientist Theodore Lowi, in his important book /The End Of Liberalism/ more than a half-century ago.
Lowi observed that America's political system had largely eroded from the broad and fluid coalitions that had existed prior to the Depression, and that political pressure was increasingly being brought to bear on Washington by large, single-purpose groups organized around industrial or occupational principles: Big Oil, Big Labor, Big Steel, and so on. Lowi--who was liberal to his core--considered this to be a corruption of classical liberalism and used the term "interest-group liberalism" to describe it.
An even better example of this post-WW2 corporatist approach was in Great Britain, where for decades national policy was hammered out behind closed doors by the Government of the day, the Trades Union Council, and the National Union of Manufacturers...or as we might say, Big Labor and Big Business, in concert with Big Government.
So as children of the post-war era, we have never actually known anything else, even in the most free countries in the world. To paraphrase Jefferson, we are all fascists now.
Perhaps that can change, but it will take a massive--and by that I mean on the order of a 90 percent reduction--downsizing of the Government to make it possible. A country in which the central government is the size of ours--let alone what it it in European countries--has no chance of shaking off a system in which organized groups prevail in competing for policy outcomes.
And that is why trying to fight against identitarianism is probably futile.
The committed “alt-right” identitarian leftists will hate this essay. They’ll commence w anti-Semitic remarks, bc “the Jew” as a species is their enemy. I — a committed and vocal conservative Constitutionalist — am their enemy. Why is that?
In engaging me so they’ll prove my point and out themselves. They can’t help it: it’s an opportunity to say “kike” without getting sideways looks. It empowers them.
Please note that much of this will happen on conservative sites who use Disqus. This is where the white identitarians who pretend to be conservative coalesce.
They’re frauds. Leftists who “gotta get mine.”
I own them.
"Dopy Opie" (reference to a classic Andy Griffith Show episode) - they surely got that one right all those years ago. I really liked Ron Howards acting career, loved some movies he directed (Splash in particular), and he was in 'The Shootist' - John Waynes last move. But to call the 'Lefty Land' he has drifted into anodyne, infantile and hackneyed, that is an understatement. That is letting him off too easily. Ron Howard seems to 'hate' all with the temerity to disagree with his clueless narrative. Buy I guess that is what one must do to survive in Hollywood. Like many 'leftist' - projection seems to be a big thing for him. I hate to break it to 'Opie,' but 'fascism' was and is a 'leftist phenomenon - a Marxist heresy if you will. Communism and Fascism, fraternal twins, much different 'means,' but the exact same 'ends.'
You see, Mr. Howard is part of the 'leftist chorus' called the 'Gleichschaltung.' And yes, there are some real 'White Supremacists' out there, but one could get them all into a medium sized auditorium, and they are universally reviled. But as they really don't exist in any meaningful sense, Leftist Progressive like Mr. Howard just have to 'make them up.' Far out man. And I still love the Andy Griffith Show. Yep, Opie was the same age as me. Sad. All the best. But hey man, he got to team up with a young Morgan Brittany, before she changed her name, in a classic AGS episode. It's just sad, as a kid, I really identified with Opie Taylor - oh well.
You are most welcome, and a most gracious response on your part! :-) It's nice to know that all that reading I did a lifetime ago when I was majoring in poli sci hasn't been a total waste... ;-)
BTW I had to look up "phatic." So you have the unusual distinction of having used a term I didn't know! :-) I guess we do really learn something new every day... :-)
You concluded your very sensible essay with this peroration: "I am not a Nazi. But they do exist. And we should despise the fascist worldview that drives them regardless of how they look or how polished they appear."
It may seem much ado about nothing, but National-Socialism and Fascism aren't the same thing, and the terms should not be used interchangeably.
This is not to say that Fascism does not have some important connections to socialism--Mussolini himself was a Socialist before turning away from them and forming his own movement. But Fascism--which Mussolini referred to as /corporativismo/, or as we might say in English, "Corporatism," is not a racialist or even particularly nationalist ideology. What it *does* share with National-Socialism--and of course with Socialism without modifiers--is that it is a profoundly *statist* ideology. As Musso summed it up, "All for the State, everything within the State, nothing outside the State."
The underlying concept of fascism--or corporatism--is a class and occupationally-based version of what we call nowadays "identity politics," but it was largely /organizational/ rather than /individual/. Each occupation or class--the farmers, the workers, the small businessmen, the professoriate, and so on--were to be represented in a quasi-legislature, the Fascist Grand Council. The logic was not dissimilar to the electoral structure of Republican Rome, where each of the 32 "tribes" (for want of a better term) had a single, unitary vote and the consuls were elected by the "tribes."
This concept--corporatism--is still alive and well in the contemporary age, and indeed was described almost exactly in those terms by the political scientist Theodore Lowi, in his important book /The End Of Liberalism/ more than a half-century ago.
Lowi observed that America's political system had largely eroded from the broad and fluid coalitions that had existed prior to the Depression, and that political pressure was increasingly being brought to bear on Washington by large, single-purpose groups organized around industrial or occupational principles: Big Oil, Big Labor, Big Steel, and so on. Lowi--who was liberal to his core--considered this to be a corruption of classical liberalism and used the term "interest-group liberalism" to describe it.
An even better example of this post-WW2 corporatist approach was in Great Britain, where for decades national policy was hammered out behind closed doors by the Government of the day, the Trades Union Council, and the National Union of Manufacturers...or as we might say, Big Labor and Big Business, in concert with Big Government.
So as children of the post-war era, we have never actually known anything else, even in the most free countries in the world. To paraphrase Jefferson, we are all fascists now.
Perhaps that can change, but it will take a massive--and by that I mean on the order of a 90 percent reduction--downsizing of the Government to make it possible. A country in which the central government is the size of ours--let alone what it it in European countries--has no chance of shaking off a system in which organized groups prevail in competing for policy outcomes.
And that is why trying to fight against identitarianism is probably futile.