Carrol Cox wrote, >To call the Bush administration fascist is capitalist apologetics.
It is also bad American history. The Bush administration's ideological extremism is as "American as cherry pie". Fascism was European and too damned intellectual. The U.S. had an organized, well-financed, ideologically extreme and politically influential anti-labor, anti-democratic movement back in the days when Mussolini was still a marxist labor union organizer. It was called the National Association of Manufacturers (and its front groups like the Citizens' Industrial Associations), although it was referred to as the "invisible government" when the scandal broke about the extent of its power and corruption. These folks developed their own labels and slogans "Americanism", "The Free Enterprise System", "Right to Work". Jack London's The Iron Heel (a bad novel in my opinion) was not a premonition about European fascism, it was a melodramatic extrapolation of the policies of the N.A.M. The lineage of this faction of the U.S. ruling class runs right through subsequent U.S. history: N.A.M. opposition to the Roosevelt New Deal through its "American Way" propaganda, the passage of Taft-Hartley after the second world war, the House Un-American Activities Committee. It has had a large presence in the Republican party throughout the 20th century, but is not identical with it. While fascism borrowed from European intellectual currents, extreme right "Americanism" owes more to revival tent evangelism and "patent" medicine shows. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
