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I'll say from the outset that admittedly this conversation can rather quickly devolve into a kind of 'gotcha' game of Leftist posturing and holier-than-thou virtue signalling (or at least that is how it leads me to behave sometimes). So even if we disagree here I don't intend this to be some kind of oppositional or insulting project. Healthy debate is certainly merited here. I'll state my case plainly: a-There's been a few really great monographs in the past decade about the connection between Nazism and America. Basically the scholarship now shows that Nazi legal theorists studied in America and did a lot of deep reading of the so-called Indian Laws (particularly the one-drop rule) as well as Jim Crow. They took that scholarship back to the German drawing boards as they drafted the Nuremberg race laws (cf. James Whitman, HITLER'S AMERICAN MODEL). Gerald Horne has been likewise writing a subtle polemic in his recent books about colonial American history about how all historiography, including radicals and progressives like Zinn and Foner, just dropped the ball ingloriously by placing so much positive emphasis on the "bourgeois democratic revolutions" of the 17th-20th centuries. In one interview he flat-out said to me the following < https://washingtonbabylon.com/six-questions-dr-gerald-horne-p1/>: "I think it is well past time for progressive people, particularly those who consider themselves to be radical, to take a critical eye to the tragic events that unfolded when the European invasion commenced post-1492 and the genocide that befell the indigenous population and the mass enslavement that ensnared the Africans. I think that failure to look more critically at that process and seeking to rationalize it, saying ‘Well, at the end of the day, post-1776 this republic emerged which was a great leap forward for humanity’, in some ways serves to rationalize and justify genocide and mass-enslavement... it seems to me that you can call these events a ‘bourgeois democratic revolution’ as long as you have a major caveat, which is that, if this was a ‘bourgeois democratic revolution’, let’s not have any more! Let that be the last one! If you are going to use that term then critique that term. And I would say that is particularly true in the United States, which is the seed bed of critiques of revolutions that have happened worldwide since 1776. There’s an entire industry with people making good livings criticizing every revolution since 1776, sometimes in a one-sided manner, be it the French revolution, the Cuban revolution, the Russian revolution, etc. That shows me folks in the United States are capable of doing a multi-sided critique of revolutions except 1776, where they come to this absurd conclusion that ‘Oh, it went well, except, you know, the genocide and mass enslavement.’ It reminds me of the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia when the mayor said afterwards “Well, everything went fine except we destroyed the neighborhood.” What kind of thinking is that?... Now obviously it doesn’t speak well for those that did have access to the archives that they could not come to this conclusion because, as I’ve been saying for some years, this is not a difficult case to make. This was not rocket science coming to these conclusions! What was created was an apartheid state... Basically that’s what has happened in North America, the ability of the 1776 regime to take land from Native Americans and redistribute it to European migrants and lift them out of poverty..." b-John Reimann, you justifiably point to the Populist Party at the end of the 19th century. A few matters that go into the weeds but merit consideration herein. First, as is the case with today and the way the bourgeoisie has produced state-sanctioned "socialists" aligned with the Democrats in response to the popular upsurges around the anti-globalization movement, the Greens, Occupy, and Black Lives Matter in the past 20 years, so was the case 130 years ago with how bipartisan Progressivism (Teddy Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryant, Woodrow Wilson, et al) emerged in response to first Populism and then the Debs-era Socialists. Progressivism in the form of this bipartisan response was a blatantly racialized and cis-hetero-patriarchal matrix of ideology. Many former Populists (Tom Watson being the most notable) allowed themselves to be absorbed into the Progressive project and became shameless white nationalists, instituting the hardest elements of the Jim Crow regime in this period. Wilson, as just one example, was a shameless proponent of the pro-Confederate Lost Cause narrative in his history books, endorsed the rebirth of the Klan by screening BIRTH OF A NATION at the White House, re-segregated federal employment, and did next to nothing to stop the 1919 Red Summer pogroms. This leads to my second point, one could make the compelling case that is fascism took root in waves and became further institutionalized after WWI as a response to the Bolshevik revolution and the upsurge in Black civil rights agitation. I would argue that, in America, we didn't see a March on Rome-style uprising but that, like Hindenburg, the government did a lot to help install the fascistic governments to subdue a working class uprising in the wings. c-Glen Ford laid out his case around American fascism in this post for Black Agenda Report several years ago that I find compelling: < https://www.blackagendareport.com/trump-and-americas-fascist-forefathers> d-Michael, you make the point of concern regarding contemporary issues, which I see as very important and worthy of tremendous attention. However, I think we need to understand the fact that certain things are going on here that go well beyond the prior elections. First, we need to acknowledge that "Make America Great Again" clearly expresses an aspiration, in its rather vulgar and simplistic way, for what can only be truly described as a uniquely American form of herrenvolk social democracy. Trump's candidacy in 2016 was a strange Rorschach test for the right that mirrored in many ways what Sanders meant for the broad Left. It meant everything to everyone and was devoid of much beyond some shameless replacement of dog-whistling with fog-horn signals to the white nationalist crowd. But David Graeber (whose economic analysis is really decent despite my lack of affinity for his politics) actually was able to parse through it coherently herein < https://therealnews.com/stories/dgraeber0516trump>: DG: "Donald Trump is a classic corporatist. It’s actually really interesting. When I say corporatist, I mean in the old-fashioned, mid-20th century sense that corporatists are people who say that employers and employees have common interests with each other against finance. This is the soul of most social democracy. Keynes talked about the euthanasia of the rentier class as this feudal leftover. Galbraith talked about the techno-structure, that in corporations there’s a natural common interest around the thing that the corporation does, so they all tend to see outsiders as interlopers interfering. Social democracy had a certain degree of corporatism, but of course under fascism, where you say, “The financiers are all Jews,” and try to kill them. It tends to be a form of political mobilization that lends itself to a certain form of nativism, at least, and racism, nationalism at worst. Trump clearly made an appeal to that. He’s a classic corporatist in that sense... Fascists are always corporatists. One of the reasons why fascists are doing so well in Europe is for that reason. They’re the only people who can still put out 1940s, 1950s-style economics, which is all about welfare state, full employment, so forth and so on." So we need to move forward from those coordinates. Even if he is a charlatan and a mountebank who has no intention of actually doing these things, he speaks to this yearning, one which is borne out of 45-50 years of crushing bipartisan austerity measures (which incidentally have underwritten the ideological shift rightwards that eventuate a fascist uprising, as was the case also in Weimar Germany). I say this because, even if Biden pulls it out with this one, we still need to understand that, barring some absurd miracle, we're going to basically get a repeat of the Obama stimulus from 2009, a lot of neoliberal construction and "public-private" partnerships along with maybe a retooling of the Affordable Care Act that injects some capital into the healthcare sector that trickles down to healthcare workers. Which means we need to organize and fight regardless of who wins. The Obama campaign took the wind out of the sails of an independent Left project and created space for the Tea Party to fill a void, something even Noam Chomsky spoke cogently to: < https://youtu.be/DwTht2L4jqA> -- Best regards, Andrew Stewart ANDREW: Considering that Robert Paxton points to the Klan as a fascist organization decades before Mussolini came to power I have to agree with that point ME: But I do think the difference, even between the Jim Crow South and true fascism, is that even in the 1920s and 30s the "trappings" of bourgeois democracy were still there. In Frederickson's book WHITE SUPREMACY (a wonderfully synthesized comparative history of the US and South AFrica) he makes the point that even in the era of JIM CROW, the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution made the Southern US qualitatively different from South Africa --- I think the only thing that could have beaten the true fascism of Italy and Germany was defeat in a war --- whereas even in South Africa, there was a way out of Apartheid short of whole-sale Civil War --- and in the US, all that was necessary was the Federal Government's willingness to enforce the 14th Amendment. In this circumstance, I do think we have a lot to fear of a fascist (creeping fascist??) transformation of the current US version of bourgeois democracy --- IF Trump gets and second term and Barr is able to continue with his centralization of power in the Presidency and voter suppression and a totally remade Judiciary, then within another 4 years we may have passed the point of no return --- (In fact, the only thing that will stand between Trump-Barr-etc. and true fascism may be the professional military in the US ... although the German military was bribed into cooperating with Hitler ....) Sorry to bring this up again (on a Marxist discussion list!!!) but that's why even a right-wing Dem like Biden is qualitatively "so much better" than Trump --- (okay, okay, I'm shutting up again!!!) (Mike Meeropol) _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
