Brad, you can do much better than this. For the most part, you have listed a
number of charges that can be levelled at most anti-democratic countries.
Regarding Temin: Karl Polanyi lumped the US [New Deal] with the USSR and Germany as
saying no to the market.
Brad De Long wrote:
> >This discussion is positively fruitless. Sometimes people on the left have
> >called somebody else a fascist when they disagree with that person. In that
> >sense, Brad is free to think that the Soviets and the Nazis were similar
> >since he regards both regimes as murderous.
>
> As you know, the similarities go much, much deeper than simply
> calling both regimes "murderous". I don't think anyone can understand
> the history of the twentieth century without recognizing and thinking
> about the obvious--but extraordinary--parallels, including:
>
> --the extraordinary dimension reached by the cult of personality
> --the common desire for the "coordination" of all forms of what
> we are now supposed to call "civil society"
> --the common use of the purge as the preferred method of elite politics
> --the common fear of elections
> --the common hatred of parliamentary politics
> --the common rejection of the ideas of an independent judicary and
> that citizens might have rights vis-a-vis the state
> --the common desire (not always accomplished) to say "no" to the
> market economy (on this, Peter Temin has a quite nice
> essay on Nazi and Soviet economic planning in the 1930s)
>
> To me it remains remarkable and astonishing that doctrines with roots
> as different as fascism and communism--for fascism's roots lie in a
> combination of Malthus and social Darwinism, while communism's lie in
> Marx's and Engels's project for radical political democracy and
> economic liberty--reached such similar outcomes in their "really
> existing" forms.
>
> It's enough to make you believe in some anti-cunning of reason, some
> malevolent spirit of history, some invisible hand that deals us
> losing cards...
>
> Brad DeLong
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
