Marv asks questions to Charles and comments:
No doubt there are conservatives within the Republican party who want to curb the democratic rights which the masses have fought for and won under capitalism, and perhaps it even harbours closet fascists who would like to eliminate these entirely, but so long as these rights exist, and however much they're threatened, we don't live under fascism.
Nowhere (as far as I know) has Stan written that we live under a fascist state. He's talking about a *threat*. (Actually, he once announced what his attitude would be if the threat materialized.) The *threat* (as a concrete possibility) of a cabal of rightwingers in power resorting to mass repression as the *main* method to elicit our gracious consent is not an exaggeration. If the threat is not apparent in the domestic climate created after 9/11 and in the mayhem of two wars in another continent, then I don't know what is. It is a threat to be taken seriously -- without paranoia, but seriously. People can only think of new phenomena in terms of the old. It's only as the new phenomena mature that we get a fuller sense of its newness, and forge new concepts to articulate them. This pickiness about semantics is a distraction. Because -- to use Stan's phrase -- if we operate under the notion that there's a "categorical imperative" not to vote for the Dems, then any mention of a fascist threat weakens our argument. Sabri wonders why this dispute gets so heated. Personally, I try to look at the musings of particular individuals as representative of the feelings and attitudes of a bunch of people out there. As far as I'm concerned, Louis Proyect's idiosyncratic reasoning is just a sample of what's out there. So I take what he writes seriously -- even if I have a harder time taking *him* seriously. Because, if we are going to be driven by mere personal animosity, then we are better off skipping the posts of those we dislike. Julio
