Is it even possible to govern a nation such that fascism or something akin to it doesn't boil up to the surface in the face of tension associated with some minority group?
Is it even possible to govern a nation such that fascism or something akin to it doesn't boil up to the surface in the face of tension with minority groups?
I wouldn't consider apartheid South Africa fascist, but it was still apartheid South Africa. You can have a somewhat functioning herrenvolk democracy despite its inherent elitism. It is just that herrenvolk democracies are inherently bad regardless of what all the apartheid South Africa apologists back in the day might have argued.
Do you believe the politics of Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful Democrat in the United States, enable the spread of fascism?
I believe the Democrats, in their role as part of the mainstream political order of the last 50 years or so, have created a situation in which fascism could again become a real threat in the United States. Nancy Pelosi had a role in that in proportion to her power to shape political reality in the US. Like I've been saying, I don't think focusing on individuals in very useful.
I feel like a Who/What/When/Where/Why/How thing is needed here. Because this is not clear.
The last 50 years or so of American politics have been a general slide towards weaker wage earnings, harder to come by social programs, crumbling social infrastructure, and a concentration of power at the top. Democrats haven't always taken the side of the most aggressive moves towards this and sometimes they've pushed good things, but often even when they create good programs they're done from that paradigm. Means testing runs hand in hand with the ideology of privatization and the undermining of the welfare state.
All of this creates a degree of social unmooring, stagnation, and need that is fertile ground for fascism.
Like, on this page we have social democrats described as neoliberals.
Is there anything left of soc dems that isn't socialist?
So unless you mean yes, even soc dems enable fascism, why would you say neoliberals enable fascism.
It's just confusing if you say that but don't mean it.
Let's try this instead.
Do you believe the politics of Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful Democrat in the United States, enable the spread of fascism?
edit: Removed a tag so I'm not calling out anyone specifically. If anyone else can clarify their position based on this specific example, it would probably be helpful.
I'm sorry, but again, I don't think that happened. Jephery said social democrats "adopted neoliberal policy." That doesn't mean they stopped being social democrats and became neoliberals, though it could. It means that they started pushing policies that had more neoliberal elements in them.
People, and especially parties, can partake of more than one ideology at the same time. People's ideas and policies change over time, and this may or may not change their primary ideology. It's perfectly internally consistent to say that Chinese communists started adopting capitalist policies, while still being communists and not capitalists. It might not be externally consistent, and one might say the opposite too, that the Chinese communists became capitalists because they adopted so many capitalist policies, but that's not the same thing.
This seems to bring up a more confusing discussion about whether labels apply to ideologies rather then people. (Are there neoliberals or just neoliberal policies? What is a neoliberal if not someone pushing neoliberal policy? etc, etc) And it pretty outside the scope of a discussion of fascism. It's kinda the whole problem with these labels because "They did neoliberal things but weren't neoliberals" is an argument that is supremely unclear about what is being said exactly.
... /shrug?
I mean... is a bus driver a bus driver simply by virtue of driving a bus? If I steal a bus, do I become a bus driver? Is this so difficult a problem that we can't talk about bus drivers or driving buses? Are we just throwing around the label "bus driver" nilly-willy?
I think we should just be charitable with other people's posts. If you really think Jephery may have called all Democrats neoliberals, maybe just ask rather than demanding that they stop using the term so nilly-willy and vaguely to apply to everything under the sun.
You can't be charitable when no one is clear wtf anyone is saying. When you are arguing that someone adopted neoliberal policies but that doesn't necessarily mean they were neoliberal, you are being clear as mud about wtf you are actually trying to say when using the term neoliberal and so people cannot engage in a charitable discussion with that. Like, wtf does someone being a neoliberal even mean then? You could have an idea, but it's not necessarily clear to anyone else.
It seems perfectly clear to me. Neoliberalism is a particular ideology focused on deregulation, shrinking the footprint of the government, free trade and globalization, and privatization. Policies that aim to achieve these goals are neoliberal policies. People who advocate for these policies are neoliberals. Other people may also advocate for neoliberal policies without being neoliberals, and they may even do it for non-neoliberal reasons: one of the reasons many social democrats began advocate neoliberal policies is that they came to believe that neoliberal policies would be the most effective (possible) way to achieve social democratic objectives (i.e. privatizing social services to achieve higher efficiency). So the question of whether someone is a neoliberal or not comes down to some combination of 1) whether the number of neoliberal policies they advocate reach some proportional threshold, 2) whether the policies they advocate run the full gamut of neoliberalism, 3) whether they advocate these policies due to a belief in neoliberalism's principles, 4) whether they advocate other policies opposed to neoliberalism, and maybe some more, and that can obviously be a difficult debatable question, as we're seeing play out here right now, but it's not an impossible one, and it's also not a question that's really all that important to answer anyways in most cases.
Like, what's hard about this? This is just... how stuff works. Not just in politics, either. We talk about existentialists in philosophy, and we talk about philosophers who are not existentialist having existentialist ideas. There's nothing unclear about that. There are existentialists and there are non-existentialists, and the existentialists don't have a monopoly on all existentialist ideas, so some non-existentialist philosopher can absolutely have some existentialist ideas. And at some point of saturation, if that philosopher has a lot of existentialist ideas, maybe we consider labeling them as an existentialist, but whether we even do that or not isn't even that important ultimately, so long as we acknowledge their relative position to other existentialists. And if I say, "Existentialists are X," then be a little charitable in interpretation before arguing that Nietzsche is not X so therefore existentialists are not X, unless I'm being so vague that everybody's X, and so X is meaningless or whatever.
I understand the need to define terms but I don’t think going “do you think [Democratic politician x] enabled fascism” is going to lead the discussion down a useful road
Fascism isn’t the kind of thing you can point a finger at one solitary person and go, “you did this”
In the big picture, neoliberalism and overwhelming adherence to the platonic ideal of capitalism have helped to enable fascism
In a very real sense, we are all collectively responsible for it
I'm trying to decide if I agree with the third line is even true. I just think we underestimated the power of white supremacy (or ethnic nationalism more generally) after we elected a black president. And more importantly how it became increasingly acceptable from 2008-2016.
"No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place where both of us were born and raised"
'
Because that racist motherfucker winking at birtherism is now seen as a paragon of civic virtue.
But maybe the inequities created by unrestrained capitalism primed the pump for this kind of thing. But then I think about the correlation between white supremacist power increasing and economic performance and it doesn't seem like there is one. It's mostly about black people demanding to be full citizens, regardless of economic climate.
I think the really important thing about fascism is that it is amorphous and unique to each country it appears in.
There's been some research (Ezra Klein I think wrote a piece on it but can't find it right now) showing that people's reaction to being told their country or whatever is diversifying is to swing right. And it's not just white people. Tell black people latinos are starting to become more numerous then them? Same thing. Tell latinos the same about asians? Same thing. And it's not just specific policies related to race it's just all policies in general.
Given the links between the right and fascism I think there's very likely a real connection between the perception of america becoming more diverse and the rise in fascist ideology.
Someone just posted on the last page, "How dare you call all Democrats neoliberals?" after I made a whole post pointing out that nobody was calling Democrats neoliberals, citing a post in which people were saying that the Democrats had thoroughly swung away from neoliberalism based on their putative 2020 presidential candidates.
Extra irony that they said they didn't repeat a discussion that had occurred in the past four pages.
Edit: cuz I got topped.
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Silly Goose, YOU called FDR a neoliberal
Right here. This is you calling FDR a neoliberal. The United States was involved in WWII by way of selling arms to the allies because of FDR. You are explicitly saying that you don't know how much credit you're going to give to "neoliberals" which would presumably be the person doing the selling in the thing you're quoting, for doing the thing that was being quoted as explictly an action of a Democratic administration. There is no other reading of it.
In the US case that's a kind of narrow definition of getting involved. We were in the war by March of '41 at the latest. It just wasn't declared yet.
... I dunno how much credit I'm going to extend to neoliberals for selling stuff to antifa.
... do you really think that I'm calling Churchill and Stalin antifa? :eh:
Who else would you be referring to when directly quoting someone who was directly referring to them?(though you could have also been referring to Churchill which would have been more correct as that is where the majority of our arms support went. (iirc))
The Democratic Party is too large to fit into any one section IMO
You've got Liberals of all stripes, some leftists, some nationalists...
When people refer to "the Democratic Party" as an entity all its own, they're talking about the people who are in the leadership positions of the party. Obviously some elected individuals who are registered Democrats might have more radical stances on a variety of topics, but it doesn't fucking matter if they don't ever get to influence what the party brings to the floor to legislate/vote on.
"Leadership" is a woolly term. Does any elected official wearing a blue rosette count? Because if so, you've also got a very broad spectrum there. You've got people who are basically genuinely leftists, all the way to the Blue Dogs or whatever nickname you want these days. There's some extremely hawkish Democrats and some hugely anti-military democrats (who are in a minority, because the Democratic Party in the US is extremely pro-military on account of the US being culturally extremely pro-military).
Know them by the fruits they bear.
Which would be socialist legislation. Democratic Leadership did not push GLB as an example. It had no Democratic co-sponsors and it was whipped against in the Senate. The "final vote" is not indicative of the push since it required significant concessions and had otherwise already passed. (I.E. the democrats were voting to get concessions not for the purpose of the bill). Similarly the democrats fought and won on language which pushed the bill away from the strong deregulation that Republicans wanted, by forcing the negotiators in conference to attempt that type of reconciliation. Now, sure today you would say that this would be terrible. But today the legislation would not have gotten off the ground, as the initial vote to send it to reconciliation was 54-46. So...
Wait what socialist legislation does the Democratic Part push?
We can start with the three attempts at socialized medicine for one. The EPA, The New Deal, the Great Society, SNAP. Like... all of the new bills the incoming house has introduced and is in line to pass.
There has been a dearth of successful legislation over the past few years but it was not for a lack of trying.
Yeah the Democrats of the 1930s, 1980s, and 2010s aren't the same people.
They are the ideological decedents of those people. Are you really going to suggest that the reason we don't have Socialized Medicine is that democrats didn't want it? That the reason we have SNAP is that democrats have fought to dismantle it and it was just super hard to convince Republicans to get rid of it?
The Democratic party isn't a monolith and neither is the Republican party. Thinking of them in those terms is erroneous.
Clinton represented a important part of the Democratic coalition in the 1990s that believed in neoliberal policies like financial deregulation. Hillary Clinton even in the 2016 election wasn't running on tougher financial regulations like much of the party that was behind Sanders and Warren wanted.
Not all of the Democratic party wants the same things.
But there was no significant coalition of democrats that believed in Financial Deregulation. Bill was not for it and neither was Hillary. I literally just had to educate you on how GLB passed and it was not a democratic led initiative at any stage in the process... until such a time as it was already clearly passing and effects could be ameliorated. Hillary even campaigned hard on financial regulation.
These things you're claiming happened did not happen.
Edit: for the purposes of this post "liberal" and "neoliberal" refer to pre keynes laissez faire capitalism and its ideological descendants.
Look I'm just going to admit that I'm seeing what I want in Bill and Hillary's records, but at the same time, a lot of Americans saw it too. Whether it was real, or just a perception of them being in Wall Street's pockets', I don't really think this is the thread the refight the Clinton legacy so I'm going to stop before I get modded.
Sure but we should not be having a discussion about "how people see things" but how they are. If we are having a discussion about ideologies and how those ideologies interact with fascism then "how things really are" is important when discussing its impact on our modern system.
Neoliberalism or classical liberalism are ideologies which espouse freedom as paramount. Specifically negative freedoms. Which is to say that "being prevented from doing something is a reduction in freedom" Socialism has a similar backing because its very hard to argue that freedom is bad. But it emphasizes positive freedoms and utility. Which is to say that being given the ability to do something is an increase in freedom. A classical liberal or neoliberal would say either that this was not true, or that it would necessitate a greater reduction in freedom on the other side.
Socialism was born out of the first European industrial revolution as a way to deal with "the social problems" and encompassed a large group of people. It eventually coalesced into a rejection of capitalism by latching onto Marx's theory of production and then theories of political economy which solved those problems and which grew out of the ideas of French Christian Communism.
Socialism, as a structure in this sense, is far less defined than liberalism and is far more open to movement on ideological grounds and for different reasons. The technical socialists (I.E. Marxists) generally failed when Marxism as an economic theory failed. Those that rejected that failure became the communists and those that accepted it became the social democrats. These two ideologies are solving a fundamentally different problem. The communists trying to solve the dialectic and the Social Democrats trying to solve a hypothetical social utility function by whatever means necessary.
The democrats come from that second tradition, not the first. And we note that while it might accept a "liberal" policy it is not doing so for a "liberal" reason. "People should be free to sell ice cream in the summer" is not therefore an inherently liberal policy position because a neoliberal would say "am i being prevented from selling ice cream this is bad" and a socialist would say "ice cream is good and this maximizes the amount of people who can get ice cream without necessarily damaging other aspects of society which we care about".
"Neoliberals/liberals" tend to support fascism because fascism tends to align with ideas of property rights. Fascism exploits the reality that an unmoderated society forum will degrade into power structures just as an unmoderated forum will degrade into power structures, those most willing to abuse societal/forum levers will "win". The "liberals" think that societal levers are neutral and contain no positive or negative aspect, so long as the "state" isn't telling "people" which levers they can or cannot pull. Hence they tend to support fascism, either implicitly or explicitly.
But people who do not come from that ideological construction are not particularly vulnerable to fascist ideology. At least as I see it. Those people are natural allies, even if they're a technocratic socialist compared to a dialectic socialist, compared to a radical isolationist communist. This does not mean they cannot be convinced in the "after Hitler, our turn" way. But they're our allies.
And we need to treat them as such and engage with them on the level of their ideology in order to facilitate that resistance. So when democrats see democrats and their ideology tarred with that brush it does not help. It shows a fundamental and maybe even disingenuous understanding of how we all got here. And it makes it harder to ally against fascism.
This is separate from the democratic norms. Which are a-whole-nother ball game and i don't think particularly relevant to the issue. They don't stem from the same axis of freedoms which define the economic philosophy that drives fascism to undermine and reject democracy.
People who advocate for these policies are neoliberals. Other people may also advocate for neoliberal policies without being neoliberals,
This is the hard part. Because you're not clear when you're discussing when people who advocate neoliberal policy are neoliberal or when they aren't. You call them all neoliberal when they might not be and then claim they're all the problem. So then is it "policy that might potentially be called neoliberal" that is the problem or is it neoliberal thought?
If you can't get it simple within two sentences in the same post how do you expect us to understand you when you tell it to us without a rubric for every label in a natural use context?
edit: Random thought on a completely different line of conversation, sorry ADHD strikes.
I'm perhaps going to show my ignorance here, but what exactly separates the USSR from fascist nations? Other than it's dubious claim to being leftist and its rivalry with fascist nations?
Popular authoritarian nationalism with an state-guided economy that's not really capitalist or socialist, leveraging ethnic and social divisions to appease the majority by crushing the minority, I'm not sure what's missing for fascism there.
Like, on this page we have social democrats described as neoliberals.
Is there anything left of soc dems that isn't socialist?
So unless you mean yes, even soc dems enable fascism, why would you say neoliberals enable fascism.
It's just confusing if you say that but don't mean it.
Let's try this instead.
Do you believe the politics of Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful Democrat in the United States, enable the spread of fascism?
edit: Removed a tag so I'm not calling out anyone specifically. If anyone else can clarify their position based on this specific example, it would probably be helpful.
I'm sorry, but again, I don't think that happened. Jephery said social democrats "adopted neoliberal policy." That doesn't mean they stopped being social democrats and became neoliberals, though it could. It means that they started pushing policies that had more neoliberal elements in them.
People, and especially parties, can partake of more than one ideology at the same time. People's ideas and policies change over time, and this may or may not change their primary ideology. It's perfectly internally consistent to say that Chinese communists started adopting capitalist policies, while still being communists and not capitalists. It might not be externally consistent, and one might say the opposite too, that the Chinese communists became capitalists because they adopted so many capitalist policies, but that's not the same thing.
This seems to bring up a more confusing discussion about whether labels apply to ideologies rather then people. (Are there neoliberals or just neoliberal policies? What is a neoliberal if not someone pushing neoliberal policy? etc, etc) And it pretty outside the scope of a discussion of fascism. It's kinda the whole problem with these labels because "They did neoliberal things but weren't neoliberals" is an argument that is supremely unclear about what is being said exactly.
... /shrug?
I mean... is a bus driver a bus driver simply by virtue of driving a bus? If I steal a bus, do I become a bus driver? Is this so difficult a problem that we can't talk about bus drivers or driving buses? Are we just throwing around the label "bus driver" nilly-willy?
I think we should just be charitable with other people's posts. If you really think Jephery may have called all Democrats neoliberals, maybe just ask rather than demanding that they stop using the term so nilly-willy and vaguely to apply to everything under the sun.
You can't be charitable when no one is clear wtf anyone is saying. When you are arguing that someone adopted neoliberal policies but that doesn't necessarily mean they were neoliberal, you are being clear as mud about wtf you are actually trying to say when using the term neoliberal and so people cannot engage in a charitable discussion with that. Like, wtf does someone being a neoliberal even mean then? You could have an idea, but it's not necessarily clear to anyone else.
It seems perfectly clear to me. Neoliberalism is a particular ideology focused on deregulation, shrinking the footprint of the government, free trade and globalization, and privatization. Policies that aim to achieve these goals are neoliberal policies. People who advocate for these policies are neoliberals. Other people may also advocate for neoliberal policies without being neoliberals, and they may even do it for non-neoliberal reasons: one of the reasons many social democrats began advocate neoliberal policies is that they came to believe that neoliberal policies would be the most effective (possible) way to achieve social democratic objectives (i.e. privatizing social services to achieve higher efficiency). So the question of whether someone is a neoliberal or not comes down to some combination of 1) whether the number of neoliberal policies they advocate reach some proportional threshold, 2) whether the policies they advocate run the full gamut of neoliberalism, 3) whether they advocate these policies due to a belief in neoliberalism's principles, 4) whether they advocate other policies opposed to neoliberalism, and maybe some more, and that can obviously be a difficult debatable question, as we're seeing play out here right now, but it's not an impossible one, and it's also not a question that's really all that important to answer anyways in most cases.
Like, what's hard about this? This is just... how stuff works. Not just in politics, either. We talk about existentialists in philosophy, and we talk about philosophers who are not existentialist having existentialist ideas. There's nothing unclear about that. There are existentialists and there are non-existentialists, and the existentialists don't have a monopoly on all existentialist ideas, so some non-existentialist philosopher can absolutely have some existentialist ideas. And at some point of saturation, if that philosopher has a lot of existentialist ideas, maybe we consider labeling them as an existentialist, but whether we even do that or not isn't even that important ultimately, so long as we acknowledge their relative position to other existentialists. And if I say, "Existentialists are X," then be a little charitable in interpretation before arguing that Nietzsche is not X so therefore existentialists are not X, unless I'm being so vague that everybody's X, and so X is meaningless or whatever.
And yet we've spawned like multiple pages of discussion where people are very unclear who is being called a neoliberal and in what way. So, empirically, not very clear at all.
If a neoliberal is not someone who does neoliberal things, what are they? When are people actually neoliberals and when not? Not at all clear. Maybe we should just be more precise about what we are saying.
It seems perfectly clear to me. Neoliberalism is a particular ideology focused on deregulation, shrinking the footprint of the government, free trade and globalization, and privatization. Policies that aim to achieve these goals are neoliberal policies. People who advocate for these policies are neoliberals.
I think it is much more about having market-based mechanisms and solutions, which can often involve new regulation or simply different ways of looking at regulation like cost-benefit analyses. Taxes are very much something a lot of neoliberal governments use as an incentive for various activities. The European Union, commonly considered pretty neoliberal overall, has little problem with new regulations with pretty significant impact on the markets. Things like preventing hidden fees are often about ensuring accurate knowledge of what a person is agreeing to and a way to make the market work more efficiently much like requiring the price listed to be the price with taxes.
Like, on this page we have social democrats described as neoliberals.
Is there anything left of soc dems that isn't socialist?
So unless you mean yes, even soc dems enable fascism, why would you say neoliberals enable fascism.
It's just confusing if you say that but don't mean it.
Let's try this instead.
Do you believe the politics of Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful Democrat in the United States, enable the spread of fascism?
edit: Removed a tag so I'm not calling out anyone specifically. If anyone else can clarify their position based on this specific example, it would probably be helpful.
I'm sorry, but again, I don't think that happened. Jephery said social democrats "adopted neoliberal policy." That doesn't mean they stopped being social democrats and became neoliberals, though it could. It means that they started pushing policies that had more neoliberal elements in them.
People, and especially parties, can partake of more than one ideology at the same time. People's ideas and policies change over time, and this may or may not change their primary ideology. It's perfectly internally consistent to say that Chinese communists started adopting capitalist policies, while still being communists and not capitalists. It might not be externally consistent, and one might say the opposite too, that the Chinese communists became capitalists because they adopted so many capitalist policies, but that's not the same thing.
This seems to bring up a more confusing discussion about whether labels apply to ideologies rather then people. (Are there neoliberals or just neoliberal policies? What is a neoliberal if not someone pushing neoliberal policy? etc, etc) And it pretty outside the scope of a discussion of fascism. It's kinda the whole problem with these labels because "They did neoliberal things but weren't neoliberals" is an argument that is supremely unclear about what is being said exactly.
... /shrug?
I mean... is a bus driver a bus driver simply by virtue of driving a bus? If I steal a bus, do I become a bus driver? Is this so difficult a problem that we can't talk about bus drivers or driving buses? Are we just throwing around the label "bus driver" nilly-willy?
I think we should just be charitable with other people's posts. If you really think Jephery may have called all Democrats neoliberals, maybe just ask rather than demanding that they stop using the term so nilly-willy and vaguely to apply to everything under the sun.
You can't be charitable when no one is clear wtf anyone is saying. When you are arguing that someone adopted neoliberal policies but that doesn't necessarily mean they were neoliberal, you are being clear as mud about wtf you are actually trying to say when using the term neoliberal and so people cannot engage in a charitable discussion with that. Like, wtf does someone being a neoliberal even mean then? You could have an idea, but it's not necessarily clear to anyone else.
It seems perfectly clear to me. Neoliberalism is a particular ideology focused on deregulation, shrinking the footprint of the government, free trade and globalization, and privatization. Policies that aim to achieve these goals are neoliberal policies. People who advocate for these policies are neoliberals. Other people may also advocate for neoliberal policies without being neoliberals, and they may even do it for non-neoliberal reasons: one of the reasons many social democrats began advocate neoliberal policies is that they came to believe that neoliberal policies would be the most effective (possible) way to achieve social democratic objectives (i.e. privatizing social services to achieve higher efficiency). So the question of whether someone is a neoliberal or not comes down to some combination of 1) whether the number of neoliberal policies they advocate reach some proportional threshold, 2) whether the policies they advocate run the full gamut of neoliberalism, 3) whether they advocate these policies due to a belief in neoliberalism's principles, 4) whether they advocate other policies opposed to neoliberalism, and maybe some more, and that can obviously be a difficult debatable question, as we're seeing play out here right now, but it's not an impossible one, and it's also not a question that's really all that important to answer anyways in most cases.
Like, what's hard about this? This is just... how stuff works. Not just in politics, either. We talk about existentialists in philosophy, and we talk about philosophers who are not existentialist having existentialist ideas. There's nothing unclear about that. There are existentialists and there are non-existentialists, and the existentialists don't have a monopoly on all existentialist ideas, so some non-existentialist philosopher can absolutely have some existentialist ideas. And at some point of saturation, if that philosopher has a lot of existentialist ideas, maybe we consider labeling them as an existentialist, but whether we even do that or not isn't even that important ultimately, so long as we acknowledge their relative position to other existentialists. And if I say, "Existentialists are X," then be a little charitable in interpretation before arguing that Nietzsche is not X so therefore existentialists are not X, unless I'm being so vague that everybody's X, and so X is meaningless or whatever.
And yet we've spawned like multiple pages of discussion where people are very unclear who is being called a neoliberal and in what way. So, empirically, not very clear at all.
If a neoliberal is not someone who does neoliberal things, what are they? Maybe we should just be more precise about what we are saying.
Re. the bolded: Well. That might be the conclusion you'd draw. I'd draw an entirely different one.
Also, no, see, you've already inverted this again. A neoliberal is someone who does neoliberal things. But doing (some/a few) neoliberal things doesn't make you a neoliberal. Right? Environmentalists recycle, because recycling is an environmentalist thing, but recycling doesn't make me an environmentalist, yes? Obviously, to be an environmentalist, you'd expect me to do more than just one thing that's environmentalist, right? More than two things, even. More than three things, probably! And certainly, if I said, "I only recycle so the city doesn't fine me," you'd be even less inclined to think of me as an environmentalist?
That is to say, surely, to be considered an environmentalist, you'd expect that someone would dedicate some significant portion of their lives to environmentalist causes. That's what I would expect before I would label someone a neoliberal. We might debate exactly how many things are needed and what level of principled belief they must have and whatnot, but at the level where we are right now, no, doing a thing that is neoliberal doesn't make you a neoliberal.
edit: Random thought on a completely different line of conversation, sorry ADHD strikes.
I'm perhaps going to show my ignorance here, but what exactly separates the USSR from fascist nations? Other than it's dubious claim to being leftist and its rivalry with fascist nations?
Popular authoritarian nationalism with an state-guided economy that's not really capitalist or socialist, leveraging ethnic and social divisions to appease the majority by crushing the minority, I'm not sure what's missing for fascism there.
The USSR was a severely mixed bag on human rights, though obviously more bad than good. Some groups made great strides and others...not so much. This isn't good mind you, but its distinctly different than fascism's self-aware disregard for human rights entirely, replacing them with in-group rights.
We'd expect to generally see more intertwining between religious structures and governmental ones in a fascist government.
Propaganda efforts aside the USSR was pretty big into the arts. So long as you weren't being counter revolutionary. Fascists have little regard for art except in so far as it can spread the state's message.
Corporate power usually holds firm under fascism, so long as its willing to play ball.
edit: Random thought on a completely different line of conversation, sorry ADHD strikes.
I'm perhaps going to show my ignorance here, but what exactly separates the USSR from fascist nations? Other than it's dubious claim to being leftist and its rivalry with fascist nations?
Popular authoritarian nationalism with an state-guided economy that's not really capitalist or socialist, leveraging ethnic and social divisions to appease the majority by crushing the minority, I'm not sure what's missing for fascism there.
Ideological construction primarily. Communist thought suggests that the state can solve the problems of society and attempts to do so. The state simultaneously distrusts the people and trusts that they're working for the interests of the people and as such experts with understanding of the system are ideal. An authoritarian state is necessary to ensure that people who would otherwise own capital cannot leverage that into political power.
Fascism is more "we are losing at the game of democracy so we're going to turn the table over".
The topic is the historical context of fascism, not your personal definitions of what is or is not a neoliberal, what is neoliberalism and whether Neo was or was not a liberal. You may have started off talking about it in relation to the topic but that was a long time ago and people's tones and posts have gotten off-topic and pretty rude and unproductive. Get back on topic.
edit: Random thought on a completely different line of conversation, sorry ADHD strikes.
I'm perhaps going to show my ignorance here, but what exactly separates the USSR from fascist nations? Other than it's dubious claim to being leftist and its rivalry with fascist nations?
Popular authoritarian nationalism with an state-guided economy that's not really capitalist or socialist, leveraging ethnic and social divisions to appease the majority by crushing the minority, I'm not sure what's missing for fascism there.
Fascism is not authoritarian nationalism.
Sure, it's authoritarian, and usually nationalist, but there's also an emphasis on conflict and war as good things by themselves, on a return to a stolen glory, on the abandon of compassion and freedom for the populace.
There's a strong notion that people have their place, and should stay in it, and that society should be run for the good of the deserving.
For example, if you own a large factory, you'll get a slave workforce and less competition. If you have a small enterprise, you will lose protection of law and might be informed that it now belong to someone richer.
Someone just posted on the last page, "How dare you call all Democrats neoliberals?" after I made a whole post pointing out that nobody was calling Democrats neoliberals, citing a post in which people were saying that the Democrats had thoroughly swung away from neoliberalism based on their putative 2020 presidential candidates.
Extra irony that they said they didn't repeat a discussion that had occurred in the past four pages.
Edit: cuz I got topped.
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Silly Goose, YOU called FDR a neoliberal
Right here. This is you calling FDR a neoliberal. The United States was involved in WWII by way of selling arms to the allies because of FDR. You are explicitly saying that you don't know how much credit you're going to give to "neoliberals" which would presumably be the person doing the selling in the thing you're quoting, for doing the thing that was being quoted as explictly an action of a Democratic administration. There is no other reading of it.
In the US case that's a kind of narrow definition of getting involved. We were in the war by March of '41 at the latest. It just wasn't declared yet.
... I dunno how much credit I'm going to extend to neoliberals for selling stuff to antifa.
... do you really think that I'm calling Churchill and Stalin antifa? :eh:
Who else would you be referring to when directly quoting someone who was directly referring to them?(though you could have also been referring to Churchill which would have been more correct as that is where the majority of our arms support went. (iirc))
The Democratic Party is too large to fit into any one section IMO
You've got Liberals of all stripes, some leftists, some nationalists...
When people refer to "the Democratic Party" as an entity all its own, they're talking about the people who are in the leadership positions of the party. Obviously some elected individuals who are registered Democrats might have more radical stances on a variety of topics, but it doesn't fucking matter if they don't ever get to influence what the party brings to the floor to legislate/vote on.
"Leadership" is a woolly term. Does any elected official wearing a blue rosette count? Because if so, you've also got a very broad spectrum there. You've got people who are basically genuinely leftists, all the way to the Blue Dogs or whatever nickname you want these days. There's some extremely hawkish Democrats and some hugely anti-military democrats (who are in a minority, because the Democratic Party in the US is extremely pro-military on account of the US being culturally extremely pro-military).
Know them by the fruits they bear.
Which would be socialist legislation. Democratic Leadership did not push GLB as an example. It had no Democratic co-sponsors and it was whipped against in the Senate. The "final vote" is not indicative of the push since it required significant concessions and had otherwise already passed. (I.E. the democrats were voting to get concessions not for the purpose of the bill). Similarly the democrats fought and won on language which pushed the bill away from the strong deregulation that Republicans wanted, by forcing the negotiators in conference to attempt that type of reconciliation. Now, sure today you would say that this would be terrible. But today the legislation would not have gotten off the ground, as the initial vote to send it to reconciliation was 54-46. So...
Wait what socialist legislation does the Democratic Part push?
We can start with the three attempts at socialized medicine for one. The EPA, The New Deal, the Great Society, SNAP. Like... all of the new bills the incoming house has introduced and is in line to pass.
There has been a dearth of successful legislation over the past few years but it was not for a lack of trying.
Yeah the Democrats of the 1930s, 1980s, and 2010s aren't the same people.
They are the ideological decedents of those people. Are you really going to suggest that the reason we don't have Socialized Medicine is that democrats didn't want it? That the reason we have SNAP is that democrats have fought to dismantle it and it was just super hard to convince Republicans to get rid of it?
The Democratic party isn't a monolith and neither is the Republican party. Thinking of them in those terms is erroneous.
Clinton represented a important part of the Democratic coalition in the 1990s that believed in neoliberal policies like financial deregulation. Hillary Clinton even in the 2016 election wasn't running on tougher financial regulations like much of the party that was behind Sanders and Warren wanted.
Not all of the Democratic party wants the same things.
But there was no significant coalition of democrats that believed in Financial Deregulation. Bill was not for it and neither was Hillary. I literally just had to educate you on how GLB passed and it was not a democratic led initiative at any stage in the process... until such a time as it was already clearly passing and effects could be ameliorated. Hillary even campaigned hard on financial regulation.
These things you're claiming happened did not happen.
Edit: for the purposes of this post "liberal" and "neoliberal" refer to pre keynes laissez faire capitalism and its ideological descendants.
Look I'm just going to admit that I'm seeing what I want in Bill and Hillary's records, but at the same time, a lot of Americans saw it too. Whether it was real, or just a perception of them being in Wall Street's pockets', I don't really think this is the thread the refight the Clinton legacy so I'm going to stop before I get modded.
Sure but we should not be having a discussion about "how people see things" but how they are. If we are having a discussion about ideologies and how those ideologies interact with fascism then "how things really are" is important when discussing its impact on our modern system.
Neoliberalism or classical liberalism are ideologies which espouse freedom as paramount. Specifically negative freedoms. Which is to say that "being prevented from doing something is a reduction in freedom" Socialism has a similar backing because its very hard to argue that freedom is bad. But it emphasizes positive freedoms and utility. Which is to say that being given the ability to do something is an increase in freedom. A classical liberal or neoliberal would say either that this was not true, or that it would necessitate a greater reduction in freedom on the other side.
Socialism was born out of the first European industrial revolution as a way to deal with "the social problems" and encompassed a large group of people. It eventually coalesced into a rejection of capitalism by latching onto Marx's theory of production and then theories of political economy which solved those problems and which grew out of the ideas of French Christian Communism.
Socialism, as a structure in this sense, is far less defined than liberalism and is far more open to movement on ideological grounds and for different reasons. The technical socialists (I.E. Marxists) generally failed when Marxism as an economic theory failed. Those that rejected that failure became the communists and those that accepted it became the social democrats. These two ideologies are solving a fundamentally different problem. The communists trying to solve the dialectic and the Social Democrats trying to solve a hypothetical social utility function by whatever means necessary.
The democrats come from that second tradition, not the first. And we note that while it might accept a "liberal" policy it is not doing so for a "liberal" reason. "People should be free to sell ice cream in the summer" is not therefore an inherently liberal policy position because a neoliberal would say "am i being prevented from selling ice cream this is bad" and a socialist would say "ice cream is good and this maximizes the amount of people who can get ice cream without necessarily damaging other aspects of society which we care about".
"Neoliberals/liberals" tend to support fascism because fascism tends to align with ideas of property rights. Fascism exploits the reality that an unmoderated society forum will degrade into power structures just as an unmoderated forum will degrade into power structures, those most willing to abuse societal/forum levers will "win". The "liberals" think that societal levers are neutral and contain no positive or negative aspect, so long as the "state" isn't telling "people" which levers they can or cannot pull. Hence they tend to support fascism, either implicitly or explicitly.
But people who do not come from that ideological construction are not particularly vulnerable to fascist ideology. At least as I see it. Those people are natural allies, even if they're a technocratic socialist compared to a dialectic socialist, compared to a radical isolationist communist. This does not mean they cannot be convinced in the "after Hitler, our turn" way. But they're our allies.
And we need to treat them as such and engage with them on the level of their ideology in order to facilitate that resistance. So when democrats see democrats and their ideology tarred with that brush it does not help. It shows a fundamental and maybe even disingenuous understanding of how we all got here. And it makes it harder to ally against fascism.
This is separate from the democratic norms. Which are a-whole-nother ball game and i don't think particularly relevant to the issue. They don't stem from the same axis of freedoms which define the economic philosophy that drives fascism to undermine and reject democracy.
People who advocate for these policies are neoliberals. Other people may also advocate for neoliberal policies without being neoliberals,
This is the hard part. Because you're not clear when you're discussing when people who advocate neoliberal policy are neoliberal or when they aren't. You call them all neoliberal when they might not be and then claim they're all the problem. So then is it "policy that might potentially be called neoliberal" that is the problem or is it neoliberal thought?
If you can't get it simple within two sentences in the same post how do you expect us to understand you when you tell it to us without a rubric for every label in a natural use context?
Talking about Democrats coming from any single ideological tradition is very silly to me. The modern Democratic party didn't exist until the Conservative wing of the Democratic Party and the Progressive wing of the Republican parties switched places.
Edit: Sorry Bogart missed that.
Jephery on
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"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
edit: Random thought on a completely different line of conversation, sorry ADHD strikes.
I'm perhaps going to show my ignorance here, but what exactly separates the USSR from fascist nations? Other than it's dubious claim to being leftist and its rivalry with fascist nations?
Popular authoritarian nationalism with an state-guided economy that's not really capitalist or socialist, leveraging ethnic and social divisions to appease the majority by crushing the minority, I'm not sure what's missing for fascism there.
Ideological construction primarily. Communist thought suggests that the state can solve the problems of society and attempts to do so. The state simultaneously distrusts the people and trusts that they're working for the interests of the people and as such experts with understanding of the system are ideal. An authoritarian state is necessary to ensure that people who would otherwise own capital cannot leverage that into political power.
Fascism is more "we are losing at the game of democracy so we're going to turn the table over".
I think the link you see between the two is the authoritarianism. The rest is very different ideologies.
Do you believe the politics of Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful Democrat in the United States, enable the spread of fascism?
I believe the Democrats, in their role as part of the mainstream political order of the last 50 years or so, have created a situation in which fascism could again become a real threat in the United States. Nancy Pelosi had a role in that in proportion to her power to shape political reality in the US. Like I've been saying, I don't think focusing on individuals in very useful.
I feel like a Who/What/When/Where/Why/How thing is needed here. Because this is not clear.
The last 50 years or so of American politics have been a general slide towards weaker wage earnings, harder to come by social programs, crumbling social infrastructure, and a concentration of power at the top. Democrats haven't always taken the side of the most aggressive moves towards this and sometimes they've pushed good things, but often even when they create good programs they're done from that paradigm. Means testing runs hand in hand with the ideology of privatization and the undermining of the welfare state.
All of this creates a degree of social unmooring, stagnation, and need that is fertile ground for fascism.
So I don't really agree with your premise about the Democratic Party in general. I think the Nixon coalition (grossly simplified: capitalists and white supremacists) has been the dominant coalition of the last 50 years and thus is basically responsible for those outcomes you're talking about. For a while part of that coalition were still technically Democrats (Zell Miller, for example).
More than that though, I think there are some outcomes that don't make sense in this narrative. Basically, it seems to me like the American fascist movement, which is to say the white supremacist movement, is strongest in times of (relative) economic prosperity and weakest when the economy is weakest. This goes all the way back to the second KKK which was enormously powerful in the 20s, when the economy was booming. You would think that kind of ideology would have been strongest during the Depression. And while there was some of that, it wasn't the most powerful political force. You can see this again recently. White supremacist/fascist political tactics were strongest in the elections of 2000 and 2016, even on the right. When the economy sucked in 2008 and 2012 and they had open primaries, they nominated the people perceived to be social/racial moderates like McCain or Romney, not the authoritarian racists like Huckabee or Gingrich.
My theory is that for white Americans, white supremacy is a luxury good. When times suck, they'll ally with anyone to make their lives better. When policy/societal structure make it so that they are the first ones to recover from the hard times, they immediately move to pull up the ladder behind them. And I think it's really more that black political activism is more likely to be seen in a strong economy than in a weak one. In a weak economy, which is even weaker for black people, they're just struggling to survive. In a good economy, they are surviving but getting fucked. And people who are surviving but getting fucked become politically active. And when white people see black people demanding their full rights of citizenship, they get very angry. And that's when you see fascists with mass popular support in America.
enlightenedbum on
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Do you believe the politics of Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful Democrat in the United States, enable the spread of fascism?
I believe the Democrats, in their role as part of the mainstream political order of the last 50 years or so, have created a situation in which fascism could again become a real threat in the United States. Nancy Pelosi had a role in that in proportion to her power to shape political reality in the US. Like I've been saying, I don't think focusing on individuals in very useful.
I feel like a Who/What/When/Where/Why/How thing is needed here. Because this is not clear.
The last 50 years or so of American politics have been a general slide towards weaker wage earnings, harder to come by social programs, crumbling social infrastructure, and a concentration of power at the top. Democrats haven't always taken the side of the most aggressive moves towards this and sometimes they've pushed good things, but often even when they create good programs they're done from that paradigm. Means testing runs hand in hand with the ideology of privatization and the undermining of the welfare state.
All of this creates a degree of social unmooring, stagnation, and need that is fertile ground for fascism.
So I don't really agree with your premise about the Democratic Party in general. I think the Nixon coalition (grossly simplified: capitalists and white supremacists) has been the dominant coalition of the last 50 years and thus is basically responsible for those outcomes you're talking about. For a while part of that coalition were still technically Democrats (Zell Miller, for example).
More than that though, I think there are some outcomes that don't make sense in this narrative. Basically, it seems to me like the American fascist movement, which is to say the white supremacist movement, is strongest in times of (relative) economic prosperity and weakest when the economy is weakest. This goes all the way back to the second KKK which was enormously powerful in the 20s, when the economy was booming. You would think that kind of ideology would have been strongest during the Depression. And while there was some of that, it wasn't the most powerful political force. You can see this again recently. White supremacist/fascist political tactics were strongest in the elections of 2000 and 2016, even on the right. When the economy sucked in 2008 and 2012 and they had open primaries, they nominated the people perceived to be social/racial moderates like McCain or Romney, not the authoritarian racists like Huckabee or Gingrich.
My theory is that for white Americans, white supremacy is a luxury good. When times suck, they'll ally with anyone to make their lives better. When policy/societal structure make it so that they are the first ones to recover from the hard times, they immediately move to pull up the ladder behind them. And I think it's really more than black political activism is more likely to be seen in a strong economy than in a weak one. In a weak economy, which is even weaker for black people, they're just struggling to survive. In a good economy, they are surviving but getting fucked. And people who are surviving but getting fucked become politically active. And when white people see black people demanding their full rights of citizenship, they get very angry. And that's when you see fascists with mass popular support in America.
If the rise of fascism in the US was a function of our lingering racism we'd expect to see resurgent fascism play out with greater difference across the developed world. Obviously we're not the only country with a racism problem, but the particular fabric isn't uniform. More over, I think you kind of skip over why the economy isn't meeting people's needs in the first place. There are cycles, sure, but its been a long time since the highs were really that high for Joe Q Regular.
Like I said earlier though, this is a big point of difference between leftists and liberals. We view racism as a symptom that can cause further ills, not a root cause.
Its not a huge point either, but I'd want to note that the perceived moderates in 2008 and 2012 struggled badly to get their base excited about them, being perceived as basically big business globally oriented elitists (you can see where that fits into theories of neoliberalism).
Honestly I don't think much that's happened since the 90s has mattered a ton for the rise of fascism in the US. The damage was already done and we're just living through the effect of it now.
I understand the need to define terms but I don’t think going “do you think [Democratic politician x] enabled fascism” is going to lead the discussion down a useful road
Fascism isn’t the kind of thing you can point a finger at one solitary person and go, “you did this”
In the big picture, neoliberalism and overwhelming adherence to the platonic ideal of capitalism have helped to enable fascism
In a very real sense, we are all collectively responsible for it
I'd say the last POTUS who wasn't decisively neoliberal would be LBJ, who for all his foreign policy faults made one of the more prominent attempts in the 20th century at wresting power from capitalists. That's not to start an argument about him specifically, more to point out that the following succession of administrations up until Clinton (I have a hard time naming anything Carter achieved to pull political power leftward) were steadfastly anti-labor, anti-regulation, and consolidated more and more power into the executive.
Following the GOPs dominance of the executive branch through H.W. Bush the lesson that the Democratic party seems to have learned in nominating Clinton was to shift economically rightward, deregulating the finance industry and ignoring organized labor altogether. You could pin most of this on the attenuation of unions as a political force in the Reagan era, leaving the Democratic party to have to build a base elsewhere. Leftists were no longer an important part of the Democratic coalition, and so the "leftist" political party in the US turned toward centrist neoliberalism. And so organized labor began its slow decline into irrelevance, as they no longer had a political party willing to go to bat for them for fear of being marginalized entirely. The 2000s saw the rise of unlimited corporate political spending and the elimination of earmarks which often acted as a sort of bipartisan stabilizing force, and here we are.
This was always the endgame of GOP political strategy: weaken the Democratic base by destroying unions, radicalize the electorate and who they vote for by removing incentives to cooperate, and consolidate power into the executive so that Congress couldn't effectively circumvent Presidential authority. Nixon created the EPA because political pressure on environmentalist was at an all time high, and he didn't want his opposition to be the ones who scored the win and wrote the rules.
Which is how fascists have now found themselves at the threshold of control: there are fewer levers of power thanks to centralization of authority in the Executive branch (from both neoliberal and more left-leaning administrations, FDR quite famously), there's no longer an effective base of political opposition due to the dismantling of organized labor, and the electorate is more and more radicalized. All of this was in the interest of maintaining GOP political power (to say nothing of voter suppression and their efforts to gerrymander statehouses and appoint right-wing judges) and has inadvertently played directly into emboldening and enabling fascists.
If this analysis seems to focus too heavily on one single elected official, the Executive branch is both an agent of and a bellwether for how larger political trends have played out. Presidential nominees necessarily reflect the preferences of their party, and I think it's telling that our ostensibly left-leaning party has taken up the playbook of the neoliberal party in both who they nominate and how they govern at the national level.
i feel like this whole conversation is just a proxy for arguing about whether or not liberalism is better than socialism, and we'd do better arguing directly about that. though it's outside the scope of the thread of course
My theory is that for white Americans, white supremacy is a luxury good. When times suck, they'll ally with anyone to make their lives better. When policy/societal structure make it so that they are the first ones to recover from the hard times, they immediately move to pull up the ladder behind them. And I think it's really more than black political activism is more likely to be seen in a strong economy than in a weak one. In a weak economy, which is even weaker for black people, they're just struggling to survive. In a good economy, they are surviving but getting fucked. And people who are surviving but getting fucked become politically active. And when white people see black people demanding their full rights of citizenship, they get very angry. And that's when you see fascists with mass popular support in America.
My theory is that for white Americans, white supremacy is a luxury good. When times suck, they'll ally with anyone to make their lives better. When policy/societal structure make it so that they are the first ones to recover from the hard times, they immediately move to pull up the ladder behind them. And I think it's really more than black political activism is more likely to be seen in a strong economy than in a weak one. In a weak economy, which is even weaker for black people, they're just struggling to survive. In a good economy, they are surviving but getting fucked. And people who are surviving but getting fucked become politically active. And when white people see black people demanding their full rights of citizenship, they get very angry. And that's when you see fascists with mass popular support in America.
Is the bolded a typo? Should it read "that?"
Yes
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Where liberal/neoliberal policy is relevant is where it created the living conditions that created an environment where gullible racists felt that hiding their racism was less important than being pandered to and told that someone had the answers to all their problems
Widening wealth inequality combined with a massive propaganda effort and virtually nobody in politics making a serious effort to fix it opened the door to Make America Great Again sounding pretty good to a lot of people, and the racism coming out of that campaign was the peanut butter to their chocolate
Where liberal/neoliberal policy is relevant is where it created the living conditions that created an environment where gullible racists felt that hiding their racism was less important than being pandered to and told that someone had the answers to all their problems
Widening wealth inequality combined with a massive propaganda effort and virtually nobody in politics making a serious effort to fix it opened the door to Make America Great Again sounding pretty good to a lot of people, and the racism coming out of that campaign was the peanut butter to their chocolate
I'm not sure how it did that. Unless we're talking like the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine and media consolidation. Because racism has always been massively powerful in American politics.
enlightenedbum on
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Where liberal/neoliberal policy is relevant is where it created the living conditions that created an environment where gullible racists felt that hiding their racism was less important than being pandered to and told that someone had the answers to all their problems
Widening wealth inequality combined with a massive propaganda effort and virtually nobody in politics making a serious effort to fix it opened the door to Make America Great Again sounding pretty good to a lot of people, and the racism coming out of that campaign was the peanut butter to their chocolate
I'm not sure how it did that. Unless we're talking like the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine and media consolidation. Because racism has always been massively powerful in American politics.
In the context of propaganda, yes
But propaganda doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it’s easier to convince people that their lives suck and The Other is a problem if their lives actually do suck
Where liberal/neoliberal policy is relevant is where it created the living conditions that created an environment where gullible racists felt that hiding their racism was less important than being pandered to and told that someone had the answers to all their problems
Widening wealth inequality combined with a massive propaganda effort and virtually nobody in politics making a serious effort to fix it opened the door to Make America Great Again sounding pretty good to a lot of people, and the racism coming out of that campaign was the peanut butter to their chocolate
I'm not sure how it did that. Unless we're talking like the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine and media consolidation. Because racism has always been massively powerful in American politics.
We talk a lot about how when the economy gets really bad things can get ugly yeah? Well neoliberalism has created an economy where its always kind of bad at best for a lot of people. That constant and very real grief gave them something they felt they could pin racist beliefs on while also swelling their ranks.
In other words, its easier on a personal level to be racist about immigrants or whatever when you haven't gotten a raise in 10 years and everything keeps costing more.
Where liberal/neoliberal policy is relevant is where it created the living conditions that created an environment where gullible racists felt that hiding their racism was less important than being pandered to and told that someone had the answers to all their problems
Widening wealth inequality combined with a massive propaganda effort and virtually nobody in politics making a serious effort to fix it opened the door to Make America Great Again sounding pretty good to a lot of people, and the racism coming out of that campaign was the peanut butter to their chocolate
I'm not sure how it did that. Unless we're talking like the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine and media consolidation. Because racism has always been massively powerful in American politics.
In the context of propaganda, yes
But propaganda doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it’s easier to convince people that their lives suck and The Other is a problem if their lives actually do suck
This is my biggest disagreement with socialists, in the context of the US. White supremacy isn't about scapegoating someone else for their problems, it's about preserving the existing power structure which privileges white people. It's disconnected from people's economic status. Which happily tracks with it actually being middle class white people that powered Trump's rise.
enlightenedbum on
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Where liberal/neoliberal policy is relevant is where it created the living conditions that created an environment where gullible racists felt that hiding their racism was less important than being pandered to and told that someone had the answers to all their problems
Widening wealth inequality combined with a massive propaganda effort and virtually nobody in politics making a serious effort to fix it opened the door to Make America Great Again sounding pretty good to a lot of people, and the racism coming out of that campaign was the peanut butter to their chocolate
I'm not sure how it did that. Unless we're talking like the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine and media consolidation. Because racism has always been massively powerful in American politics.
In the context of propaganda, yes
But propaganda doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it’s easier to convince people that their lives suck and The Other is a problem if their lives actually do suck
This is my biggest disagreement with socialists, in the context of the US. White supremacy isn't about scapegoating someone else for their problems, it's about preserving the existing power structure which privileges white people. It's disconnected from people's economic status. Which happily tracks with it actually being middle class white people that powered Trump's rise.
Not all racism comes from the same place. Like if we're talking about some prep school mother fucker who's worried that diversity quota at his investment firm will undercut him then yeah I'm on board regarding power structures. But we're talking more here about working class people. To say that the guy who lost his job, is watching his town slowly wither and blames immigrants is worried about his access to a white power structure is borderline let-them-eat-cake disregard for real ills.
Where liberal/neoliberal policy is relevant is where it created the living conditions that created an environment where gullible racists felt that hiding their racism was less important than being pandered to and told that someone had the answers to all their problems
Widening wealth inequality combined with a massive propaganda effort and virtually nobody in politics making a serious effort to fix it opened the door to Make America Great Again sounding pretty good to a lot of people, and the racism coming out of that campaign was the peanut butter to their chocolate
I'm not sure how it did that. Unless we're talking like the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine and media consolidation. Because racism has always been massively powerful in American politics.
In the context of propaganda, yes
But propaganda doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it’s easier to convince people that their lives suck and The Other is a problem if their lives actually do suck
This is my biggest disagreement with socialists, in the context of the US. White supremacy isn't about scapegoating someone else for their problems, it's about preserving the existing power structure which privileges white people. It's disconnected from people's economic status. Which happily tracks with it actually being middle class white people that powered Trump's rise.
Why are the two incompatible?
I'm reminded of that article about how many Trump voters were upset at what they saw as immigrants "cutting the line." That would seem to me to fit both: they're upset about being left behind, left out of America's economic prosperity, shoved down by growing income inequality, but they also want to preserve the existing power structure because they expected it to uplift them next, because if they're ever going to be on the top-side of things they need others to be on the bottom.
I'll also note that fascism isn't exactly an intricately rational ideology. Trump is the obvious modern example, but Hitler and Mussolini too were known for using a lot of words to say nothing much at all, a vague vacuous way of speaking that let people graft whatever beliefs they had onto the words they were hearing. The Nazis were fairly socialist* themselves right up until the Night of the Long Knives, then suddenly they were aligned with the German industrialists, and nobody batted an eye.
* Plz don't yell at me Sammich. You know what I mean.
at some point you do have to concede that political ideologies don't have clear boundaries and the question of "is X neoliberal" is inherently a fuzzy one
the original question that kicked off this whole thing was "does the Economist praising some aspects of Bolsonaro's administration constitute evidence that neoliberals have a tendency to support fascists?" if you're a leftist you're going to see it as part of an ongoing pattern, if you're a liberal you're more likely to see it as a one-time thing or an excusable lapse. i don't know if we're going to figure out which of those things it actually is just by yelling at each other. it almost seems like you'd have to do some kind of statistical analysis
I guess I feel like it can be both of those things
My counter would be the 2008 financial crisis. If you recall, Fox and the right generally moved to put the blame on the banks being required to treat black people fairly.And yes, this argument gained traction among Republican partisans, but it was never a mainstream position. People (including moderate whites) rightly blamed Wall Street and Congress. Later that year, the country overwhelmingly elected a black guy president. The economic calamity did not seem to foster racist attitudes outside of the people who are generally outwardly racist to start with.
What DID foster racist attitudes outside of those groups were things like Obama saying Trayvon Martin "could have been his son" or that the policeman who arrested Henry Louis Gates was "stupid." Or especially the entire Black Lives Matter movement. When black people went after the white power structure (police in particular), moderate whites went apeshit and started voting for fascists. I find this suggestive, personally.
Racism against Latinx and in particular with immigration might work more like the scapegoating model, I'm not sure about that. Same deal with anti-semitism, though those are usually all the same people.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
I guess I feel like it can be both of those things
so it might be outside the scope of the thread, but real quick, on this topic:
So American Racism and White Supremacy is like a fucking mutant virus engineered back in the early colonial era, which took on it's own life that's propagated since.
Basically, the way I understand it, is that it was developed as a means of dividing poor white Europeans and African slaves from one another so they posed less of a risk to the landed gentry when it came to the power structures in the colonies, while also working to prevent African slaves from ever being freed under the systems of the time. Like, you could get out of it by accepting Christianity, basically, which became something of a thing for a while.
As you can imagine, the white landed gentry was not particularly fond of losing their free labor. So they started a campaign of dehumanization against Africans in order to prevent losing their labor, and to help placate the poor white settlers by making them feel like there was someone below them.
Give it a few decades and you get the strain of American Racism we've been struggling with for literal centuries.
Slate had an article pulled from Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America about it, which is my primary cite for it:
I guess I feel like it can be both of those things
My counter would be the 2008 financial crisis. If you recall, Fox and the right generally moved to put the blame on the banks being required to treat black people fairly.And yes, this argument gained traction among Republican partisans, but it was never a mainstream position. People (including moderate whites) rightly blamed Wall Street and Congress. Later that year, the country overwhelmingly elected a black guy president. The economic calamity did not seem to foster racist attitudes outside of the people who are generally outwardly racist to start with.
What DID foster racist attitudes outside of those groups were things like Obama saying Trayvon Martin "could have been his son" or that the policeman who arrested Henry Louis Gates was "stupid." Or especially the entire Black Lives Matter movement. When black people went after the white power structure (police in particular), moderate whites went apeshit and started voting for fascists. I find this suggestive, personally.
Racism against Latinx and in particular with immigration might work more like the scapegoating model, I'm not sure about that. Same deal with anti-semitism, though those are usually all the same people.
This again tracks with what I was mentioning above. Studies have shown that the perception of, how I would describe it is a loss of place within the racial hierarchy, makes people trend more conservative.
Where liberal/neoliberal policy is relevant is where it created the living conditions that created an environment where gullible racists felt that hiding their racism was less important than being pandered to and told that someone had the answers to all their problems
Widening wealth inequality combined with a massive propaganda effort and virtually nobody in politics making a serious effort to fix it opened the door to Make America Great Again sounding pretty good to a lot of people, and the racism coming out of that campaign was the peanut butter to their chocolate
I'm not sure how it did that. Unless we're talking like the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine and media consolidation. Because racism has always been massively powerful in American politics.
In the context of propaganda, yes
But propaganda doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it’s easier to convince people that their lives suck and The Other is a problem if their lives actually do suck
This is my biggest disagreement with socialists, in the context of the US. White supremacy isn't about scapegoating someone else for their problems, it's about preserving the existing power structure which privileges white people. It's disconnected from people's economic status. Which happily tracks with it actually being middle class white people that powered Trump's rise.
Why are the two incompatible?
I'm reminded of that article about how many Trump voters were upset at what they saw as immigrants "cutting the line." That would seem to me to fit both: they're upset about being left behind, left out of America's economic prosperity, shoved down by growing income inequality, but they also want to preserve the existing power structure because they expected it to uplift them next, because if they're ever going to be on the top-side of things they need others to be on the bottom.
I'll also note that fascism isn't exactly an intricately rational ideology. Trump is the obvious modern example, but Hitler and Mussolini too were known for using a lot of words to say nothing much at all, a vague vacuous way of speaking that let people graft whatever beliefs they had onto the words they were hearing. The Nazis were fairly socialist* themselves right up until the Night of the Long Knives, then suddenly they were aligned with the German industrialists, and nobody batted an eye.
* Plz don't yell at me Sammich. You know what I mean.
I think you can't look at modern american fascism and not see it's deep roots in white supremacy. Or rather, that it's the exact same thing.
The idea that american fascism is about economics is just not well supported by what correlates with support for Trump. Economic dissatisfaction is nowhere near as strong as it's correlation with racism and sexism.
+1
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
Literally no one is defining their terms, which is why this discussion is not working.
I feel like we have, multiple times. I copied a portion of "The Handbook of Neoliberalism" that seemed very on point for defining what we were critiquing.
It's just everyone ignored it because spatting over "Are you calling me a fascist" was somehow a more interesting conversation than actually delving into the history of fascism's rise and it's parallels today.
Someone just posted on this page, "How dare you call all Democrats neoliberals?" after I made a whole post pointing out that nobody was calling Democrats neoliberals, citing a post in which people were saying that the Democrats had thoroughly swung away from neoliberalism based on their putative 2020 presidential candidates.
Extra irony that they said they didn't repeat a discussion that had occurred in the past four pages.
Because they weren't neoliberal before that either.
During the 1990s, the Clinton administration also embraced neoliberalism[84] by supporting the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), continuing the deregulation of the financial sector through passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act and the repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act and implementing cuts to the welfare state through passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act.
There is literally no way in which Clinton and Third Way Democrats can be defined as not neoliberal. They fully met the definition, and generally continue to meet it still. The qualifier of "Americans who work 40 hours a week" to claims of rights and the assertions of being super capitalist from the '20 crowd show it hasn't changed a lot.
The next sentence on Wikipedia may explain the fight over this you guys have had, I think.
The neoliberalism of the Clinton administration differs from that of Reagan as the Clinton administration purged neoliberalism of neoconservative positions on militarism, family values, opposition to multiculturalism and neglect of ecological issues.
The Democrats are not the same as the Republicans, nobody thinks that. They differ on important issues, and have very different interpretations of how to do neoliberalism. The Democratic party that we have now generally favours a more expansive welfare state, with M4A and such having great support. There is also more scepticism about deregulation, though not in all areas. It is at least closer in position to the liberal democratic welfare state as Rawls sketched it. They are certainly not neocons.
But a fairer and better welfare state will still be neoliberalism if you support the axioms of the theory. The fact that there are huge differences between mainstream parties does not mean they can't also be close on certain issues.
fascism is often pinned on poor people. it's supposed to be - times become tough, poor people are angry because they' re poor, so they become racist
but what happens just as often is - the middle class see people getting poorer, they become concerned about preserving their own wealth and status against redistribution, they look for ways to dehumanise poor people. such as racism
most of bolsonaro's support comes from wealthy brazilians, for example. poor people voted for the other guy
Where liberal/neoliberal policy is relevant is where it created the living conditions that created an environment where gullible racists felt that hiding their racism was less important than being pandered to and told that someone had the answers to all their problems
Widening wealth inequality combined with a massive propaganda effort and virtually nobody in politics making a serious effort to fix it opened the door to Make America Great Again sounding pretty good to a lot of people, and the racism coming out of that campaign was the peanut butter to their chocolate
I'm not sure how it did that. Unless we're talking like the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine and media consolidation. Because racism has always been massively powerful in American politics.
In the context of propaganda, yes
But propaganda doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it’s easier to convince people that their lives suck and The Other is a problem if their lives actually do suck
This is my biggest disagreement with socialists, in the context of the US. White supremacy isn't about scapegoating someone else for their problems, it's about preserving the existing power structure which privileges white people. It's disconnected from people's economic status. Which happily tracks with it actually being middle class white people that powered Trump's rise.
Why are the two incompatible?
I'm reminded of that article about how many Trump voters were upset at what they saw as immigrants "cutting the line." That would seem to me to fit both: they're upset about being left behind, left out of America's economic prosperity, shoved down by growing income inequality, but they also want to preserve the existing power structure because they expected it to uplift them next, because if they're ever going to be on the top-side of things they need others to be on the bottom.
I'll also note that fascism isn't exactly an intricately rational ideology. Trump is the obvious modern example, but Hitler and Mussolini too were known for using a lot of words to say nothing much at all, a vague vacuous way of speaking that let people graft whatever beliefs they had onto the words they were hearing. The Nazis were fairly socialist* themselves right up until the Night of the Long Knives, then suddenly they were aligned with the German industrialists, and nobody batted an eye.
* Plz don't yell at me Sammich. You know what I mean.
I think you can't look at modern american fascism and not see it's deep roots in white supremacy. Or rather, that it's the exact same thing.
The idea that american fascism is about economics is just not well supported by what correlates with support for Trump. Economic dissatisfaction is nowhere near as strong as it's correlation with racism and sexism.
I mean I'm not sure what a fascist movement without racist elements would even look like. The argument is mostly what the causal relationship is.
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I wouldn't consider apartheid South Africa fascist, but it was still apartheid South Africa. You can have a somewhat functioning herrenvolk democracy despite its inherent elitism. It is just that herrenvolk democracies are inherently bad regardless of what all the apartheid South Africa apologists back in the day might have argued.
The last 50 years or so of American politics have been a general slide towards weaker wage earnings, harder to come by social programs, crumbling social infrastructure, and a concentration of power at the top. Democrats haven't always taken the side of the most aggressive moves towards this and sometimes they've pushed good things, but often even when they create good programs they're done from that paradigm. Means testing runs hand in hand with the ideology of privatization and the undermining of the welfare state.
All of this creates a degree of social unmooring, stagnation, and need that is fertile ground for fascism.
It seems perfectly clear to me. Neoliberalism is a particular ideology focused on deregulation, shrinking the footprint of the government, free trade and globalization, and privatization. Policies that aim to achieve these goals are neoliberal policies. People who advocate for these policies are neoliberals. Other people may also advocate for neoliberal policies without being neoliberals, and they may even do it for non-neoliberal reasons: one of the reasons many social democrats began advocate neoliberal policies is that they came to believe that neoliberal policies would be the most effective (possible) way to achieve social democratic objectives (i.e. privatizing social services to achieve higher efficiency). So the question of whether someone is a neoliberal or not comes down to some combination of 1) whether the number of neoliberal policies they advocate reach some proportional threshold, 2) whether the policies they advocate run the full gamut of neoliberalism, 3) whether they advocate these policies due to a belief in neoliberalism's principles, 4) whether they advocate other policies opposed to neoliberalism, and maybe some more, and that can obviously be a difficult debatable question, as we're seeing play out here right now, but it's not an impossible one, and it's also not a question that's really all that important to answer anyways in most cases.
Like, what's hard about this? This is just... how stuff works. Not just in politics, either. We talk about existentialists in philosophy, and we talk about philosophers who are not existentialist having existentialist ideas. There's nothing unclear about that. There are existentialists and there are non-existentialists, and the existentialists don't have a monopoly on all existentialist ideas, so some non-existentialist philosopher can absolutely have some existentialist ideas. And at some point of saturation, if that philosopher has a lot of existentialist ideas, maybe we consider labeling them as an existentialist, but whether we even do that or not isn't even that important ultimately, so long as we acknowledge their relative position to other existentialists. And if I say, "Existentialists are X," then be a little charitable in interpretation before arguing that Nietzsche is not X so therefore existentialists are not X, unless I'm being so vague that everybody's X, and so X is meaningless or whatever.
There's been some research (Ezra Klein I think wrote a piece on it but can't find it right now) showing that people's reaction to being told their country or whatever is diversifying is to swing right. And it's not just white people. Tell black people latinos are starting to become more numerous then them? Same thing. Tell latinos the same about asians? Same thing. And it's not just specific policies related to race it's just all policies in general.
Given the links between the right and fascism I think there's very likely a real connection between the perception of america becoming more diverse and the rise in fascist ideology.
Sure but we should not be having a discussion about "how people see things" but how they are. If we are having a discussion about ideologies and how those ideologies interact with fascism then "how things really are" is important when discussing its impact on our modern system.
Neoliberalism or classical liberalism are ideologies which espouse freedom as paramount. Specifically negative freedoms. Which is to say that "being prevented from doing something is a reduction in freedom" Socialism has a similar backing because its very hard to argue that freedom is bad. But it emphasizes positive freedoms and utility. Which is to say that being given the ability to do something is an increase in freedom. A classical liberal or neoliberal would say either that this was not true, or that it would necessitate a greater reduction in freedom on the other side.
Socialism was born out of the first European industrial revolution as a way to deal with "the social problems" and encompassed a large group of people. It eventually coalesced into a rejection of capitalism by latching onto Marx's theory of production and then theories of political economy which solved those problems and which grew out of the ideas of French Christian Communism.
Socialism, as a structure in this sense, is far less defined than liberalism and is far more open to movement on ideological grounds and for different reasons. The technical socialists (I.E. Marxists) generally failed when Marxism as an economic theory failed. Those that rejected that failure became the communists and those that accepted it became the social democrats. These two ideologies are solving a fundamentally different problem. The communists trying to solve the dialectic and the Social Democrats trying to solve a hypothetical social utility function by whatever means necessary.
The democrats come from that second tradition, not the first. And we note that while it might accept a "liberal" policy it is not doing so for a "liberal" reason. "People should be free to sell ice cream in the summer" is not therefore an inherently liberal policy position because a neoliberal would say "am i being prevented from selling ice cream this is bad" and a socialist would say "ice cream is good and this maximizes the amount of people who can get ice cream without necessarily damaging other aspects of society which we care about".
"Neoliberals/liberals" tend to support fascism because fascism tends to align with ideas of property rights. Fascism exploits the reality that an unmoderated society forum will degrade into power structures just as an unmoderated forum will degrade into power structures, those most willing to abuse societal/forum levers will "win". The "liberals" think that societal levers are neutral and contain no positive or negative aspect, so long as the "state" isn't telling "people" which levers they can or cannot pull. Hence they tend to support fascism, either implicitly or explicitly.
But people who do not come from that ideological construction are not particularly vulnerable to fascist ideology. At least as I see it. Those people are natural allies, even if they're a technocratic socialist compared to a dialectic socialist, compared to a radical isolationist communist. This does not mean they cannot be convinced in the "after Hitler, our turn" way. But they're our allies.
And we need to treat them as such and engage with them on the level of their ideology in order to facilitate that resistance. So when democrats see democrats and their ideology tarred with that brush it does not help. It shows a fundamental and maybe even disingenuous understanding of how we all got here. And it makes it harder to ally against fascism.
This is separate from the democratic norms. Which are a-whole-nother ball game and i don't think particularly relevant to the issue. They don't stem from the same axis of freedoms which define the economic philosophy that drives fascism to undermine and reject democracy.
This is the hard part. Because you're not clear when you're discussing when people who advocate neoliberal policy are neoliberal or when they aren't. You call them all neoliberal when they might not be and then claim they're all the problem. So then is it "policy that might potentially be called neoliberal" that is the problem or is it neoliberal thought?
If you can't get it simple within two sentences in the same post how do you expect us to understand you when you tell it to us without a rubric for every label in a natural use context?
I'm perhaps going to show my ignorance here, but what exactly separates the USSR from fascist nations? Other than it's dubious claim to being leftist and its rivalry with fascist nations?
Popular authoritarian nationalism with an state-guided economy that's not really capitalist or socialist, leveraging ethnic and social divisions to appease the majority by crushing the minority, I'm not sure what's missing for fascism there.
And yet we've spawned like multiple pages of discussion where people are very unclear who is being called a neoliberal and in what way. So, empirically, not very clear at all.
If a neoliberal is not someone who does neoliberal things, what are they? When are people actually neoliberals and when not? Not at all clear. Maybe we should just be more precise about what we are saying.
This article lists greenhouse gas tax laws and GMO labeling laws as neoliberal regulation, for example.
https://dc.law.utah.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1019&context=ulr
Re. the bolded: Well. That might be the conclusion you'd draw. I'd draw an entirely different one.
Also, no, see, you've already inverted this again. A neoliberal is someone who does neoliberal things. But doing (some/a few) neoliberal things doesn't make you a neoliberal. Right? Environmentalists recycle, because recycling is an environmentalist thing, but recycling doesn't make me an environmentalist, yes? Obviously, to be an environmentalist, you'd expect me to do more than just one thing that's environmentalist, right? More than two things, even. More than three things, probably! And certainly, if I said, "I only recycle so the city doesn't fine me," you'd be even less inclined to think of me as an environmentalist?
That is to say, surely, to be considered an environmentalist, you'd expect that someone would dedicate some significant portion of their lives to environmentalist causes. That's what I would expect before I would label someone a neoliberal. We might debate exactly how many things are needed and what level of principled belief they must have and whatnot, but at the level where we are right now, no, doing a thing that is neoliberal doesn't make you a neoliberal.
The USSR was a severely mixed bag on human rights, though obviously more bad than good. Some groups made great strides and others...not so much. This isn't good mind you, but its distinctly different than fascism's self-aware disregard for human rights entirely, replacing them with in-group rights.
We'd expect to generally see more intertwining between religious structures and governmental ones in a fascist government.
Propaganda efforts aside the USSR was pretty big into the arts. So long as you weren't being counter revolutionary. Fascists have little regard for art except in so far as it can spread the state's message.
Corporate power usually holds firm under fascism, so long as its willing to play ball.
Ideological construction primarily. Communist thought suggests that the state can solve the problems of society and attempts to do so. The state simultaneously distrusts the people and trusts that they're working for the interests of the people and as such experts with understanding of the system are ideal. An authoritarian state is necessary to ensure that people who would otherwise own capital cannot leverage that into political power.
Fascism is more "we are losing at the game of democracy so we're going to turn the table over".
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
Sure, it's authoritarian, and usually nationalist, but there's also an emphasis on conflict and war as good things by themselves, on a return to a stolen glory, on the abandon of compassion and freedom for the populace.
There's a strong notion that people have their place, and should stay in it, and that society should be run for the good of the deserving.
For example, if you own a large factory, you'll get a slave workforce and less competition. If you have a small enterprise, you will lose protection of law and might be informed that it now belong to someone richer.
Talking about Democrats coming from any single ideological tradition is very silly to me. The modern Democratic party didn't exist until the Conservative wing of the Democratic Party and the Progressive wing of the Republican parties switched places.
Edit: Sorry Bogart missed that.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
I think the link you see between the two is the authoritarianism. The rest is very different ideologies.
So I don't really agree with your premise about the Democratic Party in general. I think the Nixon coalition (grossly simplified: capitalists and white supremacists) has been the dominant coalition of the last 50 years and thus is basically responsible for those outcomes you're talking about. For a while part of that coalition were still technically Democrats (Zell Miller, for example).
More than that though, I think there are some outcomes that don't make sense in this narrative. Basically, it seems to me like the American fascist movement, which is to say the white supremacist movement, is strongest in times of (relative) economic prosperity and weakest when the economy is weakest. This goes all the way back to the second KKK which was enormously powerful in the 20s, when the economy was booming. You would think that kind of ideology would have been strongest during the Depression. And while there was some of that, it wasn't the most powerful political force. You can see this again recently. White supremacist/fascist political tactics were strongest in the elections of 2000 and 2016, even on the right. When the economy sucked in 2008 and 2012 and they had open primaries, they nominated the people perceived to be social/racial moderates like McCain or Romney, not the authoritarian racists like Huckabee or Gingrich.
My theory is that for white Americans, white supremacy is a luxury good. When times suck, they'll ally with anyone to make their lives better. When policy/societal structure make it so that they are the first ones to recover from the hard times, they immediately move to pull up the ladder behind them. And I think it's really more that black political activism is more likely to be seen in a strong economy than in a weak one. In a weak economy, which is even weaker for black people, they're just struggling to survive. In a good economy, they are surviving but getting fucked. And people who are surviving but getting fucked become politically active. And when white people see black people demanding their full rights of citizenship, they get very angry. And that's when you see fascists with mass popular support in America.
If the rise of fascism in the US was a function of our lingering racism we'd expect to see resurgent fascism play out with greater difference across the developed world. Obviously we're not the only country with a racism problem, but the particular fabric isn't uniform. More over, I think you kind of skip over why the economy isn't meeting people's needs in the first place. There are cycles, sure, but its been a long time since the highs were really that high for Joe Q Regular.
Like I said earlier though, this is a big point of difference between leftists and liberals. We view racism as a symptom that can cause further ills, not a root cause.
Its not a huge point either, but I'd want to note that the perceived moderates in 2008 and 2012 struggled badly to get their base excited about them, being perceived as basically big business globally oriented elitists (you can see where that fits into theories of neoliberalism).
Honestly I don't think much that's happened since the 90s has mattered a ton for the rise of fascism in the US. The damage was already done and we're just living through the effect of it now.
I'd say the last POTUS who wasn't decisively neoliberal would be LBJ, who for all his foreign policy faults made one of the more prominent attempts in the 20th century at wresting power from capitalists. That's not to start an argument about him specifically, more to point out that the following succession of administrations up until Clinton (I have a hard time naming anything Carter achieved to pull political power leftward) were steadfastly anti-labor, anti-regulation, and consolidated more and more power into the executive.
Following the GOPs dominance of the executive branch through H.W. Bush the lesson that the Democratic party seems to have learned in nominating Clinton was to shift economically rightward, deregulating the finance industry and ignoring organized labor altogether. You could pin most of this on the attenuation of unions as a political force in the Reagan era, leaving the Democratic party to have to build a base elsewhere. Leftists were no longer an important part of the Democratic coalition, and so the "leftist" political party in the US turned toward centrist neoliberalism. And so organized labor began its slow decline into irrelevance, as they no longer had a political party willing to go to bat for them for fear of being marginalized entirely. The 2000s saw the rise of unlimited corporate political spending and the elimination of earmarks which often acted as a sort of bipartisan stabilizing force, and here we are.
This was always the endgame of GOP political strategy: weaken the Democratic base by destroying unions, radicalize the electorate and who they vote for by removing incentives to cooperate, and consolidate power into the executive so that Congress couldn't effectively circumvent Presidential authority. Nixon created the EPA because political pressure on environmentalist was at an all time high, and he didn't want his opposition to be the ones who scored the win and wrote the rules.
Which is how fascists have now found themselves at the threshold of control: there are fewer levers of power thanks to centralization of authority in the Executive branch (from both neoliberal and more left-leaning administrations, FDR quite famously), there's no longer an effective base of political opposition due to the dismantling of organized labor, and the electorate is more and more radicalized. All of this was in the interest of maintaining GOP political power (to say nothing of voter suppression and their efforts to gerrymander statehouses and appoint right-wing judges) and has inadvertently played directly into emboldening and enabling fascists.
If this analysis seems to focus too heavily on one single elected official, the Executive branch is both an agent of and a bellwether for how larger political trends have played out. Presidential nominees necessarily reflect the preferences of their party, and I think it's telling that our ostensibly left-leaning party has taken up the playbook of the neoliberal party in both who they nominate and how they govern at the national level.
Is the bolded a typo? Should it read "that?"
Yes
Widening wealth inequality combined with a massive propaganda effort and virtually nobody in politics making a serious effort to fix it opened the door to Make America Great Again sounding pretty good to a lot of people, and the racism coming out of that campaign was the peanut butter to their chocolate
I'm not sure how it did that. Unless we're talking like the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine and media consolidation. Because racism has always been massively powerful in American politics.
In the context of propaganda, yes
But propaganda doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it’s easier to convince people that their lives suck and The Other is a problem if their lives actually do suck
We talk a lot about how when the economy gets really bad things can get ugly yeah? Well neoliberalism has created an economy where its always kind of bad at best for a lot of people. That constant and very real grief gave them something they felt they could pin racist beliefs on while also swelling their ranks.
In other words, its easier on a personal level to be racist about immigrants or whatever when you haven't gotten a raise in 10 years and everything keeps costing more.
This is my biggest disagreement with socialists, in the context of the US. White supremacy isn't about scapegoating someone else for their problems, it's about preserving the existing power structure which privileges white people. It's disconnected from people's economic status. Which happily tracks with it actually being middle class white people that powered Trump's rise.
Not all racism comes from the same place. Like if we're talking about some prep school mother fucker who's worried that diversity quota at his investment firm will undercut him then yeah I'm on board regarding power structures. But we're talking more here about working class people. To say that the guy who lost his job, is watching his town slowly wither and blames immigrants is worried about his access to a white power structure is borderline let-them-eat-cake disregard for real ills.
Why are the two incompatible?
I'm reminded of that article about how many Trump voters were upset at what they saw as immigrants "cutting the line." That would seem to me to fit both: they're upset about being left behind, left out of America's economic prosperity, shoved down by growing income inequality, but they also want to preserve the existing power structure because they expected it to uplift them next, because if they're ever going to be on the top-side of things they need others to be on the bottom.
I'll also note that fascism isn't exactly an intricately rational ideology. Trump is the obvious modern example, but Hitler and Mussolini too were known for using a lot of words to say nothing much at all, a vague vacuous way of speaking that let people graft whatever beliefs they had onto the words they were hearing. The Nazis were fairly socialist* themselves right up until the Night of the Long Knives, then suddenly they were aligned with the German industrialists, and nobody batted an eye.
* Plz don't yell at me Sammich. You know what I mean.
the original question that kicked off this whole thing was "does the Economist praising some aspects of Bolsonaro's administration constitute evidence that neoliberals have a tendency to support fascists?" if you're a leftist you're going to see it as part of an ongoing pattern, if you're a liberal you're more likely to see it as a one-time thing or an excusable lapse. i don't know if we're going to figure out which of those things it actually is just by yelling at each other. it almost seems like you'd have to do some kind of statistical analysis
My counter would be the 2008 financial crisis. If you recall, Fox and the right generally moved to put the blame on the banks being required to treat black people fairly.And yes, this argument gained traction among Republican partisans, but it was never a mainstream position. People (including moderate whites) rightly blamed Wall Street and Congress. Later that year, the country overwhelmingly elected a black guy president. The economic calamity did not seem to foster racist attitudes outside of the people who are generally outwardly racist to start with.
What DID foster racist attitudes outside of those groups were things like Obama saying Trayvon Martin "could have been his son" or that the policeman who arrested Henry Louis Gates was "stupid." Or especially the entire Black Lives Matter movement. When black people went after the white power structure (police in particular), moderate whites went apeshit and started voting for fascists. I find this suggestive, personally.
Racism against Latinx and in particular with immigration might work more like the scapegoating model, I'm not sure about that. Same deal with anti-semitism, though those are usually all the same people.
so it might be outside the scope of the thread, but real quick, on this topic:
So American Racism and White Supremacy is like a fucking mutant virus engineered back in the early colonial era, which took on it's own life that's propagated since.
Basically, the way I understand it, is that it was developed as a means of dividing poor white Europeans and African slaves from one another so they posed less of a risk to the landed gentry when it came to the power structures in the colonies, while also working to prevent African slaves from ever being freed under the systems of the time. Like, you could get out of it by accepting Christianity, basically, which became something of a thing for a while.
As you can imagine, the white landed gentry was not particularly fond of losing their free labor. So they started a campaign of dehumanization against Africans in order to prevent losing their labor, and to help placate the poor white settlers by making them feel like there was someone below them.
Give it a few decades and you get the strain of American Racism we've been struggling with for literal centuries.
Slate had an article pulled from Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America about it, which is my primary cite for it:
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_history_of_american_slavery/2015/05/why_america_adopted_race_based_slavery.html
This again tracks with what I was mentioning above. Studies have shown that the perception of, how I would describe it is a loss of place within the racial hierarchy, makes people trend more conservative.
I think you can't look at modern american fascism and not see it's deep roots in white supremacy. Or rather, that it's the exact same thing.
The idea that american fascism is about economics is just not well supported by what correlates with support for Trump. Economic dissatisfaction is nowhere near as strong as it's correlation with racism and sexism.
There is literally no way in which Clinton and Third Way Democrats can be defined as not neoliberal. They fully met the definition, and generally continue to meet it still. The qualifier of "Americans who work 40 hours a week" to claims of rights and the assertions of being super capitalist from the '20 crowd show it hasn't changed a lot.
The next sentence on Wikipedia may explain the fight over this you guys have had, I think.
The Democrats are not the same as the Republicans, nobody thinks that. They differ on important issues, and have very different interpretations of how to do neoliberalism. The Democratic party that we have now generally favours a more expansive welfare state, with M4A and such having great support. There is also more scepticism about deregulation, though not in all areas. It is at least closer in position to the liberal democratic welfare state as Rawls sketched it. They are certainly not neocons.
But a fairer and better welfare state will still be neoliberalism if you support the axioms of the theory. The fact that there are huge differences between mainstream parties does not mean they can't also be close on certain issues.
but what happens just as often is - the middle class see people getting poorer, they become concerned about preserving their own wealth and status against redistribution, they look for ways to dehumanise poor people. such as racism
most of bolsonaro's support comes from wealthy brazilians, for example. poor people voted for the other guy
I mean I'm not sure what a fascist movement without racist elements would even look like. The argument is mostly what the causal relationship is.