Following is my reply to a left-wing blogger ranting about a right-wing author's claim that liberals are fascists:
I swear, it's like watching two teenaged boys, both straight, arguing about which one is gayer.
Both
of you appear to be having a knee-jerk reaction against the word
"fascist" because it's been reduced to a snarl word that generally means
"stuff I oppose" rather than referring to an Italian political movement
in the 1930s.
Being a 21st-century American leftist, you equate
"fascism" principally with racism and also, to a lesser degree perhaps,
with vigilantism. Your opponent, Goldberg, being a 21st-century American
right-winger, equates the word with socialism and totalitarianism.
In
that much, you're both right. The problem is that you each appear to
think it means exclusively the definition you've assigned to it, so
when he calls your ideological camp "fascist," meaning collectivist and
favoring a domineering government, you hear "racist vigilante" and say,
"Nuh-uh! YOU'RE the fascist!" He hears that as "Nuh-uh! YOU'RE the
radical, nanny-state socialist!" and denies it right back at you. This
could go on forever, and neither of you would benefit.
Let's
clear up a couple things that should move this debate forward. In early
20th-century European politics, the term "conservative" referred to
aristocratic landowners who favored protectionist policies and an
agrarian-based economy. "Liberal" referred to their political
opponents--the wealthy urban factory owners, bankers, etc. who favored
free trade, military growth, and imperialism, and a system in which
power and status went to the rich rather than to the well-born.
These
were the two political camps in power at the time. As we see in our
bicameral system today, they were only able to work together on things
they agreed on. Where they opposed each other, there was gridlock.
Neither group represented the common people, though.
The people
had their own political movements--socialism, distributism, and various
other schemes for giving common workers a voice, and there was
disagreement within these movements. One of the socialist sects was the
Bolsheviks, which grew to become the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union. Centered in Moscow, they wanted all other European socialists to
pledge fealty to the Communists. The Fascists (in Italy) and the German
Workers' Party (later the National Socialist German Workers' Party,
a.k.a. "Nazis") resisted Moscow.
It was this division, not
anti-socialist sentiments, that led to the Nazis persecuting German
Bolsheviks. The Nazis didn't rise to power telling people they were
going to murder millions of Jews. They promised--and delivered--a slew
of social welfare programs like government-paid health care, education,
and retirement, all to be funded by heavily taxing the rich.
Who have we heard promoting that kind of policy lately? The Republicans? The Tea Party?
"But
the Nazis were racist, and the Republicans are racist, therefore
Republicans, not Democrats, are Nazis! And fascist is just another word
for Nazi, so Republicans are fascists! Q.E.D."
In Weimar
Germany, antisemitism was at least as commonplace as animosity toward
Wall Street bankers and one-percenters in general is in America
today--and for similar reasons. It wasn't considered a shameful or taboo
topic the way racism is seen in America today. The popular view in
Germany (among gentiles, anyway) was that Jewish financiers were largely
responsible for destroying Germany's economy. The actual Fascists (in
Italy) weren't really all that troubled by Jews. It was at the
insistence of their larger, more powerful ally, Nazi Germany, that they
started persecuting Jews.
In America, we on the left enjoy this
tale of Nixon's "Southern strategy" whereby all the Southern bigots used
to be Democrats (Dixiecrats) and then moved en masse to the Republican
Party in the 1960s. But do we also claim that all the previously
non-racist Republicans likewise left the GOP for the Democrats, to get
away from the racist newcomers? In truth, both parties were full of
racists up until the mid-20th century when attitudes started to
change--not unlike attitudes toward LGBT folk have been changing in
recent years. Like antisemitism in the Weimar Republic, white racism
against blacks was accepted as normal and proper among whites of both
parties for a very long time.
So while American racists today
are pretty heavily concentrated among the party of the right-wing, that
doesn't make racism an inherently and exclusively right-wing trait. Was
Kennedy a right-winger when the racists were Dixiecrats? Was FDR? What
I'm saying is that today's Republicans are both right-wing AND racist,
but that fact alone doesn't make racism a necessarily right-wing trait.
Whether one is racist or not has nothing to do with being left- or
right-wing. One can be a racist socialist...as Hitler demonstrated.
At
best, then, neither of you are fascists. At worst, you're both capable
of becoming such. If a third-party candidate came along addressing
exactly the issues that mattered to you, ones that both Republicans and
Democrats routinely ignored, and that candidate had such massive support
that it looked like he had a good chance at winning and delivering on
his promises, it wouldn't be easy to say, "No, I can't vote for this guy
because he might be unkind to the people I don't like."
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
Saturday, May 10, 2014
On Suppressing Dissent
It just occurred to me when reading about Sophie Scholl: governments that suppress dissenting speech are making a huge strategic error. I can see why they would have an interest in silencing people who want to publicize shameful things that the government prefers to keep secret, but making an example out of the person who says, "The Supreme Leader sucks! Down with the Supreme Leader!" is counterproductive.
Chilling everyone into silence isn't the same thing as gaining support. It just creates the illusion of a supportive populace, an illusion that fools no one but the leader himself. The people still resent the leader; they just do it silently. The leader doesn't really know who his true supporters are except by their deeds of valor and voluntary sacrifice, because they sound exactly the same as his opponents.
In a society that allows free (or mostly free) speech, the leader knows who his enemies are. The more overt you allow them to be, the easier they are to monitor and, if necessary, to locate. Also, by allowing people to speak their complaints freely (so long as the words don't lead to actions of consequence), you immediately dull the edge of those complaints. "The leader can't be as horrible a tyrant as that, or you wouldn't be allowed to speak those words. REAL tyrants kill people for saying stuff like you just said."
It's for this reason that a tyrant who wishes to be effective must maintain a distinction between the military and the police, unless the populace has long been accustomed to being policed by their army. Concentration camps and other military detention facilities are for enemies of the leader. But civilian prisons and jails are for bad people. Nobody wants to be seen as a bad person. Few are sympathetic to criminals. People will protest for the release of a political prisoner from a place like Guantanamo, but a person convicted in a court of law on charges of attempted murder and conspiring with terrorists will have few friends. In this way, a tyrant can dispose of huge numbers of people. Thousands die in American prisons and jails every year, but we don't call them death camps. Thinking of the American criminal justice system as a form of genocide is considered radical, despite the fact that the poor and minorities--African-American men, especially--are incarcerated at such a higher rate than everyone else. Does anyone doubt that when you're in prison, you're twice as likely to die as when you're free?
We can learn something from Milgram's experiment here. If an armored troop transport rolled down the street with loudspeakers blaring an announcement that all [choose a minority group] are being rounded up and should immediately surrender themselves for a merciful execution, there'd be a battle. Even people who aren't members of the group would be shooting from their windows. The soldiers or police would be regarded as invaders in that instance. But if it's done under the pretense that those people have done something wrong, it suddenly becomes more acceptable. That is, if a few police officers show up at the homes of all the members of a particular religion to arrest them on warrants of violating tax laws or some obscure ordinance about moral turpitude, nobody will interfere.
Likewise, if armed government agents went into a slum and ordered everyone to vacate their homes so the government could bulldoze them and build expensive homes for rich people who would pay more in taxes, there would be resistance. People would fight to keep from being removed. But if the government just raised the taxes on the slum properties enough, a lot of the residents would leave because they couldn't pay. Their homes would fail to sell, and eventually the government would seize the abandoned properties. Those who remained would fall behind in their tax payments. Nobody's going to bat an eye at a bunch of "tax protesters" or "deadbeats" or "slumlords" who were millions of dollars behind on their property taxes having their homes foreclosed on by the county. And then when those people are out on the street, nobody's going to bat an eye at them being arrested for vagrancy.
As such, the successful tyrant is one who can not only convince his people that they are free, but can convince his victims (or at least all witnesses to the victimization) that they got what they deserved. A successful tyrant convinces his people that tyranny is justice.
Chilling everyone into silence isn't the same thing as gaining support. It just creates the illusion of a supportive populace, an illusion that fools no one but the leader himself. The people still resent the leader; they just do it silently. The leader doesn't really know who his true supporters are except by their deeds of valor and voluntary sacrifice, because they sound exactly the same as his opponents.
In a society that allows free (or mostly free) speech, the leader knows who his enemies are. The more overt you allow them to be, the easier they are to monitor and, if necessary, to locate. Also, by allowing people to speak their complaints freely (so long as the words don't lead to actions of consequence), you immediately dull the edge of those complaints. "The leader can't be as horrible a tyrant as that, or you wouldn't be allowed to speak those words. REAL tyrants kill people for saying stuff like you just said."
It's for this reason that a tyrant who wishes to be effective must maintain a distinction between the military and the police, unless the populace has long been accustomed to being policed by their army. Concentration camps and other military detention facilities are for enemies of the leader. But civilian prisons and jails are for bad people. Nobody wants to be seen as a bad person. Few are sympathetic to criminals. People will protest for the release of a political prisoner from a place like Guantanamo, but a person convicted in a court of law on charges of attempted murder and conspiring with terrorists will have few friends. In this way, a tyrant can dispose of huge numbers of people. Thousands die in American prisons and jails every year, but we don't call them death camps. Thinking of the American criminal justice system as a form of genocide is considered radical, despite the fact that the poor and minorities--African-American men, especially--are incarcerated at such a higher rate than everyone else. Does anyone doubt that when you're in prison, you're twice as likely to die as when you're free?
We can learn something from Milgram's experiment here. If an armored troop transport rolled down the street with loudspeakers blaring an announcement that all [choose a minority group] are being rounded up and should immediately surrender themselves for a merciful execution, there'd be a battle. Even people who aren't members of the group would be shooting from their windows. The soldiers or police would be regarded as invaders in that instance. But if it's done under the pretense that those people have done something wrong, it suddenly becomes more acceptable. That is, if a few police officers show up at the homes of all the members of a particular religion to arrest them on warrants of violating tax laws or some obscure ordinance about moral turpitude, nobody will interfere.
Likewise, if armed government agents went into a slum and ordered everyone to vacate their homes so the government could bulldoze them and build expensive homes for rich people who would pay more in taxes, there would be resistance. People would fight to keep from being removed. But if the government just raised the taxes on the slum properties enough, a lot of the residents would leave because they couldn't pay. Their homes would fail to sell, and eventually the government would seize the abandoned properties. Those who remained would fall behind in their tax payments. Nobody's going to bat an eye at a bunch of "tax protesters" or "deadbeats" or "slumlords" who were millions of dollars behind on their property taxes having their homes foreclosed on by the county. And then when those people are out on the street, nobody's going to bat an eye at them being arrested for vagrancy.
As such, the successful tyrant is one who can not only convince his people that they are free, but can convince his victims (or at least all witnesses to the victimization) that they got what they deserved. A successful tyrant convinces his people that tyranny is justice.
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