Yes, Just What Is "Fascism?"

I don't know if you have noticed, but our lefty friends have been getting very free with their accusations of "fascism" lately.

Oh, I know. It really doesn't mean anything. It is just lefties amping up the volume on their pejorative-spouting machine. It doesn't mean anything more than the vile accusation of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and hate.

By the way, I just read a beautiful definition of leftism, on Taki Magazine.

Leftism is hatred in the name of love.

Isn't that absolutely right on?

So back to fascism. The reason I feel authorized to write on what lefties mean by fascism, is that I've been reading a very readable review of the Frankfurt School, meaning mainly Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. It's The Frankfurt School by Zoltán Tar. H & A write about fascism as though "everybody knows what fascism means" without actually defining it in a way that is helpful to me, a sinner. They write about the "authoritarian personality" of the typical middle-class person, or of fascism as the "highest stage of capitalism." This is how Freud and Marx twist peoples' minds into pretzels.

So here goes:

Fascism is what you get when the middle class can't take it any more.

Fascism is what you get after World War I when the government finances of Germany and Austria and Italy were ruined by the war, and the politicians and the experts didn't have the guts to make the necessary spending cuts to put their national finances in order.

Actually, that is not fair to the politicians and experts. They know very well that the voters will punish them if ever they enact spending cuts. So they don't. They just wreck the nation and the economy with inflation because that is the easy way out.

Incidentally, that is why I demand the end of all government social insurance programs. If you have a financial crisis, such as the aftermath of a war, you can't prune back the government spending on social insurance, because of "the children" and so you end up wrecking the economy and forcing mothers of four into prostitution to keep food on the table. Yeah, that really is you might call "doing it for the children."

But eventually the middle class can't take it any more, and that is when they vote for a man on a white horse.

There is nothing shameful of outrageous about this. It is what any animal does when it is cornered. It strikes out, knowing instinctively that one alternative is certain death while the other alternative is only probable death.

That is what the German people did with Hitler. Inflation had wiped out their savings, and the Weimar regime couldn't seem to get its act together. Then the incompetence of the US Federal Reserve System led to the Great Depression. But along came Hitler blaming the Jews and the DolchStoß, the stab-in-the-back at the end of World War I. Oh yeah! That was what had caused the problem.

Well, now we have the immigration and the Muslim problem in Europe, and the ordinary people don't like it, and the ruling class is saying shut up or you will lose your job convicted of hate speech.

Obviously that kind of politics is not going to end well.

At some point, the middle class is going to say that they can't take it any more.

But the lefties, they see the growth of Alternativ für Deutschland and Front National and UKIP and Trumpism as the end of life as we know it.

So to lefties any return to nationalism is fascism, straight up.

Actually, I think the lefties made a grand-strategic error when they turned against the nation state. The  fact is that the nation state is the most successful model for organizing humans into a large political unit, based on the fiction of a national "tribe" united by its language and its totally fake common history. Lefties coulda been a  contender if they had made their peace with the nation state.

The point is that all this hyper-ventilation is utter baloney. The fascists are like any political party. They operate on the universal truth of politics: Politics is Division. You unite your supporters by dividing them from some other group. It could be foreigners, or radicals, or different races, or greedy bankers, or Jews or immigrants or Muslims. But that is how everyone does it. That is what our US liberals are doing with their identity politics; they are dividing America up by race and sex and sexual preference. The trick is to present the divisiveness of your own side as the very epitome of good thinking and the divisiveness of the other side that the most horrible extreme hard-right white supremacy ever.

See why "leftism is hate in the name of love?"

Now let us examine the turn to fascism in the light of my reductive Three Peoples theory, because all roads lead to the Three Peoples theory.

On my theory, the people that end up voting for the fascists are the ordinary middle class trying to live as People of the Responsible Self. But the aftermath of World War I, or the travails of the white working class, or the Venezuelan moms-for-hire in Colombia means that the ordinary people of the middle class cannot live as law-abiding People of the Responsible Self. The bottom has dropped out of the world of responsibility and reciprocity; the rules have changed. Now they must lie and cheat and prostitute themselves in order to put bread on the table. So they vote for a man on a white horse that promises to end the lefty hate in the name of love.

Really, this is only hard for those that will not see. I am talking about readers of The New York Times and their ilk.