But What Is Fascism, Really?

As with most things, our lefty friends have completely emptied the word "fascism" of meaning, except as a pejorative. (Boy, they certainly are the world champs when it comes to pejoratives!)

But what is fascism, really, and who is a fascist?

First of all, I would say that AntiFa is not fascist. Do you know why? Because up to now AntiFa has enjoyed a "nod nod, wink wink" relationship with the ruling class. AntiFa has been useful to the ruling class because AntiFa acts as its bully boys breaking up the peaceful assemblies of Commoners petitioning for a redress of grievances. When AntiFa intervenes, as in Charlottesville in 2017, the ruling class gets to blame the "white nationalists" for the violence. What's not to like?

But now Trump has blown the whistle on AntiFa. It will be interesting to see what comes of that.

Also, I would say that government control or partnership is not fascism. Nor is gubmint health care, nor the regulatory state, nor mass transit. Why? Because all those activities operate under the benevolent eye of the normal ruling class and benefit the usual suspects.

The point about Italy's fascists and Germany's Nazis is that they were genuine populist rebellions. And Mussolini and Hitler were nobodies. They both realized that class conflict as a basis of politics was a dead letter, or at least far inferior to the nation as a basis for politics. Boy, were they right!

But as they climbed to power the various interests climbed aboard the fascist train. And the various interests, from the old aristocracy to various advocates for free stuff, were able to persuade the fascists to hand out some of the free stuff to them.

The flaw at the heart of fascism and Nazism is the reversion to the old truth of the homeland being the source of food. Mussolini called it a spazio vitale or "vital space," and Hitler spoke of Lebensraum. Understandable, because up until the day before yesterday land was life, the food-growing land that fed its people.

It is normal, when things go wrong, to lurch back to the past for inspiration.

Except that in the industrial era, everything is for sale. You don't need your own food-growing land. Lebensraum needs to be reduced to a nostalgic dream, not an actual reality. Ships sail the world with grain, and really it is better to be making cars and computers than growing food. Unless there is a war!

And in the industrial era war, in the old way of loot and plunder and slaves that fed the Roman Empire, doesn't work. Because now wealth is "intangible capital" or the ideas and techniques of how to make a car or design a chip. If you roll over your neighbor state and kill all the men and rape all the women what have you got?

So in the fascist era after World War I you had the failure of the old regimes that killed off a generation of young men in a fruitless war, and failure to rebuild afterwards. Into that gap sprang the former corporals Mussolini and Hitler. Only their ideas were just as clueless as those of the discredited pre-war elites, and they in their turn led their peoples to disaster in yet another war.

The ruling class that inherited the developed world after World War II determined that fascism and Nazism and agressive nationalism should never rear their ugly heads again. But what political principle should they substitute in its place? Fortunately Stalin provided the answer. The rulers would be the Free World fighting against the Communist Menace.

But what should we do after the end of the Cold War and the end of the Soviet Union? The answer of the educated ruling class was globalism, in which the educated elite would administer the world. But there had to be some kind of domestic politics in the nation state before they were subsumed into supranational entities like the European Union. You can see that intersectional politics with all kinds of helpless minority classes would fit the bill, and provide the means of dividing and mobilizing voters at election time. Meanwhile the ruling class could rule, above the fray of the intersectional battlefield, while their woke battalions kept the plebs safely divided.

Is it fair to say that this ruling paradigm has reached its sell-by date? It had a point in the advocacy for the working class, except that its program actually imprisoned the working class in union jobs that looted corporations and killed them. And it had a point in the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, outlawing discrimination by race. 

And then, in 2008, the US repaid the debt of slavery by electing an African American to be president. Been there, done that.

The problem with a top-down, activists-only politics, is that it misses the point of politics, which is not to afford lordly rulers and eager activists their chance to bend the arc of history towards justice -- as defined by them and their lackeys in the universities and media.

The purpose of politics is to afford the people a chance to choose the people that will rule over them and also to permit a discovery process by which the inevitable injustices of the world bubble out into the public square. For it makes sense that the rulers and their bribed apologists in the media, the deep state, and the universities are not going to be that sensitive to the unjust effects of their noble rule.

And in recent years there have been various failures and blindnesses in the ruling class and their bribed apologists, such as the Iraq War going beyond merely punishing the Afghans for allowing the 9/11 terrorists safe haven in Afghanistan, and the once-in-a-generation financial crash of 2008 caused by the mortages-for-deadbeats policy forced upon us by our rulers. Oh, and the underhanded Obamacare to inch us towards a government healthcare system.

So you would expect that in time political movements would emerge to give voice to injustices perceived by various subordinate groups in society. These movements might be sponsored by the ruling class or they might not.

Now it is my belief, on my Little Darlings notion, that today we have three groups, at least, suffering from the injustices forced upon them by a proud and foolish ruling class. We have the white working class, abandoned by the rulers in the 1960s, the blacks, led into the wilderness of government dependence and quotas, and women, led into the barren waste of careers far away from their natural instinct to bear children and run the neighborhood.

Of course, these groups know that something is wrong. But that is all. I don't think it is patronizing to say that people petitioning for a redress of grievances may not have a clue what the real problem is. And this is the more understandable when you remember that we are living in a world completely changed from the world inhabited by our ancestors even 500 years ago. So we are programmed for a world completely different from the one we inhabit.

Now there are two ways to present your grievances to the rulers. One is to form a spontaneous movement -- like the Tea Party that nobody saw coming. The other is to work under the ruling class in a ruling-class sponsored movement, like Black Lives Matter or the Women's March.

If you go the Tea Party route you will be called fascists and Nazis. Why? Because our rulers have learned to call any movement that they do not control "fascist." And they are right: Mussolini and Hitler led movements from below that were not sponsored by the rulers. Not good.

If you go the Black Lives Matter route then your movement will be subsumed into the ruling-class's agenda.

Either way, you may still end in disaster, because while it is easy to point to a problem it is not so easy to propose a good solution.

If the populist rebellion ends in disaster, then the fault is fascism and the latest incarnation of Hitler. If the ruling-class reform ends in disaster, well, they did their best, and the problem is white supremacists and toxic masculinity.

But if the populist rebellion is co-opted by a Trump, then what? Well, then the ruling class and their bribed apologists all combine to hobble the guy; that goes without saying.

But suppose the Trump guy actually has a good plan? Well, the jury is still out on that. Meanwhile, the safe thing to do is to call him a fascist. That way your women friends won't be murmuring behind your back: "I can't believe she..."