I was listeneing to a podcast by a guy who I've met and actually like quite a bit when I finally snapped. It hurt me because he's a good kid and obviously better educated than I ever was, which is what I think it makes me so angry.Specifically, I'm referring to this insane idea by the New Right that fascism wasn't a right-wing philosophy. Psychopaths like Glenn Beck and pretty much everyone in the conservative blogosphere have been contending for a few years that fascism is really no different than communism, and that both are products of a leftist mindset.
The theory is, of course, utter horseshit and is repudiated by anyone who knows anything about politics, economics, or history. As a conservative, I'm actually embarrassed to share the same social philosophy with anyone who believes that, but it does exhibit the profound ignorance of the New Right that can be instructive to rebuilding society after the current wave of stupidity has destroyed it.
Communism is pretty easy to explain. The government would nationalize private businesses, swallowing them whole, to meet it's ends. Very often, this led to mass starvation; as happened in the Soviet Ukraine from 1932-33, and pretty much under the entire reign of Mao in China. Business ceased to exist.
Fascism was quite different. That system also mandated centralized control of the economy, but always ensuring that industry made a healthy profit. Anyone who knows anything about anything will tell you that there was never a business revolt against fascism in Germany and Italy, even before it assumed total power in either country. Business rather liked fascism, because ...why wouldn't it?
Big religion liked fascism, too, as evidenced by the creation of Vatican City as a nation-state.
Communism was defeated because it was so contrary to human nature that it couldn't help but be defeated. People will not wait in line for underwear and toilet paper for months just because the government says that they have to. Contrary to popular Republican opinion, communism wasn't defeated by Ronald Reagan. It was defeated by itself, which is pretty much what George Kennan's "containment" doctrine said it would back in 1947.
Fascism, because it actually fed and perpetuated the business cycle through guaranteed profits, had to be crushed. And, frankly, we in the West make far too much of our participation in destroying it. Any honest study of the Second World War clearly shows that Stalin's Soviet Union did the lion's share of chewing through the Nazi war machine. The battles on the Eastern Front were the most ruinous in human history. The communists destroyed fascism. We only played a bit part in that glorious enterprise.
Despite what Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and various and sundry idiot Tea Party politicians and blogs will tell you, both communism and fascism are alive, well, and prospering in the United States of America. And they have been for decades.
The U.S grows enough food to feed the entire world several times over, yet it pays it's farmers not to grow crops to keep the price unnaturally high. This, combined with the surge in politically encouraged ethanol subsidies, has led to an actual decrease in crop production for food-market consumption in 2006-07. The great P.J O'Rourke once called it "Moscow in the Potomac." If you got the government out of farming, food would almost be free.
Then there's the "military industrial complex" that President Eisenhower - who knew a few things about war - spoke about in his farewell address."
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.Yet, the defense industry operates on a "cost-plus" model, meaning that no matter how far over a bid price a contractor is on a defense contract is, that contractor will still receive a pre-determined profit. That sounds a lot like fascism, doesn't it?
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
You can argue that "cost-plus" business models are necessary to protect classified information, but you'd be wrong. This was proved by toy models of the B1 bomber being on store shelves before the government even admitted that the plane existed at all. Moreover, there isn't a country in the world willing to pay the insane amounts of money that the United States does on fighters, bombers, nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers in an age of counterinsurgency ground wars.
More importantly, the military industrial complex has spread it's tentacles into so many states and congressional districts that even weapons systems that the Pentagon doesn't even want can't be voted down. Politicians like to say that they shouldn't be second-guessing the generals. That changes dramatically whenever a weapons-system is being discussed.
Finally, let's look at President Obama's health care law. As repugnant as it is, it isn't socialism. Single-payer might be socialist, but Obama and the Democrats decided to go with something even worse.
Under the current law, you get a tax penalty if you don't buy insurance. But don't worry, because there's an individual mandate for everyone, prices will go do down across the board. The fact that this contrary to almost every experience in human history seems to be irrelevant. It just so happens that when people are paying for something themselves, they tend to consume far more of it. That's especially true if they don't have a choice in the intial purchase.
But regardless of how much the insurance companies pisses, whines and fucking moans about ObamaCare, they'll still make money, because they now have a legally mandated (and often subsidized) customer base with no cost controls whatsoever. This is what is commonly known as a guaranteed profit structure. That's a lot of things, but "socialism" ain't one of them.
In fact, the Obama plan looks a lot like the 1993 Republican alternative bill to the Clinton plan, which had 19 Republican sponsors, several of whom are still in the Senate today. They include Robert Bennett, Kit Bond, Chuck Grassley, Orinn Hatch and Richard Lugar. The individual mandate that everyone in the GOP is currently lying about repealing was actually the idea of Republicans, and rather conservative ones at that.
Besides, what exactly is health insurance if not an actual redistribution of wealth. That's sort of the point of getting a big pool of healthy people together and paying for the illnesses of a minority of participants. That the U.S government has made insurance companies protected monopolies has only served as a disincentive to cost-cutting and efficiency, while guaranteeing profits.
Let's look for a moment at the Grand Heroine of the Free Market Right, Sarah Palin. As governor of Alaska, she ran a virtual money-machine, with private business playing the part of the sucker.
With no statewide income or sales tax, Alaska funds about 90 percent of the state budget from royalties and taxes on oil producers. Soaring oil prices and a higher windfall oil profits tax - an increase pushed through by Palin, now the Republican vice presidential nominee - have state coffers overflowing with petrodollars. The Alaska oil industry calculates that its annual payments to the state doubled in a single year to $10.2 billion.If you ever wondered how Palin wound up with an 85% approval rating from Alaskans, she got it the old-fashioned way - by buying it with other people's money. That proud example of "spreading the wealth around" was funded by astronomical gasoline prices that were wiping out the pocketbooks of everyone in the Lower 48 and profited a motley collection of frost-bitten misfits who paid no state taxes at all and receive more per-captia federal lucre than any other state in the union.
Until a few years ago, the state government struggled financially for years because of low oil prices. But that's all changed. In the first two budget years under Palin, the state government has stashed almost $6 billion of surplus revenues in various reserve and savings accounts in anticipation of future drops in the price of oil. And the state has allocated another $4 billion over two years for a laundry list of new capital projects, mostly small grants initiated in budget requests by legislators for their districts.
And Alaska residents are getting their cut. Starting this week, every Alaskan who has lived in the state more than a year will receive $1,200 from the state, a total of about $756 million in rebates to offset high energy costs in the 49th state. That's on top of the perennial check each will receive from the state's oil revenue-endowed Permanent Fund, this year a record $2,069 per resident. The large Palin family is eligible to receive more than $19,000 from the combined payments.
Yet Sarah Palin, perhaps the single most impressive welfare queen in American history, gets to run around the country howling about "socialism", while otherwise intelligent people are starting fan clubs for her and demanding that she run for president. That's powerful evidence that most people have no idea what they're fucking talking about.
More powerful evidence can be found in this poll, which goes a long way in demonstrating the powerful ignorance of American voters.
When asked about “a socialist,” 33 percent of likely voters say it describes Obama “very well,” 22 percent say “well,” 15 percent say “not too well,” and 25 percent say “not well at all.”That sounds scary because it is. That poll shows that 55% of likely American voters are abject morons. It shows that they have no idea whatsoever what socialism actually is.
In other words, 55 percent of likely voters think “socialist” is a reasonably accurate way of describing Obama.
If, for example, Barack Obama was taking billions of dollars from BP and spread it around so that everybody could buy a used Pinto - like Sarah Palin did - then he would be a socialist. What he actually did do was take tax revenue from a struggling middle-class and gave it to automobile manufacturers, titanic banks and monopolistic insurance companies. He loaned multinational conglomerates like Goldman Sachs and J.P Morgan tens of billions of dollars at zero percent interest, so that they could loan it back it to the the government through Treasury Bonds ... at three percent interest.
From my reading of economic history and theory, I can tell you that this wasn't exactly what Karl Marx or the dreaded Saul Alinsky (who died in 1972, so radio talk-show hosts and bloggers should really calm down, lest they look retarded) had in mind. To argue otherwise is to prove that you're either incurably stupid or bewilderingly dishonest.
I'm leaning toward the belief that American voters are incurably stupid, and I have another poll to prove it. A 2007 poll showed that 48% of Americans believed in Extraordinary Perception (ESP) and 34% believe in ghosts. Given that, I can see where their perceptions of socialism come from.
You can, however, argue that Obama's economic program is fascist. He is undoubtedly the most corporatist president in American history. But that begs the question of what that makes the second President Bush, who built the foundation upon which Obama expanded? Wasn't Medicare Part D a minimalist version of ObamaCare that essentially threw a trillion dollars at the pharmaceutical industry without any accountability, cost controls or even the ability of government to negotiate price in bulk purchases? And both perfectly reflect the realtionship that the government and the defense industry have shared since the Second World War.
This, again from Eisehower's Farewell Address, is instructive;
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.They don't make presidents like that anymore, which is why America is doomed.
In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system – ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.
Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we – you and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without asking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.
This debate is important, but only if it's honest. Blogs and the media could have played a big part in saving the day, but they refuse to, instead preferring to play the same retarded and dishonest games that the poliical parties have been for decades.
Churchill said that democracy is the worst system of government, except for all of the others. But that was back when democratic debate was educated, informed, and at least somewhat honest. Most of you have probably noticed that it isn't any of those things now.
If, as I believe it will, democracy collapses in my lifetime, it won't be socialism, communism or fascism that does it. Nor will we be slaves to the jihadis, as so many paranoid fantasists seem to envision.
We'll instead collapse under the weight of our own intellectual laziness and partisan self-interest. We'll be fucked because we didn't listen to what great men like Dwight Eisenhower warned us of half a century ago. We've replaced that wisdom with increasingly inspid talking points and actually think that we're better off for it.
We live in an age where information is more readily accessable to us than at at any other time in history, but we insist on actually knowing less.
The NRO "SOCIALIST" story was lovingly stolen from the Tiger on Politics. He's been a good riend to this blog, so you should all rush over and read him. Ben's a really good guy, and he should take me out drinking soon. Me rikee drinkee!
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