Pixelated Semantics

A schizotypical inventory

The brownshirting of the conservatives

Sometimes it's good to be right, and sometimes you wish you weren't:

The last weeks of 2004 saw several explicit warnings from the antiwar Right about the coming of an American fascism. Paul Craig Roberts in these pages wrote of the "brownshirting" of American conservatism--a word that might not have surprised had it come from Michael Moore or Michael Lerner. But from a Hoover Institution senior fellow, former assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, and one-time Wall Street Journal editor, it was striking.

Several weeks later, Justin Raimondo, editor of the popular Antiwar.com website, wrote a column headlined, "Today's Conservatives are Fascists." Pointing to the justification of torture by conservative legal theorists, widespread support for a militaristic foreign policy, and a retrospective backing of Japanese internment during World War II, Raimondo raised the prospect of "fascism with a democratic face." His fellow libertarian, Mises Institute president Lew Rockwell, wrote a year-end piece called "The Reality of Red State Fascism," which claimed that "the most significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism. Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state, particularly its military wing."

This article itself is from The American Conservative. The Daily Kos [implicated in a "cash for comments" type of scandal with the US Democrats] comments "Failure in Iraq will advance fascism in America" - though one wonders if this is not an effort to, perversely, strengthen support for the war by use of fear, rather than prescient comment. It's difficult to know these days, but when the conservatives start publishing warnings of fascism, then we are absolutely already there.

Item posted by AutoEditor at 9:07 am ::