Never fear - those were approving if slightly appalled exclamation points. Consider also that today is (well still is on the West Coast) the anniversary of the bombardment of Fort Sumter.
@ J.E. Dyer:
Since you say you lack for time, I'll keep my response brief - also since I don't want to leave yet another long loose end on a discussion about what the American experiment is - or about what it makes sense to try to say it is.
If you're trying to suggest that every form of government except for "limited government constitutionalism" qualifies as "fascist," then you're defining evil down. If not - if there's something else that made fascism fascistic, then it may be a calumny to associate progressivism with fascism simply because both were ideologies at work in the 20th C that indulged in what you call "prophylactic" governance.
JEM - the discussion is as alive as we want it to be - zombie Tinkerbell style - and anyway the post ain't so old. So please don't hesitate to post your reply here, and thanks in advance for any help steering me out of error - especially before you alert the fearsome yet congenial JG! - or for any opposition that forces me or us to think harder or better about any point of interest. You're also welcome to try your hand at authoring a response post, if you're of a mind to.
@ fuster:
Just exploring my own reasons for hesitation. I really don't mind getting into fights and becoming a poster-boy (pixel-boy?) for RINO-hatred. I like seeing juvenile plays on my name appear on random HotAir threads - figure it virtually ensures attention, boycotters notwithstanding, and I accept the scorn of imbeciles as a sign I'm on the right track. But there's no urgency to writing on LF right now, and putting it up at HA (no rice bowl, btw, it's toadly unpaid, except when people click on an Amazon link) might be grandstanding/attention whoring... Maybe let it be a ZC exclusive, held in reserve.
@ fuster:
What - destroying the after-market by encouraging to put their used copies on sale?
I'm thinking now I won't post this piece to HA. It might just come across as picking a fight. It can remain a reference for future uses. @ narciso:
Was a good piece by JED, but which subject at hand?
@ Joe NS:
Son of the South, fersure, born Staunton, VA, brought up Savannah - but liberal sophisticated Presbyterian circles, with recent Scottish and northern roots: Not Old South/plantation class. Dad a handsome, respected Pres. Mom born in England of Scots minister. Learning disability.
@ Zoltan Newberry:
Could you handle the Awesome Responsibility of posting via e-mail? Your missives would go directly to the front page (though of course they could be proofed and edited after the fact).
One of Nevins’ more salient points was just how little influence the Executive branch had on Congress, and that particularly included the Chief Executive, who was respected in a ceremonial way but more often than not ignored.
A major theme for Wilson, too, in his most important work of political science, CONGRESSIONAL GOVERNMENT - which I haven't read, btw, except in abstracts via the Wilson biography I've been making use of.
Naturally, the Wilson-haters use Wilson's analysis, and the 29-y-o budding author's interest in parliamentary government, as "proof" that he sought either a dictatorship or (redundancy alert) evil European pollutions of pristine American perfection.
@ Joe NS:
Seriously, though - that's all quite interesting, and I mean it, but the facts as you present them cut both ways. How was a pygmy government, instituted to "promote the general welfare" and "secure the blessings of liberty," etc., supposed to contend over the long run with the likes of Standard Oil and kin?
@ Rex Caruthers:
Within a couple of decades they'd end up being hard to distinguish from each other and would re-unite amidst the political equivalent of "make-up sex."
Much more likely, and all to the better, is that we'll keep on arguing from the extremes and muddling along down the middle. JPod had it about right in his recent Commentary essay, I think. See Recommended Browsing.
I wish Goldberg woud come here to respond himself to our Tsar’s erudite reflections.
At some point I'll post this to HA, and trust that avid HA reader Glenn Beck will pass it on to Goldberg if Goldberg doesn't run across it himself.
I find that by posting these pieces first to ZC, I get a chance, with the help of the ZCers, to test and cure them, and I frequently discover typos, mistakes, un-clarities, and potentially embarrassing rhetorical excesses. Since there are folks gunning for me over there, and since I'm taking on popular figures on the right, I'm very grateful for the collective editing, even though there have also been times when hostile readers have come to ZC and grabbed statements from our discussion to use against me.
Incidentally, Mussolini’s adoption of the fasces as, not only the symbol, but for the very name of his political party places them in a whole new category of political meaning from whatever ceremonial and anodyne purposes they were put to before.
Almost - but it turns out that "Fascisti" was the conventional Italian name for political groups/bands/leagues etc. I think it is relevant, however, that the Fascists unified this independent political impulse on its own terms. They were the "groupists," and the fasces remain relevant for the same reason: They ended up representing the essence of politics, power, for its own sake and at the source. The Fascisti generally represented an alternative to traditional sources of power - church, royalty, establishment - etc. It was at the same moment that M dropped internationalism and looked into ancient history for his validation that his fascists became truly the Fascists. You might say that he stripped the will to power of burdens and distractions, fully revealing the fasces.
@ Joe NS:
Income tax was a live issue continuously after the CW. It was made impractical by the Supreme Court Pollock decision, requiring the Constitutional Amendment - which was supported by all parties, and passed, as required, by 3/4 of the states. To blame it on the progressives is in that sense to suggest that progressivism had by then become the effective American consensus. There may be some truth to that (see #12 above).
I confess that I am puzzled as to why those reforms seem uppermost in your mind in judging the legacy of Progressivism.
Because they're neglected, minimized, and discounted by the critics; because they directly contradict the notion that the progs were authoritarians merely seeking the expansion of unchecked government; because conservatives have made good use of direct democracy, recall of officials, primary challenges, etc., pretty much exactly as the reforms were intended; because the demands for government transparency and voter education and participation have characterized the conservative critique in the Age of (mrp) ; and for a bunch of other reasons.
It doesn't mean that there aren't potential downsides to direct democracy and other political reforms of that type, but, when they were first implemented, the need for them was very strongly felt as a means to strengthen democracy against concentrations of power, especially economic power - the creeping oligarchy of the day. In that wacky Bucky Fuller essay I mentioned the other day, in looking at the massification of economy and politics in his own day, he justifies his own program as follows:
Democracy must, as consumer and worker,
as soldier and mother,
as scientist, or simple employer,
be made adequate cathode
to the mighty merged annode.
@ Joe NS:
Please do note that the progs did not invent the income tax or even invent its "progressivity" - unless you're of a mind to generalize a transcendant progressive impulse and declare Honest Abe a progressive, since it was during his Civil War administration that the first American income tax was instituted. Since I'm actually of the opinion that progressivism is deeply American, I won't mind such an extension of the term, but then you'll have to grant me the Founding and even more the Framing of the Constitution as progressive moments, and I may eventually end up calling human civilization, life on Earth, and the expanding universe progressive. I believe it not just because it's absurd, though that doesn't hurt.
The motivational backbone, the transcendental aspirations of Progressivism, are its most important “aspects.” The persuasive power of various Progressivisms is more indebted debt to Emerson than Dewey. I have somewhere claimed that Progressivism, as we behold it today, is a religious zombie.
But here I have to demur a bit: There was without doubt a heavy religious aspect to classic Progressivism - from the religious calling averred by leading Progs to the widely remarked tent revival quality of the 1912 Prog Convention, where speechifying from the dais was interrupted and accompanied by ecstatic hymn-singing. (What a thing that must have been to attend!) All the same, progressive politics was very much of this world, expressing a determination to make real improvements in real lives. I disagree especially with those, like Mr. Beck, who relentlessly assert that the progs, just like the commies, were utopians. Many of them toyed with visions of a just society and some hoped that through some harmonic convergence of science, morality, and humanity, very great leaps forward could be accomplished, but, compared to the real revolutionaries of the day, they were a rather circumspect and highly law-abiding, merely reformist bunch. Even the more extreme-tending leaders like TR conceived of what they were doing as a relatively conservative alternative to revolutionary utopianism.
@ fuster:
Actually, Goldberg DOES define fascism, he just defines it prejudicially, in a manner favorable to his thesis - as a species of liberalism that has little to do with the the fascism that Joe just evoked rather poetically above.
I am in the process of preparing a piece that dwells inordinately on this question of definition. I say inordinately because it's around twice as long as it should be. I hope that it will be a little less inordinate by the time I post it. My ability to work on it effectively is also somewhat impaired by an injury to my hand.
In regard to Goldberg and Beck, Beck is obviously more melodramatic and his radicalism is much more overt. In Goldberg, the utopianism is more implicit and possibly inadvertent, yet unavoidable, as when he equates "Third Way"-ism with fascism, and states that the only other alternatives are communism and laissez-faire capitalism. I would argue that there are many gradations and multiple dimensions of alternatives, and also that the history of self-consciously "Third Way" movements is much, much richer than Goldberg seems aware, or is willing to acknowledge. Goldberg himself seems to me to be a much more moderate personality and pundit than LF is a book.
@ Zoltan P. Newberry:
Worry not, one way or the other, fine - but that goes also for me and my good friend Paul Ryan and my old buddy Newt if we like to tweak Harry Obamalosi and their army of facilitators as phony persimmons, and traitors to original preregrinationism.
His Husband, Her Wife December 12, 2013 If a word as spoken does not contain the entire history of its usages, neither does it offer any defense against them
state-nation as nation-state January 21, 2014 Its notion turns the whole world upside down, since the ideal state-nation is the universal homogeneous state, the world state or the democracy whose demos would be all of humankind, not any particular state within history but the action of history itself under a declared progressively "federative concept."
A Collective Suicide Note February 22, 2014 So much to admire about this historical document, which came up yesterday on the excellent twitter feed of "Todo libro antiguo" (@Libroantiguo) with the following description: "Declaration of war from the German Empire 1914, starting WORLD WAR I. Signed by the German Kaiser Wilhelm II."
"Chris" notes that Civil War monuments are much more common in the South than the North.
Throughout much of the South, it is impossible to escape The War.
It may be objected at this point, by those of you who have spent time in cities and especially small towns in Northern states, that there are many Civil War monuments outside of the South as well. This is true: statues of Union soldiers in kepis and greatcoats are not uncommon in the North.
This contrasts starkly, however, with the sorts of monuments one sees in the South, which are much more numerous.
Chris's observations inspired extensive further discussion at Ordinary Times, including further evidence in support, as well as some speculation about this difference between North and South. Under Chris's post and elsewhere at OT - in commentary all written, of course, in the wake of the racist-terrorist atrocity in Charleston - proposals not just to "take down" the Confederate flag, but to destroy all Civil War monuments, even on both sides, were offered. No one, however, took up my argument or meta-argument, which I stated as follows:
I am skeptical of the notion that we can successfully and usefully discuss these matters in a forum like this one. We would have to be prepared to give, enforce, and rigorously respect and support a license to say, or be seen to say, or to risk being seen to say, many things that most of us have been taught from an early age to reject presumptively, and for good reasons. If word “got out” that we were having a truly open discussion of “identity” and the meaning of the Civil War and its symbols, we might find ourselves joined by unwelcome voices, and, in time, the kind of clashes and conflicts observable on the site in the last few days might seem but a mild foretaste…
I cannot say I mind remaining mostly unheard on this topic at this time, in such a context, as I do not expect that the license to which I refer would in fact be granted, enforced, respected, and supported, while the matter of those unwanted voices and associations would remain a problem. Perhaps sensing the same danger, or just not wanting to get caught in the fraught and froth, friend of the blog Will Truman also kept his own more reserved or middle-groundish comments on the topic on his own site.
***
Briefly on the question of the North and its relative lack of interest in the Civil War, we could say that the nation such as it is, in its entirety and also in all of its ceremonies, as in another sense the world in which we live, is itself the not always very well-kept monument to the victory. Purely from the perspective of war and its monuments understood more conventionally, the Union has other wars to commemorate and other sacrifices to honor. What is for the South as such "The War" is only "a war among others" for the Union, if clearly a singularly important one.
In yet another sense, and this one may be very difficult for those more Unionist than the Union to accept, if "Union" is an all-encompassing concept, then the Southern dead were "our" dead, too. They just did not know it, or did not truly become our dead until the Confederate cause was vanquished and, same thing, the cause of Union triumphed.
This mode of thought, a union of union and disunion, will be as it always has been difficult or impossible for anyone to master. It has many facets. Most of them appear in the realm of symbolic truth, which we occupy and which at the same time pre-occupies us for the most part unconsciously. Yet we all or most of us know that the tale of valor moves us even when we have no connection at all to the acts described, and even when they are completely fictional.
I feel I should also note that I have hardly ever been to the South, and that I have no roots in the South except very remotely. I do not offer these observations on behalf of Southerners. I have never felt great personal interest in the Confederate flag - or the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia - or seen great reason to identify with its cause or perhaps the different causes confederated but not united under it. Yet, to be more precise, I have recognized an inner response to it - perhaps as a (so we say) "white" man who has never felt fully included (anywhere), or as someone of a sometimes "rebellious" temperament, or as someone constantly exposed to statements attacking or critical of "whites," especially "white" "men," especially "white" "Christian" "men," in a manner that is not, for all of the very best reasons, allowed for any other group in current conversation. (Is there any other ethnically defined group that can be spoken of as "trash" in polite company?)
***
To grasp a phenomenon of the type Chris describes requires, I believe, going well beyond the questions of the moment, and to consider the nature of Southern culture beyond the matter of slavery or our retrospective judgments of the "Lost Cause."
Simple denunciation of the Confederacy serves present political purposes and deeper social-political constitutional purposes of various types. It is by now a commonplace, even among "supporters of the flag," to "confess" that the Civil War or the Confederacy really was about slavery. Yet to be "about slavery" must also be to be "about mastery." All of those monuments are, or are also, monuments to valor itself, to "mastery" of self or "dignity." The classic or ancient underlying moral justification for slavery - or for mastery - is that a man of honor, or a man worthy of respect, would rather die than be a slave or another man's slave. A man who would accept being a slave, by contrast, deserves to be one, and is a "lesser man," and it will be in the "natural order of things" for men unworthy of mastery to be mastered by those who refuse to be enslaved.
This view or attitude is or was hardly unique to the American South. To the liberal-democratist modern, or petit-bourgeois citizen, the premise suggests fascism, but merely to denounce something as fascist is not to explain why it deserves to be denounced and why we judge denunciation of it compulsory. Fascism as it developed included a re-emergence of the ancient ethos, or an unlikely or desperate attempt to grasp it again within modern mass society, but in other contexts it remains a revolutionary ethos, one to which we even in the good old bourgeois democracy pay highest tribute, as in "Give me liberty, or give me death!"
The slave mentality, which the fascist or Nietzschean crypto-fascist, but also the revolutionary and the anarchist, will associate with the bourgeoisie and their "lackeys," if (very much) not with the bourgeois revolutionaries in their heroic moment, is "Whatever it takes, let me hold on to life a little longer." The latter is a common and instinctive sentiment, but not a "born rebel"'s sentiment and not a warrior's sentiment. Furthermore, to state what ought to be obvious but may not be so to a progressive pacifist or a progressive in peacetime, a soldier cannot operate on that basis (though an "office desk killer" or a "keyboard commando" may, at least up to a point). As long as a nation needs or perceives that it needs soldiers - warriors willing to kill and be killed for the sake of a solemnly asserted higher and necessary purpose - then it will need that sentiment or ethos, meaning that nation will need to teach, cultivate, and honor that ethos, and commemorate those who exemplify it.
The disproportionate representation - which at first seems so contradictory - of Southerners in the military of the victorious Union, Confederate battle flag next to Old Glory, up to the present day, tends to suggest that we have made use of the South or Southern culture in this way - as a repository or reserve for our "manly," military virtues. Very widely recognized political-cultural tendencies distinguishing the South from the rest of the country, in election after election and not only in elections, further support this hypothesis.
***
It serves all of the very best purposes to describe all of those monuments as monuments to slavery or to an "evil" system or, as is commonly asserted, to "hatred" - but, as belief in slavery is connected to a belief in mastery, the presence of hatred implies a love violated or endangered, or perceived to be violated or endangered. Such love may comprehend love of kith and kin, love of place, and the "greater love" affirmed in John 15:13. These may all be or seem interconnected to the lover.
It may be difficult or unwise to consider or admit too much of the above too openly within the cultural mainstream, at least for anyone with any aspirations to remain within or ever to enter it. Even more dangerous may be to admit, at least until all of the services are over and the internet is focusing on some new topic, and perhaps even then, to state that even the atrocity in Charleston was, for a weak and twisted and very young mind, a gesture of love, or a gesture in honor of a love denied, forbidden, and unrequited. By that dialectical logic of love and hate, attacking the crime as a "hate crime" or a crime of "bigotry" necessarily acknowledges this fact, if quietly.
"Bigotry" as we use the term also implies an unconditional love of one's own, a love unconditioned by reflection, or without second thoughts. The impulse toward love of one's own is, as even natural science has come to accept, virtually universal. Though mitigable, the preference for those resembling oneself is said to be biological, or authentically sociobiological. The related impulses seem to take as many different forms as human identity takes different forms, from love of one's parent or child or sibling or cousin over the stranger, to love of teammates or fellow fans. Human beings do not merely want, but apparently need or are driven to "belong," and not just because belonging serves immediate practical purposes - helps them get ahead, get better jobs, get by - but because they perceive that it involves them in a form of triumph over death, while connecting them to a life worth living at all, if any life is worth living.
The death on the battlefield, as the words of that greatest of Civil War monuments, a verbal monument, insists, can "consecrate" or "hallow" a ground and its cause. We know that our love for (identification with) child, or parent, or sibling, or community, or nation is more important and more real than our love for a sports team because, as others have sacrificed ("given the last full measure of devotion") for such love, so would we. For that matter, we readily acknowledge that a victory in sports or other realms of life won at cost of some sacrifice, if not an immediate sacrifice of life, is meaningful in that way, and may not be really meaningful except in that way.
"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends..." The Civil War monuments and the Confederate flag are, I believe, in some major part (for those who appreciate them perhaps the major part) kept or raised to honor such love and, in so honoring it, to participate in it and to preserve and widen its embrace. The flag in particular is seized upon or has been seized upon by members of a particular ethnically or even racially defined group denied, for all of the best reasons, a particular form of self-expression or expression of pride, and who are instead urged to identify with an established order morally defined by denial of that self-expression, in other words defined by their conceptual annihilation. The result almost suggests a bizarre scientific experiment meant to test the sociobiological theory mentioned above, with the further intention of driving a certain segment of society completely out of its mind, denying it a recourse for meaningful expression of identity except as identification with its proscription.
You can go to any number of web sites - all by definition outside the mainstream - to find those forbidden expressions. I won't repeat or summarize them here. I do not like them or support them, but I will note that, in my observation, they are rarely or never confronted on their own terms by those who attack them, since by definition such views are not just outside but beneath the level of the mainstream, for all of those same best reasons: They are not discussed nor are they to be discussed. The refusal to discuss them, or to treat them as discussable, is fundamental for us. If they are brought up at all - perhaps on the fringes of popular culture - it will be to witness them being rejected all over again, at every appearance, since that is part of what defines our social and political order morally - this union or Union of "reconciliation and inclusion" defined by the refusal to reconcile with or include one type or group and its symbols.
***
Perhaps we can do without the martial virtues, if they are or ever were "virtues." Maybe we will instead find some other place to locate them or some other way to draw upon them. Or maybe they will not re-emerge sooner or later in something like their traditional form - only more so - and demand their due. Maybe suppressing the Confederate Battle Flag and denouncing those who raised it on whatever grounds, or who tattooed it on their arms, or who placed it on their album covers, or who decaled their computers with it, or who sold t-shirts and bikini tops and so on in honor of the once more fashionable rebel, will help persuade a certain type of "Southern Man" to surrender to, and come to identify with, a social and political system defined by its rejection of him.
Soon, in whatever state or state of states or unstate we are found, today's neo-isolationists of left and right may find themselves exposed to ironies mirroring those now felt by the neo-conservatives of just the other day, who thought they were advancing a needed heightening, deepening, and expansion of engagement, but instead reinforced an older impulse to wash one's hands of it all.
On “On re-reading Liberal Fascism: Defining Evil Down”
Never fear - those were approving if slightly appalled exclamation points. Consider also that today is (well still is on the West Coast) the anniversary of the bombardment of Fort Sumter.
"
@ fuster:
!!!
"
Seems like a sloppy use of the word "tyrannical" to me, Sully.
"
@ J.E. Dyer:
Since you say you lack for time, I'll keep my response brief - also since I don't want to leave yet another long loose end on a discussion about what the American experiment is - or about what it makes sense to try to say it is.
If you're trying to suggest that every form of government except for "limited government constitutionalism" qualifies as "fascist," then you're defining evil down. If not - if there's something else that made fascism fascistic, then it may be a calumny to associate progressivism with fascism simply because both were ideologies at work in the 20th C that indulged in what you call "prophylactic" governance.
"
JEM - the discussion is as alive as we want it to be - zombie Tinkerbell style - and anyway the post ain't so old. So please don't hesitate to post your reply here, and thanks in advance for any help steering me out of error - especially before you alert the fearsome yet congenial JG! - or for any opposition that forces me or us to think harder or better about any point of interest. You're also welcome to try your hand at authoring a response post, if you're of a mind to.
"
@ Sully:
You're not going Paulbot on us now, are you, Sully?
"
@ fuster:
Just exploring my own reasons for hesitation. I really don't mind getting into fights and becoming a poster-boy (pixel-boy?) for RINO-hatred. I like seeing juvenile plays on my name appear on random HotAir threads - figure it virtually ensures attention, boycotters notwithstanding, and I accept the scorn of imbeciles as a sign I'm on the right track. But there's no urgency to writing on LF right now, and putting it up at HA (no rice bowl, btw, it's toadly unpaid, except when people click on an Amazon link) might be grandstanding/attention whoring... Maybe let it be a ZC exclusive, held in reserve.
"
@ fuster:
What - destroying the after-market by encouraging to put their used copies on sale?
I'm thinking now I won't post this piece to HA. It might just come across as picking a fight. It can remain a reference for future uses. @ narciso:
Was a good piece by JED, but which subject at hand?
"
@ Joe NS:
Son of the South, fersure, born Staunton, VA, brought up Savannah - but liberal sophisticated Presbyterian circles, with recent Scottish and northern roots: Not Old South/plantation class. Dad a handsome, respected Pres. Mom born in England of Scots minister. Learning disability.
"
@ Zoltan Newberry:
Could you handle the Awesome Responsibility of posting via e-mail? Your missives would go directly to the front page (though of course they could be proofed and edited after the fact).
"
Joe NS wrote:
A major theme for Wilson, too, in his most important work of political science, CONGRESSIONAL GOVERNMENT - which I haven't read, btw, except in abstracts via the Wilson biography I've been making use of.
Naturally, the Wilson-haters use Wilson's analysis, and the 29-y-o budding author's interest in parliamentary government, as "proof" that he sought either a dictatorship or (redundancy alert) evil European pollutions of pristine American perfection.
"
@ Joe NS:
Seriously, though - that's all quite interesting, and I mean it, but the facts as you present them cut both ways. How was a pygmy government, instituted to "promote the general welfare" and "secure the blessings of liberty," etc., supposed to contend over the long run with the likes of Standard Oil and kin?
"
no doubt a hard worker.
"
@ Rex Caruthers:
Within a couple of decades they'd end up being hard to distinguish from each other and would re-unite amidst the political equivalent of "make-up sex."
Much more likely, and all to the better, is that we'll keep on arguing from the extremes and muddling along down the middle. JPod had it about right in his recent Commentary essay, I think. See Recommended Browsing.
"
fuster wrote:
That's kind, or indulgent, or maybe both. Let's see how it plays out in discussion, and whether a supplementary post, or page, is justified.
Zoltan Newberry wrote:
At some point I'll post this to HA, and trust that avid HA reader Glenn Beck will pass it on to Goldberg if Goldberg doesn't run across it himself.
I find that by posting these pieces first to ZC, I get a chance, with the help of the ZCers, to test and cure them, and I frequently discover typos, mistakes, un-clarities, and potentially embarrassing rhetorical excesses. Since there are folks gunning for me over there, and since I'm taking on popular figures on the right, I'm very grateful for the collective editing, even though there have also been times when hostile readers have come to ZC and grabbed statements from our discussion to use against me.
"
Almost - but it turns out that "Fascisti" was the conventional Italian name for political groups/bands/leagues etc. I think it is relevant, however, that the Fascists unified this independent political impulse on its own terms. They were the "groupists," and the fasces remain relevant for the same reason: They ended up representing the essence of politics, power, for its own sake and at the source. The Fascisti generally represented an alternative to traditional sources of power - church, royalty, establishment - etc. It was at the same moment that M dropped internationalism and looked into ancient history for his validation that his fascists became truly the Fascists. You might say that he stripped the will to power of burdens and distractions, fully revealing the fasces.
"
@ Joe NS:
Income tax was a live issue continuously after the CW. It was made impractical by the Supreme Court Pollock decision, requiring the Constitutional Amendment - which was supported by all parties, and passed, as required, by 3/4 of the states. To blame it on the progressives is in that sense to suggest that progressivism had by then become the effective American consensus. There may be some truth to that (see #12 above).
"
Because they're neglected, minimized, and discounted by the critics; because they directly contradict the notion that the progs were authoritarians merely seeking the expansion of unchecked government; because conservatives have made good use of direct democracy, recall of officials, primary challenges, etc., pretty much exactly as the reforms were intended; because the demands for government transparency and voter education and participation have characterized the conservative critique in the Age of (mrp) ; and for a bunch of other reasons.
It doesn't mean that there aren't potential downsides to direct democracy and other political reforms of that type, but, when they were first implemented, the need for them was very strongly felt as a means to strengthen democracy against concentrations of power, especially economic power - the creeping oligarchy of the day. In that wacky Bucky Fuller essay I mentioned the other day, in looking at the massification of economy and politics in his own day, he justifies his own program as follows:
"
@ Joe NS:
Please do note that the progs did not invent the income tax or even invent its "progressivity" - unless you're of a mind to generalize a transcendant progressive impulse and declare Honest Abe a progressive, since it was during his Civil War administration that the first American income tax was instituted. Since I'm actually of the opinion that progressivism is deeply American, I won't mind such an extension of the term, but then you'll have to grant me the Founding and even more the Framing of the Constitution as progressive moments, and I may eventually end up calling human civilization, life on Earth, and the expanding universe progressive. I believe it not just because it's absurd, though that doesn't hurt.
"
But here I have to demur a bit: There was without doubt a heavy religious aspect to classic Progressivism - from the religious calling averred by leading Progs to the widely remarked tent revival quality of the 1912 Prog Convention, where speechifying from the dais was interrupted and accompanied by ecstatic hymn-singing. (What a thing that must have been to attend!) All the same, progressive politics was very much of this world, expressing a determination to make real improvements in real lives. I disagree especially with those, like Mr. Beck, who relentlessly assert that the progs, just like the commies, were utopians. Many of them toyed with visions of a just society and some hoped that through some harmonic convergence of science, morality, and humanity, very great leaps forward could be accomplished, but, compared to the real revolutionaries of the day, they were a rather circumspect and highly law-abiding, merely reformist bunch. Even the more extreme-tending leaders like TR conceived of what they were doing as a relatively conservative alternative to revolutionary utopianism.
On “Paul Ryan on Real Progressivism”
@ fuster:
Actually, Goldberg DOES define fascism, he just defines it prejudicially, in a manner favorable to his thesis - as a species of liberalism that has little to do with the the fascism that Joe just evoked rather poetically above.
I am in the process of preparing a piece that dwells inordinately on this question of definition. I say inordinately because it's around twice as long as it should be. I hope that it will be a little less inordinate by the time I post it. My ability to work on it effectively is also somewhat impaired by an injury to my hand.
"
@ J.E. Dyer:
Wouldna sed it, didna believe it.
In regard to Goldberg and Beck, Beck is obviously more melodramatic and his radicalism is much more overt. In Goldberg, the utopianism is more implicit and possibly inadvertent, yet unavoidable, as when he equates "Third Way"-ism with fascism, and states that the only other alternatives are communism and laissez-faire capitalism. I would argue that there are many gradations and multiple dimensions of alternatives, and also that the history of self-consciously "Third Way" movements is much, much richer than Goldberg seems aware, or is willing to acknowledge. Goldberg himself seems to me to be a much more moderate personality and pundit than LF is a book.
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However, you probably did read his "working definition" of fascism, then blotted it out of your little frog brain.
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@ Fourstring Casady:
Stay tuned.
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@ Zoltan P. Newberry:
Worry not, one way or the other, fine - but that goes also for me and my good friend Paul Ryan and my old buddy Newt if we like to tweak Harry Obamalosi and their army of facilitators as phony persimmons, and traitors to original preregrinationism.