So all contiguous countries (states) that are not united under a constitution have been at all places and all times in a constant state of nature (war) where the correlation of brute force has ruled?
Except where they choose to be bound by treaty or agreement, pretty much, and often even then.
As I said way back, I’m personally glad Lincoln acted dictatorially and I think he acted rightly; but let’s not try to clothe his action in legality.
Then you're fine, and Lincoln's legally naked, since there would be nothing but moral right or material advantage in which to clothe him, as there could be no illegality to refer to either.
@ Sully:
Those powers are reserved to the states by the same contract, and the union it memorializes and enacts, that secession attempts to negate. Without the Constitution, we either revert to the state of nature and correlation of brute forces, or, as I would prefer, to overriding moral issues, such as those described.
@ MovieMan0283:
Consistency? None available I'm afraid, not when popular self-styled educator of hard righties Doctor Zero inveighs in purple hues against the "ruling class" and feels no compunction about asserting that the left is defined by "hatred of the people." He's just a more verbose and literary expression of the contradictions that would perplex the Tea Partiers and their pseudo-anti-progressive leadership if same were sensitive to contradictions. We are upside down in bizarro world, one or a few universes over from the one in which Doctor Manhattan fled the Earth after one last kind, mass murderous gesture. (BTW, is WATCHMEN on your list of great 21st C films, or going to be? (Checked out your site a bit, going to blogroll it, both here and at the blog I run for my movie memorabilia business.))
I take the position that we're all on "the left" - republicans to the left, royalists to the right - 200+ years after the categories were asserted. We all, contrary to Doctor Manhattan I mean Zero, are in love with the people, justice, and one or another species of equality. The modern American right is in that sense a relative right, while the Euro-right is more an absolute right: The fascists were royalist zombies, summoned from the bloody Earth by alchemical necromancy. As for their socialist roots, you can come to revolutionary socialism by will or by idea - by rebellious mood, aesthetics, and emotion; by dialectical materialist etc. etc.; or, sometimes, usually in college, both. Socialism - or more broadly speaking "the left" - was just the most popular revolutionary ideology on offer. That many fascists wore red before they adopted the more ornate costumes of later years mainly reflects the fact that red was in fashion in their youths.
I think Musso was more than 50% attracted by the will, and the style, and experienced little difficulty substituting Marinetti for Marx to divert and distract his verbal centers. Hitler, on the other hand, was rather more than a little psycho-pathological - discursive abstractions couldn't come close to supplying adequate narcissistic resources to him. The Enlightenment had never provided the Imperial Way Japanese with much more than outerwear. In some ways they came by their brand of fascism much more honestly and authentically.
As I never tire of repeating, American conservatism conserves the fruits of a progressive revolution, and those fruits go rotten if not eaten and picked again, and again, as the revolutionaries themselves, TJ most famously, sought to remind us.
@ MovieMan0283:
It was a primitive or regressive, lowest common denominator transvaluation of values. As you likely are well aware, in pre-modern societies, no categorical separation between aesthetic, religious, political, and practical ideas and objects is asserted. There might be specialization and division of labor - shaman vs chieftain vs warrior, etc. - but acts and objects typically would be all of those things at once - warfare as ritual, ritual as artistic expression - rain dance as dance, religious ritual, quasi-political re-assertion of unity, and attempt to get some rain. Part of the post-structural critical project was an attempt to recover this unity by negating categorical separations - the telephone directory as text and art object and political document, that kind of thing - without succumbing to the fascist temptation.
The confusion or incoherence of Goldberg's analysis that you point to may result from his lack of interest in this discussion - which can be, to say the least, very difficult to integrate with a conventional political project, and which contemporary conservatives are more likely to identify (categorically separate) as aestheticist-nihilist-probably leftist intellectualism than as a tool. It's a typical post-structuralist "lacuna," a looming absence in his critique that also corresponds to his suppression of "what makes fascism fascistic" in his working definition.
Brilliant - ties into fascism's mythopoetic primitivism/paganism - the fascists' idea that they represented a more radical truth about human nature and the meaning of life on Earth than any of the Enlightenment rationalisms or even Judeo-Christian religion could. I disagree with the idea, though, that there was "no real political motive" - every seemingly pointless or even self-destructive murder served a political purpose, as a self-reinforcing, exemplary demonstration of power. "This is how ruthless we are, this is what we do to those of whom we do not approve - if this is what we do to the innocent, imagine how we would conduct ourselves towards the guilty."
@ narciso:
Not to mention the mess that Buchanan left. I think you're completely right that Lincoln didn't expect a cataclysm. As is common on the outset of major wars, both side were expecting a shorter conflict.
Also this "aggressive war" thing is a bit much. It's like accusing a police officer of assault for arresting a burglar in the act. I'm still assuming that Sully is being intentionally provocative in his language.
You'll have to supply me with a reference to the secession clause. I can't find it. At the moment that a state or group of states dissolve the terms of union, and to the precise extent that they achieve separation, without any alternative arrangements in place, then there is no basis to govern relations - no moral assumption at all. Once you've broken the covenant that was in place before most of the Confederate states even existed, why would the Confederates have any more right to the land and its governance than anyone else? The North had possessions and sympathizers in the South left unprotected: Even and perhaps especially the slaves were equally the North's moral responsibility - citizens in waiting whose right to what later generations would call self-determination was being flagrantly denied.
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.
@ Joe NS:
Did you mis-type? Goldberg's explicit definition of P-ism was a major focus of my post.
You're quite right, however, to highlight the paganism of the Fs, and the godless religiosity of the Cs. In a longer version of the post, I dwelt more on the fascist rejection of the Enlightenment and obsession with myths of origin, and I went into more detail regarding the origins and usages of the word "Fascism." The "fasce" play into it all, but it gets a bit complicated, since the ancient Roman derivation was already assumed in common neutral usages relating to government - and not just in Italy: fasces have also appeared on U.S. currency and government insignia, and not, as far as I know, as part of a fiendish Progressive plot.
I could also have gone into the differences between a Sozialist and a Nationalsozialist, or between a "workers party" and a "German workers party," but I didn't want to bust the blog. I avoided the Imperial Way Japanese even though I think they qualify as fascist - and rather better than Thommy Wilson and his gang - because Goldberg shows little interest in them.
@ Seth Halpern:
On Mexico, Wilson permitted Pershing's punitive expedition against Pancho Villa and, earlier, a brief but bloody action in Vera Cruz - the chief benefit of the former being that it enabled Pershing to gain some experience in the field while somehow preserving his reputation, the chief benefit of the latter being that its pointlessness dissuaded Wilson from attempting any repetition or escalation. The call at the time, that Wilson resisted, was for a full-blown intervention to decide Mexico's internal affairs and "protect American interests."
I'll see if I can clarify the language. As for your main point, the easy part about defending the Ps is that, Palmer Raids and naive pronouncements on socialism notwithstanding, they weren't Nazis, and they weren't Bolsheviks. The hard part is that as soon as you point that out, you're considered an enemy of the true faith, and for all intents and purposes a defender of Nazis and Bolsheviks. Of course, the same thing happens in further left world for anyone who dares to put in a word for evangelicals or George W Bush.
Sully wrote:
Except where they choose to be bound by treaty or agreement, pretty much, and often even then.
Then you're fine, and Lincoln's legally naked, since there would be nothing but moral right or material advantage in which to clothe him, as there could be no illegality to refer to either.
@ Sully:
Those powers are reserved to the states by the same contract, and the union it memorializes and enacts, that secession attempts to negate. Without the Constitution, we either revert to the state of nature and correlation of brute forces, or, as I would prefer, to overriding moral issues, such as those described.
@ narciso:
At least we agree on V FOR VENDETTA (tho I thumbs-upped STRANGE DAYS).
@ narciso:
No accounting for tastes. In my alternative universe WATCHMEN rules and goes in my Blowmind Marathon with ZARDOZ.
@ MovieMan0283:
Consistency? None available I'm afraid, not when popular self-styled educator of hard righties Doctor Zero inveighs in purple hues against the "ruling class" and feels no compunction about asserting that the left is defined by "hatred of the people." He's just a more verbose and literary expression of the contradictions that would perplex the Tea Partiers and their pseudo-anti-progressive leadership if same were sensitive to contradictions. We are upside down in bizarro world, one or a few universes over from the one in which Doctor Manhattan fled the Earth after one last kind, mass murderous gesture. (BTW, is WATCHMEN on your list of great 21st C films, or going to be? (Checked out your site a bit, going to blogroll it, both here and at the blog I run for my movie memorabilia business.))
I take the position that we're all on "the left" - republicans to the left, royalists to the right - 200+ years after the categories were asserted. We all, contrary to Doctor Manhattan I mean Zero, are in love with the people, justice, and one or another species of equality. The modern American right is in that sense a relative right, while the Euro-right is more an absolute right: The fascists were royalist zombies, summoned from the bloody Earth by alchemical necromancy. As for their socialist roots, you can come to revolutionary socialism by will or by idea - by rebellious mood, aesthetics, and emotion; by dialectical materialist etc. etc.; or, sometimes, usually in college, both. Socialism - or more broadly speaking "the left" - was just the most popular revolutionary ideology on offer. That many fascists wore red before they adopted the more ornate costumes of later years mainly reflects the fact that red was in fashion in their youths.
I think Musso was more than 50% attracted by the will, and the style, and experienced little difficulty substituting Marinetti for Marx to divert and distract his verbal centers. Hitler, on the other hand, was rather more than a little psycho-pathological - discursive abstractions couldn't come close to supplying adequate narcissistic resources to him. The Enlightenment had never provided the Imperial Way Japanese with much more than outerwear. In some ways they came by their brand of fascism much more honestly and authentically.
As I never tire of repeating, American conservatism conserves the fruits of a progressive revolution, and those fruits go rotten if not eaten and picked again, and again, as the revolutionaries themselves, TJ most famously, sought to remind us.
MovieMan0283 wrote:
(b)
@ MovieMan0283:
It was a primitive or regressive, lowest common denominator transvaluation of values. As you likely are well aware, in pre-modern societies, no categorical separation between aesthetic, religious, political, and practical ideas and objects is asserted. There might be specialization and division of labor - shaman vs chieftain vs warrior, etc. - but acts and objects typically would be all of those things at once - warfare as ritual, ritual as artistic expression - rain dance as dance, religious ritual, quasi-political re-assertion of unity, and attempt to get some rain. Part of the post-structural critical project was an attempt to recover this unity by negating categorical separations - the telephone directory as text and art object and political document, that kind of thing - without succumbing to the fascist temptation.
The confusion or incoherence of Goldberg's analysis that you point to may result from his lack of interest in this discussion - which can be, to say the least, very difficult to integrate with a conventional political project, and which contemporary conservatives are more likely to identify (categorically separate) as aestheticist-nihilist-probably leftist intellectualism than as a tool. It's a typical post-structuralist "lacuna," a looming absence in his critique that also corresponds to his suppression of "what makes fascism fascistic" in his working definition.
MovieMan0283 wrote:
Brilliant - ties into fascism's mythopoetic primitivism/paganism - the fascists' idea that they represented a more radical truth about human nature and the meaning of life on Earth than any of the Enlightenment rationalisms or even Judeo-Christian religion could. I disagree with the idea, though, that there was "no real political motive" - every seemingly pointless or even self-destructive murder served a political purpose, as a self-reinforcing, exemplary demonstration of power. "This is how ruthless we are, this is what we do to those of whom we do not approve - if this is what we do to the innocent, imagine how we would conduct ourselves towards the guilty."
@ narciso:
Not to mention the mess that Buchanan left. I think you're completely right that Lincoln didn't expect a cataclysm. As is common on the outset of major wars, both side were expecting a shorter conflict.
Also this "aggressive war" thing is a bit much. It's like accusing a police officer of assault for arresting a burglar in the act. I'm still assuming that Sully is being intentionally provocative in his language.
You'll have to supply me with a reference to the secession clause. I can't find it. At the moment that a state or group of states dissolve the terms of union, and to the precise extent that they achieve separation, without any alternative arrangements in place, then there is no basis to govern relations - no moral assumption at all. Once you've broken the covenant that was in place before most of the Confederate states even existed, why would the Confederates have any more right to the land and its governance than anyone else? The North had possessions and sympathizers in the South left unprotected: Even and perhaps especially the slaves were equally the North's moral responsibility - citizens in waiting whose right to what later generations would call self-determination was being flagrantly denied.
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.
@ Joe NS:
Did you mis-type? Goldberg's explicit definition of P-ism was a major focus of my post.
You're quite right, however, to highlight the paganism of the Fs, and the godless religiosity of the Cs. In a longer version of the post, I dwelt more on the fascist rejection of the Enlightenment and obsession with myths of origin, and I went into more detail regarding the origins and usages of the word "Fascism." The "fasce" play into it all, but it gets a bit complicated, since the ancient Roman derivation was already assumed in common neutral usages relating to government - and not just in Italy: fasces have also appeared on U.S. currency and government insignia, and not, as far as I know, as part of a fiendish Progressive plot.
I could also have gone into the differences between a Sozialist and a Nationalsozialist, or between a "workers party" and a "German workers party," but I didn't want to bust the blog. I avoided the Imperial Way Japanese even though I think they qualify as fascist - and rather better than Thommy Wilson and his gang - because Goldberg shows little interest in them.
@ Seth Halpern:
On Mexico, Wilson permitted Pershing's punitive expedition against Pancho Villa and, earlier, a brief but bloody action in Vera Cruz - the chief benefit of the former being that it enabled Pershing to gain some experience in the field while somehow preserving his reputation, the chief benefit of the latter being that its pointlessness dissuaded Wilson from attempting any repetition or escalation. The call at the time, that Wilson resisted, was for a full-blown intervention to decide Mexico's internal affairs and "protect American interests."
I'll see if I can clarify the language. As for your main point, the easy part about defending the Ps is that, Palmer Raids and naive pronouncements on socialism notwithstanding, they weren't Nazis, and they weren't Bolsheviks. The hard part is that as soon as you point that out, you're considered an enemy of the true faith, and for all intents and purposes a defender of Nazis and Bolsheviks. Of course, the same thing happens in further left world for anyone who dares to put in a word for evangelicals or George W Bush.