Roman "Fasces" on the wall behind the Speaker's Podium U.S. House of Representatives chamber, U.S. Capitol.How Mr. Madison's Republic is Dying, or Sinclair Lewis was Right
Paul Bolin -- World News Trust
Nov. 22, 2014
Today we are confronting ever more rapidly creeping fascism in the United States; one might even say that it is no longer creeping but trotting along briskly.
It is not your father's or grandfather's fascism but it is fascism all the same. Fascism, like all ideas, has evolved with the times and now makes use of the technologies and methods that are most efficacious given the social milieu in which it exists at any given point in history.
The most crucial point I discuss herein is that it is no longer necessary to use the blunt and obvious methods that Nazi Germany used to obtain a like hold on the population and implement a fairly hard form of fascism, say a 7.5 or 8 on a scale where fascist Germany represents a 10. Back in 1935, writer Sinclair Lewis observed that when fascism came to the United States it would be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross, just as it is doing now. I set out the reasons why I believe this to be true below.
This is NOT intended to be anything more than a description of the current situation in the United States, and shorthand terms are used to express concepts that should be readily apparent. I do not have any suggestions at this time about how to forestall or prevent what now seems as an inevitable descent into open New Fascism. This is a think piece about how and why we have come to be where we are, and nothing more.
The Project And Its Historical Antecedents
What the corporatists have in mind for their endgame might be best described as an unholy fusion of fascism and feudalism.
Feudalism can be accurately defined as a system based on the preservation of the privileges and wealth of a small number of aristocrats against the poverty of the masses of peons and peasants. Feudal lords did have, at least in theory, certain obligations to their peasants based on the religious mores and norms of the times as decreed by the Catholic Church. It was, for instance, considered very bad form to let one's peasants starve. Though these obligations were honored as often in their breach as not, the obligation was at least theoretically there.
Fascism could not be better defined than it was by Benito Mussolini's associate, the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, who ghostwrote “The Doctrine of Fascism” (which was published under Mussolini's name) and stated that "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power." (This quote was later and erroneously attributed to Mussolini himself.) Mussolini did contend that fascism “has a religious element” in that it is a pure belief system not open to question.
The current virtual worship of the almighty “free market” championed so devoutly by Milton Friedman (and the favorite “philosopher” of the New Fascists, Ayn Rand) is clearly a riff on Mussolini's observation. Let it be said that Rand is to actual philosophy what an astrologer is compared to Albert Einstein. Rand's opinions (they are nothing remotely resembling actual philosophy) are , taken most generously, just another justification for the solipsistic selfishness, the eternal search for which John Kenneth Galbraith once defined as the central goal of conservatism. Yet, they are at the core of the New Fascism with feudalism and fascism.
These are the two models the plutocracy in all its parts -- including but not limited to international high finance and the military-industrial-intelligence complex (MIIC) that has given rise to the total surveillance “security state” of the last decade or two -- has fused as the model for the system they are imposing step-by-step on the United States. They are systematically unmaking the Madisonian republic with the active collaboration of both the Democratic and Republican parties. The latter is more open about its allegiance to the New Fascism, but it is abundantly apparent that the institutional Democratic Party has drifted into open pursuit of the same goals over the last 30 years. The one and only difference between the two is this: the Democratic New Fascists will boil the frogs in the kettle -- we, the peasantry -- a bit more slowly, but boil them they surely will. Make no mistake about that. New Fascists of both parties work for exactly the same bosses: the plutocracy and the MIIC.
Where the founding fathers thought that the goal of proper governance was the facilitation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the New Fascist elite believe that the peasantry -- in other words everyone not them or in their immediate service -- is entitled to strife, squalor and the freedom to expire. The nominal obligations of feudalism assuredly do NOT exist in the New Fascism. The “people” are nothing but a mass of fungible, easily replaceable serfs whose sole purpose is to serve and enrich those at the top -- the plutocrats and warmongers -- until they are no longer cost-effective. The peasantry is utterly disposable and their very existence depends on the whims of the New Fascist leadership class. And your individual number may come up at any time once the project has been fully implemented.
The Mechanisms of Implementation
Control mechanisms and media psyops are generally much more subtle now than they were in 1930s Germany. They are not always so, but the craziest and most Nazi-like elements of the propaganda -- right-wing hate radio and Fox News -- are reserved for and targeted at the most gullible and low-information elements of the populace. They are the best targets because they are the most susceptible to simple propaganda; this is so because they are also the least likely to possess even rudimentary critical thinking skills. Furthermore, they are the most xenophobic elements of the population. That they distrust intelligent people, education, science, and the facts that science discovers to be facts, makes them a perfect audience for such indoctrination and reinforcement; they are predisposed by their nature and culture to be just that. Above all they want someone to blame and their chosen media serve up the targets. To draw a not-perfect but accurate enough analogy, those media are the counterpoints to the Nazi Party's Volkischer Beobachter, Der Angriff, and Die Sturmer. Their purpose is to keep the already simple-minded and rabid millions perpetually astir and outraged about something, anything.
It is necessary to understand and accept the cold fact that this country has deep streaks of self-delusion and anti-intellectualism and for the most part always has. Read the late Joe Bageant's “Deer Hunting With Jesus” if you doubt me. Bageant wants to love, and in a way does love, his own “Scots-Irish mutt-people” as he describes them, but cannot forgive them their self-willed ignorance and profoundly self-destructive worldview, their failure to accept facts, and their simple-minded religiosity. This is, however, assuredly not a regional phenomenon; the South may have more of it but the mindset lurks in every state and city. These individuals are found by the millions throughout the United States, some because they have never been exposed to a wide variety ideas in an unslanted way, and far more because they reject the very concept of critical thinking as either “pointy headed intellectualism” as George Wallace so memorably put it, or “ungodly.” They believe that Real Americans don't “think," they feel, and those feelings are what is right. Gut feelings are always better, more authentic and more right than a calm evaluation of extrinsically proven facts.
There is, then, a huge pre-existing audience for the kind of propaganda the New Fascists are using to partially pave their way to total power. A significant share of the populace -- I've read estimates as high as 40 percent -- is in effect functionally illiterate. Needless to say these people possess nothing in the way of critical thinking skills. They believe exactly what their opinion leaders -- talk radio, Fox News, their preachers -- tell them to believe and question nothing. They are, in many ways, the zombies George Romero warned us about. They exist in a paranoid, twilight world filled to the brim with imaginary threats and phantom enemies in which they have already internalized the required basic messages. The Limbaughs, O'Reillys, Hannitys and Savages serve as constant, daily reinforcers of these already-accepted modes of thought and the fundamentally paranoid worldview of which they are a central pillar.
The United States has always been, in significant part, a bigoted, benighted and profoundly insecure place. As constitutional scholar and theorist John Hart Ely observed decades ago, tar, feathers and running people out of town on a rail (one might also add lynching to Ely's list) are at least as much a part of the American cultural heritage as the declaration of inalienable rights and perhaps more so. It has also been a profoundly anti-intellectual place. Distrust of educated persons, indeed of education itself and the very process of critical thinking, has been a part of this country's zeitgeist as long as it has existed. Millions of people are proud of being uneducated, ignorant or just plain dumb As the late humorist and straight-razor-keen observer of the human zoo George Carlin once observed, “think of how dumb the average person is and remember, half of the population is dumber than that.”
The more insidious propaganda come through the “major news media,” especially television, which is controlled by a handful of companies owned by, surprise!, the corporatists and 0.1-percenters. The propaganda that comes from these outlets is quite a bit more sophisticated than the openly racist, homophobic and flat-out paranoid/schizophrenic “information” put out by the above sources. It is carefully designed and nuanced to reflect the opinions of the corporate masters in nearly subliminal ways. Concepts like “centrism,” “bipartisanship,” and “expert opinion” are pushed constantly and carefully defined within limits that are exceedingly narrow and which have been shifting ever more rightward for the last 35 years. The Democratic party is now, as an institution, somewhat to the right of the Republican party of the pre-Reagan 1970s. That is no accident. These messages are not directed at the sub-literate cave trolls described above, the sheeplike base of voters that make up the hidebound electoral base of New Fascism. The messages in the mainstream news serve to reassure the slightly brighter, low-to-moderate information populace and convince them that things are really all right while the skids are being slowly but inexorably greased for the final descent into fully operationalized New Fascism. It is a gradual acculturation process, all meant to calm the frogs and distract them from the increasingly hot water in which they are being cooked while convincing them that the kettle they are already in does not even exist. And it works, which should not be in the least surprising. Tens of billions of dollars are spent on it, and it is extremely skillfully packaged and painstakingly researched, tested, and tailored in focus groups for the maximum effect on its intended audience. This mainstream propaganda has slowly lulled the non-crazy masses into a state of nearly unquestioning acceptance, if not the Absolute Belief of the cave trolls.
The other primary tool for the propagandizing and manipulation of the masses, particularly the cave trolls described above, is religion, though it was not part of the original plan as was originally set forth in the Powell Memorandum. Its simultaneous emergence with the designs of the corporate New Fascists has, however, proved immensely useful to the New Fascist hierarchy.
It is unfortunate in a way that there never was a state religion in the United States. Centralized state religions were easily written off as the enablers and accompanists of corrupt regimes in the 18th and 19th centuries. Intellectuals as diverse as Marat and Voltaire, Adam Weishaupt and Karl Marx rejected them out of hand as rationalizers of the misery of the masses and implacable foes of the Enlightenment, which they of course were. Religious belief is, indeed, the opiate of the masses, and fundamentalist Protestantism is both the Oxycontin and meth of the not-too-bright masses. Few Western European countries are religious in significant numbers today, in other than a simply ritualistic and cultural sense, and they are certainly not religious in anything resembling the way in which the United States is. This has made them somewhat more resistant to the appeal of the New Fascism, particularly when coupled with the fairly strong tradition of genuine parties of the Left and experience of the Old Fascism. It must be admitted that the Old, that is to say, nationalist Fascism rears its head now and again, but seldom on a mass level. The identification of the state with a church served to breed a deep and justified cynicism in European civilization about, and resentment of, both in the pre-democratic era.
The religious freedom guaranteed with the best of intentions by Madison and Jefferson in the Bill of Rights foresaw that freedom being exercised by the likes of Quakers and the Roger Williamses of the world, not by inbred, three-toothed snake-handling morons or jet-owning, faith-healing charlatans using mega-”churches," the mass media and the internet as tools for the twin purposes of fleecing the vast oceans of the gullible of their last dime, while having the undeniable side benefit, from the view of the New Fascists, of converting them to a belief system that is essentially New Fascist in nature. Any nut could and did, under the protections of the First Amendment's Religion Clauses, pick up a bible and declare themselves a preacher handing down what they claimed to be authoritative truth no matter how demonstrably insane it was. There was nothing to stop them, and like all grifters they took the con and ran as far and as fast as they could. That every lunatic can find believers in their lunacy is something approaching a law of physics or mathematics in its truthfulness as applied to the United States for all of its history from Cotton Mather until today.
A state religion would never have allowed such nonsense-spouting freelancers to exist, much less overrun the religious landscape. Say what you will about the Catholic Church, and there is indeed much to be said about its blood-soaked history, it at least required its priests to be educated in a meaningful way. American hucksters, three-toothed idiots and scam artists immediately picked up on something Frank Zappa aptly observed in 1981 -- “It is easy with the bible to pretend you are in showbiz” -- and ran with that discovery all the way to their Cayman Islands banks after a short stop at the nearest Mercedes dealership.
But people willingly believe the ludicrous and blatantly obvious bullshit these swindlers sell because they do not have the education or intellectual horsepower to work things out for themselves and have nothing in their mindset or worldview allowing them to critically evaluate claims of any kind, be they those selling beer or jebus. And people, especially people who aren't bright enough or educated enough to get their heads around the nature of the universe as it is, want to believe in something, regardless of how implausible or contrary to provable facts that thing is. For these people, the suspension of disbelief is automatic if the message is delivered in an authoritative enough way.
When they are offered something simple, slickly-packaged and hard-sold in which to believe, be it phony religion or the evil of the scary other (poor people/African-Americans/Latinos/uppity women/loudmouthed homos of both sexes all demanding that they are human and deserve to be treated as such), or these days both, they lap it up like a cat does cream. Particularly when their authority figures encourage and reinforce a belief that “those people” and their otherness/laziness/corrupt and evil natures/insufficient godliness are responsible for all the wrongs of the world and their own inability to advance their positions in life. And the propaganda machines I have described above reinforce these delusions with an intensity and frequency that is literally mind-numbing especially when you don't have a lot of mental horsepower to begin with. With that demographic the dehumanization of the evil, dangerous, different other works every time and has throughout history. Again, it could almost qualify as a law of the universe, or at least Earth.
Scapegoating is, of course, as old as politics. The New Fascists have built not a different kind of machine than has been used in the past but a better one: one far more thoroughly researched and market-tested, slickly packaged, and infinitely better-funded, an omnipresent machine that exists in every corner of modern American life: Call it the New Fascist Mighty Wurlitzer. Its more sophisticated manifestations are subtle enough to seem plausible to those in the middle who don't pay a lot of attention. And its siren song of simple, albeit utterly wrong, answers to impossibly complex questions of economics, ethics and morality could not be more beautifully targeted to the cave trolls. Leave the modern day equivalent of “The Eternal Jew” for the Limbaughs, the Robertsons and the Hagees, who do their jobs superbly, the New Fascists have bigger fish to fry by propagandizing the middle. That's where the key to a majority and final power is, and they have made it work. The cave trolls fell for it in the trial run and they have trained their massive propaganda machine for the last 20 years on the Great American Mushy Middle, and they are convincing them.
What is remarkable is that many in the mushy middle have been converted into near-true-believers, largely by this carefully concocted combination of secular and religulous propaganda. Tens of billions of dollars of unrebutted, and unrebuttable in financial terms, utter lies, can shift a significant percentage of public opinion in this media age. Ultimately, though, the New Fascists depend most on the True Believers, the cave trolls of the rabid right who will believe literally anything they are told by their opinion leaders. It seems safe to opine that about 35 percent of the population of the United States has been intentionally and deliberately reduced to a state so pathetic they would happily vote to liquidate themselves if they were told it was the will of lily-white, blue-eyed, Caucasian Republican Jebus and the almighty R party that they do so.
Offer them a 50 percent pay cut and a brutal subsistence existence in exchange for attaining the goal of eliminating the people they have been programmed to hate and they'd be on it like a duck on a june bug as long as they could keep their guns. They would willingly drink Jim Jones' koolaid of annihilation and beg for, indeed demand, more while in the final flailings of their own death throes. Never before has there been -- so carefully manufactured -- such a huge group of people who are such absolute and self-nullifying zilches that they would happily destroy themselves with a smile on their faces to revenge themselves on their purely imaginary oppressors. That is terrifying and has no real precedent in human history of which I am aware. These people aren't like the masses of Germans who in the Nazi era "went along to get along" -- this is a huge base of lemming-like sheeple whose true-believing minds function at the same analytic level and depth of a 6-year-old who still believes devoutly in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. The belief is absolute and the critical faculties are zero, facts be damned. They are zombies who deliberately chose to be zombies.
The ironic and amusing part of this is that the New Fascists do not give one good goddamn about most of the issues that so excite and (sometimes literally, it seems) arouse the cave trolls. If anyone is naive enough to believe that a Lloyd Blankfein type cares one hoot about whether gay couples can get married or people can smoke weed legally they are living in a fool's paradise. The New Fascists are concerned only with two things: Money and the Power they need to protect that Money from the masses. Though, if in time the cave trolls are given their head as a payoff by the New Fascist Powers That Be for their undying support -- and there is a small possibility that it might happen -- then all bets are off and their death squads will probably materialize and go into action overnight.
As noted above, another reason that the New Fascists are so successful is that they hold absolute power over all the major media. This control is carefully exercised and its outputs are microscopically calibrated and infinitely careful to systematically marginalize everything and everyone that doesn't serve their corporate fascist vision (the “catapulting of the propaganda”) not by eliminating those individuals, who exist in significant numbers, but by making them completely invisible in the mass media. And if they are not covered by the mass media, it is obvious to all but the questioners like us that such individuals are not Serious Persons whose opinions need to be considered. Dissidents electronically disappear to the furthest corners of the internet rather than literally disappearing, as was the preferred method of fascists past, from Mussolini to Pinochet, but the societal effect is exactly the same. It is modern technology and control mechanisms put to the same ends as Josef Stalin pursued in literally erasing people from photographs. Dissidents and real leftists and liberals become “unpersons.” Nothing can be allowed to interfere with the media propaganda, which as Goebbels proved, is by far the best and most cost-effective way of controlling the masses. Were there a great beyond, Doktor Goebbels would be smiling down therefrom and rubbing his hands together in glee. He would be immensely proud of his intellectual children, none more than Roger Ailes and the Koch brothers.
A startling, and surprising side benefit of this total control of both the media and the acceptable parameters of the political debate is a unique and new use to which it can be put in the New Fascist project: The New Fascist elites have now figured out a way to monetize fear, bigotry and ignorance. This should scare sensible people out of their wits. Fascists of the past were interested solely in political power and territorial expansion. The New Fascists are not content with that. They literally want all the money in the world. The monetization of ignorance works as follows - relentlessly propagandize the sheep-like, infinitely gullible populace 24/7 in order to get a majority to vote for policies that continue to further impoverish them, policies which facilitate an even greater and more rapid transfer of wealth to the tenth-percenters. This is something new and represents the feudal element of the New Fascism. The fascists of the past realized that a reasonably prosperous middle class was a base on which their regimes could rest rather comfortably. Not the New Fascists. They see every last dime in hands other than their own or those of their servitors as a dime that rightfully and properly belongs to them. And they will extract every last penny from the sheeple by any means necessary before they head to their walled and heavily-secured “Galt Gulch” compounds somewhere in the Rocky Mountains or South America where they intend to laugh and watch the world burn.
The Crucial Differences: Why The New Fascism Will Work, At Least For A While.
The Fascism of the past was messy and hands-on. The New Fascism is not. It is clean and technologically based, which gives it a huge long-term advantage over its primitive forbears.
As a for-instance, the New Fascists don't need large numbers of concentration camps, which might attract public or international attention, which might be Bad For Profits, which is to be avoided at all costs, so to speak. They already possess the technologies and willingness necessary to spy on every single person in the country for any or no reason. It is far easier to convince the masses to will themselves into slavery.
Dissent need not be stamped out by massive shows of lethal force like Tienanmen Square or Kristallnacht when small shows of non-lethal force are just as effective in communicating the central and crucial message -- that resistance is utterly futile -- via their omnipresent propaganda outlets. The message that mass protests do not exist -- remember the U.S. media's nonexistent coverage of the enormous, unprecedented, worldwide protests before the Chimperor's Iraq war, which were reduced to page-20 items in the U.S. media if they were reported upon at all -- and that peaceful small-scale mobilizations such as Occupy can be effortlessly be brushed aside and dismissed, combined with the media's nonstop selling of the mobilized as borderline or fringe “kooks” can do the job, why waste the money building concentration camps? The desired effect is obtained for less of the holy grail and Only Thing That Matters: MONEY (take your hat off and kneel when the Holy Word is spoken, pigs!). A handful of very remote, easily deniable and highly secured camps will do for the few thousand hard core loudmouths protesting the New Fascist takeover whom they consider to be actually dangerous.
Effective mobilization, short of a mass armed and violent revolution, the desirability or results of which must be considered dubious at best, is now a thing of the past and that is a fact that the American Left must face for the foreseeable future. There's a damned good reason that dozens of government agencies have informants and that police departments have been militarized into super-Gestapos and this is it. (See http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/They-re-everywhere--NY-T-by-Dave-Lindorff-Assange_Dept-Of-Homeland-Security_Federal-Agency-FBI_Freedom-141118-567.html)
A high-tech Stasi is being built brick-by-brick, day-by-day in the good ol' USA. Mobilized, as opposed to individual, dissent is not to be tolerated however small its manifestations may be. If you think these resources described will not eventually be directed at political dissidents when the perceived need arises I am amused by your naivete. Throughout history the secret police always turn on the citizenry. One reason for long term hope exists in the prophetic words of John F. Kennedy, “those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” Individual dissenters, even intellectual giants like Chomsky, pose no threat at all if for all intents and purposes they do not exist in the mass mediasphere nor do the courageous, dedicated investigative reporters who make the internet their home. Even more importantly, electronically erasing dissidents creates no martyrs who could serve as rallying points. This has all been carefully thought through.
The New Fascists also don't need messy, smelly, hard-to-hide death camps. Their new mechanisms of implementation make them far too noticeable and superfluous even if only the already marginalized Chris Hedges types of the world would ever try to raise a fuss. It is far easier and infinitely cheaper, its primary attraction to the New Fascists, to passively cull the herd as they see fit by making health care and the necessities of life inaccessible to the "undesirables." Then they can just die off “naturally” with no awkward questions being asked. Better yet, they can plausibly be blamed for their own deaths, which is a true triumph of evil manipulation. They were failures, and we don't want parasites as free riders on the grand and glorious experiment that is 'murkin' capitalism now, do we? It's their fault. It's always their fault. And so the sheeple are calmed reassured. “That will never be us. That's impossible.”
If necessary or desirable, Goldman and its ilk can always engineer the necessary commodity shortages to facilitate starvation or freezing to death as adjunct culling methods, and do it all in the name and under the cover of glorious free-market capitalism. Nothing can be done about the workings of the always-perfect and omniscient "free market." Them's the breaks, chumps. Suck it up or die, preferably the latter. Don't expect the New Fascists to admit that the “free market” championed by Milton Friedman and his disciples, as it exists today by their design, is not a natural phenomenon -- it isn't, it's a purely human construct, unlike the laws of physics, which have always existed. Every economic system that has ever existed is the product of human-designed rules. The question is who designs the rules and who those rules are intended to benefit. The modern “free market” is the most manipulated and gamed thing on earth and it is dedicated solely to one purpose -- reducing the masses to slavery in all but name so that the rich may be further enriched..
The final necessary piece of the New Fascists' machinery of oppression is the freshly emerged doctrine of War Now, War Forever, the vital contribution of one Richard Bruce Cheney and his minions, and the one which will secure the success, for a significant time, of the New Fascism. Firstly, there is no better way to appeal to the masses than by promoting “patriotism,” the basest, yet most powerful emotional response in a world comprised of nation-states. Secondly, there are uncountable hundreds of billions of dollars, perhaps trillions, yet to be squeezed from the sheeple, at least for a few more decades, by the military-industrial-intelligence complex.
There will always be a new, trumped-up, or in some cases actively created, enemy, (and just roll that concept around in your head for a moment or two to realize what it implies about the amount of control the New Fascists already have) each the most dangerous since the last one, and if all else fails, drag out Zombie Hitler in a new costume like Cheney and Little Boots Bush did with the essentially harmless, save to those under his actual rule, Saddam Hussein. It will never end. The scam is so thoroughly entrenched that it has now become self-perpetuating for the foreseeable future, with both parties taking their cut of the spoils.
Which is perhaps the most disturbing thing of all: The glory years of the Democratic Party had their genesis, ironically enough, in the administration and philosophy of a Republican president, one Theodore Roosevelt, who despite being a patrician's patrician, chose to cast his political lot with the common man and condemned the behavior of his own class in the most vituperative terms imaginable. TR demanded and received legislation which at least partially cut the balls off of the economic royalty of his day. His distant cousin Franklin took his ancestor's approach to government and applied it with vigor and decisiveness to the problems of his time. The .1%ers of FDR's day, including one Prescott Bush, friend and enabler of the financiers who backed Adolf Hitler, and father of G.H.W. Bush and grandfather of His Chimperial Highness, tried to organize a coup to topple FDR and replace him with a military dictator because they perceived FDR as a virtual communist, upon which Marine General Smedley Butler blew the whistle. Google Octafish's invaluable posts on democrticunderground.com for the history of this sordid chapter of American history. But FDR, in an uncharacteristically unwise and short-sighted decision, chose not to prosecute the plotters for treason, which in those times would have resulted in an entirely justified sentence of life in front of a firing squad.
Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were more than happy to carry forward the traditions of the Democratic Party as the party of the average working American. A legacy which died with Jimmy Carter, admirable in many ways though he may have been and still is. Then came Reagan and then came the DLC, who decided that the best way to win elections was not by standing for principle but by bending over for to obtain the cash offerings the .1% and advancing the goals of those who have evolved into the pillars of the New Facism. Selling out traditional Democratic principles was good business and those who did reaped rich rewards. Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Clinton.
Perhaps you think I am overstating the case? I don't think so. DUer woo me with science assembled the terrifying list of monstrosities I have appended below on which the two supposedly “contesting” parties agree in full upon. Read it and tell me that the road to the full implementation of The New Fascism is not already paved. We already live in a soft fascist kleptocracy/kakistocracy. They just haven't put the eyebrows on it yet, as Mr. Zappa would put it.
Maybe Hillary can finish the job and tie the bow on the New Fascists' final triumph, temporary though it may be. She certainly looks and sounds like she is more than up for the job. Actual friends of the people, the real people of this deeply flawed though once-great nation, do not spend their time cuddling up to amoral monsters in human form like Henry Kissinger and Lloyd Blankfein, who consider capital crimes against humanity to be merely necessary and ordinary parts of doing the business that they choose to do to enrich their ultimately corrupt and evil selves. Given their utter lack of anything resembling a conscience, I have no doubt that they sleep the sleep of contented infants.
We are fucked and there is not one thing we can do about it save go underground, think, and write unless there is one among you who can tell me how to fight unlimited billions of dollars of propaganda by knocking on doors, and in trying to get the masses to use the logic in which they do not believe in or understand.
Michio Kaku, the theoretical physicist, has spelled out a number of reasons why the next 50-100 years will be the most dangerous time in human history, and I agree. The twin pathologies of greed and belief in Iron Age superstition are the problems posing the greatest threats to the long term existence of the human species. Whether we can conquer them is the question upon which the fate of humanity hangs.
At the current time it is very difficult to imagine how constructive, humane and progressive change can be achieved in the United States. It is likely that nothing will fundamentally change in the United States until planetary catastrophe intervenes - and there is zero doubt that it will via global climate change, comet/asteroid strike, or nuclear exchange - and clears the way for humans to seriously consider and adopt ways of living that do not involve capitalist exploitation, the worship of money and the belief in gods which can be demonstrated to not exist. I find the Roddenberry theory of the future to be plausible -- following such a catastrophe the desperately needed rethink of the way to live life and best be human will likely come about and lead to a human golden age, though I do not see how it can come about before a systemic collapse. And it is not going to be any time soon. The day will come when the human race adopts logic and compassion and ceases to believe in Iron Age Middle Eastern superstitions and the infinitely-funded lies of the capitalists. It cannot come quickly enough.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My deepest and most profound thanks and gratitude to DUers Octafish and woo me with science, without whose posts and deep thoughts I would never have undertaken this analysis. I owe you both many fine beers. Further thanks to Michio Kaku for his brilliant, albeit unintentional description of what a humanity shorn of greed and superstition could and might yet be in his inspirational book “The Physics of the Future,” Charlie Pierce for his brutally incisive “Idiot America” and to Thomas Frank for every word he has ever written. Pierce and Frank are both prophets without honor, which makes them no less correct. And “faith” is the fool's substitute for knowledge. 'twas ever thus.
The List -- compiled by woo me with science of DU.
Mass spying on Americans? Both parties support it.
Handing the internet to corporations? Both parties support it.
Austerity for the masses? Both parties support it.
Cutting social safety nets? Both parties support it.
Corporatists in the cabinet? Both parties support it.
Tolling our interstate highways? Both parties support it.
Corporate education policy? Both parties support it.
Bank bailouts? Both parties support it.
Ignoring the trillions stashed overseas? Both parties support it.
Trans-Pacific Job/Wage Killing Secret Agreement? Both parties support it.
TISA corporate overlord agreement? Both parties support it.
Drilling and fracking? Both parties support it.
Wars on medical marijuana instead of corrupt banks? Both parties support it.
Deregulation of the food industry? Both parties support it.
GMO's? Both parties support it.
Privatization of the TVA? Both parties support it.
Immunity for telecoms? Both parties support it.
"Looking forward" and letting war criminals off the hook? Both parties support it.
Deciding torturers are patriots? Both parties support it.
Militarized police and assaults on protesters? Both parties support it.
Indefinite detention? Both parties support it.
Drone wars and kill lists? Both parties support it.
Targeting of journalists and whistleblowers? Both parties support it.
Private prisons replacing public prisons? Both parties support it.
Unions? Both parties view them with contempt.
Trillion dollar increase in nuclear weapons. Both parties support it.
New war in Iraq. Both parties support it.
New war in Syria. Both parties support it.
Carpet bombing of captive population in Gaza. Both parties support it.
