A Distinction Without a Difference By: shep

by shep

Reading Daily Kos this morning, a came across this peculiar claim by DHinMI in a long essay about Blackwater and the GOP:

“But the main reason why it’s wrong to refer to Bush authoritarianism as fascist is, simply, that it’s not fascist. Fascism exalted the state as the most powerful force, more powerful than any other institutions, including business.”

My reply is: you’re making a distinction where there is no difference, in both fascism and the Republican model of government.

The most perfect illustration of that is the current purchase of immunity for cooperating in illegal domestic spying for telecom companies by former political officials (in both parties) now employed by the telecoms and lobbying by current government officials, such as intelligence director Mike McConnell, who were formerly (directly) employed by the telecoms.



I’ll let Glenn Greenwald describe another dimension to the lack of distinction between “the state” and business:

”The top telecom officials are devoting substantial amounts of their energy to working on highly classified telecom projects with the Bush administration, including projects to develop whole new joint networks and ensure unfettered governmental access to those networks. Before joining the administration as its Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell spearheaded the efforts on behalf of telecoms to massively increase the cooperation between the Federal Government and the telecom industry.

The private/public distinction here has eroded almost completely. There is no governmental oversight or regulation of these companies. Quite the contrary, they work in secret and in tandem -- as one consortium -- with no oversight at all.”

Strangely, DHinMI’s thesis is based in large measure on Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine which contains no such denial of Republican fascism:

“A more accurate term for a system that erases the boundaries between Big Government and Big Business is not liberal, conservative or capitalist but corporatist. Its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on security. For those inside the bubble of extreme wealth created by such an arrangement, there can be no more profitable way to organize a society. But because of the obvious drawbacks for the vast majority of the population left outside the bubble, other features of the corporatist state tend to include aggressive surveillance (once again, with government and large corporations trading favors and contracts), mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties and often, though not always, torture.”

From Wikipedia on “corporatism”:

“Political scientists may also use the term corporatism to describe a practice whereby an authoritarian state, through the process of licensing and regulating officially-incorporated social, religious, economic, or popular organizations, effectively co-opts their leadership or circumscribes their ability to challenge state authority by establishing the state as the source of their legitimacy, as well as sometimes running them, either directly or indirectly through shill corporations.”

From Wikipedia on fascism:

”Fascism also operated from a Social Darwinist view of human relations. Their aim was to promote "superior" individuals and weed out the weak. In terms of economic practice, this meant promoting the interests of successful businessmen while destroying trade unions and other organizations of the working class. Lawrence Britt suggests that protection of corporate power is an essential part of fascism. Historian Gaetano Salvemini argued in 1936 that fascism makes taxpayers responsible to private enterprise, because "the State pays for the blunders of private enterprise... Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social."

And from the self-proclaimed “founder” of fascism himself:

”The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others; it makes its action felt throughout the length and breadth of the country by means of its corporate, social, and educational institutions, and all the political, economic, and spiritual forces of the nation, organised in their respective associations, circulate within the State.” (p. 41).
—Benito Mussolini, 1935, The Doctrine of Fascism, Firenze: Vallecchi Editore.

Any way you slice it, fascism is about the alignment of all institutions of state power, especially corporate power, against the interests of democratic representation, populist policy and individual liberty, i.e., liberalism. It seeks not to enhance the state relative to business but to remove the barrier between corporate interests and the interests of state entirely. Meanwhile, fascism seeks to suppress or coerce any remaining conflicts with those interests as determined by its elites in both business and government, because they are the same people and the same interests.

From the corruption of the democratic process in the Supreme Court sanctioned Republican coup of 2000 and political prosecutions and voter suppression by Republican government officials, to restructuring the tax system to favor wealth rather than work, to outsourcing the writing of US law to corporations, to privatizing entire government functions like protecting US government officials overseas, to the militarization of society through fear mongering, to colluding between government and corporations to violate the law to spy on the lawful activities American citizens, this Republican government cannot be distinguished from US corporate interests and their combined interest in monopolizing the country’s wealth and power and undermining the liberty and self rule of average citizens. That is fascism by every meaning of the word.


[Cross-posted at E Pluribus Unum]