Michael Ledeen: WE'RE All FASCISTS NOW

pajamasmedia.com ^ | February 12th and 14th, 2009 | Michael Ledeen

[Yosemitest]

We Are All Fascists Now
February 12th, 2009

Newsweek magazine, which has given us many of the most damaging deceptions about America in recent years
(remember the “Koran-Down-the-Toilet” hoax?),
now weighs in with a pretentious and embarrassingly ignorant cover story, “We Are All Socialists Now.”
To be sure, the basic theme
–that the huge “stimulus” and the big big big TARP is leading once-capitalist America down the dangerous road to socialism–
is not limited to the skinny weekly.
You hear it all over the place, from Right to Left, from talk radio to the evening news
(or so I am told; personally, I haven’t watched an evening news broadcast since 1987).

There’s a element of truth to the basic theme (although not to the headline):
the state is getting more and more deeply involved in business,
even taking controlling interests in some private companies.
And the state is even trying to “make policy” for private companies they do not control,
but merely “help” with “infusions of capital,”
as in the recent call for salary caps for certain CEOs.
So state power is growing at the expense of corporations.

But that’s not socialism.
Socialism rests on a firm theoretical bedrock:
the abolition of private property.
I haven’t heard anyone this side of Barney Frank calling for any such thing.
What is happening now
–and Newsweek is honest enough to say so down in the body of the article–
is an expansion of the state’s role, an increase in public/private joint ventures and partnerships, and much more state regulation of business.
Yes, it’s very “European,”
and some of the Europeans even call it “social democracy,”
but it isn’t.

It’s fascism.
Nobody calls it by its proper name, for two basic reasons:
first, because “fascism” has long since lost its actual, historical, content;
it’s been a pure epithet for many decades.
Lots of the people writing about current events like what Obama et. al. are doing,
and wouldn’t want to stigmatize it with that “f” epithet.

Second, not one person in a thousand knows what fascist political economy was.
Yet during the great economic crisis of the 1930s, fascism was widely regarded as a possible solution,
indeed as the only acceptable solution to a spasm that had shaken the entire First World, and beyond.
It was hailed as a “third way” between two failed systems (communism and capitalism), retaining the best of each.
Private property was preserved, as the role of the state was expanded.
This was necessary because the Great Depression was defined as a crisis “of the system,” not just a glitch “in the system.”
And so Mussolini created the “Corporate State,”
in which, in theory at least, the big national enterprises were entrusted to state ownership (or substantial state ownership) and of course state management.
Some of the big “Corporations” lasted a very long time; indeed some have only very recently been privatized,
and the state still holds important chunks–so-called “golden shares”–in some of them.

Back in the early thirties,
before “fascism” became a pure epithet,
leading politicians and economists recognized that it might work,
and many believed it was urgently required.
When Roosevelt was elected in 1932, in fact, Mussolini personally reviewed his book, Looking Forward,
and the Duce’s bottom line was,
“this guy is one of us.”

As an economic fix, the Corporate State was not a great success, either in America or in Italy.
Roosevelt’s New Deal didn’t cure America’s economic ills
any more than Mussolini’s Third Way did.
In both countries, however, its most durable consequence was
the expansion of the ability of the state to give orders to more and more citizens,
in more and more corners of their lives.
In the first half of the twentieth century, that was hardly unique to the “fascist” states;
tyranny was the order of the day in the “socialist” or “communist” countries as well
(not for nothing were so many learned books written about “totalitarianism,” which embraced both “systems”).
Paul Johnson writes of a “new species” of “despotic utopias,”
and Richard Pipes went so far as to call both Soviet Bolshevism and Italian fascism “heresies of socialism.”

So I suppose to that extent, Newsweek has a certain point,
although probably not what the authors of the cover story had in mind.
For those of us more concerned with the future of freedom
than with the pedantic subtleties, the key point is the political one:
the great “rescue” to which our governors are subjecting us
will challenge our commitment to freedom in many dramatic ways.
It’s going to be a hell of a fight.



---



We’re All Fascists Now II: American Tyranny
February 14th, 2009

Most Americans no longer read Alexis de Tocqueville’s masterpiece, Democracy in America,
about which I wrote a book (Tocqueville on American Character; from which most of the following is taken) a few years ago.
What a pity!
No one understood us so well,
no one described our current crisis with such brutal accuracy, as Tocqueville.

The economics of the current expansion of state power in America are, as I said, “fascist,” but the politics are not.
We are not witnessing “American Fascism on the march.”
Fascism was a war ideology
and grew out of the terrible slaughter of the First World War.
Fascism hailed the men who fought and prevailed on the battlefield,
and wrapped itself in the well-established rhetoric of European nationalism,
which does not exist in America and never has.
Our liberties are indeed threatened,
but by a tyranny of a very different sort.

Most of us imagine the transformation of a free society
to a tyrannical state in Hollywood terms,
as a melodramatic act of violence
like a military coup or an armed insurrection.
Tocqueville knows better. He foresees a slow death of freedom.
The power of the centralized government will gradually expand,
meddling in every area of our lives until,
like a lobster in a slowly heated pot,
we are cooked without ever realizing what has happened.
The ultimate horror of Tocqueville’s vision is that
we will welcome it,
and even convince ourselves
that we control it.

There is no single dramatic event in Tocqueville’s scenario,
no storming of the Bastille,
no assault on the Winter Palace,
no March on Rome,
no Kristallnacht.
We are to be immobilized, Gulliver-like,
by myriad rules and regulations,
annoying little restrictions
that become more and more binding
until they eventually paralyze us.


Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day
and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately.
It does not drive men to resistance,
but it crosses them at every turn,
till they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will.
Thus their spirit is gradually broken
and their character enervated…

The tyranny he foresees for us
does not have much in common with the vicious dictatorships of the last century,
or with contemporary North Korea, Iran, or Saudi Arabia.
He apologizes for lacking the proper words with which to define it.
He hesitates to call it either tyranny or despotism,
because it does not rule by terror or oppression.
There are no secret police, no concentration camps, and no torture.
“The nature of despotic power in democratic ages is not to be fierce or cruel,
but minute and meddling.”
The vision and even the language anticipate Orwell’s 1984, or Huxley’s Brave New World.
Tocqueville describes the new tyranny as “an immense and tutelary power,”
and its task is to watch over us all, and regulate every aspect of our lives.


It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform,
through which
the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate,
to rise above the crowd.

We will not be bludgeoned into submission;
we will be seduced.
He foresees the collapse of American democracy
as the end result of two parallel developments
that ultimately render us meekly subservient to an enlarged bureaucratic power:
the corruption of our character,
and the emergence of a vast welfare state
that manages all the details of our lives.
His words are precisely the ones that best describe out current crisis:


That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild.
It would be like the authority of a parent if,
like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood;
but it seeks, on the contrary,
to keep them in perpetual childhood:
it is well content that the people should rejoice,
provided they think of nothing
but rejoicing.
For their happiness such a government willingly labors,
but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness;
it provides for their security,
foresees and supplies their necessities,
facilitates their pleasures,
manages their principal concerns,
directs their industry,
regulates the descent of property,
and subdivides their inheritances:
what remains,
but to spare them all the care of thinking
and all the trouble of living?

The metaphor of a parent
maintaining perpetual control over his child
is the language of contemporary American politics.
All manner of new governmental powers are justified
in the name of “the children,”
from enhanced regulation of communications
to special punishments for “hate speech;”
from the empowerment of social service institutions
to crack down on parents who try to discipline their children,
to the mammoth expansion of sexual quotas
from university athletic programs
to private businesses.
Tocqueville particularly abhors such new governmental powers because they are Federal,
emanating from Washington, not from local governments.
He reminds us that
when the central government asserts its authority over states and communities,
a tyrannical shadow lurks just behind.
So long as local governments are strong, he says,
even tyrannical laws can be mitigated by moderate enforcement at the local level,
but once the central government takes control of the entire structure,
our liberties are at grave risk.

It is evident that our associations, along with religion
one of the two keys to the great success of the American experiment,
are prime targets for the appetite of the state.
In the seamless web created by the new tyranny,
everything from the Boy Scouts to smoking clubs will be strictly regulated.
It is no accident that the campaign
to drive religion out of American public life
began in the 1940s,
when the government was consolidating its unprecedented expansion during the Depression and the Second World War,
having asserted its control over a wide range of activities
that had previously been entrusted to the judgment of private groups and individuals.

When we console ourselves with the thought
that the government is, after all, doing it for a good reason
and to accomplish a worthy objective,
we unwittingly turn up the temperature under our lobster-pot.
The road to the Faustian Deal is paved with the finest intentions,
but the last stop is the ruin of our soul.

Permitting the central government to assume our proper responsibilities
is not merely a transfer of power from us to them;
it does grave damage to our spirit.
It subverts our national character.
In Tocqueville’s elegant construction,
it “renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent;
it circumscribes the will within a narrower range
and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself.”
Once we go over the edge toward the pursuit of material wealth,
our energies uncoil,
and we become meek, quiescent and flaccid in the defense of freedom.


The will of man is not shattered,
but softened, bent, and guided;
men are seldom forced by it to act,
but they are constantly restrained from acting.
Such a power does not destroy,
but it prevents existence;
it does not tyrannize,
but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people,
till each nation is reduced to nothing better
than a flock of timid and industrious animals,
of which the government is the shepherd.

The devilish genius of this form of tyranny
is that it looks and even acts democratic.
We still elect our representatives,
and they still ask us for our support.
“…servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind…
might be combined with some of the outward forms of freedom,
and…might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people.”
Freedom is smothered
without touching the institutions of political democracy.
We act out democratic skits
while submitting to an oppressive central power
that we ourselves have chosen.


They devise a sole, tutelary and all-powerful form of government,
but elected by the people
…this gives them a respite:
they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection
that they have chosen their own guardians.

There is a very old joke
about the husband who announces that he has a perfect marriage:
he makes all the big decisions,
and lets his wife deal with the minor matters.
He decides when the country should go to war,
while she manages the family budget.
He decides who should govern America,
and she makes all the decisions
about the upbringing of the children:
where they go to school,
what they wear,
how much allowance they receive, and so on.
That is precisely the sort of division of powers Tocqueville fears for us.
We will be permitted to make the big decisions:
who will be president,
and who will sit in the legislature.
But it will not matter,
because the state will decide
how our money will be spent,
how our children will be raised,
and how we will behave,
down to the details of the language we are permitted to use.

We laugh at the joke
because we realize that the husband’s “big decisions” are meaningless;
the same eventually applies to a “democratic” state
that makes all our little decisions for us.
Tocqueville unerringly puts his finger on the absurdity:
we give power to the state
in matters that require only simple good sense,
as if we were incapable of exercising it.
But we elect the government itself,
as if we were the very incarnation of wisdom.
We are “alternately made the playthings of [our] ruler, and his masters,
more than kings and less than men.”

We may chuckle,
but it is the rueful laugh of the powerless,
because such a government is far harder to resist than a traditional tyranny.
“Nothing is so irresistible as a tyrannical power
commanding in the name of the people,”
Tocqueville intones,
because it wields the awesome moral power of the majority
and “acts…with the quickness and the persistence of a single man.”

As Tocqueville grimly predicted, modern totalitarians have thoroughly mastered this lesson.
Nazis, Fascists and Communists have passionately preached sermons of equality,
and constantly paid formal homage to the sovereignty of the people.
Hitler proclaimed himself primus inter pares, the first among equals,
while Mao and Stalin claimed their authority in the name of a classless society where everyone would be equal.
And, while Communism was brought to power by violent coups or by military conquest,
Fascism was not installed by violence.
Hitler and Mussolini were popular leaders,
their authority was sanctioned by great electoral victories
and repeated demonstrations of mass public enthusiasm,
and neither of them was ever challenged by a significant percentage of the population.

The great Israeli historian Jacob Talmon coined the perfect name for this perversion of the Enlightenment dream,
which enslaves all in the name of all:
totalitarian democracy.

These extreme cases help us understand Tocqueville’s brilliant warning
that equality is not a defense against tyranny,
but an open invitation to ambitious and cunning leaders
who enlist our support in depriving ourselves of freedom.
He summarizes it in two sentences
that should be memorized by every American who cherishes freedom:


The…sole condition required in order to succeed
in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community
is to love equality,
or to get men to believe you love it.
Thus the science of despotism,
which was once so complex,
is simplified, and reduced, as it were, to a single principle.

As I said last time, we’re in for a hell of a fight.
Or so I hope.

[Yosemitest]

Thank you, Michael Ledeen.

And thank you, Rush,
for pointing this great article out.

[668 - Neighbor of the Beast]

Fascism, smashism. Anybody who indulges in quibbling and tweaking over the labels, is not helping. Most people get no further than a paragraph or two.
Not socialism. Uh, okay!
If the average American understands this relationship of govt to economy as “socialism,” let him.
Keep your nuances about creeping socialism vs galloping fascism vs totalitarian democracy vs communism.
A rose is a rose.

[dogcaller]

...We are all Kenyans now...

[Yosemitest]

We are “alternately made the playthings of [our] ruler, and his masters,
more than kings and less than men.”

It sounds similar to this ...
No servant can serve two masters:
for either he will hate the one,
and love the other;
or else he will hold to the one,
and despise the other.

Do NOT be mistaken....
this is important!!!

[MrB]

There IS a distinct advantage to the “fascist” label, however.

Did you hear how 0bama was so tweaked about the insinuation that his policies were being labeled “socialist” that he CALLED the newspaper BACK to “clarify further” and blame Bush?

And I know many “liberals” that really get mad when you refer to their ideology as “socialist”.

Well, take that... discomfort times about 1000 when you explain how their policies are NOT, indeed, “socialist”, but ARE, indeed FASCIST.

You’ll see their heads pop off. They have for decades referred to the right as the natural ideological heirs of Hitler himself, that any truth that THEY are, in truth, the fascists, causes them to go into a spittle flecked rage.

[Texas Fossil]

There are no secret police, no concentration camps, and no torture. “The nature of despotic power in democratic ages is not to be fierce or cruel, but minute and meddling.”

Sounds benign but is not, all forms of totalitarianism are by nature brutal. It is impossible to maintain power over time without it. That is why it is so evil. It is EVIL by nature. Any attempt to excuse it is naieve.

[ninonitti]

Kenyan Facists......

[668 - Neighbor of the Beast]

As I mentioned, a rose is a rose. However, there is a problem with the label “fascism.” It’s threadbare. Overuse has rendered it useless.
Fascist is anything and everything. Laws against pot, tax on cigs, laws against porn, zoning laws, bank nationalization, the SEC, the income tax, the ban on prayer in school, and any other law that chaps your hide.
Ledeen said not one in a thousand knows what it was. Right, and not one in ten thousand knows what Peron’s industrialism was either. Nor cares.
Socialism, as a term, is the best label for what’s going on today, because, first of all, everyone understands what is meant by it. It carries no connotation of geographic or temporal specificity, such as nazism or fascism or communism holds in the minds of the average public school product.
Any clever fellow can refute a claim of fascism by proving that we’re not Mussolini’s Italy in this or that respect, and arming people with a concept (”fascism”) from which they are easily intellectually disarmed is a disservice.
Besides, it’s all socialism. Ledeen should quit being such a wine taster about it.

[668 - Neighbor of the Beast]

I know many “liberals” that really get mad when you refer to their ideology as “socialist”

There you have it. They get mad because they can't deny that. They can easily deny they're fascists, by identifying Mussolini's Italy and demonstrating all sorts of essential contrasts to our time and place.

But they ARE socialists, many of them actually have studied it, and endorse it plainly. It's a lot harder to deny, distort or conceal. Ergo, they get really mad.

[MrB]

On the flipside,

if you DON’T want to cause a leftist to get their back up right away,

you can use the generic term “collectivist” to start the conversation, then lead into the fact that no collectivism is done voluntarily, but must be done by force, hence it invariably becomes socialism and eventually outright communism.

I have, however, had conversations with someone that did everything she could to dance around the fact that taxes are collected at gunpoint. Harry Reid recently that claimed that our tax system is voluntary - another person trying to avoid the reality that government is FORCE, nothing else, and that policies and laws are backed by the threat of the legal use of deadly force for non-compliance.

[Yosemitest]

No, only Barack Hussein Obama II is Kenyan, not the rest of us.

Obama Born In Kenya? His Grandmother Says Yes

[MrB]

Has the sign

Kenyan, Go Home!

showed up at any rallies yet?

[Yosemitest]

I don't know.

But I'd like to see this one, show up.

[Yosemitest]

"there is a problem with the label “fascism.” It’s threadbare. Overuse has rendered it useless"

I disagree. It's quite accurate.

[Yosemitest]

"refute the claim of fascism"

Go ahead, and try it, but the article is clear.
Sounds like to me,Tocqueville was right when he said...

All manner of new governmental powers are justified
in the name of “the children,”
from enhanced regulation of communications
to special punishments for “hate speech;”

[depressed in 06]

The problem with fascism is that nobody knows exactly what it means today. Most know that we defeated fascism in WWII. They do not see the parallels with what is happening today and yesterday, mainly, because no one studies history past “dude, it was hot today.” “Liberal Fascism” by Jonah Goldberg is one of the best comparison between modern liberalism and fascism. Liberals have taken over the name Liberal and consigned the previous definition to the name Conservative and made it sound bad. Liberal thinking a century ago is what conservative thinking is today, rule of law, liberty, freedom and responsibility.

I prefer to call Democrats Bolshecrats, because, they are run by a minority running rough shod over the majority. No one can possibly say that Pelosi is a good Speaker of the House. They problem I have is there are precious few who have any idea what a Bolshevik was. We need to apply a new term to what they are doing. Nannyism would fit, but, probably won’t resonate.

[Islander7]