The Mini-Skinny: Headlights

The Mini-Skinny: Headlights

 

The Corporate Establishment Will Not Oppose Fascism

 

“The message corporate America delivers when it continues to fund the campaigns of fascists, coup plotters, and white supremacists while pretending to oppose the reactionary policies they put forth, could not be more obvious; they’re completely fine with fascism because it doesn’t interfere with the capitalist order or their bottom lines.

Frankly, fascism is likely more profitable than neoliberalism is for the Pig Empire private sector; after all, putting Trump in the White House got them all a big tax cut last time.”

Nina Illingworth, November 29th, 2021

One of the barely-discussed historical truths about fascism is that it is rarely, if ever, the result of the actual application of violent force. Rather, fascism is installed quite deliberately by the presupposed guardians of the liberal democratic order. Typically, this takes the form of some combination of a ruling class seeking to purge anti-capitalists, a political class cowed by the threat of violence and perfectly willing to sacrifice the marginalized to continue business as usual, and a culturally conservative petite bourgeoisie seeking to impose its values on those they regard as beneath them in the social hierarchy.

I mention this not to admonish my fellow Americans for their historical ignorance, which I have come to learn, is quite deliberate. Rather my purpose here is to provide some sort of context for the slow slide into overt, as opposed to covert, fascist rule in the Pig Empire. Do you want to know what Weimar America looks like? It looks like powerful corporations signing pledges to protect voting rights, while funding the campaign of pasty Republican fascists who are actively destroying voting rights and protecting coup plotters, for starters.

If you’ve been reading my work over the past few years, it should now be abundantly clear to you that the authorities, whomever they may be, are not going to stop the installation of an actually fascist Pork Reich. This is because fascism is ultimately a defense mechanism for a Pig Empire capitalist order that has every intention of exterminating billions of people to keep the wheels of neofeudalism grinding for another generation or two. Given that it will be awful hard to get a majority non-white society to actively vote for a white supremacist political order intent on murdering them so Elon Musk can continue to chase a path to Mars on a dying planet, this social order, including both the ruling classes and their overseers, is now done with democracy.

I’m not saying that the rise of overt fascism in the Pig Empire is inevitable; but if we keep sitting around waiting for the referee to punish the nazis, it might as well be.

 

Fascism Is Not Alien to the American Experience

 

“If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States.”

Henry A. Wallace

 

If nothing else, today’s Quickshot Quotation once again demonstrates the staggering effect over a hundred years of reactionary capitalist propaganda has had on the general American understanding of fascism. In this instance, we find the thirty-third Vice President of the United States not only explaining why fascism could *definitely* happen in America, but also, perhaps unconsciously, exposing the paradox at the heart of all liberal anti-fascist efforts. After all, capitalism ultimately requires a marriage to the profit motif, and in a world of enforced scarcity where the poor might literally starve to death unless they pony up some ducats for food, what is profit if not placing money and power ahead of human beings?

I’m not here to pick on Henry for the contradictions of his opinions today however; what’s important to us here is the realization that American fascism is not going to be installed by a marching column of fashionably-kitted neonazi storm troopers. Indeed, as men like Wallace, FDR, and John Maynard Keynes knew all too well, fascism in any “western” liberal democracy will come riding a headwind of popular support; not necessarily a majority, but a significant teaming horde of reactionary capitalists, cranks, and white supremacists. They were able to predict this not only because they’d just witnessed the process in Germany, but also because they understood just how fragile a “democratic” society bent to the will of rich people through a racist, reactionary, violently exploitative capitalist order, actually is. In short, they knew America could fall to fascism because the ideas at the root of the fascist ethos, are quite similar to the ideas at the root of the American system of capitalism. Of course, for reasons of class and privilege, the FDR administration chose to stave off fascism by restraining capitalism, instead of abolishing it; thereby setting us up for an inevitable final conflict with the forces of capitalist reaction at some point in the future.

Are we at the point of that “final” conflict? Well, as anyone who is watching the news can clearly see today, there are in fact millions upon millions of Americans, including numerous rich and powerful entities, who are effectively and openly stating their preference to end democracy, and install fascism. Furthermore, all signs point to a political, judicial, and economic elite who are either feckless and incapable of preventing the cancerous growth of the fascist order, or simply don’t care and would prefer empowering the nazis to paying their taxes.

There is still time to stop the ultimate rise of the Pork Reich, but clearly if it is to be done, it’s going to be everyday people that roll back the tide – our Pig Empire systems of governance are structurally, politically, and indeed morally, incapable of stopping the fascists for us.

 

Trainspotting in the Heart of the Pig Empire

 

“Total Asymmetric Warfare” – Georgia GOP Redraws Political Map as US Senate Dems Do Nothing

Have you ever wondered what it would look like if a whole society caught “deer in headlights” syndrome? Yeah, me neither; until I started living it. After Joe Biden’s election victory and inauguration, I (and many other observers) warned that with, or without Downmarket Mussolini, American fascism as embodied by the Republican Party, was just getting warmed up. As the forces of reaction seek to intimidate political opponents into submission and force the system to warp around fascist conspiracy theories, we have been proven largely correct. Now we’re seeing the poisonous fruits of a longstanding, yet entirely exposed GOP plot to rig the next decade’s worth of elections, inside the context of a fascist political takeover being conducted by folks who seemingly regard any vote against them, as foundationally illegitimate.

In this November 23rd, 2021 article by Jessica Corbett over on Common Dreams, we go inside GOP attempts to effectively disenfranchise perhaps millions of predominantly minority voters through the magic of gerrymandering; the art of ensuring all the people who won’t vote for cracker supremacists are jammed into the same voting districts. This is of course in addition to other ways the fascist Republican Party is working to rig the next election cycle; including threatening their political opponents until they quit, offering bounties for evidence of presupposed voter fraud, and just downright making it as hard as possible for poor and marginalized people to vote against them.

Now you might be tempted to assume that the ostensible opposition to the fascist party in American politics, the Democrats, would be working night and day to solve this problem; after all, even if they couldn’t give a rat’s ass about folks living under the threat of fascist violence, this could affect their own political careers in a very direct way. As the article and voting rights author Air Berman noted however, you’d be wrong:

 

“It’s beyond enraging that Manchin and Sinema continue to say voting rights legislation needs 60 votes when GOP is rigging elections and shutting Democrats out of power for next decade on simple majority party-line votes. Total asymmetric warfare.”

 

Yes, you heard that correctly; literal fascists who at least pretend to believe Trump’s “big lie” are about to rig the next decade’s worth of elections because two corrupt as f*ck Democratic Party Senators are being bribed to, among other things, keep the filibuster intact. This in turn has allowed the GOP to repeatedly block measures that would at least help secure voting rights, including the For the People Act, Freedom to Vote Act, and John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act; despite Joe Machin’s clown-shoes attempts at bipartisanship and appeasement. Please keep in mind that none of this is any sort of secret, and neither is the fact that corporate America is playing both sides of the battle against the fascist creep; some folks who know Trump well are already promising a second Herr Donald presidency would come with reprisals against his enemies.

This, at the end of the day, is what I mean when I talk to you about Weimar America. It’s not so much a set of historical circumstances shared between interwar Germany and modern America, as it is a social ethos built around exceptionalism and liberal capitalist norms, that leads to a seemingly inevitable, and wholly predictable surrender to fascism. Right now, it feels like most of the country knows full damn well that the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train full of nazis; the question then becomes, is anyone going to do anything to stop the carnage that’s about to ensue, at all? Clearly, if you’re asking the corporate liberal establishment, the answer to that question is ultimately “no,” and history says that course of (in)action, has consequences.

 

 

nina illingworth

 

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

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“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”