The state of the democratic party

she was no Tip O'Neil. Really far too divisive for her own good. She had plenty of company on the other side of the aisle, of course, but she didn't do a whole lot on her end to govern well

 

that's all well and good, but my point was about divisiveness. There is more to "governing well" than simply passing legislation.

 

this piece gets at what I was saying:

Conservatives Are Dying for a House Speaker Like Nancy Pelosi

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/a...a_house_speaker_like_nancy_pelosi_148497.html

 

Do Democrats Care About the Mexican-American Vote?
The Republican Party’s midterm election expectations for South Texas were dashed. But Democrats should still see the results from the region as a wake-up call.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/democrats-mexican-american-vote

 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/12/the-lefts-fascism-problem/

The Left’s ‘Fascism’ Problem
By NATE HOCHMAN
December 6, 2022 6:51 PM

Progressives are directing the epithet at a broadening array of conservative politics while struggling to define the term.

Certain conversations and debates on the left can be fascinating. The MSNBC-style, boilerplate #Resistance genre is dull and uninteresting; toeing the party line of Jen Rubin Thought is a lucrative endeavor, but it requires little to no critical thinking. The thinking of the actual Left, however, is unique and worthwhile; that Left defines itself in opposition to the institutional progressive mainstream, and its relative lack of proximity to power gives it a critical perspective. (For examples of this distinction in practice, just look at the vitriolic divisions between Bernie Sanders supporters and the Democratic Party establishment in both 2016 and 2020.) Serious left-wing political theory, too, offers insights that even conservatives can find useful — aspects of the Frankfurt School, for example, are surprisingly reminiscent of traditionalist critiques of modernity, and neo-Marxist theorists such as Antonio Gramsci have been an object of fascination among right-wing thinkers for decades.

A popular debate in American political discourse lately has featured progressives of all stripes fastened on the question of whether, why, and to what extent the Trump-era GOP is a vehicle for fascism. As a Republican who happens not to think of himself as a fascist, I naturally greet this debate over who in conservative politics is implicated as fascist, semi-fascist, or fascist-adjacent with skepticism. On Twitter a couple of days ago, I inadvertently sparked a rehash of the debate over fascism and conservatism, asking what distinguishes fascism from “normal” right-wing politics.



The question was genuine — and, I think, quite reasonable if taken in good faith. I probably should have known that, given the nature of Twitter’s incentive structure, good-faith engagement wasn’t going to characterize the majority of the replies. There were hundreds of silly “you’re so close to getting it,” “huh, I wonder why that is,” “maybe that’s because you guys are fascists,” etc. responses that didn’t engage with the actual question. And even if we were to concede the dubious premise that most of modern conservatism is fascist, it would effectively render the “fascism” term and its attendant debates useless, as a practical matter.

One of the central purposes of political language is the drawing of distinctions that make the complexities of political life more coherent. This is hardly an original insight. Noting “the special connection between politics and the debasement of language,” George Orwell was complaining about the numerous political terms that had been drained of any substantive meaning all the way back in 1946:

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable.” The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way.​

With that being said, some of those who replied to my question made serious efforts to arrive at an answer. I can’t claim to be an expert on the academic literature regarding fascism, but my frustration with what I have read on the matter — and most of the responses I received on Twitter — stems from two primary problems.

The first is that the ideological tenets that ostensibly characterize fascism are themselves broad and contested terms. Chuck Anesi’s “Fascism: The Ultimate Definition” surveys the definitions offered by three established scholars of the ideology, all of whom were commended to me by my interlocutors on Twitter: Michael Mann, Robert Paxton, and R. J. B. Bosworth. While there are important differences among their conceptions, “all three authors agree that statism, nationalism, unity, authoritarianism, and vigor are essential elements of fascism,” Anesi writes.

Two of these terms — “statism” and “authoritarianism” — are pejorative. “Nationalism” can be negative or positive, depending on the context. “Unity” and “vigor” are usually seen as positive. But all of these concepts, to one degree or another, have been ascribed to right-wingers of every stripe, across time and place. Writing in Scientific American in 2012, the political activist Shawn Lawrence Otto argued that Mitt Romney’s “path to endorsement exemplifies the problem” of the GOP’s “authoritarian approach” to “attacking the validity of science itself as a basis for public policy.” Ross Perot, a 1996 Independent editorial argued, “represents an unattractive side of American politics: personalist, xenophobic, authoritarian.” Alexander Hamilton, according to the New Republic, was a “statist.” But then again, according to David Stockman, who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan, so was Reagan: “Rather than a permanent era of robust free market growth, the Reagan Revolution ushered in two spells of massive statist policy stimulation before it finally ran out of steam,” Stockman declared in 2014. Abraham Lincoln’s “nationalism” has been written about at length. And as for “vigor” and “unity” — what politicians haven’t used such terms when touting their policy agendas?
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conclusion:

The second problem, as I see it, is that much of the literature on the difference between conservatism and fascism is oddly lacking in ideological specificity, focusing on means rather than ends. A blog post penned by the left-wing writer John Ganz in response to my original tweet, in spite of Ganz’s obvious discomfort at engaging with conservatives in anything other than sardonic and mocking terms, was one of the more thoughtful and comprehensive efforts to answer my question.

With some important exceptions, Ganz’s delineation of conservatism from fascism largely makes reference to tactics rather than goals: “While both imagine a ‘traditional’ and ‘wholesome’ social order characterized by certain hierarchies—husbands and fathers over wives and children, bosses over workers, the nation over all, etc.—fascists and conservatives have different notions of how to assert and maintain them,” he writes. Conservatives, for example, “tend to believe that the existing elite, or at least its right-flank, ought to stay in power,” while “fascism—at least on the level of its propaganda—is populist: it speaks of the entire existing ruling class as corrupt and hopeless.” And while “authoritarian conservatives can countenance a break with constitutional legality, they would prefer this to originate within the existing elite of the state.” Fascists, by contrast, “strive for a putsch ‘from below,’ originating from their own cadre,” led by paramilitary cliques. “In general,” Ganz argues, “mass mobilization is a desideratum of fascists, while conservatives generally would prefer to not stir up the public and disturb the social order.”

The problem here is that tactical distinctions are effectively content-neutral; the description of the strategic differences between fascism and nonfascist conservatism could feasibly be applied to the extremist versus moderate factions of any number of political ideologies. The preference for mass mobilization led by a paramilitary elite, for example, is reminiscent of Vladimir Lenin’s “vanguard of the proletariat” — which, as a 32-year-old Lenin argued in the 1902 political pamphlet What Is to Be Done?, would fulfill “the pressing needs of the working class for political knowledge and political training” and eventually lead the masses to revolution. This revolutionary vanguard strategy, of course, was distinct from progressive reformism in its belief that, as Ganz aptly put it, “the entire existing ruling class” was “corrupt and hopeless,” and necessitated wholesale overthrow via violent revolution. But it was also distinct from the more moderate Menshevik wing of the Russian socialist movement, which ostensibly shared many of its long-term political goals.

To be fair, Ganz does point to some specific ideological divergences between fascism and conservatism. The distinction between fascism’s preference for “mass mobilization” and the conservative reluctance to “stir up the public and disturb the social order,” for example, gets to an important difference between a form of Burkean institutionalist conservatism and a fascist ideology that has no particular use for Chesterton’s fence.

But the other examples Ganz cites are more aesthetic than substantive. This category includes “the degree of national crisis” — in which conservatives “shake their heads at declining mores, and propose alternatives,” while “fascist propaganda is hysterical and shrill,” holding that “things have gotten so bad that only a radical move break the present regime can save the nation” — and fascism’s “cult of masculinity” that “explicitly centers violence and war.” (Conservatives, in contrast, “tend to emphasize the patriarchal and staid parts of traditional masculinity—the stern but beneficent father as pillar of community stability and so forth,” he writes.)

These, too, run into the same problem of ideological neutrality: Just as the rhetoric of “crisis” may distinguish fascism from conservatism, it also distinguishes more radical leftists from liberal reformers. The “crisis of capitalism” is a core tenet of Marxism, and the theory implicates every facet of modern society: As the Marxist economist Kuruma Samezō wrote in his 1929 Introduction to the Study of Crisis, “my use of the term ‘theory of crisis’ is not limited to the theory of economic crisis. This term naturally also encompasses the study of the necessity of imperialist world war as the explosion of the contradictions peculiar to modern capitalism.” And while the radical Left’s centering of violence and war may be less “hyper-macho,” as Ganz puts it in reference to fascism, it delineates the more extreme versions of leftism from their more moderate counterparts. Frantz Fanon’s seminal Wretched of the Earth was a perfect illustration of this cult-of-violence impulse, celebrating the violent aspects of anticolonial revolts as an act of both political and psychological liberation:

At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect. . . . When the people have taken violent part in the national liberation they will allow no one to set themselves up as “liberators.” . . . Illuminated by violence, the consciousness of the people rebels against any pacification.

None of this is meant as an attempt at “both-sidesism” — it’s an attempt to explain the deeper problems with the conventional ways in which “fascist” is defined and applied. Ganz concludes his response to me by arguing: “If you are a conservative, you might ask yourself if you’ve already been sucked into the blob—especially if you are already having trouble differentiating your own politics from fascism.”

But I have no problem differentiating my own politics from fascism. My challenge is to those who operate on a flawed definition of the term such that they are incapable of meaningful differentiation.

NATE HOCHMAN is a staff writer at National Review. @njhochman
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