Any Fascists North of Richmond?

That surprise hit song,Rich Men North of Richmond, reminds me of the late Angelo Codevilla's great piece from 2010 on America's Ruling Class, somehow. Glenn Reynolds called it the best article on American politics this century. But it's too much for me to tackle today. Even though it is really pertinent to Rich Men North of Richmond.

This weekend, I have also been thinking about a friend who has recently been characterized as a "fascist" on social media, with her job threatened. She's okay for now, thanks to a lot of support from other people.

And I happened to run across a fascinating piece from 2020 by Codevilla on Mussolini, the original fascist, and the true nature of fascism. I thought it would be worthwhile to get a little deeper into it. Because "fascist" is no longer a movement. Now it is an epithet. While those hurling the epithet may not care what it actually means, some young people might respond to a little education.

Barbie was called a fascist by a tween in that too-pink movie this summer.

School started this week here. That means school board meetings, with lots of opportunities for people to be labeled as fascists. And the media is trying to convince us that next year's presidential election is the thing which must dominate our lives. You could be called "fascist" pretty much no matter who you support (bleaah).

Mussolini and Fascism

Codevilla's 2020 essay, The Original Fascist, From movement to epithet is elegantly written and it is hard to pick out highlights, but here goes:

Today, the adjective "fascist" is an epithet -- often mixed promiscuously with "white supremacist," "sexist," etc. -- that the ruling class uses to besmirch whoever challenges them, and to provide emotional fuel for cowering, marginalizing, and disempowering conservatives.

This maneuver consists of defining fascism in terms of unpopular ideas, political practices, and personality traits observable in many times and places; then, having cited Hitler's Nazi movement as fascism's quintessence, of pinning those deplorable characteristics on the intended targets. This reductio ad Hitlerum aims at no less than to outlaw conservatives. As the Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin exclaimed: "these people are not fit for polite society.... I think it's absolutely abhorrent that any institution of higher learning, any news organization, or any entertainment organization that has a news outlet would hire these people." And the New Republic explains "why fascist rhetoric needs to be excluded from public discourse." The establishment doesn't seem to realize that they are preaching some of fascism's practices.

This essay looks behind fighting words to fascism's reality. Although Benito Mussolini, fascism's artificer and personifier, died discredited in 1945, fascism's socio-political paradigm, the administrative state, is well-nigh universal in our time. And as the European and American ruling class adopted Communism's intellectual categories and political language, the adjective "fascist" became a weapon in its arsenal.

We begin with how fascism developed in Mussolini's mind and praxis from 1915 to 1935, how it was hardly out of tune with what was happening in the rest of the Western world, as well as how it then changed and died. After considering how fascism fit in the 20th century's political warfare doctrines, we explore its place in contemporary political struggles.

(emphasis mine)

One thing this essay does is show several differences between Nazism (including its devotion to ideology) and Mussolini's Fascism.

Mussolini - a few highlights.

These are not the only interesting facts about his life:

Mussolini was radical, talented, ambitious, insatiable. He fashioned fascism out of the ideas and circumstances of his time.

In 1883, his socialist father, a blacksmith, named him for the most radical revolutionary of the time, the Mexican Benito Juarez. His middle names were those of Italy's most radical socialists. But Benito was also raised to revere the liberal republicans who had unified Italy. . .

. . . Since age 18, he carried the official title "professor." But teaching in small towns strained his leftist political advocacy and his personal ambitions, including sexual ones. He was a "chick magnet." Also because he was not about to let himself be drafted into the king's army, he emigrated to Switzerland in 1902.

While supporting himself as a stonemason, he learned German and French, studied philosophy, in part at the University of Lausanne. . . He was active in socialist circles, both Italian and international, giving speeches to workers and helping to organize strikes -- which got him expelled. He got to know Vladimir Lenin, who later chastised Italian socialists for letting such a talent leave their ranks.

Back in Italy, taking advantage of an amnesty for having evaded the draft, he served for two years in the army's elite Bersaglieri corps.

He knew Lenin?

By 1915 he had also married, and fathered a son by one of his mistresses. He had become Italian socialism's brightest star.

The socialist movement's adherence to Karl Marx's dictum "the workers have no fatherland" had led to the expectation that the masses would not lend themselves to war among nations, and is among the reasons why many believed that the Great War would not happen. But when it did, rank-and-file socialists in all nations dragged all but fragments of their respective parties to support the carnage. So long as Italy stayed out of the war, Italy's socialist party was the major exception, along with Russia's Bolshevik faction. In 1911, Mussolini had campaigned against Italy's war in Libya. In August 1914 he wrote a fiery editorial, "Abbasso la guerra!": Down with the war! By November, however, he was arguing that entering the war would complete Italy's unification by taking the Austro-Hungarian empire's Italian-speaking regions, and make possible a host of beneficial social changes. . .

In December, he committed socialist heresy by writing that class struggle is a bad idea because the nation is more important than social class. He called his few scattered followers fasci, bundles, of individuals. The word recalled the bundles of punishing rods and axes that ancient Rome's lictors bore for the consuls. Hence he labeled the movement "Fasci Rivoluzionari d'Azione Internazionalista" and its members "Fascisti." In 1915, when Italy entered the war, as most of the party remained faithful to doctrine, and as Mussolini further identified with popular sentiment, the party expelled him and his Fascisti and did its best forcibly to silence them.

The war, and his own military service, had impressed upon him of what human beings are capable when acting as a disciplined mass. All over the world, people had produced more things, made greater sacrifices for their countries, than anyone had thought possible. European elites had been worshiping the state's architectonic powers since the time of Louis XIV's ministers (Louvois, Vauban, Colbert). G.W.F. Hegel, following Napoleon, had made patriotic worship of the scientifically administered, progressive state the political essence of modernity. Mussolini's vision of Italy followed from that. "The bureaucracy is the state," he said.

"When the nation's interests are at stake," Mussolini explained, "all particular interests, whether the proletariat's or the bourgeoisie's, must be silent." "All know that Benito Mussolini is an individualist," he declared. But, as regards the nation, "[Mussolini] is utterly disciplined." The state personifies the country, and disciplines its several elements to its service. "Soon, we will be the state." "We do the bureaucracy the highest honor and raise it to a level above that which it occupied under previous governments by making it into an army of co-belligerents, which works toward the same end." He said that Catholicism too must be brought into the nation's service in order to revive the Italian people's millennial tradition of greatness. Doing all this would take sacrifice, perhaps war, as had the struggle for independence in the previous century, and as the Great War had reawakened national consciousness.

By year's end, fascism was personified by thousands of street warriors who cheered their "Duce" (Leader), and who seemed to live the poet Gabriele D' Annunzio's exalted patriotic visions.

Mussolini, however, felt the need to explain himself philosophically. He called himself "a practical relativist." . .

"Relativism is akin to Nietzsche's Der Wille zur Macht, and fascism is a most formidable creature of an individual and collective will to power."

(emphasis mine)

Doing honor to the bureaucracy? This does not sound like Hitler.

I've seen Italian bureaucracy in action. It doesn't have much staying power.

In the 1921 elections, Mussolini's Fascists had gained only .04% of the vote. But chaos reigned in the streets because of socialist, Communist, and anarchist mobs, as well as because of the perhaps 40,000 fascist squadristi (the Blackshirts) who fought them. The government seemed irrelevant. King Victor Emmanuel III and the rest of the country looked for a savior. Mussolini organized the descent of some 30,000 squadristi on Rome to demand he be named prime minister. The incumbent, Luigi Facta, demanded the king institute martial law. When the king refused, Facta resigned and the king appointed Mussolini to head a government with almost no fascists. But, beginning with parliament's grant of plenary powers for a year (recalling the Roman institution of constitutional dictatorship), Mussolini gradually dispossessed the rest.

Hegel, as well as the positivist and Progressive movements, had argued for the sovereignty of expert administrators. Fascist Italy was the first country in which the elected legislature gave up its essential powers to the executive, thus abandoning the principle, first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, by which people are rightly governed only through laws made by elected representatives. By the outbreak of World War II, most Western countries' legislatures--the U.S. Congress included -- had granted the executive something like "full powers," each by its own path, thus establishing the modern administrative state.

(emphasis mine)

Fascism was an Italian movement

Codevilla makes the case that fascism was an Italian movement which is now dead. After the parliament gave up its power to the executive, Mussolini's word became law. This should make us very uneasy here in the USA.

Mussolini's economic program and comparisons to the New Deal are described (remember Liberal Fascism?)

Mussolini's downfall includes his meeting with Hitler. Many features of fascism were tied to Italian history and culture. You'll need to get into the essay to see this. The expansion of the Administrative State in many countries seems to me to be its contribution to the world.

Birth of a Slur

Communists in general and Joseph Stalin in particular are responsible for turning the words "fascism" and "fascist" into mere negative epithets. . .

In 1922-23, Germany was the big question. Its socialist party was really the only big nationwide force other than the Christians. The two did not get along. Stalin judged that the Communists could defeat them both, and the National Socialists, too, acting alone. Perhaps most of all he feared that if Communists were to ally with movements not under his control, he might lose control of the Communists.

Hence, Stalin elaborated the doctrine of "social fascism" which, verbiage aside, meant that Communists should consider all to the right of them--essentially all who were not under Communist discipline--as "fascists." Stalin wrote:

Fascism is the bourgeoisie's fighting organization that relies on the active support of Social-Democracy. Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism. There is no ground for assuming that the fighting organization of the bourgeoisie can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of Social-Democracy. There is just as little ground for thinking that Social-Democracy can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of the fighting organization of the bourgeoisie. These organizations do not negate, but supplement each other. They are not antipodes, they are twins. Fascism is an informal political bloc of these two chief organizations; a bloc, which arose in the circumstances of the post-war crisis of imperialism, and which is intended for combating the proletarian revolution. The bourgeoisie cannot retain power without such a bloc.

In 1935, after the Communists had lost Berlin's streets to the Nazis and Hitler had taken power, Stalin dropped the notion that everything to the right of him was fascism and reversed tactics. Thereafter, "popular front" became the watchword--meaning Communists would ally with everyone, under whatever banner, to defeat his worst enemies. . .

But the notion that everything to the right of Communism is fascism remains a fixture in the minds of Communists and other radicals. They never ceased to think of non-Communists and especially anti-Communists as fascists.

Marxist ideology lets them do that. According to Marx, consciousness is epiphenomenal to class reality. Hence, what people think subjectively does not affect what they are objectively. Truth that is class-objective and hence politically correct, is whatever the party judges useful to itself. That is why Communists believe they may apply the term "fascist," or any other, to people who do not think themselves so. But this reasoning, so clearly expressed, is adequate only among Communist apparatchiks.

For that claim to have force outside of the Stalinist canaille, for it to migrate into modern Western society's bloodstream, it had to be translated into pseudo-academic form. The book The Authoritarian Personality (1950), by the Communist Theodor Adorno and researchers working at the University of California, Berkeley, began doing that by popularizing a test that purports to correlate personality traits with fascism--that is, Adorno's F-scale (F for fascist). The test consists of a questionnaire that measures agreement with what Adorno calls "conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intraception [the rejection of all inwardness], superstition and stereotypy, power and 'toughness,' destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and [excessive] sex." These are the characteristics by which Adorno defined fascists.

Other academics started formulating their own "F-scales" to describe people they didn't like as fascists. But they are really just parroting Stalin.

This cracks me up:

This author first encountered the scam in 1963 as a student at Rutgers University's Eagleton Institute. The text assigned us, Herbert McClosky's "Conservatism and Personality" ( American Political Science Review, 1958 ), consisted of one questionnaire to measure conservatism, as defined by McClosky, and a second designed to measure personality traits, most of which were translations of Adorno's F-scale. The article touted its scientific bona fides by stating that both sets of definitions had been submitted to, and certified by, experts, including McClosky's graduate students. Not surprisingly, the project's results showed a strong correlation between conservatism and repulsive, dangerous personality traits.

Having received permission to do a term paper on that article, I replicated it as "Liberalism and Personality," using the same "scientific" methods--likeminded friends--to validate the questionnaires as McClosky had for his. What do you know? The results showed that liberals suffer from even worse disorders than conservatives, many unmentionable in a family publication. Only one of my professors cracked a smile.

Stalin and Adorno were a long time ago.

But what is the point of repeating from society's commanding heights that the ruling class's opponents are fascists, fascistizing, near-fascists, Nazis, white supremacists, racists, and so forth?

Today, those words mean simply that those so indicted have no right to challenge the ruling class. Whatever they do in that regard is illegitimate. Whatever may be done to quash them is legitimate, because it involves saving all things decent.

To engage in these practices in 1922-26 and in 1933-34, Mussolini and Hitler had to change Italy's and Germany's basic laws because, although they controlled the government, they did not yet control society's commanding heights: the judges, schools, businesses, press, and religious establishment. But because the 21st century's ruling class has almost a monopoly of all those heights, it does not really need new laws. Having seized the power to make words mean whatever they want, as well as the power to include and exclude from society's prime places, they are the law.

Our ruling class increasingly labels people fascists -- but not for doing or saying things other than what they did or said in previous decades. Those who are so labeled have not changed. Indeed, those who call them fascists chastise them for refusing to abandon their ways. Nor has fascism changed. It is one of history's closed chapters -- except for the theory and practice of political economy that it invented and that is now well-nigh universal. Hence, the invidious labeling and the punitive consequences result from a change in those who impose them. We may understand that change as the progressive deformation of liberalism.

That people who still sometimes call themselves "liberal," who had once defined themselves in terms of all manner of freedom, should vilify and try to hurt those with whom they disagree is counterintuitive. But our liberal, or formerly liberal, ruling class's claim exclusively to embody enlightenment and righteousness, its taste for humbling those outside itself, is our time's predominant reality. That claim, that taste, are impervious to reason.

We may understand why they are impervious, and hence why fighting that class is the only alternative to submission, by reference to the German sociologist Robert Michels. At the turn of the 20th century, he developed what he called the "iron law of oligarchy," which argued that any and all human organizations, regardless of their ostensible purpose or structure, end up serving the interests of their leaders. . .

Are the Rich Men North of Richmond impervious to reason?

Music

There was one criticism of Rich Men North of Richmond that led people to characterize the artist as mean: a line criticizing welfare. In response, a couple of people posted excerpts from this piece on welfare in Appalachia, the Big White Ghetto:

This is about "the draw."

"The draw," the monthly welfare checks that supplement dependents' earnings in the black-market Pepsi economy, is poison. It's a potent enough poison to catch the attention even of such people as those who write for The New York Times. Nicholas Kristof, visiting nearby Jackson, Ky., last year, was shocked by parents who were taking their children out of literacy classes because the possibility of improved academic performance would threaten $700-a-month Social Security disability benefits, which increasingly are paid out for nebulous afflictions such as loosely defined learning disorders. "This is painful for a liberal to admit," Kristof wrote, "but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America's safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency."

There is much here to confound conservatives, too. Jim DeMint likes to say that marriage is our best anti-poverty program, and he also has a point. But a 2004 study found that the majority of impoverished households in Appalachia were headed by married couples, not single mothers. Getting and staying married is not a surefire prophylactic against poverty. Neither are prophylactics. Kentucky has a higher teen-motherhood rate than the national average, but not radically so, and its young mothers are more likely to be married. Kentucky and West Virginia have abortion rates that are one fourth those of Rhode Island or Connecticut, and one fifth that of Florida. More marriage, less abortion: Not exactly the sort of thing out of which conservative indictments are made. But marriage is less economically valuable, at least to men, in Appalachia -- like their counterparts elsewhere, married men here earn more than their unmarried counterparts, but the difference is smaller and declining.

Speaking in the Rose Garden in March 1965, Lyndon Johnson had high hopes for his Appalachia Bill. "This legislation marks the end of an era of partisan cynicism towards human want and misery. The dole is dead. The pork barrel is gone. Federal and state, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican, Americans of these times are concerned with the outcome of the next generation, not the next election ... The bill that I will now sign will work no miracles overnight. Whether it works at all depends not upon the federal government alone but the states and the local governments as well."

The dole, as it turns out, is deathless, and the pork barrel has merely been reincarnated as a case of Pepsi. President Johnson left out of his calculations the factor that is almost always overlooked by populists: the people.

People are listening to the song.

This might be good advice for some folks:

Dark as a Dungeon

Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Last week's thread, August 12, Playing Kick the Can: The Chinese Biotech Lab in Reedley

Other threads involved in the "Lost in Space" episode last week:

Daily Tech News 12 August 2023

8/12/23 EMT

Saturday Morning Coffee Break & Prayer Revival

Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on week-old threads. But don't try it anyway.

posted by K.T. at 11:15 AM

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