No need to look back to the prophetic words of long dead Prophets.
Just listen to modern day Prophet Chris Hedges. He speaks with
clarity and truth.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/3/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Chris Hedges does one article a week, on Mondays. But apparently, he is
disturbed enough about what is happening politically, to have written a
second article this week, and here it is.
Miriam
The Revenge of the Lower Classes and the Rise of American Fascism
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_revenge_of_the_lower_classes_and_the
_rise_of_american_fascism_20160302/
Posted on Mar 2, 2016
By Chris Hedges
Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, seen in reflection.
(Andrew Harnik / AP)
College-educated elites, on behalf of corporations, carried out the savage
neoliberal assault on the working poor. Now they are being made to pay.
Their duplicity—embodied in politicians such as Bill and Hillary Clinton
and
Barack Obama—succeeded for decades. These elites, many from East Coast Ivy
League schools, spoke the language of values—civility, inclusivity, a
condemnation of overt racism and bigotry, a concern for the middle
class—while thrusting a knife into the back of the underclass for their
corporate masters. This game has ended.
There are tens of millions of Americans, especially lower-class whites,
rightfully enraged at what has been done to them, their families and their
communities. They have risen up to reject the neoliberal policies and
political correctness imposed on them by college-educated elites from both
political parties: Lower-class whites are embracing an American fascism.
These Americans want a kind of freedom—a freedom to hate. They want the
freedom to use words like “nigger,” “kike,” “spic,” “chink,” “raghead” and
“fag.” They want the freedom to idealize violence and the gun culture. They
want the freedom to have enemies, to physically assault Muslims,
undocumented workers, African-Americans, homosexuals and anyone who dares
criticize their cryptofascism. They want the freedom to celebrate
historical
movements and figures that the college-educated elites condemn, including
the Ku Klux Klan and the Confederacy. They want the freedom to ridicule and
dismiss intellectuals, ideas, science and culture. They want the freedom to
silence those who have been telling them how to behave. And they want the
freedom to revel in hypermasculinity, racism, sexism and white patriarchy.
These are the core sentiments of fascism. These sentiments are engendered
by
the collapse of the liberal state.
The Democrats are playing a very dangerous game by anointing Hillary
Clinton
as their presidential candidate. She epitomizes the double-dealing of the
college-educated elites, those who speak the feel-your-pain language of
ordinary men and women, who hold up the bible of political correctness,
while selling out the poor and the working class to corporate power.
The Republicans, energized by America’s reality-star version of Il Duce,
Donald Trump, have been pulling in voters, especially new voters, while the
Democrats are well below the voter turnouts for 2008. In the voting
Tuesday,
5.6 million votes were cast for the Democrats while 8.3 million went to the
Republicans. Those numbers were virtually reversed in 2008—8.2 million for
the Democrats and about 5 million for the Republicans.
Richard Rorty in his last book, “Achieving Our Country,” written in 1998,
presciently saw where our postindustrial nation was headed.
Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old
industrialized
democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist
movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward
Luttwak,
for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The
point of his book The Endangered American Dream is that members of labor
unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize
that
their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to
prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize
that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being
downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social
benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide
that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote
for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug
bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist
professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of
Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once
a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932,
most
of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler
chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past
forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped
out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words
“nigger” and “kike” will once again be heard in the workplace. All the
sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its
students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated
Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college
graduates will find an outlet.
Fascist movements build their base not from the politically active but the
politically inactive, the “losers” who feel, often correctly, they have no
voice or role to play in the political establishment. The sociologist Émile
Durkheim warned that the disenfranchisement of a class of people from the
structures of society produced a state of “anomie”—a “condition in which
society provides little moral guidance to individuals.” Those trapped in
this “anomie,” he wrote, are easy prey to propaganda and emotionally driven
mass movements. Hannah Arendt, echoing Durkheim, noted that “the chief
characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his
isolation and lack of normal social relationships.”
In fascism the politically disempowered and disengaged, ignored and reviled
by the establishment, discover a voice and a sense of empowerment.
As Arendt noted, the fascist and communist movements in Europe in the 1930s
“… recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people
whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for
their
attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted
of
people who had never before appeared on the political scene. This permitted
the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and
indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not
only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole,
they
found a membership that had never been reached, never been ‘spoiled’ by the
party system. Therefore they did not need to refute opposing arguments and
consistently preferred methods which ended in death rather than persuasion,
which spelled terror rather than conviction. They presented disagreements
as
invariably originating in deep natural, social, or psychological sources
beyond the control of the individual and therefore beyond the control of
reason. This would have been a shortcoming only if they had sincerely
entered into competition with either parties; it was not if they were sure
of dealing with people who had reason to be equally hostile to all
parties.”
Fascism is aided and advanced by the apathy of those who are tired of being
conned and lied to by a bankrupt liberal establishment, whose only reason
to
vote for a politician or support a political party is to elect the least
worst. This, for many voters, is the best Clinton can offer.
Fascism expresses itself in familiar and comforting national and religious
symbols, which is why it comes in various varieties and forms. Italian
fascism, which looked back to the glory of the Roman Empire, for example,
never shared the Nazis’ love of Teutonic and Nordic myths. American fascism
too will reach back to traditional patriotic symbols, narratives and
beliefs.
Robert Paxton wrote in “The Anatomy of Fascism”:
The language and symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of course,
have little to do with the original European models. They would have to be
as familiar and reassuring to loyal Americans as the language and symbols
of
the original fascisms were familiar and reassuring to many Italians and
Germans, as [George] Orwell suggested. Hitler and Mussolini, after all, had
not tried to seem exotic to their fellow citizens. No swastikas in an
American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian
crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the pledge of
allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of
course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus
tests for detecting the internal enemy.
Fascism is about an inspired and seemingly strong leader who promises moral
renewal, new glory and revenge. It is about the replacement of rational
debate with sensual experience. This is why the lies, half-truths and
fabrications by Trump have no impact on his followers. Fascists transform
politics, as philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin pointed out,
into aesthetics. And the ultimate aesthetic for the fascist, Benjamin said,
is war.
Paxton singles out the amorphous ideology characteristic of all fascist
movements.
Fascism rested not upon the truth of its doctrine but upon the leader’s
mystical union with the historic destiny of his people, a notion related to
romanticist ideas of national historic flowering and of individual artistic
or spiritual genius, though fascism otherwise denied romanticism’s
exaltation of unfettered personal creativity. The fascist leader wanted to
bring his people into a higher realm of politics that they would experience
sensually: the warmth of belonging to a race now fully aware of its
identity, historic destiny, and power; the excitement of participating in a
wave of shared feelings, and of sacrificing one’s petty concerns for the
group’s good; and the thrill of domination.
There is only one way left to blunt the yearning for fascism coalescing
around Trump. It is to build, as fast as possible, movements or parties
that
declare war on corporate power, engage in sustained acts of civil
disobedience and seek to reintegrate the disenfranchised—the “losers”—back
into the economy and political life of the country. This movement will
never
come out of the Democratic Party. If Clinton prevails in the general
election Trump may disappear, but the fascist sentiments will expand.
Another Trump, perhaps more vile, will be vomited up from the bowels of the
decayed political system. We are fighting for our political life.
Tremendous
damage has been done by corporate power and the college-educated elites to
our capitalist democracy. The longer the elites, who oversaw this
disemboweling of the country on behalf of corporations—who believe, as does
CBS Chief Executive Officer Leslie Moonves, that however bad Trump would be
for America he would at least be good for corporate profit—remain in
charge,
the worse it is going to get.
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
The Revenge of the Lower Classes and the Rise of American Fascism
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_revenge_of_the_lower_classes_and_the
_rise_of_american_fascism_20160302/
Posted on Mar 2, 2016
By Chris Hedges
Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, seen in reflection.
(Andrew Harnik / AP)
College-educated elites, on behalf of corporations, carried out the savage
neoliberal assault on the working poor. Now they are being made to pay.
Their duplicity—embodied in politicians such as Bill and Hillary Clinton
and
Barack Obama—succeeded for decades. These elites, many from East Coast Ivy
League schools, spoke the language of values—civility, inclusivity, a
condemnation of overt racism and bigotry, a concern for the middle
class—while thrusting a knife into the back of the underclass for their
corporate masters. This game has ended.
There are tens of millions of Americans, especially lower-class whites,
rightfully enraged at what has been done to them, their families and their
communities. They have risen up to reject the neoliberal policies and
political correctness imposed on them by college-educated elites from both
political parties: Lower-class whites are embracing an American fascism.
These Americans want a kind of freedom—a freedom to hate. They want the
freedom to use words like “nigger,” “kike,” “spic,” “chink,” “raghead” and
“fag.” They want the freedom to idealize violence and the gun culture. They
want the freedom to have enemies, to physically assault Muslims,
undocumented workers, African-Americans, homosexuals and anyone who dares
criticize their cryptofascism. They want the freedom to celebrate
historical
movements and figures that the college-educated elites condemn, including
the Ku Klux Klan and the Confederacy. They want the freedom to ridicule and
dismiss intellectuals, ideas, science and culture. They want the freedom to
silence those who have been telling them how to behave. And they want the
freedom to revel in hypermasculinity, racism, sexism and white patriarchy.
These are the core sentiments of fascism. These sentiments are engendered
by
the collapse of the liberal state.
The Democrats are playing a very dangerous game by anointing Hillary
Clinton
as their presidential candidate. She epitomizes the double-dealing of the
college-educated elites, those who speak the feel-your-pain language of
ordinary men and women, who hold up the bible of political correctness,
while selling out the poor and the working class to corporate power.
The Republicans, energized by America’s reality-star version of Il Duce,
Donald Trump, have been pulling in voters, especially new voters, while the
Democrats are well below the voter turnouts for 2008. In the voting
Tuesday,
5.6 million votes were cast for the Democrats while 8.3 million went to the
Republicans. Those numbers were virtually reversed in 2008—8.2 million for
the Democrats and about 5 million for the Republicans.
Richard Rorty in his last book, “Achieving Our Country,” written in 1998,
presciently saw where our postindustrial nation was headed.
Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old
industrialized
democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist
movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward
Luttwak,
for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The
point of his book The Endangered American Dream is that members of labor
unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize
that
their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to
prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize
that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being
downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social
benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide
that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote
for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug
bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist
professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of
Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once
a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932,
most
of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler
chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past
forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped
out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words
“nigger” and “kike” will once again be heard in the workplace. All the
sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its
students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated
Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college
graduates will find an outlet.
Fascist movements build their base not from the politically active but the
politically inactive, the “losers” who feel, often correctly, they have no
voice or role to play in the political establishment. The sociologist Émile
Durkheim warned that the disenfranchisement of a class of people from the
structures of society produced a state of “anomie”—a “condition in which
society provides little moral guidance to individuals.” Those trapped in
this “anomie,” he wrote, are easy prey to propaganda and emotionally driven
mass movements. Hannah Arendt, echoing Durkheim, noted that “the chief
characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his
isolation and lack of normal social relationships.”
In fascism the politically disempowered and disengaged, ignored and reviled
by the establishment, discover a voice and a sense of empowerment.
As Arendt noted, the fascist and communist movements in Europe in the 1930s
“… recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people
whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for
their
attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted
of
people who had never before appeared on the political scene. This permitted
the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and
indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not
only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole,
they
found a membership that had never been reached, never been ‘spoiled’ by the
party system. Therefore they did not need to refute opposing arguments and
consistently preferred methods which ended in death rather than persuasion,
which spelled terror rather than conviction. They presented disagreements
as
invariably originating in deep natural, social, or psychological sources
beyond the control of the individual and therefore beyond the control of
reason. This would have been a shortcoming only if they had sincerely
entered into competition with either parties; it was not if they were sure
of dealing with people who had reason to be equally hostile to all
parties.”
Fascism is aided and advanced by the apathy of those who are tired of being
conned and lied to by a bankrupt liberal establishment, whose only reason
to
vote for a politician or support a political party is to elect the least
worst. This, for many voters, is the best Clinton can offer.
Fascism expresses itself in familiar and comforting national and religious
symbols, which is why it comes in various varieties and forms. Italian
fascism, which looked back to the glory of the Roman Empire, for example,
never shared the Nazis’ love of Teutonic and Nordic myths. American fascism
too will reach back to traditional patriotic symbols, narratives and
beliefs.
Robert Paxton wrote in “The Anatomy of Fascism”:
The language and symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of course,
have little to do with the original European models. They would have to be
as familiar and reassuring to loyal Americans as the language and symbols
of
the original fascisms were familiar and reassuring to many Italians and
Germans, as [George] Orwell suggested. Hitler and Mussolini, after all, had
not tried to seem exotic to their fellow citizens. No swastikas in an
American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian
crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the pledge of
allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of
course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus
tests for detecting the internal enemy.
Fascism is about an inspired and seemingly strong leader who promises moral
renewal, new glory and revenge. It is about the replacement of rational
debate with sensual experience. This is why the lies, half-truths and
fabrications by Trump have no impact on his followers. Fascists transform
politics, as philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin pointed out,
into aesthetics. And the ultimate aesthetic for the fascist, Benjamin said,
is war.
Paxton singles out the amorphous ideology characteristic of all fascist
movements.
Fascism rested not upon the truth of its doctrine but upon the leader’s
mystical union with the historic destiny of his people, a notion related to
romanticist ideas of national historic flowering and of individual artistic
or spiritual genius, though fascism otherwise denied romanticism’s
exaltation of unfettered personal creativity. The fascist leader wanted to
bring his people into a higher realm of politics that they would experience
sensually: the warmth of belonging to a race now fully aware of its
identity, historic destiny, and power; the excitement of participating in a
wave of shared feelings, and of sacrificing one’s petty concerns for the
group’s good; and the thrill of domination.
There is only one way left to blunt the yearning for fascism coalescing
around Trump. It is to build, as fast as possible, movements or parties
that
declare war on corporate power, engage in sustained acts of civil
disobedience and seek to reintegrate the disenfranchised—the “losers”—back
into the economy and political life of the country. This movement will
never
come out of the Democratic Party. If Clinton prevails in the general
election Trump may disappear, but the fascist sentiments will expand.
Another Trump, perhaps more vile, will be vomited up from the bowels of the
decayed political system. We are fighting for our political life.
Tremendous
damage has been done by corporate power and the college-educated elites to
our capitalist democracy. The longer the elites, who oversaw this
disemboweling of the country on behalf of corporations—who believe, as does
CBS Chief Executive Officer Leslie Moonves, that however bad Trump would be
for America he would at least be good for corporate profit—remain in
charge,
the worse it is going to get.
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/would_this_man_be_hillary_clinto
ns_treasury_secretary_20160303/
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/would_this_man_be_hillary_clinto
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hreaten_millions_of_people_20160303/
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_20160303/
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