A Wee Bit More Sadness

     Once again, from John Hinderaker:

     The most remarkable thing, to me, is that I am not aware of a single Democratic Party politician who has condemned the violence and grotesque criminality of Antifa and Black Lives Matter. As far as I can tell, the Democratic Party is on the side of the vicious criminals whom we see in the above videos. So the lines in November’s election are more clearly drawn than ever: Good–or at least normality!–vs. evil.

     The sad part isn’t that this is a unique, unprecedented insight. The sad part is that this is completely unconcealed: to use two of my favorite words, it “should” be “obvious.” But then, a fascist political party must have a military auxiliary. Hitler’s National German Socialist Workers’ Party had the Sturmabteilung. Mussolini’s National Fascist Party had the Black Shirts. Robert Mugabe has the ZANU-PF. And the Democrats have Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

     By their fruits shall ye know them...and those fruits are on garish display in Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, and elsewhere.

Quickies: The Best Policy Is Always To Go To The Source...

     ...and David L. Burkhead does so today:

     People talk about being “against fascists.” There are some problems with that, however. As the founder of Fascism, Benito Mussolini said about the movement:

     “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

     Please read it all.

     Mussolini coined the word fascism from the Latin fasces, a bundle of wooden rods Roman slaveowners used to flog disobedient slaves. Fascism is about naked force: “the power of the Rods and the Axe,” used to coerce submission from those who would prefer to go their own way. That force, when placed in the hands of the State and allowed to reign unbounded over all other things, is the defining characteristic of the totalitarian state, whether it calls itself the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, a People’s Republic, or the World Stronghold of Barbies and Peeps.

     “AntiFa” isn’t fighting against fascism. It’s fighting for it.

Corporatism And The American Future Part 1

     A corporation has neither a soul to be damned nor a body to be kicked – old maxim

     Have a few words from an old (1932) book:

     In the declining years of capitalistic old age, assuring adequate consumption to balance a requisite volume of production is the problem for the coercive action of the state-not for planning by profit makers or producers. Capitalism has always depended on the state, whether for war profits or tariff protection. In its old age, a senile capitalism must be nurtured by the state, not with war profits, necessarily, but on an even diet of 2 per cent gruel. Capitalism has run down· for want of new worlds to conquer.

     And from another almost (1936) as old:

     From the inescapable fact of the inequalities of human endowment, it also follows that any well-ordered society must train and condition its elite under an efficient and hard discipline of national interest. Fascist theory, by recognizing personal inequalities and their full social implications, can be much more humane than a liberalism which assumes that all men are born equal and which, in practice, affords to those born with superior endowment, or favored with better luck than the majority, virtually unlimited opportunities to acquire and use power with irresponsibility for social consequences and in ways further to increase social inequalities....

     Fascism does not accept the liberal dogmas as to the sovereignty of the consumer or trader in the free market. It does not admit that the market ever can or should be entirely free. Least of all does it consider that market freedom, and the opportunity to make competitive profits, are rights of the individual. Some measure of market freedom, competition, private enterprise, and profits and losses for private enterprise, in the view of fascism, must be deemed essential as guides to any measure of social control.

     Under fascism, private property, private enterprise, and private choice in the market, have no rights as ends in themselves. They have different measures of social usefulness subject to proper public control. If these institutions and ways are to have social utility to the State, the liberal regime must be ended, the great monopolies nationalized, and all the economic processes subjected to the discipline of a national plan. The ultimate objective is welfare through a strong national State, and neither the dictatorship of the proletarian nor the supremacy of private rights under any given set of rules.

     The first book’s title is Is Capitalism Doomed? The second book’s title is The Coming American Fascism. Their author was Lawrence Dennis, a moderately popular commentator of the Thirties and Forties.

     What’s on my mind this morning is how greatly Dennis’s vision of an “American fascism” resembles contemporary corporatism. The most significant point of comparison is the ever-tightening concentration of employment into a shrinking number of employers. The most significant point of contrast is that in Dennis’s vision, the federal government was explicitly in charge of the “national plan,” whereas in our actual present Washington exerts influence through law, regulation, and its purchasing power rather than explicit authority.

     Note that Dennis’s underlying value system differs greatly from that of the “national greatness” fascists of his era: Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Those latter figures were militaristically inclined, whereas Dennis was an isolationist in the fashion of Charles A. Lindbergh Sr. Indeed, he opposed FDR’s “New Deal” fascism because he saw it as an instrument for enlarging an American Empire that had ceased to grow when its land frontier disappeared:

     Getting rid of the American frontier amounted to getting the American empire. Being republicans and Puritans, we could not well call ours an empire. We had no emperor. Besides, our governing, though not ruling, imperialists, the Eastern plutocracy, felt that the less said about their ownership and power, the better. They were interested in the take, not the glory. They wanted to rule indirectly and anonymously. Their principal device for ruling eventually, along in the eighties, came to be the modern corporation which has been called by the French, with their genius for logical definition, the société anonyme.

     Briefly, so far as empire is concerned, it is the growth, not the existence, the getting, not the keeping that is historically significant and socially dynamic. A nation grows great by winning an empire. It cannot remain great merely by keeping one. Indeed, once it stops growing it will start decaying. This is clearly proved by Spain and Portugal both of which went into decline once they ceased to increase their imperial holdings. Mankind is destined to live by toil and struggle, not by absentee ownership.

     [The Dynamics of War and Revolution, 1940]

---

     After the war, Lawrence Dennis repudiated his earlier convictions and adopted a free market orientation. He came to see that the system he advocated could only lead to the reverse of his highest aim – i.e., that fascism, socialism, and similar systems of collectivism all produce a totalitarian State that will pursue the expansion of its power through war:

     “The most socialist institution of the State in America today,” Dennis wrote, “is that of the armed forces...the free market or freedom of contract is out. The members of the armed forces, their dependents and their widows and orphans must be virtual wards of a paternal state.” Just as Hitler had built his war machine through a strong national socialism, the U.S. defense program was “the most obvious and practical way imaginable to convert America to a totalitarian socialist basis.” The same liberal leaders now calling on war with Soviet Russia would transform the United States into a “socialist society by conscription, controls, and rationing.”

     Major governmental subsidies to develop foreign markets meant socialism at home and war abroad. “Most people will think that the essence of socialism is a shift from private to public ownership, greater equalization of wealth and income and certain so-called economic reforms.” Dennis disagreed. “They are all wrong. State planning and control of the economy, with enough spending of government or bank-created money to maintain full employment—that is now the essence of socialism in action.”

     [From Ronald Radosh’s Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism ]

     Thus did an early, intelligent and highly articulate booster of fascism, once confronted with the consequences of the system he had advocated, transform into one of the staunchest critics of a government managed economy – regardless of the guise assumed by the managers.

---

     The above citations from Lawrence Dennis illustrate one of the oldest maxims of moral and ethical behavior:

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

     It is not enough to mean well; one must act virtuously, and virtue cannot justify compelling others to conform to one’s own preferred plan. Similarly, he who argues for a system of social control, and who, upon being confronted with the horrors such systems inevitably inflict upon their subjects, is morally obliged to admit his fault, to detail how he came to see it – in Lawrence Dennis’s case, by realizing that FDR’s fascistic “New Deal” had led directly to the American involvement in World War II and the subsequent institutionalization of a government-administered economy – and explicate the educational process he followed for the specific benefit of those who had been seduced by his earlier reasoning.

     It is particularly pernicious to assume that one’s own intellect and virtue are so superior to that of others that one is justified in taking power over others, whether by force or by fraud. There is no defense for such self-exaltation.

     But let’s examine America in the Year of Our Lord 2018. We see a corporatism further advanced than even FDR intended: a state of affairs in which approximately 3000 corporations employ half the workers in the United States, while governments look on with approval. Yes, approval! For they who seek to rule always prefer that their targets be compact: few in number and therefore easily fettered with a single set of enforceable rules. One more citation, this time from the late, great Garet Garrett:

     There was a Director of the Budget who was not at heart a New Dealer. One day he brought to the President the next annual budget—the one of which the President afterward said: "The country, and I think most of Congress, did not fully realize the large sums which would be expended by the government this year and next, nor did they realize the great amount the Treasury would have to borrow."

     At the end of his work the Director of the Budget had written a paragraph saying simply and yet in a positive manner that notwithstanding the extraordinary activities indicated by the figures and by the appropriations that were going to be made, the government had really no thought of going into competition with private enterprise.

     Having lingered for some time over this paragraph the President said: "I'm not so sure we ought to say that."

     The Director of the Budget asked, "Why not, Mr. President?"

     The President did not answer immediately, but one of his aides who had been listening said: "I'll tell you why. Who knows that we shall not want to take over all business?"

     The Director of the Budget looked at the President, and the President said: "Let's leave it out." And of course it was left out.

     [From The People’s Pottage.]

     More anon.

DIY: Celebrate "D-Day" the Google way!

The following is an augmented screen-cap from this morning. (Note website thumbnail, bottom row, 2nd from right!)

Find a photo of my WWII-veteran father here.

I can't wait to see how Google honors the Islamic holy days of Ramadan.

Guilding The Polity Part 2: Recognizing The Distribution

Yesterday's essay introduced the concept of a contemporary guild system -- i.e., a governmentally enforced distribution of "rights" among recognized groups -- as the Left's structural aim for American society. However, I deliberately left the treatment incomplete, and a good thing, too.

On Monday, the great Charles Murray wrote in the Wall Street Journal (sadly, subscriber-only) about the Right's failure to recognize a correlated distribution on the Left: "The Trouble Isn't Liberals. It's Progressives."

Social conservatives. Libertarians. Country-club conservatives. Tea party conservatives. Everybody in politics knows that those sets of people who usually vote Republican cannot be arrayed in a continuum from moderately conservative to extremely conservative. They are on different political planes. They usually have just enough in common to vote for the same candidate.

Why then do we still talk about the left in terms of a continuum from moderately liberal to extremely liberal? Divisions have been occurring on the left that mirror the divisions on the right. Different segments of the left are now on different planes....

It is that core philosophy [Progressivism] extolling the urge to mold society that still animates progressives today—a mind-set that produces the shutdown of debate and growing intolerance that we are witnessing in today's America. Such thinking on the left also is behind the rationales for indulging President Obama in his anti-Constitutional use of executive power. If you want substantiation for what I'm saying, read Jonah Goldberg's 2008 book "Liberal Fascism," an erudite and closely argued exposition of American progressivism and its subsequent effects on liberalism. The title is all too accurate.

Murray's distinction between liberals, whom he can judiciously approve, and progressives, whom he characterizes as the enemies of American ideals of freedom, is an important one. It illuminates a critical parallel to the behavior of the various segments of the Right at election time.

---

Despite the policy differences that divide social conservatives from libertarians, we in the Right tend to rally behind the same Republican candidate, especially in presidential elections. The general thinking is that the GOP candidate might not satisfy us in detail, but that he's "the lesser of two evils." Anyway, there's too much to lose should the Democrats gain or retain political hegemony. Similarly, liberals (in Murray's sense) will rally behind the same Democrat candidate as progressives (again in Murray's sense) under the same rationales. While that effect tends to make the Republican Party "split the differences" among the preferences of its subsectors, on the Left it causes a continuous, fierce struggle over the control of the Democrat Party, especially its mechanisms for choosing and promoting candidates for federal offices.

For the past eight years at least, the progressives have held the levers of Democrat Party power. They've striven to use their period of dominance to make themselves its permanent rulers.

The dominance of the Democrats by progressives has put the liberals in a corner. They can't bring themselves to side with the Right except on the most singular subjects. Atop that, absenting themselves from votes and public debates over progressive policy prescriptions is electorally hazardous. In consequence, these two blocs, which would appear to be separated by important differences on fundamental principles, vote together -- and as the progressives hold the whip hand, that will both advance the progressive agenda and solidify progressive control of the Democrat Party.

Contemporary American progressivism, as Murray delineates it, is militant social fascism. It's a perfect fit to Jonah Goldberg's conception of liberal fascism, marching under the flag of "social justice." Indeed, we can penetrate it further by noting its similarities to National Socialist Fascism, the key figures of which populated its hierarchy of "fuhrers."

The fuhrer personified the leader principle of National Socialism. A fuhrer of any level wielded absolute authority over all matters given to his jurisdiction. He was subject to being overruled only by fuhrers above him. Just as Hitler had ranks of "fuhrers" -- "leaders" -- inside his regime with himself at the pinnacle, in the cosmetically private sector, every industrial organization of any significant size had its betriebsfuhrer: an official approved by the Reich who exerted absolute authority over every aspect of the firm's operations. It was the National Socialist way of preserving the fiction of private enterprise.

Compare this to Obama's "czars," and to the progressives' demand for the absolute submission of any and every private organization, regardless of its purposes, to the dictates of the federal government.

---

The enormous foofaurauw over the Hobby Lobby decision is because the Court's defense of the private rights of the owners of a family corporation crosscuts progressive fascism. Progressives are unwilling to allow that any aspect of employer / employee relations should be exempt from federal mandates or a requirement for federal approval. The recent (2011) flap between Boeing and the Washington state machinists' union was a fine illustration of the progressive mindset. The NLRB permitted Boeing to shift aircraft construction to a site in right-to-work South Carolina only after Boeing agreed to preserve and expand union employment in Washington state.

Unions, as I mentioned yesterday, are a modern variety of guild. But let's not limit our perspectives to formally organized groups. Consider gender-war feminists, who are united mainly in sharing a hostile, aggressive attitude toward anything and everything they deem "patriarchal." In recent years that community of conviction has advanced through the law, steadily slicing away at employers' rights, men's rights generally, and longstanding conceptions of justice. It's hardly mattered that their assertions are nearly always counterfactual and foolish, for they are politically favored by the progressives who dominate the federal edifice, especially its regulatory sectors. They have the power and influence of a guild without being openly organized or recognized as such.

When viewed in that light, the Left's tumult over the Hobby Lobby decision becomes easier to comprehend. It's a step backward for the progressives' drive to eliminate the individual as the possessor of rights, and to replace him with guild-like groups whose "rights" are parceled out and protected by the State. Sandra Fluke and her ilk have never had a problem obtaining or affording contraception. Cost-free provision of contraception is merely the next hill their campaign has determined to secure, on the way to establishing "women" as a "stakeholder group" with specific "rights" it can exercise at the expense of non-members.

The ultimate beneficiary of this creation of de facto guilds is, of course, the State -- and America's progressives are determined to remain its masters.

More anon.

The Worst Social Fascist...

...is the one who indignantly refuses the label.

First, allow me to be maximally explicit about my terms. A fascist is one who deems the State to have no limit to its authority and no limit to what it may do to its subjects in the application of its authority. In theory, a fascist State would have the authority, if not the de facto ability, to regulate your breathing and elimination, and to punish you for a violation by executing you. The implication of such an unbounded State is that individuals possess no rights whatsoever.

A social fascist is a fascist whose rationale for his fascism is "the greater good of society." Such persons speak incessantly of chimeras such as "social justice." He might be sincere in his belief that an omnipotent State can achieve that undefined goal, or it might be a veneer, a cosmetic representation intended to disguise his true priorities. Either way, he'll maintain to his dying breath (and may that happy moment come sooner than later) that the eggs he's broken or proposes to break are for the greater good of the omelet.

Thus, we have a creature who, whatever his protests to the contrary:

• Denies that individuals have rights but maintains that "society" does;
• Deems the State the sole arbiter of all things, including what rights "society" possesses;
• Accepts that some can, should, and must wield absolute and unbounded power over others for "the greater good of society;"
• Refuses to define any of the end states he claims to seek, nor will he posit delivery dates his policies will meet for delivering them.

You have your template, Gentle Reader. How many of the members of our contemporary political class would you say are good fits to it?

---

Anyone with the patience required to read Liberty's Torch will undoubtedly remember that, during the 2008 presidential campaign, when an interviewer pressed Barack Obama about whether he would raise the capital gains tax even if it were proved to reduce federal revenues, Obama unhesitatingly replied that he would do so "as a matter of fairness."

That statement should have shocked the entire nation into maximum alertness. Sadly, it garnered less attention, and far less outrage, than it deserved. Of course, there were pseudo-Americans, utterly consumed by envy of the better-off, who thought the idea a splendid one. But decent Americans who heard the statement mostly shrugged it off, whether because they failed to grasp its implications or because they were confident that such an attitude would come to nothing in practice.

What concept of "fairness" in taxation would be consistent with a practice that would make both the federal government and the taxed individual worse off? Only one imbued with antipathy toward wealth -- and to a degree that would embrace a reduction of the federal government's resources for meeting its bills. That's irrational by any standard. The suggestion waved a huge red flag over Obama's candidacy... sadly, a red flag that an insufficient number of decent Americans took seriously.

As for those who greeted the idea with approbation...well, envy will do that to you. They prattle about "social justice" without deigning to elaborate on how a purely destructive practice could meet any standard of justice. (The esteemed Jonah Goldberg does a terrific demolition of "social justice" in this brief YouTube video.) But it's merely distracting twaddle intended to deflect examination of their real priority. As Helmut Schoeck has noted, envious Smith thinks that breaking his neighbor Jones's leg would enable Smith to walk better.

How many such pseudo-Americans are there? Perhaps more than we'd like to think. After all, Obama is in his second term as we speak.

---

The Obamunist Ascension has emboldened others of similar sentiment. Matt Yglesias, long a prominent presence in the SinistroSphere, recently added his brain splinter to the subject. Read the whole thing if you can; it's about as bald a case for the deliberate, tax-code-engineered destruction of wealth in service to an abstract notion of "social justice" as you'll encounter anywhere. Familiarity with the social-fascists' approach to such propositions is important if we're to have a hope of defeating them.

Yglesias does decorate his screed with a few de rigueur "practical" offerings: assertions that "sin taxes" reduce the "sinful" practices, and carbon taxes would reduce pollution (unproven). But his core priority, the one that trumps all else, is never concealed:

• "in an era of surging inequality..."
• "endlessly growing inequality can have a cancerous effect on our democracy..."
• "it would help break the doom loop of oligarchy..."

Inasmuch as all Yglesias's claims for beneficial effects from confiscatory taxation -- e.g., in terms of employment, the compensation of workers, and additional resources for "the poor" -- are unsubstantiated by historical evidence, the question this social-fascist should be compelled to face is "What if your suppositions about such a policy leading to "the greater good" were to be proved incorrect? Would you then renounce the policy, cry mea culpa for the damage you'd caused, and concede that your claim to expertise was arrogant at best?"

Don't expect Yglesias to answer that question directly. Indeed, don't expect him to be required to face it. He would never agree to be interviewed by a Bret Baier, a John Stossel, a Megyn Kelly, or any other interviewer who might pose such a question. Social-fascists dislike to have their pretensions spotlighted in such clarity; it reveals them all too clearly for what they are.

At the deeper level of justice in public policy, Yglesias and his fellow travelers operate from premises utterly divorced from the foundations of Western thought. Their prattle about "social justice" is nothing but froth and gas. They cannot define it and will not suffer to try. The key word in their lexicon, inequality, speaks of a natural attribute of men that cannot be effectuated without killing us all. Those who are aware of it have practiced evasion of the subject to the heights of the rhetorical art.

But this is of a piece with the social-fascist mentality. Once you have chosen "everything for the State; nothing outside the State" as your touchstone, all else is merely jockeying for position. Friedrich Hayek, in The Road To Serfdom, shows us where that would lead us -- where it will lead us, unless a sufficiency of Americans should rise against it in the little time we have left before it becomes impossible to reverse.