Brad DeLong — You Can Say What You Want About Modern American Libertarianism, But at Least It's an Ethos!

Whaaat?

Do Brad DeLong and Noah Smith really believe that there is no strong impetus toward fascism in the US?

What don't they understand about a corporate state — Citi calls it "plutonomy" — with the world's largest military, whose policy is permanent political, economic and military hegemony such that it will brook no rivals.

Don't they get that national "exceptionalism" is the soil from which fascism sprouts, racism is the fertilizer, and militarism is the manifestation.

Can't they see that the incorporation of a military positioned around the globe, clandestine services conducting total surveillance, and centralized (DHS) and militarized domestic security, and a deep state ensuring policy continuity is the essence of totalitarianism, especially when combined with suspension of civil rights and constitutional liberties due to endless war against manufactured enemies.

We report on this here at MNE just about every day. As far as the US is concerned social, political and economic liberalism are the pretext for employing realpolitik cynically to achieve global political, economic and military hegemony, as well as a compliant domestic population, and permanently maintain this through force as necessary.

Neoliberalism, neo-imperialism, and neo-colonialism are joined at the hip and they represent the rule of translational corporatism through the deep state that has captured the apparatus of the state. Liberal democracy is really plutocracy.

The rule of an ownership class though capture of a political apparatus — here the deep state, the Establishment that supplies the top level of the bureaucracy, and the selection of political candidates through campaign finance —is fascism.

Under such as system, elections are a periodic farce that changes almost nothing of importance to the ruling elite, which exercises total control in all matters regarding its interests.

The preferred method of control is indoctrination and interest politics to "divide and conquer" by exploiting issues that the electorate perceives as important but which the ruling elite does not. Contested social issues are used to distract from economic ones. The military issues are now largely out of the way since the abolition of the draft and the introduction of a professional military, clandestine operations, and the use of proxies.

Brad and Noah are very smart people and well read. The propaganda must be truly blinding if they don't see what's happening right under their eyes.

In fairness, where I think that problem lies is that Brad and Noah are talking about political positions that are actually being expressed. It can be argued that no faction in US politics is espousing "fascism" as either national authoritarianism or corporate statism. But that doesn't mean that neither of these isn't either a hidden agenda or else the consequence of policy that is being advocated under the guise of spreading liberal democracy.

I would argue that this has been a hidden agenda for decades, at least since the Reagan Administration but the deep state was launched in the Truman administration. (Remember that Harry Truman was selected instead of Henry Wallace as the Democratic vice-presidentail nominee.)

It also underlies the Republican advocacy of limited government, which is code for replacing the welfare state with a market state. A market state is implicitly a corporatocracy in a modern developed economy.

General and then President Eisenhower cautioned about the growing power of the military-industrial complex, recognizing as a military man the danger of an alliance between business and the military, with the revolving door linking business, the military, lobbying, and political office.

Grasping Reality
You Can Say What You Want About Modern American Libertarianism, But at Least It's an Ethos!Brad DeLong | Professor of Economics, UCAL Berkeley

Here's the other side of the story, from the right.

Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change (2009) — publishers' description at Amazon:

“Fascists,” “Brownshirts,” “jackbooted stormtroopers”—such are the insults typically hurled at conservatives by their liberal opponents. Calling someone a fascist is the fastest way to shut them up, defining their views as beyond the political pale. But who are the real fascists in our midst?

Liberal Fascism offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler's National Socialism and Mussolini's Fascism.

Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term “National socialism”). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities—where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist.

Do these striking parallels mean that today’s liberals are genocidal maniacs, intent on conquering the world and imposing a new racial order? Not at all. Yet it is hard to deny that modern progressivism and classical fascism shared the same intellectual roots. We often forget, for example, that Mussolini and Hitler had many admirers in the United States. W.E.B. Du Bois was inspired by Hitler's Germany, and Irving Berlin praised Mussolini in song. Many fascist tenets were espoused by American progressives like John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson, and FDR incorporated fascist policies in the New Deal.

Fascism was an international movement that appeared in different forms in different countries, depending on the vagaries of national culture and temperament. In Germany, fascism appeared as genocidal racist nationalism. In America, it took a “friendlier,” more liberal form. The modern heirs of this “friendly fascist” tradition include the New York Times, the Democratic Party, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood. The quintessential Liberal Fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.

These assertions may sound strange to modern ears, but that is because we have forgotten what fascism is. In this angry, funny, smart, contentious book, Jonah Goldberg turns our preconceptions inside out and shows us the true meaning of Liberal Fascism.

See Michael Lind's rejoinder:

Why libertarians apologize for autocracy