Liberally speaking

This is hilarious. It proves not only that polls are not at all to be trusted (not news in itself, of course) but also that "liberal" and "conservative" are labels that most people bandy about without demanding they actually mean anything. I'm not sure who could think that putting Alito on the SC bench would make it more liberal but I remind myself we're dealing with a nation that voted Bush in, so confusion ought to be expected.

A problem with the terms "liberal" and "conservative" is that they must serve two uses, political and economic, and they do a poor job of it. Many conservatives are economic liberals and vice versa. It's worse than that, even, because Americans so strongly equate positions with the labels, so that a person who, in my view, is clearly a rightist, can say "I'm a liberal because I support legalisation of marijuana but a conservative because I oppose gun control". Of course, in cases like this, the reason for both positions is much the same: the division in politics is not between a preference for freedoms or restrictions but between the individual and society. The left, broadly speaking, believes that the greater good is paramount and that social solutions are best for social problems; the right that the individual is and that individuals are responsible for their own solutions. It's not quite as clearcut as it looks at first view. Surely, on this view, Mussolini was a man of the left: he believed in subordinating the individual to the state? Unsurprisingly, some on the right argue exactly this, but the argument has no merit. Mussolini did not urge the individual's subordination to the state for a greater good of the society but to aggrandise the state. As he was leader of the state, and clearly identified himself with it, it's clear who that benefited. A better understanding of the fascist polity makes things even clearer. Fascism arose in nations where corporations -- themselves controlled by single men or families -- had gained control of power. Subordination of the individual to the state tends to benefit whoever the individual is working for: if he or she works for a soviet, the soviet will gain; if for a private employer, the private employer will gain. This is because in these states, the state itself is a tool of the employer. Fascism arose as a means of controlling and directing private desires towards the ends of a small group of individuals (just as the Roman system that the fascists admired existed largely to enrich a small class of Romans by similarly focusing private desires to ends that did not serve the community as well as they did that small class).

Commentators often speculate about whether the United States could become a fascist power. It has seemed to come ever closer to the fascist polities. It's obvious that appealing to its traditions or claiming that its constitution would save it from that fate ignores that the Bush party does not feel any constraint from tradition or constitution. Still, it should be clear that fascism was a tool, not an inevitability. Countries don't inch step by step into reactionary forms of government for no reason. They are not hostages to fate. Men (and rarely women) push them that way. If they can serve the same ends without needing a fascist state, why bother with the trappings of it? It was of its time, anyway, influenced strongly by both modernism and modernism's ugly little brother, futurism. Neither is in fashion now. The embrace of postmodernism (evident even in companies' addiction to change) makes the wide adoption of a unifying theme such as antisemitism or extreme nationalism much harder to sustain, as does the rise of individualism and to some extent multiculturalism. It was a lot easier for Hitler to appeal to a notion of "German" then than it would be now. These days we're much more accustomed to asking what our national identities actually "mean". Even Americans find it hard to articulate what an "American" is, although some, like the Germans before them, find it expressible in terms of militarism. (However, one shouldn't forget that the symbols of "Germanism" were much more broadly shared than those of "Americanism". Worshipping the flag is not enough in this context because the symbols of Nazi Germany represented a reality that people felt, and were not self-referential in the way that the Stars and Stripes is.) Some of the means that the corporatists use today match those of the fascists, which is why commentators wonder about the drift towards fascism, but they use them because they work, and work in any context, not because they belong inherently to one or other political programme. If I want you to work to enrich me, and it's more to my benefit than yours that you do, it's plain common sense for me to try to control or influence the media that help form your opinions, so that you come to believe that your best interest is to pursue my ends. I don't have to be a fascist to do it. But I'm your enemy, for the same reason in this instance that the fascists were.

posted by Dr Zen @ 8:56 pm