[Peace-discuss] a possible flier for the next Main Event

[E. Wayne Johnson]

These handles left right fascist socialist conservative progressive 
liberal neoliberal neoconservative classical liberal
Libertarian little-L-libertarian etc are indeed clearly definable as 
Carl can point out admirably,
but unfortunately they can mean different things and have different 
stigmata of good/evil among different groups.

The technical language I use when dealing with my peers who are 
academics is different from the patois I use
when I am with my peers who are farmers and rednecks.

The question becomes when throwing around words like liberal and fascist 
is to determine and partition the disharmony of opinion
into wrong-headedness and error,  unskillful use of terms, and inability 
to come to arrive a useful working consensus
of what words mean in a particular context.

C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> ann h. wrote:
>> 14 Points of fascism: The warning signs 
>> http://www.oldamericancentury.org/14pts.htm
>
> Ann--
>
> This might be a good place to start in a meeting discussion as we try 
> to figure out the shape of politics in the contemporary US, in order 
> to oppose them.  But I'm not sure it makes a good handout.
>
> First, the US is not now a fascist state, except under a definition of 
> fascism that would be adventitious and unhistorical.  What we want to 
> oppose is not so much tendencies to fascism (altho' of course we would 
> want to oppose them) as the policies of this existing (non-fascist) 
> government.
>
> Second, altho' it may in the future be seen to be true that the US was 
> tending towards fascism in our day, making that the focus of our 
> objection now may be regarded as crying wolf.  Again, I'd rather work 
> on making people aware that our government is killing people around 
> the world -- and exposing why, against their lies.
>
> We might say that out enemy is neoliberalism, not (at the moment) 
> fascism, because the latter doesn't exist (now), and the former surely 
> does.  Bob McChesney made the distinction in a piece a decade ago:
>
>    Earlier in the twentieth century some critics called fascism 
> "capitalism with the gloves off," meaning that fascism was pure 
> capitalism without democratic rights and organizations. In fact, we 
> know that fascism is vastly more complex than that. Neoliberalism, on 
> the other hand, is indeed "capitalism with the gloves off." It 
> represents an era in which business forces are stronger and more 
> aggressive, and face less organized opposition than ever before. In 
> this political climate they attempt to codify their political power 
> and enact their vision on every possible front. As a result, business 
> is increasingly difficult to challenge, and civil society (nonmarket, 
> noncommercial, and democratic forces) barely exists at all.
>
>    It is precisely in its oppression of nonmarket forces that we see 
> how neoliberalism operates - not only as an economic system, but as a 
> political and cultural system as well. Here the differences with 
> fascism, with its contempt for formal democracy and highly mobilized 
> social movements based upon racism and nationalism, are striking.  
> Neoliberalism works best when there is formal electoral democracy, but 
> when the population is diverted from the information, access, and 
> public forums necessary for meaningful participation in 
> decision-making. As neoliberal guru Milton Friedman put it in 
> Capitalism and Freedom, because profitmaking is the essence of 
> democracy, any government that pursues antimarket policies is being 
> antidemocratic, no matter how much informed popular support they might 
> enjoy. Therefore it is best to restrict governments to the job of 
> protecting private property and enforcing contracts, and to limit 
> political debate to minor issues. (The real matters of resource 
> production and distribution and social organization should be 
> determined by market forces.)
>
> --CGE
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