WHAT IS FASCISM?

A recent Truthout article, "The Fascist in November" claims that Trump is a Fascist.  Of course this is nothing but misplaced historical concreteness.  If as the authur, William Rivers Pitt, claims, Fascism is the merger of state and corporations, then we've had fascism for some time.  Of course, at most ours is not a structural fascism but a functional fascism.  But that does not make Trump more fascist than Obama or the Clintons.  But to cast allegations such as this is an easy and transparently polemical way to avoid concrete, political and historical analysis.  It is at best lazy thinking but more likely ideologically and culturally crippled thinking.

For those dissatisfied with this election outcome (and how could one not be?), this is the time for action.  Part of such action, and at this point in our viciously anti-intellectual history, is developing a real democratic discourse with a theoretical heart.  We can no longer, if we ever could, hope for a political silver bullet, to save the day.  Government is one of those silver bullets.  But parliamentary democracy is dead. 

It is time for a new grassroots movement to unite the neo-populist right and left.  It is time to go beyond the embarrassingly smug, self-righteous political correctness that wants to sum up our problems in terms of such bureaucratic and also polemical categories as racism, sexism, fascism, religious chauvism, militarism, etc.  Whereas Trump's detractors want to reduce him to these categories, this is simply another way of not moving forward practically and theoretically.  

Trump has called out the ideological function of political correctness and provides the opportunity to think beyond it and go beyond our so delicate pseudo-sensitivities to the suffering of others.  Let's stop reducing the causes of our suffering to the symptoms attacked by the political correctness police.  Let's move on to the real causes such as the oligarchs running the show and the corporations corrupting the law, culture, and the value and virtue of community.

So all you sobbing Clinton supporters out there can take comfort in the words of Gandhi: "When I despair," said Mahatma Gandhi, "I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall."

If Trump is one of the tyrants, then, if Gandhi is right, he will fail.  So far Clinton is more implicated in murder.  Witness her support of Iraq war. She has proved herself to be quite capable of imperialist tyranny. 

The Perversion of Political Correctness: Divide and Conquer in the Name of Unity

The Democrats ideologically re-invoke the myth of the melting pot and how we should all just get along, respect one another and presume political and cultural unity.  I think a reverse psychology is at work here.  The very attempt to end discrimination, hatred, ethnocentrism, etc., without addressing the question of the integrity, identity, needs and interests of the mass of Americans at the infrastructural level is simply mind and emotion control, further dividing us.  In other words, we are discouraged from expressing or even admiting to ourselves what we really feel, believe, want.  The new myth serves the purpose of effectively homogenizing the pseudo-political populace to the end of easy manipulation and control, easily mobilized for war and consumption, especially the consumption of war.  The liberal media machine generates endless false political issues and discourses for public consumption.  We remain drastically dumbed down, deluded and endlessly essentially disenfranchised especially politically.

The dump-Trump movement within the Republican Party purports to be "offended" by Trumps out-of-bounds behavior.  They are really terrified that he will crash the party of the insiders.

In fact the putative liberal compassion and sense of justice further serves to divide and conquer.  It's not convincing and doesn't solve our social/cultural problems.   In the name of justice if not civility, the Liberals suppress the undercurrent of suffering, exclusion and opposition to a system that self-righteously postures itself in the mode of Christian loving kindness but propagates economic policies and laws that preserve the imbalance of power, wealth and knowledge.  The divisions, anger, hatred, ignorance of the other, remain.

The Republicans and Democrats, best characterized as the "Republicrats," have the same essential infrastructural interest and global concerns.  The fear regarding Trump is not really his supposed authoritarianism, crassness, supposed lack of sensitivity, lack of compassion or political incorrectness but the fear that he won't play ball with the 1% and their political lackeys like the Clintons, the Bushes, the Koch brothers and other elites of the political class.

The Republicrats want us to act as if there is a cultural unity when such multi-cultural integration and re-constitution of community is a long way off if ever.  Life in contemporary America is threatening, insecure, fragile and hard to believe in.  

So I suggest Trump should be allowed to crash the party and enable the possibility that our real divisions be dealt with materially and not psychologically.  Especially the division of the mass from the 1% and their financial control of economy and politics.