{"id":37870,"date":"2018-09-17T05:39:03","date_gmt":"2018-09-17T10:39:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=37870"},"modified":"2018-09-17T05:41:54","modified_gmt":"2018-09-17T10:41:54","slug":"american-fascism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=37870","title":{"rendered":"American Fascism"},"content":{"rendered":"

American Fascism<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Photo Source Alan Turkus | CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

From Whence \u2018We\u2019 Came<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fascism is a loaded topic for Americans. The term is usually put forward as oppositional, as the flip side of representative democracy, e.g. authoritarian. Left unaddressed is whose interests\u2019 American representative democracy represents. Twenty years of research<\/a> by political scientist Thomas Ferguson strongly supports the conclusion that it is monied interests (a\/k\/a the rich) that determines public policy. And while this isn\u2019t the authoritarian leader alluded to with the charge of fascism, neither does it contrast with it in the sense implied.<\/p>\n

In the American iconography, slavery and genocide against the indigenous population took place from the so-called founding forward under this system of representative democracy. Phrased differently, there is nothing intrinsic to representative democracy that precludes slavery and genocide. The social, economic and political repression and exploitation they represented had economic taking as their motive and they were systemic in structure\u2014 no single authoritarian leader, no Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini, created them as social facts.<\/p>\n

The way that slavery and genocide functioned as American institutions was through oppositional definitions of the polity and not-polity. The assignation<\/a> of slaves as three-fifths a human being in the Constitution was to accrue political representation to slave owners, not partial representation to slaves. Any geographic definition of the polity would have included slaves and some proportion of the indigenous population. One can argue the details of \u2018the progress of history,\u2019 but from the founding to the present, with \u2018restorative\u2019 interregnums, American representative democracy has meant class rule.<\/p>\n

The class relations of American political economy are antithetical to the notion of a unified public interest. The point isn\u2019t to suggest that this or that authoritarian leader isn\u2019t authoritarian, but rather to sketch in the political backdrop to argue that the lived experience of social, economic and political repression is lived experience, not academic theories or bourgeois fantasies.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

American Fascism Photo Source Alan Turkus | CC BY 2.0 From Whence \u2018We\u2019 Came Fascism is a loaded topic for Americans. The term is usually put forward as oppositional, as the flip side of representative democracy, e.g. authoritarian. Left unaddressed is whose interests\u2019 American representative democracy represents. Twenty years of research by political scientist Thomas […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[5493,1491,13827,827],"class_list":["post-37870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-counterpunch","tag-fascism","tag-rob-urie","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37870"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37875,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37870\/revisions\/37875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}