Republican-fascism didn't arise out of evangelical fundamentalism, it arose in the Federalist Society, in the elite law school faculties at Harvard, the U. of Chicago and other such places here the unitary executive theory of the presidency was incubated by aristocratic snobs to destroy egalitarian democracy on behalf of the rich. It was certainly given a huge boost by the legal, judicial and journalistic supporters of privileging lies as "civil liberties". It is through lies that all of their work was accomplished, the role of giving the media a freedom to lie with impunity was probably the major hurdle they had to get past to destroy government by an accurately informed American People of sufficient good will and a sense of decency to bend the arc of their history in the direction of justice.
"The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure." --Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, 1823.
But Jefferson must have known that he left something important out even as he choose to leave it out. In order for the press to make us free THEY CAN ONLY DO THAT IF THE CHOOSE TO TELL THE TRUTH. He certainly knew that the press was as likely to lie if it could get away with it in order to harness the "agitation it produces" for evil purposes as ours was by the Supreme Court through its "First Amendment" rulings in the 20th century and the present one. And our media - the media which has a real political effect - is an Iron Curtain of lies. FOX, Sinclare, CNN, and forcryin'outloud the internet.
Like it or not, only by the elected government of The People preventing the "free press" from lying us into fascist tyranny by traitors against democracy can Jefferson's formulation of the free press work the way he claimed it would. The history of the use of media in the 20th and 21st centuries to destroy egalitarian democracy proves, beyond any doubt, that that quaint mid-20th century notion of "free speech absolutism" - invented by professional scribblers, pornographers, the lawyers who they paid to lie on their behalf, neo-fascist law theorists who also came up with stuff like the unitary-executive theory is a guarantee of the destruction of democracy.
I will note that whenever I read the aristocratic non-military revolutionary Jefferson waxing romantic over things such as "agitation" I feel my mouth twisting into a sneer. He was perfectly willing to see the "tree of liberty" watered by the blood of others but he had no intention of his being shed for it. I do have contempt for a writing table to tea table revolutionaries now. I used to buy their words but now they just disgust me. Same for a lot, though not all, of the "never-Trumpers" who had a hand in creating this fascist regime.
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Before my relative had to have bypass surgery I was intending to go over and digest some of the ideas about the neo-cons from this article in The New Republic (better than in the bad old Perez days) The Neocons Strike Back. I'd recommend reading it because it proves how malignant the influence of intellectual snobs with credentials and positions at elite universities has been.
I'll give you a couple of passages in it about one of the worst of those, Bernie Sanders' fellow former Trotskyite, Irving Kristol, whose influence is still strong through his son, a "never-Trumper" who I wouldn't trust for a second.
The fall of communism, in other words, set the stage for a new neoconservative paradigm. Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History appeared a decade after Kirkpatrick’s essay in Commentary and just before the Berlin Wall was breached on November 9, 1989. Here was a sharp break with the saturnine, realpolitik approach that Kirkpatrick had championed. Irving Kristol regarded it as hopelessly utopian—“I don’t believe a word of it,” he wrote in a response to Fukuyama. But a younger generation of neocons, led by Irving’s son, Bill Kristol, and Robert Kagan, embraced it. Fukuyama argued that Western, liberal democracy, far from being menaced, was now the destination point of the train of world history. With communism vanquished, the neocons, bearing the good word from Fukuyama, formulated a new goal: democracy promotion, by force if necessary, as a way to hasten history and secure the global order with the U.S. at its head. . .
But perhaps the neoconservatives’ greatest strength lies in the realm of ideas that Irving Kristol identified more than three decades ago. The neocons remain the winners of that battle, not because their policies have made the world or the U.S. more secure, but by default—because there are so few genuinely alternative ideas that are championed with equal zeal. The foreign policy discussion surrounding Soleimani’s killing—which accelerated Iran’s nuclear weapons program, diminished America’s influence in the Middle East, and entrenched Iran’s theocratic regime—has largely occurred on a spectrum of the neocons’ making. It is a discussion that accepts premises of the beneficence of American military might and hegemony—Hobbes’s “ill game”—and naturally bends the universe toward more war.
But I think an even more important article published by TNR from three years ago, noted the cynical glee with which Irving Kristol predicted the rise of someone like Trump and the uses that his fellow neo-fascists could make of him.
But one right-wing luminary did, in fact, see Trump coming—a full three decades before his arrival. In 1985, Irving Kristol, the leading founder of the neoconservative movement, wrote an article in The Wall Street Journal called “THE NEW POPULISM: NOT TO WORRY.” In it, Kristol foresaw the possibility that a conservative posing as a populist could one day lead a successful democratic uprising against the nation’s liberal elites. What’s more, Kristol argued, such an uprising was an absolute necessity to salvage America from what he had come to see as the pernicious effects of the Enlightenment principles on which it had been founded.
Kristol, a Trotskyite-turned-antiliberal intellectual, was at first repelled by the emerging populism of the 1970s, much of it tied to the religious right. In a 1972 article in his magazine The Public Interest, he described populism as “the belief that the world is being misdirected by a kind of mischievous conspiracy against the common man,” and noted with obvious condemnation the “tendency toward xenophobia and racism” of American populist movements of the past.
But unlike the old kind of populism that struck terror in the hearts of the Founding Fathers, the “new populism,” as Kristol dubbed it, was nothing to worry about. In his view, the sentiments of the people now represented a “common sense” reaction against the “un-wisdom” of the elites. What was needed, he believed, was a strong leader who could rally the masses to reclaim American democracy from the clutches of liberal intellectuals, institute a faith-based government, and bind the nation together by preaching an assertive nationalism.
As political scientist Shadia Drury has pointed out, Kristol’s evolving view of populism was heavily influenced by the reactionary political philosopher Leo Strauss, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. Though atheistic in his own personal views, Strauss objected to the fact that the Enlightenment, and the philosophy of liberalism that constituted its political expression, privileged reason over religious faith, which he thought was the glue that held society together; without that glue, he believed, the social order would descend into Nazi-style barbarism. Through his reading of Strauss, Kristol was also influenced by the ideas of Carl Schmitt, who served as the legal-political philosopher of the Nazi regime in its early years. Schmitt considered the whole idea of parliamentary democracy, with its naïve and romantic notion of accommodation among political rivals, as absurd and futile. The key to politics, he believed, was adopting a “friend/foe” mentality of identifying your political enemy and then bringing about his political destruction. And the enemy, in his view, was liberalism itself, in all its manifestations.
I am beginning to think anyone who claimed to have learned much from Leo Strauss is dangerous to egalitarian democracy. His heritage seems to me to be pretty much uniformly poisonous. I would also note that the entire history of the neo-cons and their ideological claims highlight how easily the word "democracy" can be turned from everything from an oligarachic, aristocratic system of those with an inhereited status as rulers over a huge population of slaves and virtual slaves - many of them being women to the kind of thing that is the only legitimate form of government, egalitarian democracy. Irving Kristol's "democracy" as well as Leo Struss is, in fact, such a fascist government.
I think the problem for all of them is that they rejected the real alternative to the endless and futile search of the Socratic philosophers for an ill defined universal, the very religion that Strauss knew was essential but which he rejected. That can, as well, be twisted by people who want to lie. Choosing to not lie is where those differences start to be articulable and even discernable.
I don't trust an ex-Trot, for much the same reason.
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