I have not posted a diary here since leaving my last job at the end of August 2007. The many changes in my life since then made Daily Kos a low priority for me; but I have found some features of it, particularly the daily poll, riveting as the election approaches. You will be happy to know voter suppression will be very difficult for the Republicans in New Mexico, where I live now, because we no longer have Election Day -- we have Election Month and it started in early October. I voted for Barack Obama, for every judge but one and against every bond issue (this being a bad time for states to take on more debt) on the first day of voting.
I was happy to know when I got here that my boss, an elected official, is like every other elected official in this county a Democrat. Northwest New Mexico is in fact one of the most heavily Democratic areas in the country. When the primary for offices other than President was held in early June (on the same night Barack Obama went over the top), Democratic voters outnumbered Republicans by almost 5 to 1!
You would think I would be in hog heaven and I am except for one thing. The job I came out here to do is in law enforcement. The building where I work is a little island of conservatism in the sea of Navajo and Latino Democrats that is this county. Indeed perhaps I should say fascism, as a man who would have been my colleague had he not switched sides before I arrived maintains.
I could not work in law enforcement, naturally, without believing that Anglo-American conservatism is an eminently respectable tradition with eminently respectable post-World War II representatives such as Dwight Eisenhower, Edmund Brooks and Gerald Ford. I read Andrew Sullivan's blog every day too. I would define an Anglo-American conservative, if he's honest, as a person who understands we live in a fallen world; that the fundamentals of human existence will not change; and that salvation in this world or the next is therefore attained only by individual effort. Conservatism in other cultures of course means other things. A Latino conservative would be more likely to embrace a feudal social system which still prevails in some parts of Latin America. A Russian conservative would rather be a Soviet, and so on.
I would define a fascist globally as a person who is willing to cause any amount of death in order to realize their political, and particularly geopolitical, goals. Certainly Stalin wanted to drive the United States and Britain out of Europe, but he was not a fascist because he did not in the last eight years of his life start World War III to bring that about. He knew his limits. Hitler didn't. We can also identify one other difference between communism and fascism as economic systems. Communism's great goal is cheap goods and services (at the expense of their quality); fascism's great goal is cheap labor (at the expense of the people's quality of life). Consequently it becomes hard at some point to distinguish pro-feudal Latin conservatives from fascists when in this century other models of social organization are available, even in developing economies.
I am not sure I can identify a uniquely Anglo-American brand of fascism except by referring to my intermediate boss (between me and the elected official) who today, shortly after arguing that Nixon was actually impeached for bombing Cambodia, launched into a sort of reverie about a dead newborn whom he found abandoned at a Grateful Dead concert about five years into his career. He holds that liberalism is responsible for this atrocity. While the mother who abandoned the baby may not have been a liberal or indeed had any political convictions of any description, liberals empowered her and probably prevented her arrest and imprisonment on drug charges before she could get pregnant, his thinking goes. Barack Obama is far more the spiritual heir of this woman than of his mother or grandparents (whom there is a slight possibility that my intermediate boss would recognize as decent people) and therefore a vote for Obama means a vote for more dead babies. My secretary feels the same way, although she is more afraid of abortion than infanticide. If anybody knows any way to talk to such people respectfully, please provide some details in the comments to this diary. Thank you.