Barbarism with a bad combover. Donald Trump has become a Cypher for crypto-fascism, but as of yet is is only a magnet for dead-ender would-be RWNJ groupies. They’ve revealed the fracture in the GOP between poor and elite whites made slowly aware of their being bamboozled by the Reagan Southern Strategy.
While The Donald may not be a fascist, it’s at least now OK for us to discuss continuing being anti-fascist and the world will again be the better for it — Francisco Franco still being dead. It is what can ally the Greatest Generation and GenX-Y-Z in reversing the recent deep manipulation of popular false consciousness.
What counts in all of this is party discipline.
One hopes this will result in coalition voting, but wedge issues like racism and classcism may create additional chaos and cover for the 1%. It may be a risk to decide how to stop Trump in terms of fragmenting downticket GOP strength that will determine a change in Congress as well as the White House.
Change election procedure so that the remaining delegates must pledge their support to whichever nominee scores highest on a seventh grade vocabulary test. Unfortunately this will probably give the edge to college debate champ Ted Cruz, an opportunistic, bigoted liar whose vision for America is a theocracy engaged in an apocalyptic war against Islam run by a man who looks like Dracula’s fat cousin smugly eating a sour candy he received as a prize for tattling. But you can’t have everything. www.theguardian.com/…
Can there be party discipline to GOTV at the downticket level even as there is continuing interest in POTUS nominations. More important recently is the need to focus on challenges to GOP Senators up for reelection and the their obstruction opf the SCOTUs nomination — a clear sign of that is IL-Sen Mark Kirk’s weakening position because of the challenge of Tammy Duckworth.
Overall, voting in modern democracies most commonly follow party lines. The ten to fifteen percent that fall outside are on issues where party coercion is not strong enough to maintain unity – often on issues where geographic interests dominate instead. On most contentious ideological issues, however, party identification is usually strong enough to hold the voting blocs together. These contentious or controversial votes are commonly the ones that build and break down parties, and therefore reinforce the importance of voting together. (2009)
...If capitalism was in its death-agony, then fascism was the expression of the weakness of the system in its terminal stages. Poulantzas observes:
"The blindness of both the PCI and KPD leaders in this respect is staggering. Fascism, according to them, would only be a 'passing episode' in the revolutionary process. Umberto Terracini wrote in Inprekorr, just after the march on Rome, that fascism was at most a passing 'ministerial crisis'. Amadeo Bordiga, introducing the resolution on fascism at the Fifth Congress, declared that all hat had happened in Italy was 'a change in the governmental team of the bourgeoisie'. The presidium of the Comintern executive committee noted, just after Hitler's accession to power: 'Hitler's Germany is heading for ever more inevitable economic catastrophe...The momentary calm after the victory of fascism is only a passing phenomenon. The wave of revolution will rise inescapably Germany despite the fascist terror..."
Deleuze and Guattari see fascism as a permanent feature of social life. Class is not so important to them. They are concerned with what they call "microfascism", the fascism that lurks in heart of each and every one of us. When they talk about societies that were swept by fascism, such as Germany, they totally ignore the objective social and economic framework: depression, hyperinflation, loss of territory, etc.
This is wrong. Fascism is a product of objective historical factors, not shortcomings in the human psyche or imperfections in the way society is structured. The way to prevent fascism is not to have unfascist attitudes or live in unfascist communities, like the hippies did in the 1960's. It is to confront the capitalist class during periods of mounting crisis and win a socialist victory.
In a key description of the problem, they say, "The concept of the totalitarian State applies only at the macropolitical level, to a rigid segmentarity and a particular mode of totalization and centralization. But fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of molecular focuses in interaction, which skip from point to point, before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State. Rural fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war veteran's fascism, fascism of the Left and fascism of the Right, fascism of the couple, family, school, and office: every fascism is defined by a micro-black hole that stands on its own and communicates with the others, before resonating in a great, generalized central black hole."
...Fascism is not intolerance, bad attitudes, meanness or insensitivity. It is a violent, procapitalist mass movement of the middle-class that employs socialist phrase-mongering.
www.columbia.edu/...