"Liberal Fascism" is an Oxymoron. It Doesn't Exist Except in Right Wing Brains!

The term "liberal fascism" has become increasingly fashionable to bandy about but mostly in right wing circles because this enclave of under-educated folk don't know the difference between any of the historical political-economic systems, whether fascism, socialism, or Neoliberal capitalism. Hence, it's no surprise the term would be misused.

What prompted the Right to inject the boogeymen of liberal fascism into the ongoing cultural wars? Well, a sequence of incidents. First you had the way most of us in the liberal spectrum came down like a ton of bricks on Nate Silver for hiring climate denier Roger Pielke Jr on his Fivethirtyeight blog. Then there has been the massive criticism of the Right - as in the 'Hobby Lobby' case, trying to exploit the specious "religious liberty" theme to justify aborting the contraceptive sections of Obamacare. Finally, there was the Brandeis University announcement that it would rescind an honorary degree it planned to award to Ayaan Hirsi, a best selling author and critic of Islamo-fascism.

Brandeis’ decision to cave has been described (even in liberal quarters like salon.com)  as arising from pressure by the left-wing/Islamofascist militants and thus canceling Hirsi Ali’s honor has been castigated by champions of freedom around the world..

Here, we need to back up and explain that there is no such thing as a "left wing Islamo-fascism"  no matter what the militants call themselves. This would have about as much "left wing" bona fides as Hitler's National Socialist Party would have socialist bona fides. (Leading to the continued confusion that remains today between genuine socialism - which is wholly left wing - and Hitler's Right wing version). IF "left" is synonymous with Liberal, then no kind of fascism can be permitted. Fascism is a creature of the Right, not the Left, and has been since the days of Hitler and Mussolini.

 It is instructive here to consult Douglas Rushkoff's  Chapter Four ('Individually Wrapped').  in  his  book, Life Inc. - How Corporations Conquered the World and How We Can Take It Back.   He observes (p. 109):

"American corporatists saw in fascism a counterbalance to FDR's strong-handed tactics and aggressive social welfare programs.....Henry Luce, a co-founder of TIME magazine, put Mussolini on the cover five times and traveled the country arguing that corporations - not government - were really in charge of America.  Luce convinced many business people that fascism might be corporatism's best hope for organizing and influencing people."


One is led to question why  American corporatists would want to invoke fascism to offset FDR's pro-government programs. There are several reasons, all of them tied to the historically accepted characteristics of fascism and germane to Rushkoff's point, as well as mine, i.e. that liberalism and fascism are counterpoised:

Corporate Power is Protected -- The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation are often the ones putting government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and a power elite.  This automatically sets domestic non-military and social insurance programs in opposition, and at risk - from the nascent pro-corporate economic structure.


Labor Power is Suppressed -- Because the organizing power of labor is the only real remaining counterbalance to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely or are severely suppressed. We have seen this happen progressively in this country as unions have all but vanished from the landscape and are mightily resisted where they might find new places to begin.


Supremacy of the Military -- Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.  This is deliberate in all fascist nations-systems, given their opposition to providing domestic social insurance for the masses. Thus, if the military spending can be made large enough it can deplete the tax commons to the extent that inadequate money is available to support social -domestic needs.

Obsession with National Security -- Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses and special attention is focused on those who complain about inadequate domestic resources, say because they are at the mercy of increased military spending and inciting wars by which to validate such spending.  If then a "boogeyman" can be created and sustained it can also be used to mute the demand for addressing domestic needs.  Create a system of color -coded alerts or 'warnings' then you keep most people in tow, and also the critics at bay.

The 1983 American Heritage Dictionary defined fascism as:

"A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."

The U.S.-based  dictionary definition has gotten somewhat squishier since then, as all the larger dictionary companies have been bought up by multinational corporations (e.g. Bertelsmann AG, NEWSCorp etc.), who would be more invested in obscuring key definitions to align with their corporatist bias.

Benito Mussolini, however, was quite straightforward about all this. In a 1923 pamphlet titled "The Doctrine of Fascism" he wrote,

"If classical liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells government."

But not a government of, by, and for (We)  The People - instead, it would be a government of, by, and for the most powerful corporate interests in the nation. In 1938, Mussolini brought his vision of fascism into full reality when he dissolved Parliament and replaced it with the "Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni" - the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations. Corporations were still privately owned, but now instead of having to sneak their money to folks like John Boehner and useful idiots like the Tea Partyers, they were openly in charge of the government.

The above preliminaries are useful in parsing salon.com writer Alex Pareene's take:

 “All of these seemingly unconnected incidents can be understood with one simple word: fascism. Liberal fascism. “Fascism” as a term has been abused by leftists over the decades, but it is a definable and concrete thing. Essentially, fascism is when a bunch of people criticize something they disapprove of or are offended by, and ask that the thing or person that offends them not be rewarded in some fashion."

But as we've seen,  fascism is a lot more complex than merely a "bunch of people criticizing something they disapprove of or are offended by, and asking that the thing or person that offends them not be rewarded in some fashion." 

This is what I would call the "elementary school version" of fascism.  Comprehensible to those at the fourth grade level - i.e. grasped easily in the personal antagonism 'he said-she said' domain, but unfitting for an adult of even moderate intelligence to really grasp what fascism is about.

As for "liberal fascism" it can only make sense in the cartoon context Pareene describes, but not in the formal definitional sense.

If you're at a cocktail party and engage in a political debate (not advised), don't interject "liberal fascism" unless you want to be thought of as an over-sized, ill-informed 4th grader!    

Bill Nye Should Be Able to Wallop Marsha Blackburn in Climate Science Debate

Bill Nye on Real Time Friday Night, discussing climate change

This morning, incredibly (to many of us), Bill Nye squares off on 'Meet the Press' against Marsha Blackburn in a debate ('discussion') to do with climate change. While this encounter is fraught with peril (given likely 'sound bite' limits and that the moderator David Gregory is a Neolib tool) there is really no reason why Nye - if he commands the most basic facts - can't send Blackburn scurrying out the door - vanquished and yelping 'Vamanos!'  This is, of course, assuming the moderator sticks to the science!

For those who may not know,  Blackburn is a vocal skeptic and vice chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. which basically means she's a nobody. At least in the realm of genuine climate science. She has zero qualifications, likely not even a physics first degree, and merely being on some HOUSE energy committee means nada - given the House was taken over by the Tea Party in 2010. 

As a salon.com piece (by Alex Pareene) pointed out ,  Bill Nye in some ways also lacks creds in that his actual qualifications (before becoming the 'Science Guy') were in mechanical engineering. But let's bear in mind that the courses taken by a mechanical engineer are heavy in advanced math (differential equations, complex variables, etc.) as well as advanced physics (thermodynamics, mechanics, etc.) at least place him in league with climate scientists in being exposed to the scientific method, and being familiar with climate change.

Sadly, too many under-informed Americans (like Marsha Blackburn) aren't. One of the glaring deficiencies was revealed in a  2012 Washington Post-Stanford University poll, wherein Americans' average estimate of the share of scientists who believe global warming is happening due to human behavior was a measly "64 percent". (At least this was better than a  2009 Post-ABC poll  where only 36 percent said "most scientists agree with on another" that global warming is happening; and a majority sensed "a lot of disagreement."

Of course, this is nonsense. It also shows the stupidity of most polls on scientific issues, where the media source is basically asking the opinion of uninformed people - who likely have little or no scientific exposure. In the case of climate science consensus, for example, the uninformed public is way, way off.  An extensive review of nearly 12,000 published papers from 1991 to 2011 led by John Cook and Dana Nuccitelli found 97 percent of those taking a position on the issue endorsed the idea of human-caused global warming.

Meanwhile, in their analysis of the extent of scientific consensus on global warming (Eos Transactions, Vol. 90, No. 3, p. 22) , P. T. Doran and M. Kendall-Zimmerman found that (p. 24)

“the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely non-existent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes.”

In their analytic survey for which 3146 climate and Earth scientists responded, a full 96.2% of specialists concurred temperatures have steadily risen and there is no evidence for cooling. Meanwhile, 97.4% concur there is a definite role of humans in global climate change.

In other words, the dissenters are mainly outliers, and often cranks. In many cases too, they have no formal climate science background.  This also feeds into a nonchalance to take serious action because of a cognitive disconnect. For example,  while Americans consistently support government regulation of greenhouse gases, Gallup polls since the late 1990s have found a clear majority of Americans doubting global warming will seriously threaten them during their lifetime, even as most perceive some effects today.

Of course, this is bollocks. Anyone who isn't at least 95 years old today, WILL see definite and severe effects of climate change, and it will turn over their lives and definitely threaten them.  These effects will also ramp up as more and more carbon is pumped into the atmosphere until we exceed the 551 gT limit noted by Bill McKibben, which will engender a 2C increase and catastrophic climate events. The existing polar vortex is only one of  those, which instability has given rise to the Arctic weather conditions recently and the immense amounts of snow. See e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/01/yes-global-warming-is-still-real-and.html

But this elicits the question of why have such an "exchange" at all if the conditions don't contribute to greater understanding or a clear winner.   First, the time allotment isn't sufficient. The 'Meet the Press' meet up is only now beginning at 9.20 a.m. so not even a full hour is allotted. This means there won't be ample time for Nye to knock down effluent such as recently spouted by a CATO drone, i.e. that "it's just that there's so many more people living in so many more places....so you hear about more disasters."

Really? Then how account for the scores of receding, melting glaciers where NO people live? Images and videos not long ago made available in a PBS program, see:

http://video.pbs.org/video/1108763899

Even five minutes into this 'debate' Blackburn has tried to invoke the non sequitur that neither she nor Nye are "science experts" and there is still "disagreement" even amongst those in Obama's own WH.  Seconds later she resorted to the "only tiny difference" shtick, saying we "have only gone from 0.032% to 0.040% CO2 concentration"-  not realizing that even a 0.001 % increase in CO2 is critical, as Gunther Weller showed in his Arctic melting studies from the 1980s.

She's  also again introduced the  recycled idiocy that "there's no consensus" - mentioning losers and outliers like Richard Lindzen and Judith Curry - though here David Gregory did interrupt to correct her- pointing out that naming a couple skeptics doesn't equate to there being no consensus.  For my takedowns of Lindzen and his rubbish, see:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2010/06/richard-lindzens-fantasies-1.html

and:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2010/06/richard-lindzens-fantasies-2.html

Realizing she was busted there, Blackburn plied the usual ploy of: " Well, let's assume everything Bill says is right. Even director McCarthy from the EPA, in answering questions before our committee, said reaching all of the 26 U.S. goals is not going to have an impact globally"

Which is likely correct, given the U.S. is now outsourcing, exporting high polluting, cut-rate, climate damaging fuels to other nations! In other words, while we portray ourselves as the cleaner and cleaner nice guys, we are happy to foul up the rest of the planet as we embrace the error that "there's no fossil fuel we will leave in the ground" (See 'How the U.S. Exports Global Warming' in Rolling Stone, Feb. 13, p.32.)

As Nye's eyes rolled, she then added to that by averring "You don't make good policy based on unproven hypotheses". 

Nye did present a solid comeback, holding up a photo image of the melting Arctic (though I'd have preferred to see short video clips from the PBS documentary - as shown at the link above). He also noted that Blackburn's mention of a "slight change" is ludicrous, since it's actually a 30 percent increase and in the last few decades.

At this point, the discussion again veers to policy, and how costly implementing climate change responses will be.

The turf is mainly beneficial to Blackburn - harping endlessly on "cost benefit analysis" - but on the science Nye enjoys the edge.

However, David Gregory has brought up the sad polling stat (again) that global warming - climate change is only 19th on the list of Americans' concerns. (It ought to be first, or roughly equivalent to the Earth facing a planet killer asteroid.)

Nye's response is fair enough but not as hard hitting as it could be. In the end, this 'debate' wasn't nearly a patch on the one with Ken Ham -  because it wasn't a formal one with adequate time allotted and proper rules. However, it terms of the science and what needs to be done, Nye clearly got the better of Marsha Blackburn.

Another Mikey Goes Berserk - What's With These Psycho Mikeys?

Mike Grimm(left) , and Pastor Mike - in his latest selfie.

Seriously now, what's with all these Mikeys going berserk? Is it something to do with the name, or is it some hormone (testosterone) over-production leading to insane behavior and acts or what? Inquiring minds want to know!  Recall that we had already seen, some two years ago, a "pastor" by the name of Mike who wanted to put all atheists into a National Registry of Atheists - like a sex offender registry. This whacko actually wanted atheists to be singled out and identifiable the same way sex offenders are for current state registries! The bozo actually claimed, I shit you not:

 "I mean, think about it. There are already National Registrys [sic] for convicted sex offenders, ex-convicts, terrorist cells, hate groups like the KKK, skinheads, radical Islamists, etc. This type of 'National Registry' would merely be for information purposes."

Right! Whose information?

Then, more recently, we beheld the nutso Reep Mike Rogers, going off half -cocked and accusing Patriot Edward Snowden of being in league with "Russian Intelligence".  Without a shred of hard evidence, and in contradiction to an earlier conclusion reportedly  reached by NSA,  this turkey actually said:

"I believe there's questions to be answered there! I don't think it was a gee-whiz luck event that he ended up in Moscow under the handling of the [Russian intelligence service] FSB.”

Now, we have another Mike, this one named Michael Grimm, who - as reported by Rachel Maddow three nights ago, actually confronted a reporter trying to ask him a question and going off on him with f-bombs and threatening to hurl him over a railing, after saying he'd "break him like a boy". At which point Rachel rightly asked, "Wait, do boys break more easily than men?"  Apart from the fact he implicitly insulted the reporter in making the threat. 

Grimm, an ex-Marine, displayed all the bravado and fake macho that we've beheld in a certain other "Mike"  ex-Marine, who's bragged about how many bat and tire chain fights he's been in, and how many times he's broken skulls and had his broken. (No shit!)   The difference is that while the latter Mike is a nobody sitting in his den somewhere in FLA blogging baloney and hate against "homos, blacks, and libtards", Mike Grimm is an actual representative from NY  - somehow getting in on the Tea Party bandwagon in 2010. That means how he acts and what he does - especially to other citizens - has far more  import than a wannabe backwoods pseudo-preacher blogger.

Meanwhile, this current Mikey's history evidently precedes him, as Rachel noted and as others have exposed an unstable, possibly dangerous goon. That much was obvious in the video in which he corners and threatens NY1 reporter Michael Scotto. His act may not have surprised readers of The New Yorker’s 2011 profile of Grimm, which describes the 1999 night that Grimm, brandishing a gun, terrorized a nightclub full of people in search of a man with whom he’d fought earlier.

What is it with these aggressive asshole Mikes, anyway? Do they all eat the same GMO-manufactured crap and feed off the same prion-tainted beef? Is that what turns them into screwball rage-aholics replete with all the macho posturing ? Or is it something else? Maybe an inferiority complex? Like they are out of their depth and know it.

And once more, like Mike Rogers, we have the earlier lawman background. As noted in a recent piece (The Real Problem with Dangerous Goon Michael Grimm)  on salon.com by Alex Pareene :


Grimm’s actions that night at the Caribbean Tropics nightclub in Queens would have likely put a regular citizen in jail for years. But Grimm was not a regular citizen: He was an FBI agent at the time, and thus, after an internal investigation, he received no punishment at all.

Pareene went on to cite former Grimm opponent, Dem Mark Murphy, who opined that maybe Grimm is a victim of roid-rage, from steroids. But really, this level of anger doesn't require drugs to attain, only the right (wrong?) political persuasion - the arch-conservative individualist bully. In this case, as Pareene observes: "Grimm is just what happens when the worst sort of hyper-aggressive lawman transitions into another field where being a short-tempered bullying prick is rewarded rather than punished: Conservative politics"

Cut those benefits! Take the kid's food away, because his parents are deprived of food stamps or unemployment benefits! Meanwhile, by virtue of this cutting, slow down the nation's growth. Nearly 1 % of GDP is believed to have been lost in the last quarter, thanks to GOP- demanded austerity measures - the major one being to no extension of unemployment benefits for the long term unemployed.

But this is the natural attitude that really binds all these 'Mikes' in common. Be the bully, the one who pushes around the weakest, the most vulnerable, including kids. Then call yourself a "man".  But the rest of us aren't fooled and we understand that brutal  macho posturing - even in the guise of conservative "tough" love economics - only renders you a mouse.