Monthly Archives: January 2016

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in … Continue reading →

The language and symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of course, have little to do with the original European models. They would have to be as familiar and reassuring to loyal Americans as the language and symbols of the … Continue reading →

[A] debate has arisen about which country spawned the earliest fascist movement. France is a frequent candidate. Russia has been proposed. Hardly anyone puts Germany first. It may be that the earliest phenomenon that can be functionally related to fascism … Continue reading →

Fascism does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system, but rather upon popular feelings about master races, their unjust lot, and their rightful predominance over inferior peoples. It has not been given intellectual underpinnings by any system builder, like … Continue reading →

The political role of corporate power, the corruption of the political and representative processes by the lobbying industry, the expansion of executive power at the expense of constitutional limitations, and the degradation of political dialogue promoted by the media are the basics … Continue reading →

Our present-day hagiography celebrates Founding Fathers but almost entirely overlooks the emergence of an American version of a demos in the decades before and during the revolution. —Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 254.

Politically, as well as socially and economically, inverted totalitarianism is best understood as imperialist and hence as a postdemocratic or, better, post-social democratic phenomenon. It is marked by an expansion of the horizons and ambitions of the governing classes and … Continue reading →

At Neustar we used Skype for instant messaging as well as video conferencing. For the most part I ignored the mottos people posted on their profiles, but at one point I asked a young Chinese woman about her choice of … Continue reading →

In a genuinely democractic system, as opposed to a pseudodemocratic one in which a “representative sample” of the population is asked whether it “approves” or “disapproves,” citizens would be viewed as agents actively involved in the exercise of power and in … Continue reading →

[F]ascism is the product of democracies gone wrong, that had working constitutional systems which they gave up voluntarily. —Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Knopf, 2004)