Monday, April 19, 2004
The F word once more
Salon (go on, get the day pass) has a useful piece on the F word (back). Scholar Robert O. Paxton comes up with the following definition:
All in all, Miller is pretty sanguine:
I'm not sure I am as sanguine as Miller. There's no sense using "the F word" as an all-purpose term of abuse, because that devalues it. But in political science, the nature and adaptability seems like "the problem of evil" in theology: There is something about the world, and something about being human, that can cause terrible, horrific events to occur—and the fall can take a single generation.
And I think that what Miller is missing is the marriage of the Republican party, right wing extremism, and fundamentalism. So I return to Paxton's list, and reformat it this way:
Readers?
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 uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."
(via Laura Miller inSalon)
All in all, Miller is pretty sanguine:
Closer to home, using Paxton's definition, is George W. Bush a fascist? Nah. America in the early 2000s doesn't resemble Germany in the 1930s much at all, really. But that doesn't mean this administration's encroachments on civil liberties, cheap appeals to patriotism in launching an ill-conceived and ineptly executed war in Iraq, or efforts to conduct government business in excessive secrecy aren't extremely disturbing. The comparisons of Bush to Hitler don't shed much light on his policies, but they do show just how much fury he's provoked. Usually, when Americans call a politician they don't like a "fascist" it's not because we know he's got an extra-governmental squad of jackbooted thugs ready to sic on his enemies. It's because it's the worst thing we can think of to call anyone. But you can be a bad leader who does bad things without deserving comparisons to the Nazis and ominous references to the "thin end of the wedge." We've all heard the poem by the German who didn't speak out when they came to get this group and that, but let's face it, it's just not effective political vigilance to cry "Hitler" at every provocation. Because most of the time it's not Hitler, and should the day finally come when it is, we want to make sure people are still listening.
I'm not sure I am as sanguine as Miller. There's no sense using "the F word" as an all-purpose term of abuse, because that devalues it. But in political science, the nature and adaptability seems like "the problem of evil" in theology: There is something about the world, and something about being human, that can cause terrible, horrific events to occur—and the fall can take a single generation.
And I think that what Miller is missing is the marriage of the Republican party, right wing extremism, and fundamentalism. So I return to Paxton's list, and reformat it this way:
Readers?
