General usage
“The term fascism has functioned in public life primarily to denigrate and insult, operating as the rhetorical equivalent of throwing a tomato at a speaker at a public event.” - Bruce Kucklcik
Friendly Fascism - Bertram Gross
Background
- Representation of corporations and TNCs over the people a politician is meant to represent is the first stage
- The difference between modern and classical fascism is that these corporations are not loyal to any one nation: The state instead acts as a tool for the corporation to leverage its status and wealth.
- “A powerful oligarchy operates outside of as well as through the state. Each subverts constitutional government. Each suppresses rising demands for wider participation in decision-making, the enforcement and enlargement of human rights.” - p.169
- How corporations view democracy:
- Trilateral commission’s 1975 Report on “The Excess (Crisis) of Democracy”
- People would vote in their best interests not in the interests of some corporation
- Customary repression of human rights and conglomeration of the 3 branches of state (US) start to merge. E.g. Excessive power given to oil companies in the states; Patriot Act; destruction of unions .
- Noam Chomsky: “Function to create a world of isolated individuals at the mercy of concentrated power”…John Dewey “Until the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication reside in the hands of public, politics will remain the shadow cast on society by big business.”
- Power is being taken away from the people - this fear makes this fascism more appealing as the solutions offered in velvet gloves seem all the more safe and hope inspiring.
- Hume: “As Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. ‘Tis therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as the most free and most popular”
- Friendly fascism only really works if people view it as acceptable, or at least better than the alternative.
Moving forward
- The emergent effects (E.g. Disenfranchisement as a result of ‘Globalism’) are often blamed on liberal institutions who supposedly control the aesthetics and often rivaling political parties.
- This presents a unique kind of political discrimination to all people, due to a lack of representation. People then start to see the pluralism and openness of liberal institutions as nihilistic and relativistic.
- A response to this is the “New right”
- Drolet Williams (2018) “Those still tied to locality, who experience migration or cultural Cosmopolitanism as a threat, as well as the ‘deplorables’ who hold on to tradition, to their inherited communities and prejudices even as they are being eroded by globalization, and who are disparaged as backward and bigoted, dependent and (if they are lucky) in need of ‘re-skilling’ by a liberal elite which is the condescending agent of their increasingly dire economic “plight and that dismisses and disparages their feelings of social and cultural dislocation and alienation” p.300
- They are experiencing a dissonance between what is being promised and what is being dealt: taxation is not going to improving healthcare, education or general quality of life but the support of (oversea) corporations.
- Walter Benjamin “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but a chance to express themselves.”
- Expression over genuine empowerment.
- Project 2025
- Take away the feat that fascism is fueled upon; talk about it.