Bloggy synergy

DeweyCounts has a good post over at dailykos on totalitarianism, but I wanted to just pull out the relevant points and supplement it with a post over at SadlyNo! (yes, I'm mixing lefty blogs...kind of like mixing drugs...feel the synergistic effects bitches!)

(the italics are DeweyCounts - I just wanted to demote them to highlight the points)

[George S.] Counts' 8 Elements of Totalitarianism:

1. The organization of a disciplined party: let's call it neoconservative.

2. The formulation of a "grand program": let's call it the "Project for a New American Century."

3. The appeal to idealism and heroism: let's put our dear leader in a flight suit and let's spread freedom.

4. The cultivation of human weakness: Count's explained this as cultivating hatred toward class, race, or religion as a means of social control. Totalitarians, according to Counts "experience pleasure in the torture and suffering off others." Go figure.

5. The undermining of social solidarity: let's hate the immigrants and let's hate the gays.

6. The creation of confusion: Counts: "the apostles of totalitarianism assiduously propagate half-truths and falsehoods in unqualified praise of their particular form of dictatorship." Can you say Mcllelan? How about Snow?

7. The arousing and spreading of terror: heh, listen to Counts: "...people are persuaded to believe the most fantastic tales about the savage and bloody actions or intentions of some adversary...that a small neighboring state is bent on aggression and conquest..."

8. The exploitation of the very processes and virtues of democracy: again, Counts: "...all totalitarian movements, whether of foreign or domestic origin, bend their energies to the overthrow of free institutions." Have you taken a moment to say goodbye to the 1st, 4th, 6th, and 8th amendments? To FEMA? To public schools? I'll give you a minute...

I say all 8 elements of totalitarianism are present in the current administration. Is it time for my tinfoil, or was Counts, back in 1941, onto something? Please take the poll.

I'll finish with Counts:

"If the American people should lose their democratic institutions, it would not be because those institutions had failed or because the ideals on which they rest are transient. Disaster will come only if the American people themselves, because of indifference, carelessness, or complacency, refuse to bestir themselves in time and to take the necessary steps to practice and defend the ways of democracy."

From SadlyNo!

Scaring White People for Fun and Profit (and Votes!)
While I'm reluctant to paint all conservatives with this brush, it's certainly true that scaring white people has become the staple component of the bizarre right-wing populism that started with Nixon's Southern Strategy, came to fame with AM talk radio in the '90s and that reached its peak with Bill O'Reilly and FOX News right after 9/11. Just look at Michelle Malkin's front page, and you'll find a cornucopia of supposed mortal perils for the white race. Wherever there are Mexicans waving flags, scary Islamists holding crazy signs, deranged black studies professors advocating genocide, or 7-year-old girls reciting black nationalist poetry, Michelle is there to tell you all about them and let you know that THEY ARE OUT TO GET YOU.

[snip]

You can search through Michelle Malkin's archives and find literally thousands of these Pavlovian exchanges. Michelle will post something intended to scare the crap out of white people, and then, as if one cue, several of her white readers leave trackbacks talking about how scared they are. Alas, this has become the standard operating procedure not just for Michelle Malkin, but for the entire Republican campaign machine.

[snip]

The most distresing [sic] thing is that they will never run out of enemies to attack. It doesn't matter if they grow tired of using Muslamonazi murders global or elitist gay homosodomites or Hispino invaders or some cracked-out professor: the GOP attack machine has sufficient bogeymen to last it until the year 2678, and by then we'll have become a band of polytheistic space refugees whose chief concern is fending off Cylon nuclear raids. But I digress.

[more]

And a follow-up from SadlyNo!

Fukuyama's Gift

Here's a story of importance, via Matthew Yglesias, who doesn't seem to appreciate the gravity of what he's discovered. Francis Fukuyama, the apostate neoconservative, says that in the 1990s, neocons tried to manufacture an enemy, because they felt that the Republican Party "didn't do as well" when there wasn't a ruthless, monolithic pinkomuslimcommienihilist threat to America.

People, this, coming from Fukuyama (who would know), is big. It's as big as Ike's warning about the military-industrial complex; bigger than Bill Kristol's admitting that "The Liberal Media" is a useful wingnut delusion. It's big because it provides the final and conclusive missing evidence for something that the Left has known and argued for years but could never prove: That wingnuts contrive monolithic foreign enemies, either by exaggeration or by invention from whole cloth. The Left just never knew whether such a position came from a conscious decision, or if it was instead organic and structural (i.e., simply stupidity). Now, at least for the example of the 1990s, we have a formidable testimony, from the inside so to speak, that it was conscious and deliberate.

[snip]

The wingnut strawman is the Clash of Civilizations, World War IV, the Great Struggle Against a Monolithic Enemy. Folks, this is what the man means by "perpetual war for perpetual peace". This is why you have nutjobs like Atlas Shrugs and the Powertools saying that capturing or killing bin Laden would merely be a symbolic act. This is why you have Glenn Reynolds and Stephen Green disseminating the "Long War" talking points. This is why you have Daniel Pipes and Mark Steyn constantly calling for an all-out war on Islam. They want the war to last forever, and not just because they hate the "Other", but also because they enjoy the conditions war puts on domestic politics.

Perpetual War against the Monolithic Enemy also serves other purposes than a strategery for Republican election victories: it provides wingnuts with a means to feel better about themselves. For wingnuts, it takes a supremely Evil enemy, one that is powerful and promises a struggle to the death, to remind them of how resolutely Good they themselves are. Also -- and this mostly pertains to neocons -- they think that wartime is the proper crucible in which the moral character of the masses is formed. They admired the societal mobilization and sacrifice that America summoned during WW2. They also relish the prospect of a ruthless domestic government (as long as it's Republican), one that has enhanced powers of snooping, one that wipes its browneye with the Bill of Rights. Hence Michelle Malkin's desire for internment camps, and the general wingnut defences of American torturing, indefinite detention, illegal domestic surveillance.

Wingnuts, and neocons specifically, like to think that their decisions are based only on ideology rather than on a mix of ideology, tribalism, sectarianism, and nationalism -- a mix that is pretty much universal throughout the world. Of course we know that wingnuts proceed from all these biases: we document the evidence all the time. But they believe their own lies, and say they proceed as they do because of love of "freedom" and "democracy" -- such words that have always perfumed the rank atrocities they've wrought. It is probably true that neocons, at least, have the ideological bias more strongly than most. But still the other biases are there, particularly nationalism. Yet the important thing is that they project their fundamental error on others.

[more]