American Fascism
By Via Magnus at Capital Cadre, this offering at The Officer’s Club is about the clearest distillation of an American fascism that I’ve ever seen.
A selection:
The problem with our world today is cultural rot. Cultural rot can be detected by symptoms such as terrorism, oppression, overpopulation, ineffective government, poor economic models, and extremism. Conversely, cultural rot can also be identified by an obsessive media, a naval gazing pop culture movement, isolationists, pervasive liberalism, ignorance of history, and a society becoming disconnected from its past.
And demonstrating that a little knowledge is often worse than none at all…
When a society disconnects itself from the principles and institutions that played a prominent role in its establishment, rot begins to fester in the darker crevices of the culture. In America, tougher-than-nails colonists and settlers hacked their existence out of the wilderness. They went to church, prayed, ate dinner with their families, and labored with a consistent vision that tomorrow would be better than today. We have now disconnected ourselves from these principles. We have jettisoned our families in the inner cities, and become so self-focused that our individual wants and desires insert themselves in front of our duties and responsibilities to our family. We have maligned or marginalized (Judeo-Christian) religion in this country, and have lost the values that were taken from religion and applied elsewhere in life. Morality, publicly and privately, has suffered because of this. Because of this encroaching rot, consequences have emerged. Parents who were too successful in providing a better life for their children have led to children leading lives of privilege, not understanding the values that allowed their existence to be so leisurely.
This translates directly into a disrespect for society, the institutions that govern it, and the military that defends it.
In a particularly delightful move, and one demonstrative of Robert Paxton’s observation that fascism always takes on essentially local characteristics, he maintains that part of America’s greatness is “rugged individualism”. In other words, individualism is great as long as it has nothing whatsoever to do with the individual.
Paging David Neiwert; David Neiwert to the lobby please…
UPDATE: Speaking of which, it never hurts to give Neiwert’s essay The Rise of Pseudo Fascism another read.