Collective Conscious

I have mostly avoided com­par­ing neo­con­ser­v­a­tive views to fas­cism in my pre­vi­ous cri­tiques. But I guess it’s under­stood around the blo­gos­phere that it would be an apt com­par­i­son, if the word “fas­cist” wasn’t over­bur­dened with his­tory. Andrew Sul­li­van:

The con­tempt for the masses, the eso­teric agenda of small elites, the loathing of the judi­cial branch, the use of an exec­u­tive to trash con­sti­tu­tional norms in the name of secu­rity, and the neces­sity for con­stant war­fare as a way to instill tra­di­tional virtues in the cit­i­zenry: these are not specif­i­cally fas­cist. But they have fascis­tic under­tones. This used to be spec­u­la­tion. When you remem­ber their instincts under Bush-​​Cheney, it’s more like an observation.

In sup­port of this point, he cites Damon Linker over at Cato (empha­sis mine):

I agree that the strong second-​​generation neo­con empha­sis on nation­al­ism and war­mak­ing as a means to over­com­ing domes­tic nihilism does lean in the direc­tion of fas­cist polit­i­cal ideas. But I would still coun­sel against using the term because the sim­i­lar­i­ties are mainly for­mal. A polit­i­cal pro­gram that advo­cates war as a means of spread­ing democ­racy and over­throw­ing dic­ta­tors […] is very dif­fer­ent from a polit­i­cal pro­gram that advo­cates war as a means of ter­ri­to­r­ial aggran­dize­ment and/​or racial and eth­nic oppres­sion, dom­i­na­tion, and genocide. That means that how­ever much William Kristol’s for­eign pol­icy views resem­ble fas­cism on one level, they diverge from fas­cism pretty fun­da­men­tally on another.

So the argu­ment is that the ends jus­tify the means? That neo­con­ser­v­a­tives’ par­tic­u­lar off­shoot of fas­cism will use state supremacy to achieve desir­able outcomes?

That line of thought is sim­ply unac­cept­able. Legit­i­mate gov­ern­ment requires not just that its out­puts are good, but that the process used to arrive there is in line with the same rights and prin­ci­ples. There must be at least that basic har­mony between ends and means, or the process is moot and the out­comes illegitimate.

I’ll still gen­er­ally be using the term ‘security-​​statist’ to refer to the neo­con­ser­v­a­tive pro­gram, because I agree with Linker that the goals of that move­ment are rad­i­cally diver­gent from those of twentieth-​​century fas­cism. But the fas­cist roots of the ide­ol­ogy are no less clear, and no less dangerous.