Collective Conscious

The Repub­li­can Study Group has out­lined exactly how they would use the fed­eral bud­get deficit to mostly elim­i­nate pub­lic ser­vices and leave only a mil­i­tary gov­ern­ment in the dis­cre­tionary budget:

But, the RSC’s longer term plan, which the 165-​​member House GOP group unveiled yes­ter­day, would go much, much fur­ther.  By 2021, it would reduce non-​​defense appro­pri­a­tions by 42 per­cent below what the Con­gres­sional Bud­get Office says is needed to main­tain last year’s fund­ing level, adjusted only for inflation.

But at the same time…

The rea­son why Repub­li­cans want to entirely defund USAID but avoid touch­ing a hair on the defense bud­get is that they see every sin­gle mat­ter of for­eign affairs as a nail, and so they don’t under­stand why we should be spend­ing money on any­thing other than hammers.

Let’s not say we weren’t warned:

The dis­like of gov­ern­ment spend­ing pol­icy as such is over­come under fas­cism by the fact that the state machin­ery is under the direct con­trol of a part­ner­ship of big busi­ness with fas­cism.  The neces­sity for the myth of ‘sound finance’, which served to pre­vent the gov­ern­ment from off­set­ting a con­fi­dence cri­sis by spend­ing, is removed.…

The dis­like of gov­ern­ment spend­ing, whether on pub­lic invest­ment or con­sump­tion, is over­come by con­cen­trat­ing gov­ern­ment expen­di­ture on arma­ments.  Finally, ‘dis­ci­pline in the fac­to­ries’ and ‘polit­i­cal sta­bil­ity’ under full employ­ment are main­tained by the ‘new order’, which ranges from sup­pres­sion of the trade unions to the con­cen­tra­tion camp.  Polit­i­cal pres­sure replaces the eco­nomic pres­sure of unemployment.

I’m not sug­gest­ing that Repub­li­cans are inten­tion­ally adopt­ing fas­cist poli­cies. But I do think Kalecki was accu­rate in his analy­sis of the devel­op­ment of the right-​​wing mil­i­tary state: it emerges from the union of anti-​​government and pro-​​business inter­ests by way of arms con­tracts. Today, how­ever, I think the threat is more insid­i­ous:

Mil­i­tary spend­ing is still king: the DoD’s 2011 bud­get was ten times big­ger than DHS’. But if Eisen­hower were leav­ing office today, and warn­ing about emerg­ing pow­ers with undue influ­ence over the allo­ca­tion of funds for the pub­lic inter­est, would he also be warn­ing Amer­i­cans about the “security-​​industrial complex”?

Yes: the poten­tial for a fas­cist secu­rity state is latent in cap­i­tal­ism, and Repub­li­cans seem to be awfully unaware of how their poli­cies might serve to bring it about.

Update: The Atlantic has a long piece worth reading.