You Nazis

Hmmm, I dunno, what about the soup nazi? I think it had become a distressingly common thing to do long before Bush took office.

I agree with Tuomas's point as well.

After the war, Theodor Adorno came to the US and worked on a book called 'The Authoritarian Personality'. This isn't like Adorno's more theoretical stuff, it's an empirical study based on interviews and questionnaires and psychological studies. His basic concern was to find out how fascism happens, and to trace it back to relatively normal character traits. He found the characteristics of the 'authoritarian personality' to be:

<table border="1" bgcolor="whitesmoke" width="80%" align="CENTER">
<tr valign="TOP">
<td>Conventionalism </td>
<td>Rigid adherence to conventional, middle-class values </td>
</tr>
<tr valign="TOP">
<td>Authoritarian submission </td>
<td>Submissive, uncritical attitude toward idealized moral authorities of the in-group </td>
</tr>
<tr valign="TOP">
<td>Authoritarian aggression </td>
<td>Tendency to be on the lookout for, and to condemn, reject, and punish people who violate conventional values</td>
</tr>
<tr valign="TOP">
<td>Anti-intraception </td>
<td>Opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, the tender-minded </td>
</tr>
<tr valign="TOP">
<td>Superstition and stereotypy </td>
<td>the belief in mystical determinants of the individual's fate; the disposition to think in rigid categories </td>
</tr>
<tr valign="TOP">
<td>Power and 'toughness' </td>
<td>Preoccupation with the dominance-submission, strong-weak, leader-follower dimension; identification with power figures; overemphasis upon the conventionalized attributes of the ego; exaggerated assertion of strength and toughness </td>
</tr>
<tr valign="TOP">
<td>Destructiveness and cynicism </td>
<td>Generalized hostility, vilification of the human </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Projectivity </td>
<td>The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world; the projection of unconscious emotional impulses </td>
</tr>
<tr valign="TOP">
<td>Sex </td>
<td>Exaggerated concern with sexual 'goings-on' </td>
</tr>
</table>

also: "Rigid adherence to conventional, middle-class values "

but, wouldn't you suggest this is filtered through a fetishization of imagined working class culture, because totalitarianism fetishizes and priviledges 'physical workers' as pure and untarnished. of course, this imagineering you could possibly see echoes of in the trucker hat fetishization of the last couple of years, again a re-imagineering of an 'authentic' signifier, though this time, less with the purity aspect i imagine.

although, i have a feeling that my nice new thread is about to go down a road i hadn't intended, before. the negative side is that we are going to rehash some of the old arguments again, the positive side is that we might get to see people play the "you nazi!" card, IN REAL TIME!

I don't think that it is so at least in the popular conciousness. Most ppl will associate "fascist" with Hitler, Franco or (over here) Salazar as much as they will with Mussolini (and I'm not sure why they're wrong in this, especially w/r/t the second two, either. Please sk00l me.)

xpost

Daniel -- 'fascist' is a Roman symbol (of twigs rolled up or some shit) taken up by Mussolini so it is directly an Italian thing.

Fascism countered communism by making a nationalist version of it, and by co-opting some elements, for instance hatred of international entrepreneurs. In Germany, it even stole the name 'socialism'!

Although communism no longer sets the agenda, the traits Adorno identified as 'authoritarian' are still good predictors of the behaviour of the right. 'Exaggerated concern with sexual 'goings-on', for instance, explains the Starr Report rather well.

(Communism then countered itself by making an authoritarian version of itself, cf Stalin...)

'Theirs is a subculture that took form in the mid- to late sixties, at a time when what was officially going on in the United States was a great uprising of rebellious youth and a flowering of liberal politics. The College Republicans were young people who believed that the coming thing was a resurgence of the political right.'

Notice that both the Nazis and the Neo-Cons are reactionary or oppositional. The agenda in both cases is being set by the left. This is the inverse of the way we're told to look at comtemporary politics: now the tendency is to see the Democrats and the left as having no convictions, no ideas, no program. While this may be true of the US Dems and New Labour, it's worth remembering that communism and 60s-style counterculture is what continues to drive the right, even if negatively. I personally see this as ongoing validation of Karl Marx and the New Left, not that they need a justification from the Right.

i dont really read 60s counterculture as particularly leftist, (and in many cases it is far more right wing and conservative than the mainstream it was rebelling against?), but i do agree that it is something that the right reacts to, still today, despite, in certain ways, it being their antecedent

"Godwin's standard answer to this objection is to note that Godwin's Law does not dispute whether, in a particular instance, a reference or comparison to Hitler or the Nazis might be apt. It is precisely because such a reference or comparison may sometimes be appropriate, Godwin has argued, that hyperbolic overuse of the Hitler/Nazi comparison should be avoided. Avoiding such hyperbole, he argues, is a way of ensuring that when valid comparisons to Hitler or Nazis are made, such comparisons have the appropriate semantic impact."

Doesn't 'neo' already define them as reactionary?

now the tendency is to see the Democrats and the left as having no convictions, no ideas, no program. While this may be true of the US Dems and New Labour, it's worth remembering that communism and 60s-style counterculture is what continues to drive the right, even if negatively

US Dems != the left. And tell me there isn't a thing reactionary about the current Left today. Without George W. Bush, would they even exist?

And I can't remember the last time I did actually use the words in anger anyway.

xp

Contrasting that with fascism which had plenty of time to be warped and wrapped around by it's masters. From Italian Nationalist Revivalism, through the catholic/royalist/phalagist coalition of spain to nazism and back to spain and on to south american military nationalism. Now the word fascism has very little meaning and will do unless anyone picks up and runs with it again. Which is unlikely; the age of ideaologies and manifestos being dead. You could call the imperial military nationlism of the current US administration 'fascism' in the Italian sense of the word. You could say that clinton started this trend, you could say it goes all the way back to Truman

What Bush advert is that Ed?

I know the left existed well before GWB. The real problem with the term reactionary, is that its very Chicken vs the Egg. If current conservative are reacting to the 60's libs, weren't the 60's libs reacting to the 50's conservatives? And on and on and on....

http://www.georgewbush.com/

Politics is reaction. Socialism grew out of a reaction to 19th Century Capialism, Liberalism and Conservatism.

http://www.georgewbush.com/

Actually I belivethe hitler bit came from a moveon.org video, but I my point still stands, the nazi epithet is thrown around pretty lightly in mainstream politics

Politics is reaction. Socialism grew out of a reaction to 19th Century Capialism, Liberalism and Conservatism.

As soon as such a comparison occurs, someone will start a Nazi-discussion thread on alt.censorship.

weren't the 60's libs reacting to the 50's conservatives?

Yes, but "reactionary" tends to mean specifically reacting from a conservative standpoint. The 60s libs, I guess, could be called reactionary only if the "natural" and up-until-the-50s-had-always-been-this-way state of society was the one they advocated. In which case, they'd be the conservatives for wanting to preserve that. But there seem to be cycles of liberalism and illiberalism (I use the terms literally and without the US-name-calling connotation) so it could be the other side of the same coin really: not that both are reactionary but that neither are.

xpost

I agree that the term "Nazi" is used way too carelessly today. I really hate to see the word debased by reckless use, even though it may be tempting to apply it to someone whom you perceive as having an authoritarian personality and being intolerant. Calling people Nazis simply because they don't agree with you is really abusing that word's historic implications.

We could get into the semantics of socialism but in essense it's a reaction against the monied establishment. Lollards, Diggers, Reformists, Marxists, whatever.

By the way, I think neo-cons as we've known them lately are way less a reaction to 60s youth leftism and way more a reaction to the vaguely academic 70s and 80s left that grew out of it. Specifically: the rise of identity politics; feminism, sexual liberation, and homosexual visibility; post-Civil Rights racial identity politics; the expansion in academia of a feminist / Marxist / postmodernist vogue; etc. That's the Culture War these guys are still fighting: the neo-con aesthetic certainly existed in the 60s, and all of these later developments certainly have some roots in the 60s, but the decades that followed codified and aligned them into something quite different from what they'd previously been.

And yes, I know that technically you could say the same about all words as symbols.

This is slightly irrelevant but I wanted to get it off my chest because the interviewer didn't point out what a moron the spokesman was revealing himself to mean. But I guess he didn't have to.

(Re: the proper noundom of "Nazi," I think you can rest assured that everyone who uses it as an epithet today knows full well that the person it's directed toward is most likely not a part of any organized National Socialist party; there's such a thing as a metaphor. Similarly I doubt Dick Cheney believes it's biologically possible for a person to copulate with himself, although if you've got a really long bendy one it sort of is, cause I saw it in this movie once.)

Even if it's supposedly a metaphor.

and in the time that it took me to type all of that out, mei said the same thing much more simply so xpost

"Reactionary" does fit some people very well, though.

YUO = VEGETAERIEN DID YUO NOT KNOW TAHT HITL3R WAS A VERETEAERION!?!??!?

"nazi" as dour, fun-hating daddy-figure authoritarian; it's not hard to see why people make comparisons with Bush, especially combined with the political antecedents of Bush's puppet-masters

the odd thing is that many people have a warm/guilty spot in their heart that prompts a kind of compulsive allegiance to daddy figures

That's not quite what I said. It's not 'the core problem' so much as a process of reaction. I was characterising Nazis and Neo-Cons as the antithesis to Communism and 1960s radicalism, respectively, and trying to show that their ideology, vaunted even by some on the left for its proactive, agenda-setting quality, is in fact often rather secondary, a mere reaction to more left wing ideas which are at once more intellectually rigourous and more populist. (Marx remains the outstanding analysis of the weaknesses of capitalism, and the creative, anti-authoritarian spirit of the 1960s is what freedom will lead to time and again. That self-actualisation is more sheerly populist than any tax cut.)