Re: <nettime> Not One

Hello...interesting thread! Thank you, Zak for querying the potentials of a Biden militarism. It's difficult to respond to the critique without giving up other more hopeful impressions I have about Biden and the coming election and the American people at present because I am like Brian, I believe, believing that we are at a potentially very positive turning point for politics in this country - a turning point that will come from the continued pushing from below of the grassroots movements -blank & brown lives, the womens' movement, LBGTQ movement, democratic socialists, the young and very hardworking politicians such as AOC who pushes for a Green New Deal...these leanings are the progressive "left" in this country; and, curiously, our progressive "left" merges important aspects of identity-politics (like anti-binary thinking) and socialism along with enough education and wealth in the hands of progressives to get the votes; to get the steam; to get the press.

My money is on this progressive wave of politicians - Buttar, AOC, Khan...These figures are representative of one of the many America's that Brian mentions (Neyrat). But, these politicians will not be President, and if Harris were to outlive Biden and become President, I'm not 100% convinced of her ability to do much more than wallow in neo-liberal goals.

New national goals - this is spot on - that is what this country needs and what Trump's administration has drawn a bow around so adroitly. It will be the apparent climate crisis and the spread of disease which will end his presidency if nothing else can. But we can't be fooled that efforts to produce a more climate-wise American or a more careful and germ-free society can't be co-opted and capitalized on for purposes of Wall Street. We need new policies, new approaches, and investment in what has been great about this country - an actively secular, free public education for all, the legalization of blackness and reproductive rights, the capacity to elect our own leaders, socialist, communist, liberal democrats...Agreed, bourgieous democracy is far and away different from fascism. What Hitler and Trump have in common is the unself-conscious desire to dictate even if it means adopting the most unseemly aspects of their populist flocks.

We have long had fascism in America, just no one in power who had the hubris to draw it out flagrantly as we have seen Trump (and GWBush with his photo opps hyping the military from atop aircraft carriers) do. Fascism lurks in the marching bands of many American high schools and in the JROTC and in corporate hierarchies and the minds of phys ed teachers, many of whom are ex-marines. Militarism does not have to be fascist, but fascists love the "disciplines" of military might. Fascists promote ideal bodies and deterministic thinking. Fascism lurks where people are made to line up, take orders, obey...the populist white nationalists behind Trump are profoundly anti-intellectual, anti-gay, anti-feminist, racist...they love someone who gives them someone else to blame. Hitler's German populists had their scapegoat: immigrants. The Proud Boys (whom we chased out of San Franscisco) have theirs: immigrants.

I wanted to shout to livx - as she took Trump from being a "gross uncle" to being "a serial killer" and I agree with this point of hers.

We will only be able to effect change in this country through the continued opening up of our government to the voices of the people either through representation at the level of Congress or through making them listen. What appears to be is that Biden is willing to take on Warren and Sanders into his circle; he is willing to listen and not simply be a figurehead for Clinton style neo-liberal ideas.

The fact of social change in our country has already happened...as the civil rights movement of the last few months and the tremendous outpouring of resistance to Trump has shown. What we do not have...but which I hope we will have...is a government that can deal with the political difference that has flourished among the American people.

Along with the normalization of American capitalist imperialism at least within our country is the very very huge power of the corporate-led media to encourage that normalization. Yet, too, the Trump administration has fostered a regrouping in our information gathering and investment in truth. The media has a lot to answer for in creating the enemies and the goals.

As for modernity and fascism - Fordism helped usher in the Holocaust as an efficient means to eliminate society of unwanted populations. Adolf Hitler had a photo of Henry Ford in his office. The concept of modernity that ended empirical monarchies had to do with unity through industrialization, and that is a good idea when in the hands of modernists, and an evil in the hands of Hitler...but, ultimately, it was people and their unformed hearts and minds which put Hitler, and Trump into power (not popular vote however). Those same people walk among us at rallies and go to our universities because we are a democracy and everyone is not the same.

National goals - instead of bailing out Wall Street - the first stimulus package should have gone to our young people and their colleges and universities, but where higher ed is scoffed at by leaders, then we will continue to have ignorance. National goals - universal health care for all...we got closer to it with Obama...we got a taste of what a safety net might be like. We have not been able to let that go.

Molly

On Sat, Oct 10, 2020 at 12:17 PM Keith Sanborn <[email protected]> wrote:

Not a precise match between modernity and bourgeois democracy, but close enough to provoke reflection. Still, while bourgeois democracy and fascism may both show aspects of modernity, such as rationalization of “production” and its corollary destruction, that does not make them ethically identical. Roosevelt does not equal Hitler.

> On Oct 10, 2020, at 3:04 PM, mp <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 10/10/2020 19:45, Keith Sanborn wrote:
>> Again the "always already.”
>>
>> What if fascism is not a mask? The voices of the dead should be listened to.
>
> Waves and particle, apples and oranges. My way, your way, anything goes
> tonight.
>
> Zygmunt Bauman, who is dead and spend considerable time developing a
> voice that made sense of the Holocaust, to which many students of
> Sociology have been subjected, investigated the relations between
> fascism and modernity, and I wonder if he would readily agree that, as
> you write, "..there is a qualitative and quantitative difference between
> bourgeois democracy and fascism..".
>
> Here from a random blog:
>
> "...In Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman contends that the
> Holocaust should not simply be understood as an accident along the road
> to modernity. Rather, Bauman argues that modernity provided the
> “necessary conditions” (Bauman, 13) for its undertaking. As Bauman puts
> it, the Holocaust was “a legitimate resident in the house of modernity”
> (Bauman, 17). To support this contention, Bauman suggests that the
> principles of rationality and efficiency which so uniquely characterize
> the modern era may have had, in the case of the Holocaust, some
> unintended consequences: “at no point of its long and tortuous execution
> did the Holocaust come into conflict with the principles of rationality.
> The ‘Final Solution’ did not clash at any stage with the rational
> pursuit of efficient, optimal goal-implementation” (Bauman, 17)...".
>
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