Flirting with fascism
October 24, 2005
Vox Day
"Fascism," David Ramsey Steele writes:
... was an attempt to pluck the material fruits of liberal economics while abolishing liberal culture. The attempt was entirely quixotic: There is no such thing as economic development without free-market capitalism and there is no such thing as free-market capitalism without the recognition of individual rights.
One of the great imponderables is the question of which is more ironic: the American left's feverish denial of its ideological kinship with the historical Fascist and National Socialist parties, or the Republican Party's continued leftward drift toward what both Benito Mussolini and Tony Blair described as the third way between capitalism and socialism.
Since the term "fascism" is so often misunderstood thanks to five decades of European academics desperately trying to scrub the history books clean, let us put it aside for the nonce. Perhaps a more useful term capable of accommodating honest individuals on both sides of the political spectrum is "corporatism," which refers to a political ideology which gives primacy to the marriage of state and big business.
Even this term is imperfect, as it is not uncommon to confuse corporatism for capitalism. But this can hardly be the case, as the modern concept of the corporation as an artificial person with legal standing only dates back to 1886, a scant two years before Karl Marx was scientifically predicting capitalism's certain demise. And while the marriage of corporation and state is indubitably more civilized and less lethally inclined than socialism – after all, someone has to buy those products that generate the profits that are the lifeblood of the corporation – it is nevertheless inimical to human liberty.
There are four obvious dangers of the corporatist Third Way:
Corporations have no loyalties. A government that is beholden to corporations is one that will not defend its citizens' rights or its own national sovereignty.
Corporatism represents a constant and growing government interference with the capitalist operation of the free market, usually at the behest of the established players. This produces the same sort of wealth-inhibiting technological and entrepreneurial sclerosis that plagues socialist systems, albeit to a lesser extent.
Corporations perpetuate the continuation of government power without limitation, because they can so easily become direct extensions of it should the government choose to acquire them.
Because they are artificial persons, they have no direct stake in individual freedom and have no inherent reason to oppose intrusions upon it.
For example, the Electronic Freedom Foundation has discovered that the Brother, Canon, Dell, Epson, Hewlett Packard, Konica, Kyocera, Lanier, Lexmark, Ricoh, Savin and Xerox corporations all appear to have quietly added secret codes to the output of the color laser printers in order to facilitate the federal government's ability to track printed material. This is nominally conceived to interfere with monetary counterfeiting operations, but could easily be used for a whole host of liberty-reducing actions.
Now, there is nothing illegal about the government requesting such codes, nor is there anything inherently wrong with the corporations acceding to the government's request. But, by the same token, consumers have a right to know what they are buying, so that if they would prefer to instead buy a printer that allows them to print an anonymous document, they have the ability to do so. This is only one of many ways in which corporatism sacrifices the interests of individuals for the benefit of both corporations and the government.
While the Third Way may look somewhat reasonable to both liberals and conservatives, it is actually in the interests of no one but the professional bureaucratic class that runs both sides of the corporatist equation. Liberals who oppose big business need to recognize that it is big government which enables and protects the very big business policies that they despise, and conservatives who prioritize economic growth must likewise understand that big business does not provide it, but instead are feeding and growing fatter upon the small businesses that actually provide the impetus for such growth.
Despite themselves, the wild-eyed liberal lunatics are not entirely incorrect. The Bush administration does harbor an identifiably fascist ideological strain, but the salient fact that liberals fail to recognize is that the Democratic Party happens to share it. A Rodham administration in 2008 will not represent an ideological change from the present domestic regime, but rather a continuation of the Third Way openly declared by President Clinton in 1992. |
