Psychopolitics in The Age of The New World Order
by Chris Bowers, Mar 21, 2006
www.mydd.com
In our August 2005 paper the Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere, Matt and I wrote the following (emphasis in original):
Conservatives use the same tactics on blogs that they do in mainstream politics – attack the media and attack progressives. The right wing tends not to build independent online communities, using their existing offline communities to generate web sites that reinforce their politics and their ideology.
Posted November 9, 2004
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 9th November 2004
There is a precedent for the Bush Project, but it’s not fascis
“If Bush wins”, the US writer Barbara Probst Solomon claimed just before the election, “fascism is possible in the United States.”(1) Blind faith in a leader, she said, a conservative working class and the use of fear as a political weapon provide the necessary preconditions.
She’s wrong. So is Richard Sennett, who described Bush’s security state as “soft fascism” in the Guardian last month.(2) So is the endless traffic on the internet. In The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton persuasively describes it as “… a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity”.(3) It is hard to read Republican politics in these terms. Fascism recruited the elite, but it did not come from the elite. It relied on hysterical popular excitement: something which no one could accuse George Bush of provoking.
But this is not to say that the Bush project is unprecedented. It is, in fact, a repetition of quite another ideology. If we don’t understand it, we have no hope of confronting it.
