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Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Bastions And Batteries Part 2: Techno-Fascism, 2010
The neologism techno-fascism, which your Curmudgeon employed in the previous essay, might strike many a Gentle Reader as unnecessarily obscure. From one standpoint, it's entirely about promising the public tangible benefits in exchange for the surrender of part or all of its freedom. However, there's more in the stew than simply an offer to buy our rights from us today for a promise of jam tomorrow. The past success of America's Ruling Class at selling the public on its techno-fascist approach to governance demands that it be unpacked and examined all the way down to its lowest premises.
Your Curmudgeon's definition of techno-fascism from the previous essay:
A techno-fascist is one who holds that the regimentation of a human society is both possible and efficient, given the right knowledge and tools in the right hands.
What would make such a claim palatable to a private citizen?
- The belief that the techno-fascist possesses the required intelligence, knowledge, and insight;
- The belief that the necessary tools exist and are available at an acceptable cost;
- The belief that no moral constraints forbid the use of those tools;
- The belief that the techno-fascist can be trusted, both on his promises and with the requested degree of power;
- The belief that a sufficiently large fraction of the public will "get with the program" to make it successful.
When such a claim is made de novo, before Mankind has had experience with such things, everything depends on individuals' beliefs, and on their willingness to "make the trade." But once we've suffered a few techno-fascist regimes -- and up to this year of Our Lord 2010, there have been more than a few -- John Q. Public's willingness to dismiss the historical record and extend his trust as far as the techno-fascist requires becomes problematic. We simply must ask: Haven't we seen enough of this to know better?
The United States, which has enjoyed relative, de facto political freedom since its birth, has had only the mildest direct experience of fascistic governance: mainly the Wilson Administration during World War I and the New Deal. These "war fascisms" were largely accepted on the grounds of military exigency. We expected them to fade away after the wars were won. One did, or mostly so; the other has persisted to a very great degree, and has been "normalized" into our national routines. To the extent we accept fascistic governance today, it's with an "it's got nothing to do with me" judgment of irrelevance to one's personal concerns.
But when fascism moves into our immediate sphere -- when we perceive that it threatens our autonomy in a matter or matters of direct importance to us -- our first reaction is truculent resistance. If the aspiring fascist is to have what he wants, he must sell us on the benefits of what he proposes. He must persuade us to believe in the Five Pillars of Techno-Fascism enumerated above.
That's quite a sales job. So far, no great percentage of Americans has bought it, which raises the question of how we've been saddled with it even so.
As Angelo Codevilla notes in his American Spectator essay, our Ruling Class holds itself to be our intellectual and moral superiors. In and of itself, that needn't have been a problem for us. Many groups' members hold themselves to be superior to others by reason of their memberships in those groups. Now and then, such a claim is even partially substantiable.
The problem arises when a claim of superiority is used as a justification for seizing power.
In the case of the Wilson and FDR Administrations, the seizure of unhallowed power by the ruling junta was rationalized to the public as an emergency measure. But note that the premise of intellectual superiority had already been established by both regimes: Wilson by virtue of his academic credentials and record of publication; FDR through association with his "Brain Trust." The greater public extended its trust to those men, and accepted their yoke in confidence that things would return to the status quo ante when the emergency had passed.
That confidence proved to be misplaced. Even the resolutely limited-government Harding and Coolidge Administrations were unable to make a clean sweep of the usurped power; when Herbert "The Great Engineer" Hoover succeeded Coolidge to the Oval Office, the possibility of expunging Wilsonian fascism from Washington expired. The fascisms of the Roosevelt New Deal drove deep anchors into American government; the special interests that emerged in response to changed incentives could never thereafter be defeated.
For some time, Americans retained enough memory of those fascisms, and how they were fastened upon us, to be wary of further ones. Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs, particularly Medicare and Medicaid, were put over on us through gradualistic means; once we had permitted "the camel's nose under the tent," they proved impossible to undo. However, Richard Nixon's wage and price controls were swiftly ripped away, and Jimmy Carter's near-disastrous energy rationing proposals never made it to first base.
Whatever they might have thought of themselves, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter failed to persuade us that they were so smart, so knowledgeable, so moral, and possessed such potent and trustworthy tools of governance, that we could allow them free rein over our freedom.
The first harbinger of a fresh challenge to our resistance was the emergence of Bill Clinton as a national political figure. Clinton, a Rhodes Scholar, could make a credible claim to being smarter than most of the rest of us.[1] His highly intelligent and articulate wife, as annoying as her pretensions were, provided support for his claim. But Clinton was also an astute politician. He had learned something about the palatability of fascist policy; he knew better than to talk it up before it had become inexorable. To the Clintons, speed was the name of the game.
Thus, immediately after Clinton's inauguration, he formed the infamous First-Lady-headed Health Care Task Force, closed its doors to public scrutiny, and urged it to rush forward with all possible speed. The five hundred members of that task force were almost unanimous in their acceptance of its core ethic -- that only they could be trusted to shape the health care industry and its insurers -- and surged forward in near-perfect compliance with Clinton's order of secrecy. Happily, public indignation over the task force, its composition, and its secretiveness rose high enough that it never even released final recommendations. In November 1994, the Second Republican Revolution, powered in large part by the excesses of the first two Clinton years, neutralized the young techno-fascist and kept Washington from running wild. From that point forward, the Clintons had to make do with prestige rather than actual power.
The years of the George W. Bush Administration were too strongly flavored by war for American techno-fascists to make much headway. Bush II era policy missteps were exactly that: missteps, mistakes by a well-meaning president who believed his Congressional caucuses could and should compromise with their adversaries for the good of the nation. But the adverse effects of the resulting overspending cast a pall over Bush's tenure dark enough to eject the GOP from both the White House and Capitol Hill.
Today's techno-fascist Obama Administration rose to power by never, ever letting on what it intended to do once installed in office.
The Obamunist / Democrat campaigns of 2008 ran against the record of the Bush years. They claimed that the Bush Administration, and the Republican legislative majorities of 1994 through 2006, were both fatally inept and insensitive to civil liberties. They attacked Bush-era national-security policy and spending remorselessly, and criticized the handling of the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan with a venom that implied war-crimes trials for the to-be-ejected president and his lieutenants.
It's in the nature of an "against" campaign that by filling the air with denunciations of its opponents, it strives to evade explicit statements about its intentions in power. Thus, the Obamunists were allowed, especially by the Old Media, to get away with non-specific statements about policy preferences. They were allowed to imply, mendaciously, that their intent was to reverse the damage done by Bush-era overspending and military half-measures. As we know today, nothing could have been further from the truth.
But what mattered most to the 2008 Obamunist / Democrat campaign was its successful projection of intellectual and moral preferability to its Republican opponents. Obama himself was presented to us as an intellectual of stature, despite the thinness of his resume, and a person of eminently trustworthy moral quality, despite his political origins and his unsavory associates. Those fabrications, coupled with popular disgust over Bush-era missteps and the two protracted wars, were enough to put our current crop of techno-fascists in power.
Here again, we see the application of lessons learned by our contemporary techno-fascists from the failures of their predecessors:
- Go fast;
- Go in secrecy.
Because the Obamunists succeeded in evading discussion of specifics during the campaign proper, they confronted an unprepared opposition and a befuddled populace when the keys to power were laid in their hands. All the same, in this age of the Internet, such advantages tend not to last long; they knew they had to act swiftly, and as stealthily as possible. And indeed, breakneck speed and complete, closed-doors secrecy have characterized every move of the young administration, from the "stimulus" bill through every other measure it's proposed.
The Obamunist techno-fascists might not have convinced us that they deserve the power to ride roughshod over us, but they've plainly convinced themselves. From January 20, 2009 to today, they've wielded unlimited power over us, with neither remorse nor relief.
Here's where we stand today:
- The ruling techno-fascist clique has displayed a complete lack of scruple about our rights, most especially the rights of private property.
- It dismisses all notions of Constitutional limitations on the federal government.
- It has committed a string of unethical, and in several cases illegal, acts to facilitate the passage of major legislation.
- It has disdained to allow its legislation into public view until it's been passed and signed.
- Its members believe themselves to be above the law -- indeed, that the law is what they say it is, rather than the black-letter words on the page, and may therefore be dispensed with at their option.
- It is supremely disdainful of adverse popular opinion, no matter how large it grows.
- It is willing to assail its opponents with slander and unsupported allegations.
- Above all:
- Either its members continue to believe themselves wise enough to run the country according to their notions, despite the disastrous results to date;
- Or the results to date are exactly what they intended.
And so we have the fusion of the self-glorifying attitude of techno-fascism with the ruthlessness of the power-obsessive: a clear demonstration of what Friedrich Hayek meant about "why the worst get on top."[2]
More anon.
NOTES:
1. Bill Clinton's IQ has been reported as being about 180. Though that doesn't qualify him for Certified Galactic Intellect status, it's six standard deviations higher than the American average.
2. Hayek, Friedrich A., The Road to Serfdom, University Of Chicago Press, 2007.
Comments
I’m failing to see how technofascism is different from the old fashioned kind. Both believe in the power of the state, the power of elites, and both believe in the use of the right tools to achieve these ends. That the right tool is, in the end, almost always a firearm that they get to have and the helots don’t only seems to emphasize that their isnt much point in calling technofascists techno when fascists has fewer letters and takes up less space on the screen.
Posted by on 07/27/2010 at 07:12 PMThink about it from the standpoints of rationale and public palatability, Akaky. Yes, the methods and outcome are the same. But the ingress and the attitudes of the techno-fascist differ considerably from those of the “national greatness” fascist or the straight-up / no-pretenses autocrat. And ingress and attitude make a big difference to the political process.
Put it another way: Could Vladimir Putin or Hugo Chavez rise to power in the U.S. by being elected? And were one of them to come to power by some means or another, would he harbor a sincere conviction that he has a personal “right” to rule?
Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 07/27/2010 at 07:33 PM“six standard deviations higher than the American average”
I knew he wasn’t a standard American deviate.
Posted by CGHill on 07/27/2010 at 09:18 PMI’m failing to see how technofascism is different from the old fashioned kind.
This type of fascism appears to be the type that Jonah Goldberg warns of in “Liberal Fascism”. This is fascism instead of being instituted by force it is advanced by bribing the populace with any amount of free money expropriated from the “other”.
C.S. Lewis said it best:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
This is a very accurate description of the road we’re on.
Posted by on 07/28/2010 at 07:11 AM"Bill Clinton’s IQ has been reported as being about 180.”
Which, QED, is utterly irrelevant in certain circumstances.
Posted by on 07/28/2010 at 09:41 PM
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