Re: US On The Road To Fascism?

        I guess I should clarify.  
        I cannot speak to the motives behind the original posting
(forwarded to me which I forwarded to WSN), and I agree with Louis'
assertion that hysteria is a good way to keep the troops mobilised.
However, I still agree with the overall thrust of it for the reasons I
mentioned in my own post in reaction.  The actual time-scale involved in
this conflict (over modes of globalization) is not the issue for me.  What
*IS* the issue is the fact of the conflict itself.  I have no illusions
about the Democratic party--I voted for Nader myself.  Furthermore I know
that patronage is among the motivations for some of the public players.
But that should not obscure the deeper reality: Globlization today is a
process of acceleration in the ability of Capital to vitiate the effective
power of the nation-state, thereby eroding the old core-periphery
hierarchy BETWEEN states and substituting instead that hierarchy WITHIN
them.  The NECESSARY consequence is income polarization within the core
replicating that within the periphery, with a concommitant political
structure based on coercion.
        However cynical the Democratic party's players may be, their
legitimacy has been based upon the post-war "social structure of
accumulation" of social democracy--albeit in an extremely weakened form.
As is everywhere true throughout the core, social democracy is
incompatible with the competitive "rigors" of globalization, hence the
multiple crises of national health care in England & Canada, the collapse
of the Italian CP & other strong unions, the rise of down-sized skinhead
youth across the core (& their left-anarchist polarised brethren), etc.,
etc., etc.
        The electoral battle is a distant echo of that very real struggle
against the residues of a no-longer-tenable social democracy as filtered
through the lens of competing sectors of capital.  Not that either Gore or
Clinton *ever were* genuine social democrats!  Rather, their covering
IDEOLOGIES were the inherited & vitiated cultural echos of social
democracy.  Put simply, the electoral battle is a shadow-box on the walls
of Plato's cave.  But let us not confuse their dismissal as shadows with
the dismissal of the very real battle raging in the fire that illumines
them.

--Peter

PS--My name is indeed the same as the opera.  My parents always claimed
innocence of intention.