Orcinus: The fascination with fascism

[WoodrowFan]

Orcinus (my fav blog) has a nice piece for Friday on fascism and it's growth in the US. http://www.dneiwert.blogspot.com/

"The latent fascists who are the biggest problem right now are not Republican leaders. It is their oxyconned, Foxcized, Freeped-out, fanatic army of followers, comprising ordinary people, who pose the long-term problem. Drawing them back from the abyss is the real challenge that confronts us. "

"Fascism does not come with brownshirts, stormtroopers and grandiloquent displays of power. Those are what happens when it's too late. It comes with a job and a home in the suburbs. It disguises itself in a surface reasonableness that's easily scratched to find the festering hatred and fear boiling beneath. I was struck, in fact, by how much the white supremacists I met and interviewed and dealt with were like people I grew up around: proud, hard-working, but not very succesful; a little ignorant, a little gullible, but sincere in believing they were doing the right thing. Primed, in other words, for an appeal based in the politics of resentment.

Faced with this reality, it became a point of interest to me to understand fascism itself and its underlying psychology. It is not a typical "ism" in that its ideology is indistinct at best; it is, as I've often discussed, better understood as a cultural and political pathology, which like psychological pathologies comprises not a single core principle but a constellation of traits, beliefs, and behaviors. Fascism happens first on a personal level. Followers are not "brainwashed" -- they join avidly, of their own accord. "