The 14 Characteristics of Fascism

[FIND]

by Lawrence Britt
Spring 2003
Free Inquiry magazine

The 14 Characteristics of Fascism

Political scientist Dr. Lawrence Britt recently wrote an article about fascism ("Fascism Anyone?," Free Inquiry, Spring 2003, page 20). Studying the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia), and Pinochet (Chile), Dr. Britt found they all had 14 elements in common. He calls these the identifying characteristics of fascism. The excerpt is in accordance with the magazine's policy.

The 14 characteristics are:

Powerful and Continuing Nationalism
Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights
Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause
The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

Supremacy of the Military
Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

Rampant Sexism
The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and anti-gay legislation and national policy.

Controlled Mass Media
Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.

Obsession with National Security
Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

Religion and Government are Intertwined
Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.

Corporate Power is Protected
The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

Labor Power is Suppressed
Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed .

Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts
Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts.

Obsession with Crime and Punishment
Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

Fraudulent Elections
Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

 

[shagdrum]

Mr. Britt makes some good points as far as he goes, but he does not go far enough. His analysis ignores ideology and focuses instead on the mere political and rhetorical trappings of Fascism (which he arguably defines excessively broadly). You can not understand an ideology simply by looking at those trappings. To understand an ideology you have to look at...the ideology.

Here is an excerpt from a chapter in what is a modern classic of political philosophy; The Road To Serfdom written by Nobel Laureate Friedrich A. Hayek and published in 1944. It focuses specifically on ideology and the linage of ideas that culminated in National Socialism. While not a perfect analogy, many of the ideas mentioned also played a part in the development of Facism, especially the work of Sorel and Syndicalism.

The Socialist Roots of Naziism
Friedrich A. Hayek

It is a common mistake to regard National Socialism as a mere revolt against reason, an irrational movement without intellectual background. If that were so, the movement would be much less dangerous than it is. But nothing could be further from the truth or more misleading. The doctrines of National Socialism are the culmination of a long evolution of thought, a process in which thinkers have had great influence far beyond the confines of Germany have taken part. Whatever one may think of the premises from which they started, it cannot be denied that the men who produced the new doctrines were powerful writers who left the impress of their ideas on the whole of European thought. Their system was developed with ruthless consistency. Once one accepts the premises from which it starts, there is no escape from its logic. It is simply collectivism freed from all traces of an individualist tradition which might hamper its realization.

Though in this development German thinkers have taken the lead, they were by no means alone. Thomas Carlyle and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Auguste Comte and Georges Sorel, are as much a part of that continuous development as any Germans. The development of this strand of thought within Germany has been well traced recently by R. D. Butler in his study of The Roots of National Socialism. But, although its persistence there through a hundred and fifty years in almost unchanged and ever recurring form, which emerges from that study, is rather frightening, it is easy to exaggerate the importance these ideas had in Germany before 1914. They were only one strand of thought among a people then perhaps more varied in its views than any other. And they were on the whole represented by a small minority and held in as great contempt by the majority of' Germans as they were in other countries.

What, then, caused these views held by a reactionary minority finally to gain the support of' the great majority of Germans and practically the whole of Germany's youth? It was not merely the defeat, the suffering, and the wave of nationalism which led to their success. Still less was the cause, as so many people wish to believe, a capitalist reaction against the advance of socialism. On the contrary, the support which brought these ideas to power came precisely from the socialist camp. It was certainly not through the bourgeoisie, but rather through the absence of a strong bourgeoisie, that they were helped to power. The doctrines which had guided the ruling elements in Germany for the past generation were opposed not to the socialism in Marxism but to the liberal elements contained in it, its internationalism and its democracy. And as it became increasingly clear that it was just these elements which formed obstacles to the realization of socialism, the socialists of the Left approached more and more to those of the Right. It was the union of the anticapitalist forces of the Right and of the Left, the fusion of radical and conservative socialism, which drove out from Germany everything that was liberal.

The connection between socialism and nationalism in Germany was close from the beginning. It is significant that the most important ancestors of National Socialism-Fichte, Robertus, and Lassalle-are at the same time acknowledged fathers of socialism. While theoretical socialism in its Marxist form was directing the German labor movement, the authoritarian and nationalist element receded for a time into the background. But not for long. From 1914 onward there arose from the ranks of Marxist socialism one teacher after another who led, not the conservatives and reactionaries, but the hard-working laborer and idealistic youth into the National Socialist fold. It was only thereafter that the tide of nationalist socialism attained major importance and rapidly grew into the Hitlerian doctrine. The war hysteria of 1914, which, just because of the German defeat, was never fully cured, is the beginning of the modern development which produced National Socialism, and it was largely with the assistance of old socialists that it rose during this period.

[for the full chapter, go here]​

Democrat activist, historian and Pulitzer Prize recipient Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. noted that facism was hardly conservative in nature (looking at ideological aspirations) when he wrote in 1948:

The Fascists, for example, were not conservative in any very meaningful sense. They did not wish to preserve the existing order, or even to turn back the clock to some more stable century. They purposefully planned to transform the existing order into a new and all-absorbing authoritarianism, based upon the energies and frustrations of modern industrialism. The Fascists, in a meaningful sense, were revolutionaries.​

Benito Mussolini was the creator of Fascism and the source of the term "totalitarianism". Here are a few excerpts from his 1932 writting, "The Doctrine Of Fascism":

Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal, will of man as a historic entity. It is opposed to classical liberalism which arose as a reaction to absolutism and exhausted its historical function when the State became the expression of the conscience and will of the people. Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts The rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual. And if liberty is to he the attribute of living men and not of abstract dummies invented by individualistic liberalism, then Fascism stands for liberty, and for the only liberty worth having, the liberty of the State and of the individual within the State. The Fascist conception of the State is all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism, is totalitarian, and the Fascist State - a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values - interprets, develops, and potentates the whole life of a people.

***

The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the state, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the state is absolute; individuals and groups are relative. Individuals and groups are admissible insofar as they come within the state.

***

The Fascist state organizes the nation, but it leaves the individual adequate elbow room. It has curtailed useless or harmful liberties while preserving those which are essential. In such matters the individual cannot be the judge, but the state only.​

And finally one more quote from F.A. Hayek's The Road To Serfdom:

individual freedom cannot be reconciled with the supremacy of one single purpose to which the whole society must be entirely and permanently subordinated.​

That last point of Hayek's cannot be stressed enough, especially in contrast to Fascism as Mussolini spelled out.

It is also worth noting that, when Mussolini talks about liberalism, he is referring to classical liberalism. Modern American Conservatism is rooted in that unique form of Classical Liberalism that the Framers enacted in the country. It seeks to preserve that existing order which is uniquely liberal in the classical sense.

 

[FIND]

It seems to me reading more of his work that he avoided ideology because of the variations in ideology. The stuff I posted was what he meant to be the primary defining characteristics shared by all instances of fascism. By the way, if you read that list, ideology can be directly derived from those characteristics.

Also, what is the attempt again to prove that fascism is not a right wing thing? Sure, Fascism is generally revolutionary in nature, but as you can see, it is rooted in conservatism and the twisting and manipulation of conservative values.

It is a lot easier to get people to side with you if they feel they can relate to you, therefore, Fascists generally rely on conservative values to mask their more radical ideals. As to why you wished to bring up Hayek's work on the "link" between socialism and Nazism.... I have no idea what the point of that was. Perhaps you are just trying to create some vague link to prove that socialism is fascism. Obviously you have not read Hayek's work, only the excerpts conservatives champion. You probably don't really understand his politics either.

Trying to argue where conservatism is rooted? Who even brought that up? ...... perhaps you see the similarities between fascism and modern Conservative agenda and that is why you mentioned it Preemptive damage control?

I don't really see those characteristics as particularly broadly defined though.... Don't know where you are getting that from, perhaps you could enlighten me as to why you feel that way?

 

[04SCTLS]

It seems to me reading more of his work that he avoided ideology because of the variations in ideology. The stuff I posted was what he meant to be the primary defining characteristics shared by all instances of fascism. By the way, if you read that list, ideology can be directly derived from those characteristics.

Also, what is the attempt again to prove that fascism is not a right wing thing? Sure, Fascism is generally revolutionary in nature, but as you can see, it is rooted in conservatism and the twisting and manipulation of conservative values.

It is a lot easier to get people to side with you if they feel they can relate to you, therefore, Fascists generally rely on conservative values to mask their more radical ideals. As to why you wished to bring up Hayek's work on the "link" between socialism and Nazism.... I have no idea what the point of that was. Perhaps you are just trying to create some vague link to prove that socialism is fascism. Obviously you have not read Hayek's work, only the excerpts conservatives champion. You probably don't really understand his politics either.

Trying to argue where conservatism is rooted? Who even brought that up? ...... perhaps you see the similarities between fascism and modern Conservative agenda and that is why you mentioned it Preemptive damage control?

I don't really see those characteristics as particularly broadly defined though.... Don't know where you are getting that from, perhaps you could enlighten me as to why you feel that way?

Our current crop of Nazis and white supremacists consider themselves conservatives and not liberals or socialists.

I was posting about this a while ago when CammerFe quipped the even the Nazis don't want to be called liberals.

 

[FIND]

Our current crop of Nazis and white supremacists consider themselves conservatives and not liberals or socialists.

I was posting about this a while ago when CammerFe quipped the even the Nazis don't want to be called liberals.

That too is true. For many people promoting Fascist beliefs, or other "revolutionary" beliefs, to them, they believe they are conservative in many ways. KKK for instance believes themselves conservative in the fact that they want to restore america to its "glory days" of separation, white supremacy and protestant christian ideology. Of course, most conservatives wouldn't call the KKK conservative, and rightfully so, as they obviously are a far different kind of conservatism, but one also cannot deny that they are, on some issues, similar to conservatives, even if they are only using some of the ideas and twisting or perverting those ideas. This is kinda why I always make a point of arguing that socialism does not equal fascism, or other things of that nature, just that one cannot blur the lines just for convenient argumentation.

Though, still, Nazism embraces so few socialist ideologies, it is kinda silly to equate the two. One can acknowledge that there are some similarities or ideas borrowed, but yeah......

 

[shagdrum]

It seems to me reading more of his work that he avoided ideology because of the variations in ideology.

So, you understand a political ideology by intentionally avoiding ideology?

Political scientist Lawrence Britt avoids looking at ideology and instead focuses on the trappings of ideological governance while effectively defining down the ideology in question (fascism). You don't define an ideology simply by the incidental aspects of policy stemming from that ideology unless you are looking to distort that ideology toward political ends. Political, pragmatic and a host of other considerations are involved in the development of policy that can (and often do) cloud ideology and water down (and even counter) it's influence. Focusing simply on those policy trappings inherently distorts that ideology.

While Dr. Britt's study does make some valid and worthwhile points, it is very easy to draw the wrong conclusions from it and for it to be distorted into a source of disinformation. What Britt's study says and what many are drawing from it are two very different things. It is not claiming anything about the ideology but simply the trappings of ideology; the similarities in policy. Inferring anything more is going beyond the scope of Britt's study.

Unfortunately, in many areas, the field of political science has long been moving away from anything more then a token inquiry into political philosophy, much to it's detriment. It is also generally dominated by very well read, intelligent leftists (at least when it comes to domestic policy), which can make for some unique learning opportunities.

One of the most effective means of distorting ideology involves intentionally avoiding ideology and legitimate inquiry into it's philosophical roots, the lineage of it's ideas, it's internal logic and the basic premises upon which it is based. Instead of honest inquiry, you get what Susan Haack calls "fake inquiry".

A fake reasoner is concerned, not to find out how things really are, but to advance himself by making a case for some proposition to the truth-value of which he is indifferent.

***
The fake inquirer tries to make a case for some proposition advancing which he thinks will enhance his own reputation, but to the truth-value of which he is indifferent. (Such indifference is, as Harry Frankfurt once shrewdly observed, the characteristic attitude of the bullsh[!]ter.) Both the sham and the fake inquirer, but especially the sham, are motivated to avoid examining any apparently contrary evidence or argument too closely, to play down its importance or impugn its relevance, to contort themselves explaining it away. And, since people often mistake the impressively obscure for the profound, both, but especially the fake reasoner, are motivated to obfuscate.​

'04, what evidence do you have that, "Nazis and white supremacists consider themselves conservatives"? It can be said that most MSM outlets view them as such, but that is a long way from the groups in question viewing themselves as such. It could be said that the fact that "Nazi and White Supremacist groups" are perceived as such says more about the worldview, bias, ignorance and group think inherent in the MSM beltway culture and how ubiquitous that cultural bias is in information dissemination. In fact, identity politics have long been identified with the left. Slavery, segregation, etc. were all unique to the DEMOCRAT party while abolitionism was unique to the REPUBLICAN party.

Frankly, I am really tired of these lies about conservatives being "racist" in some way. It is rooted in a self-serving and one-sided "analysis" of federal legislation and election cycles in the 1960's, combined with subtle redefinitions of certain concepts like "bigotry", "tolerance", "racism" etc. and spread for decades in both academia, leftist thought and ultimately accepted as fact by the entertainment industry and the mainstream media.

 

[cammerfe]

Sharing

You and I also share some characteristics. One head each, finger-and-toe-count, etc. But you still seem to be a liberal/progressive and I'm more conservative than anything else. So, what's your point?

KS

 

[04SCTLS]

'04, what evidence do you have that, "Nazis and white supremacists consider themselves conservatives"? It can be said that most MSM outlets view them as such, but that is a long way from the groups in question viewing themselves as such. It could be said that the fact that "Nazi and White Supremacist groups" are perceived as such says more about the worldview, bias, ignorance and group think inherent in the MSM beltway culture and how ubiquitous that cultural bias is in information dissemination. In fact, identity politics have long been identified with the left. Slavery, segregation, etc. were all unique to the DEMOCRAT party while abolitionism was unique to the REPUBLICAN party.

Frankly, I am really tired of these lies about conservatives being "racist" in some way. It is rooted in a self-serving and one-sided "analysis" of federal legislation and election cycles in the 1960's, combined with subtle redefinitions of certain concepts like "bigotry", "tolerance", "racism" etc. and spread for decades in both academia, leftist thought, the entertainment industry and the mainstream media.

Shag
We went through this here.

http://www.lincolnvscadillac.com/showthread.php?t=66899

Please read what's been posted already
I thought you were the dean of LVC here or something.

I'm not going to rehash or find more proof that these people call themselves "moral conservatives" among other labels.
They certainly don't call themselves or act like liberals.
So they're a nuisance with their extremism to true conservatives.

 

[shagdrum]

Shag
We went through this here.

http://www.lincolnvscadillac.com/showthread.php?t=66899

Touche.

I have two points though.

First, As Cal pointed out in quoting the article in that thread:

Murdough has said he picked the GOP not because he considered himself a party member, but simply because it was the easiest way to get onto the ballot. It costs only a few dollars, while filing as an independent would require 150 signatures.​

The decision was simply monetary, not ideological.

Second, this is ONE GUY. At best, it is anecdotal evidence that doesn't logically show any connection to your assertion other than an incidental one unique to that one man. You can hardly logically conclude that neo-nazi and KKK as a whole identify themselves as conservatives. To do so in light of this fact alone would be a hasty generalization.

At most, you can say that these modern white supremacist groups are reactionary. In that way they can be considered similar to conservatives (as well as any ideology in certain circumstances). But that similarity is completely superficial, not ideological.

 

[04SCTLS]

Touche.

I have two points though.

First, As Cal pointed out in quoting the article in that thread:

Murdough has said he picked the GOP not because he considered himself a party member, but simply because it was the easiest way to get onto the ballot. It costs only a few dollars, while filing as an independent would require 150 signatures.
​

The decision was simply monetary, not ideological.

Second, this is ONE GUY. At best, it is anecdotal evidence that doesn't logically show any connection to your assertion other than an incidental one unique to that one man. You can hardly logically conclude that neo-nazi and KKK as a whole identify themselves as conservatives. To do so in light of this fact alone would be a hasty generalization.

At most, you can say that these modern white supremacist groups are reactionary. In that way they can be considered similar to conservatives. But the similarity is completely superficial, not ideological.

A lapse in the republican rules let this guy run as a republican.
The world works on rules.
Anyways the thread winner was cammer's quip
that even the nazis don't want to be called liberals
so I'll leave it at that

 

[FIND]

So, you understand a political ideology by intentionally avoiding ideology?

I didn't think you were talking about political ideology, I thought you were talking about social ideology or religious ideology.

In that case, you are obviously just arguing that this is wrong because as I noticed with your first post, you just didn't like the similarities between fascism and current conservatism. Don't know why you are so hurt by that, I didn't say conservatives are fascists because there are some similarities in their ideology..... Political ideology is OBVIOUSLY described in this list, however, the list, as I said before, is just a list to show common traits among fascist governments.....

Frankly, I am really tired of these lies about conservatives being "racist" in some way. It is rooted in a self-serving and one-sided "analysis" of federal legislation and election cycles in the 1960's, combined with subtle redefinitions of certain concepts like "bigotry", "tolerance", "racism" etc. and spread for decades in both academia, leftist thought and ultimately accepted as fact by the entertainment industry and the mainstream media.

I never said that conservatives were racists. You are the only one making that connection. What I said is that groups like the KKK think they are conservative because they believe they are conserving "traditional american" values..... the fact that modern conservatives do not share those values is moot. Modern conservatives were not the focus of how these groups view themselves.

Just to be clear since you are letting your rage get ahead of you, all I was talking about was the reason THOSE groups view THEMSELVES as conservatives. I never said conservatives were racists. I also never said conservatives were fascists. You are the only one who has been trying to defend against the link there.

Why is philosophy and politics to you only about attacking and defending? Haven't you ever once thought about trying to have a discussion and expand your knowledge beyond what you can learn on a conservative blog? You are always on the attack or the defense. How about if you want to participate in a discussion about fascism, you try and keep the discussion about fascism, instead of trying to find a way to defend conservatism, prove liberals are fascists and show that socialism will lead to nazism and the antichrist? Jeez. It was just a snippet from something a guy wrote identifying the common traits among fascist governments. You know, the things that you will ALWAYS find where you find fascism. Finding "Powerful and Continuing Nationalism" does not in any way suggest Fascism. If you find all 14 of these traits among a group though, you may wish to look closer at their politics.....

Now, if you wish to continue arguing that this list is somehow inaccurate or wrong, why don't you go ahead and show me how the items on this list are not characteristic of a FASCIST government?

 

[JohnnyBz00LS]

Frankly, I am really tired of these lies about conservatives being "racist" in some way. It is rooted in a self-serving and one-sided "analysis" of federal legislation and election cycles in the 1960's, combined with subtle redefinitions of certain concepts like "bigotry", "tolerance", "racism" etc. and spread for decades in both academia, leftist thought and ultimately accepted as fact by the entertainment industry and the mainstream media.

No matter how much you and other conservatives would like to re-write that chapter of history, the facts remain.

Gov. Barbour's civil rights fairy tale

By Eugene Robinson
Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who may seek the Republican nomination for president, is trying to sell the biggest load of revisionist nonsense about race, politics and the South that I've ever heard. Ever.

He has the gall to try to portray Southern Republicans as having been enlightened supporters of the civil rights movement all along. I can't decide whether this exercise in rewriting history should be described as cynical or sinister. Whichever it is, the record has to be set straight.

In a recent interview with Human Events, a conservative magazine and Web site, Barbour gave his version of how the South, once a Democratic stronghold, became a Republican bastion. The 62-year-old Barbour claimed that it was "my generation" that led the switch: "my generation, who went to integrated schools. I went to integrated college -- never thought twice about it." The "old Democrats" fought integration tooth and nail, Barbour said, but "by my time, people realized that was the past, it was indefensible, it wasn't gonna be that way anymore. And so the people who really changed the South from Democrat to Republican was a different generation from those who fought integration."

Not a word of this is true.

Barbour did not attend "integrated schools," if he's referring to his primary and secondary education. Mississippi ignored the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that was meant to end separate-but-unequal school systems. Eventually, officials implemented a "freedom of choice" desegregation plan -- but black parents who tried to send their children to white schools were threatened and intimidated, including by cross-burnings. Finally, in 1969, the Supreme Court ordered Mississippi to integrate its schools immediately. The long-stalled change took place in 1970.

That was long after Barbour had graduated from high school in Yazoo City and gone on to attend the University of Mississippi -- the "integrated college" he mentioned in the interview. The federal government had forced Ole Miss to admit its first black student, James Meredith, in 1962; he had to be escorted onto the campus by U.S. marshals as white students rioted in protest.

The following year, a second black student was admitted. In the mid-1960s, when Barbour was attending Ole Miss, it's no wonder that he "never thought twice" about integration. There were only a handful of black students, and by all accounts -- except Barbour's -- they were isolated and ostracized by their white peers.

The governor's assertion that segregation was a relic of the past "by my time" is ludicrous. He was 16, certainly old enough to pay attention, during the Freedom Summer of 1964, when civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan near Philadelphia, Miss. He was a young adult, on his way to becoming a lawyer, when the public schools were forced to integrate. I'll bet Barbour could remember those days if he tried a little harder.

Equally wrong -- and perhaps deliberately disingenuous -- is his made-up narrative of how the South turned Republican. Barbour's fairy tale doesn't remotely resemble what really happened.

As he signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law, Lyndon Johnson is supposed to have said that the Democratic Party had "lost the South for a generation." Among those who voted against the landmark legislation was Sen. Barry Goldwater, who became Johnson's opponent in the presidential race that fall.

Johnson scored a landslide victory. Goldwater took his home state of Arizona and just five others: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. It was the first time those Deep South states had voted for a Republican presidential candidate since Reconstruction -- and marked the moment when, for many Southern voters, the GOP became the party of white racial grievance. It wasn't "a different generation from those who fought integration" that made the switch. Integration was the whole reason for the switch.

Now, Haley Barbour is not stupid. Why is he telling this ridiculous story?

Maybe this is the way he wishes things had been. You'll recall that earlier this year, when asked about a Confederate history month proclamation in Virginia that didn't mention the detail known as slavery, Barbour said the whole thing "doesn't amount to diddly." Most charitably, all this might be called denial.

It's much more likely, however, that Barbour has a political purpose. The Republican Party is trying to shake its image as hostile to African Americans and other minorities. It would be consistent with this attempted makeover to pretend that the party never sought, and won, the votes of die-hard segregationists.

One problem, though: It did.

 

[shagdrum]

Johnny brings up the leftist Southern Strategy narrative. While this issue has already been discussed on this forum a few times, and it is easy to look past as meaningless posturing, it is worth the time to critically examine it because of the inherent and profound logical consequences of that narrative.

The leftist Southern Strategy narrative is the basis of the entire leftist narrative of "conservatives as racists". Without the Southern Strategy narrative, the entire notion of conservative racism logically falls apart.

If the leftist Southern Strategy narrative is accepted as a self-evident truth, conservative racism does not need to be proven, but simply confirmed in individual circumstances (an effective way to marginalize). When that "self evident truth" is accepted as an (often unstated) premise in analysis of conservative thought, that analysis is purely academic as conservative thought it inherently illegitimate because it is based on a flawed, irrational and invalid theory of social causation rooted in bigotry.

So is the leftist "Southern Strategy" narrative accurate?

Gerard Alexander had done a yeoman's work on this issue. His essay, The Myth Of The Racist Republicans gives a good rundown of the Southern Strategy narrative as well as pointing out the logical flaws in the analysis that justifies it. Here are a few excerpts:

The Myth of the Racist Republicans
by Gerard Alexander​

A myth about conservatism is circulating in academia and journalism and has spread to the 2004 presidential campaign. It goes something like this: the Republican Party assembled a national majority by winning over Southern white voters; Southern white voters are racist; therefore, the GOP is racist. Sometimes the conclusion is softened, and Republicans are convicted merely of base opportunism: the GOP is the party that became willing to pander to racists. Either way, today's Republican Party—and by extension the conservative movement at its heart—supposedly has revealed something terrible about itself.

* * *​

Now to be sure, the GOP had a Southern strategy. Willing to work with, rather than against, the grain of Southern opinion, local Republicans ran some segregationist candidates in the 1960s. And from the 1950s on, virtually all national and local GOP candidates tried to craft policies and messages that could compete for the votes of some pretty unsavory characters. This record is incontestable. It is also not much of a story—that a party acted expediently in an often nasty political context.

The new myth is much bolder than this. It insists that these events should decisively shape our understanding of conservatism and the modern Republican Party. Dan Carter writes that today's conservatism must be traced directly back to the "politics of rage" that George Wallace blended from "racial fear, anticommunism, cultural nostalgia, and traditional right-wing economics." Another scholar, Joseph Aistrup, claims that Reagan's 1980 Southern coalition was "the reincarnation of the Wallace movement of 1968." For the Black brothers, the GOP had once been the "party of Abraham Lincoln," but it became the "party of Barry Goldwater," opposed to civil rights and black interests. It is only a short step to the Democrats' insinuation that the GOP is the latest exploiter of the tragic, race-based thread of U.S. history. In short, the GOP did not merely seek votes expediently; it made a pact with America's devil.

The mythmakers typically draw on two types of evidence. First, they argue that the GOP deliberately crafted its core messages to accommodate Southern racists. Second, they find proof in the electoral pudding: the GOP captured the core of the Southern white backlash vote. But neither type of evidence is very persuasive. It is not at all clear that the GOP's policy positions are sugar-coated racist appeals. And election results show that the GOP became the South's dominant party in the least racist phase of the region's history, and got—and stays—that way as the party of the upwardly mobile, more socially conservative, openly patriotic middle-class, not of white solidarity.

Let's start with policies. Like many others, Carter and the Black brothers argue that the GOP appealed to Southern racism not explicitly but through "coded" racial appeals. Carter is representative of many when he says that Wallace's racialism can be seen, varying in style but not substance, in "Goldwater's vote against the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, in Richard Nixon's subtle manipulation of the busing issue, in Ronald Reagan's genial demolition of affirmative action, in George Bush's use of the Willie Horton ads, and in Newt Gingrich's demonization of welfare mothers."

The problem here is that Wallace's segregationism was obviously racist, but these other positions are not obviously racist. This creates an analytic challenge that these authors do not meet. If an illegitimate viewpoint (racism) is hidden inside another viewpoint, that second view—to be a useful hiding place—must be one that can be held for entirely legitimate (non-racist) reasons. Conservative intellectuals might not always linger long enough on the fact that opposition to busing and affirmative action can be disguised racism. On the other hand, these are also positions that principled non-racists can hold. To be persuasive, claims of coding must establish how to tell which is which. Racial coding is often said to occur when voters are highly prone to understanding a non-racist message as a proxy for something else that is racist. This may have happened in 1964, when Goldwater, who neither supported segregation nor called for it, employed the term "states' rights," which to many whites in the Deep South implied the continuation of Jim Crow.

The problem comes when we try to extend this forward. Black and Black try to do this by showing that Nixon and Reagan crafted positions on busing, affirmative action, and welfare reform in a political climate in which many white voters doubted the virtues of preferential hiring, valued individual responsibility, and opposed busing as intrusive. To be condemned as racist "code," the GOP's positions would have to come across as proxies for these views -and in turn these views would have to be racist. The problem is that these views are not self-evidently racist. Many scholars simply treat them as if they were. Adding insult to injury, usually they don't even pause to identify when views like opposition to affirmative action would not be racist.

In effect, these critics want to have it both ways: they acknowledge that these views could in principle be non-racist (otherwise they wouldn't be a "code" for racism) but suggest they never are in practice (and so can be reliably treated as proxies for racism). The result is that their claims are non-falsifiable because they are tautological: these views are deemed racist because they are defined as racist. This amounts to saying that opposition to the policies favored by today's civil rights establishment is a valid indicator of racism. One suspects these theorists would, quite correctly, insist that people can disagree with the Israeli government without being in any way anti-Semitic. But they do not extend the same distinction to this issue. This is partisanship posturing as social science.

The Southern Strategy

This bias is evident also in how differently they treat the long Democratic dominance of the South. Carter and the Black brothers suggest that the accommodation of white racism penetrates to the very soul of modern conservatism. But earlier generations of openly segregationist Southerners voted overwhelmingly for Woodrow Wilson's and Franklin Roosevelt's Democratic Party, which relaxed its civil rights stances accordingly. This coalition passed much of the New Deal legislation that remains the basis of modern liberalism. So what does the segregationist presence imply for the character of liberalism at its electoral and legislative apogee? These scholars sidestep the question by simply not discussing it. This silence implies that racism and liberalism were simply strange political bedfellows, without any common values.

But the commonality, the philosophical link, is swiftly identified once the Democrats leave the stage. In study after study, authors say that "racial and economic conservatism" married white Southerners to the GOP after 1964. So whereas historically accidental events must have led racists to vote for good men like FDR, after 1964 racists voted their conscience. How convenient. And how easy it would be for, say, a libertarian conservative like Walter Williams to generate a counter-narrative that exposes statism as the philosophical link between segregation and liberalism's economic populism.

Yet liberal commentators commit a further, even more obvious, analytic error. They assume that if many former Wallace voters ended up voting Republican in the 1970s and beyond, it had to be because Republicans went to the segregationist mountain, rather than the mountain coming to them. There are two reasons to question this assumption. The first is the logic of electoral competition. Extremist voters usually have little choice but to vote for a major party which they consider at best the lesser of two evils, one that offers them little of what they truly desire. Segregationists were in this position after 1968, when Wallace won less than 9% of the electoral college and Nixon became president anyway, without their votes. Segregationists simply had very limited national bargaining power. In the end, not the Deep South but the GOP was the mountain.

Second, this was borne out in how little the GOP had to "offer," so to speak, segregationists for their support after 1968, even according to the myth's own terms. Segregationists wanted policies that privileged whites. In the GOP, they had to settle for relatively race-neutral policies: opposition to forced busing and reluctant coexistence with affirmative action. The reason these policies aren't plausible codes for real racism is that they aren't the equivalents of discrimination, much less of segregation.

Why did segregationists settle for these policies rather than continue to vote Democratic? The GOP's appeal was mightily aided by none other than the Democratic Party itself, which was lurching leftward in the 1970s, becoming, as the contemporary phrase had it, the party of "acid, amnesty, and abortion." Among other things, the Democrats absorbed a civil rights movement that was itself expanding, and thus diluting, its agenda to include economic redistributionism, opposition to the Vietnam War, and Black Power. The many enthusiasms of the new Democratic Party drove away suburban middle-class voters almost everywhere in the country, not least the South.

Given that trend, the GOP did not need to become the party of white solidarity in order to attract more voters. The fact that many former Wallace supporters ended up voting Republican says a lot less about the GOP than it does about segregationists' collapsing political alternatives. Kevin Phillips was hardly coy about this in his Emerging Republican Majority. He wrote in 1969 that Nixon did not "have to bid much ideologically" to get Wallace's electorate, given its limited power, and that moderation was far more promising for the GOP than anything even approaching a racialist strategy. While "the Republican Party cannot go to the Deep South"—meaning the GOP simply would not offer the policies that whites there seemed to desire most—"the Deep South must soon go to the national GOP," regardless.

[for the rest of the essay, including a very thurough (if dry) analysis of electoral patterns, go here]​

Essentially, what the left is doing is looking at a number of cherry picked, out of context coincidences and illogically assuming causation that is ideologically convenient.

In fact, when you actually examine all the facts to try and logically infer causation, the leftist Southern Strategy narrative holds little water. Far from Republicans selling their soul to win the votes of southern racists, those southern racists had little option but to vote for Republicans. The leftists Southern Strategy narrative spins it 180 degrees in the name of political expediency.

This narrative is very effective because it arouses strong indignation which often overrides reason in favor of emotion. This is why far to many leftists accept this narrative without critical examination. Not surprisingly, this narrative is generally accepted by leftist academics and the mainstream media which leads to it becoming ubiquitous in most media outlets.

This is why the claims that bigotry on the part of tea partiers, Prop 8 supporters, the Arizona anti-immigration law, those opposed to the Ground Zero Mosque, Beck, Limbaugh, etc. is given so much weight in the news with nothing more then hearsay and speculation for evidence. It confirms the leftist worldview and, specifically, their (mis)understanding of conservatism.

In fact, since this narrative serves to delegitimize conservatism, it is one of the biggest reasons for leftist ignorance of conservative thought.

The problem is that the narrative is a LIE, It is one of the most effective pieces of misinformation and political propaganda in American politics (at least in the past century), but it is still nothing more then a LIE.

However, without that Southern Strategy narrative, the leftist view of conservatives as racists logically crumbles so they will desperately cling to it and get very nasty in the face of any reasonable challenge to that narrative, as Johnny just demonstrated.

 

[FIND]

Standard shag wall o copy/paste

Hey, instead of a bunch of mindless drivel, how about some facts to back it up? Keep trying to rewrite history.

besides, your point is moot. No one in this thread is saying conservatives or republicans are racists as we have told you several times. What we were talking about is the ways that a racist may claim the label conservative. Kinda like how Fox News calls itself "fair and balanced" - doesn't meant they are fair or balanced, just means that from their perspective they are.

 

[Calabrio]

A racist can claim any label they want.
Are the black panthers a tolerant group? Do they define all liberals?

And what do conservatives, in the classical liberal tradition, have in common with neo-nazis or klansmen? This is a serious question. If anyone has an answer, I'd like to hear it.

Arguably, those groups have more in connection with the political left, because both the nazi party in America and the KKK have direct, historic connections with the American political left in the 1930s and prior. Nazism, fascism, and communism were all considered related experiments in the same spirit as American progressiveness.

However, the political left in this country has condemned the racial hatred of those groups, and including the racial hate associated with their progressive roots, in modern times.

So, ultimately, a thread like this is really just intended to perpetuate the false association of racism with the "political right" in this country.

 

[fossten]

So, ultimately, a thread like this is really just intended to perpetuate the false association of racism with the "political right" in this country.

"Perpetuate" and "false" are synonyms for Johnny.

 

[FIND]

A racist can claim any label they want.
Are the black panthers a tolerant group? Do they define all liberals?

And what do conservatives, in the classical liberal tradition, have in common with neo-nazis or klansmen? This is a serious question. If anyone has an answer, I'd like to hear it.

Arguably, those groups have more in connection with the political left, because both the nazi party in America and the KKK have direct, historic connections with the American political left in the 1930s and prior. Nazism, fascism, and communism were all considered related experiments in the same spirit as American progressiveness.

However, the political left in this country has condemned the racial hatred of those groups, and including the racial hate associated with their progressive roots, in modern times.

The only person in this thread who has said anything about the "political right" being associated with racism before your post was Shag. The only point I ever made was that groups, just like you said, may claim labels by saying they have something similar with the group they are claiming the label of. That doesn't make them a part of that group or representative of that group. It is historical fact that racism was widespread and systematic in the south in the past, by a majority of nearly all political groups in the south at the time. What relevance that has to the republican party today, I don't know. I don't even know why Shag is so set on arguing about it. The republican party today is not the "republican party" of the civil war era.

So, ultimately, a thread like this is really just intended to perpetuate the false association of racism with the "political right" in this country.

No. This thread was talking about fascism until Shag came in and went off on his tangent. This thread cannot possibly be intended to perpetuate an association of racism with the "political right" in this country unless it is your statement that the "political right" are fascists.



I am curious though, what are these direct historical connections you are speaking of? Especially in the case of the KKK pre-1930. The only support I have seen for your argument so far is the fact that they had radical beliefs, therefore they must not be right wing according to you and shag......