Of course, you emit a glimmer of hope for yourself when you wrote that human self organization is what matters and not right and left semantics. Of course, this revelation is so 1917 (and again 1932).

You were wrong when you stated that communism is a path to fascism. Fascism depends on the organization of the middle class to support it. Communism, which we will look at as it actually exists and as it will only exist – with a totalitarian aristocracy at its helm, only exists when that support is eradicated. The eradication is accomplished through cultural eradication. Fascism is accomplished through cultural promotion. These two paths lead to widely differing social structure, no matter how many individualists are prone to pointing out superficial, meaningless coincidences in government policy. The social structure is what matters, and is what defines the government. This is because, whether or not the government is forced into place ahead of the structure, the structure is ultimately what keeps it in place or forces its ousting. The nation defines the nation, not the government nor even economic policy (communist countries can be capitalist and fascist countries can be socialist). Fascism and communism, while sharing some superficial qualities such as authoritarianism (which exists in all governments), are not only antipodal but are also mutually antidotal. It’s amusing when individual bloggers think that they’re brighter than the sum of fascist thinkers from the early twentieth century to the present. Your ‘revelation’ that communism is a path to fascism is ridiculous in its lack of awareness of its idiosyncratic existence. However, I’ll repeal my appeal to authority for the sake of the argument.

Fascism is collectivism based in shared culture. Communism is individualism based in perceived economic interest (or whatever other cultural surrogate is used in the future to replace the weakening of deep cultural ties). All individualist philosophies, from Christianity down the line, exist only to convince people not to exert power through co-operation either in self-defense of group interest. In other words, they exist to weaken cultural ties to the end of weakening political power. The end result is the communist state, which can take many forms as long as the aforementioned social conditions are met. Once they are met, overt individualism can be reigned in and replaced with the false culture of the class war. Communism depends on breaking societies down and building them up again using easily manipulated shared interests such as economics. Communism is literally the process of turning a slavery resistant nation into a nation of slaves. It happens 100% in the social sphere. All incidental economic propaganda is secondary to the end social goal, and can be manipulated as necessary across the gamut of economic policy. There is no political power and resultant resistance to strong, politically coherent groups without community collective interest. An individual can never and will never defeat an army.

I’ll look forward to more cogent, fact supported assertions as to why you think the new right will destroy Europe in the comment section of your more recent post. As it stands, I only read hyperbolic assertions. No offense. I’d like to believe that this blog actually has a point of view other than serving as a logic trap for conservatives wandering too far to the right. Right now, it seems to only be ushering them back into pre-revolutionary traditionalism (and the associated individualism and universalism) that, as we saw, inevitably leads to where we are.

It is more correct to think of fascism as the previous, failed generation of neo-reaction.

Progressives want to go forward. Reactionaries want to abandon modernity and return to the glorious, partially imaginary past.

Neo-reactionaries want to marry modernity and reaction. Fascists also wanted to marry modernity and reaction. They attempted to do so, but things didn’t work out so well for them.

The stakes are high gentlemen, don’t screw this up.

@ admin – Agree

Look at Luther, now what did he do? DO. And who did it? DID. IT.

Is THEDEN which are apparently young men who want a future high culture? The Antigones and other sparks and flames of resistance in Europe? Resistance in the US?

Yale and Harvard are going to stop being Hedge Funds with PC seminaries attached?

They can’t. They’re quite trapped in their own doomed logic and imperatives. For instance the Bernanke attempted a modest tailoring of QE to $70 Billion a month. That got stopped quick. Don’t ignore they’re in the inflationary trap now.

Serious answer: rules of thumb can.

Predicates for action* can.

My people lack leaders, and that is all. They lack a coherent vision [I’m telling you it’s atavism and restoration], the leaders are stay at home moms applying for tax exempt status from the IRS and wondering how they got derailed. That is exactly the Tea Party Profile, no it’s not Koch astroturf. Their leaders are: Moms. They looked at the finances, TARP and Obamacare, shrieked and organized the Tea Party around conference calls on their calling cards from the kitchen tables, followed by email and [when men showed up] social media.

They don’t need an agonizing debate over how communist we are or not, they need rules of thumb for action*. For men . Currently the leaders such as they are have a primary job title of MOM. Mommy don’t do barricades.

You don’t win with that, but it’s the progress made. I would estimate quite effectively stalled. Certainly since the IRS and the Alphabet soup mix gang bang after 2010 worked it will be repeated. That’s it, done.

What you have here is a proto-mass. It gets plenty of stimulus and a rich growth material [outrage] from the Progs, but then founders.

* I did not say activism

Elite and bourgeoisie make for crude actors, because the important question is how different elements within these classes relate to one another. The problem faced by the 19th century intelligentsia was that the stable forms of the 20th century were to be inaesthetic, mass-propaganda administrative states. No system of norms or law deals with the transition from 19th century life to that type of state, nor is it palatable, nor did everyone predict such an outcome.

It would have been desirable for every elite to have united in developing a large administrative bureaucracy, propaganda saturation and the arcane tools of the progessive state that we enjoy discussing before the turn of the century.* However, I don’t think an elite of any probable composition or norms would have done so. The reactionary Russian government responded very poorly to this challenge, balking the growth of an efficient bureaucracy and alienating the moderate liberals; but surely it is the least bourgeois administration one can imagine at the turn of the 20th century.

So, although the end products of centralisation and modern technology are self-evidently stable, if not especially desirable, the process of transition and botched adjustment created huge internal disputes, brought territorial elites into conflict and disrupted the old system of law, politics and warfare that had allowed differences to be resolved sanely.

Positive feedback–belief in the stability of a way of life makes it stable–is a parsimonious explanation for the suddenness of the cataclysm.

*They could hardly have developed new countervailing legal forms, which I think is feasible and appropriate now.

National Socialism was pro-private property? No, it was what Sheldon Richman said: socialism with a capitalist veneer. At most it was intermediate between Communism and classical Liberalism. Here’s Bryan Caplan:

“The main difference between the German Social Democrats and the Communists was primarily what are you going to do with agriculture? The Social Democrats and the Nazis decided they weren’t going to take the peasants’ land away from them because it didn’t work out very well when Lenin tried it and then when Stalin went ahead and actually did it because there was a tremendous decline in productivity. In terms of industry, not a total takeover, but the Nazis expanded it further. Defense industry; new government industries built up. The way often described–may be apocryphal–interview with Herman Rauschning, book on Hitler Speaks, conversations with Hitler and wrote them up: We don’t need to take your cow so long as we own you. Who cares about whether we actually own the firm in name? So long as we have complete control over the people running it, that’s good enough.”

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/06/caplan_on_hayek.html

As Hayek said, the essence of ownership is control. Separated from control, “ownership” is meaningless.

Despite the advances of fascism in the direction of propaganda and ‘intellectual hegemony’, it seems improbable that its opponents thought their central problem was that they’d ‘lost the culture’ — the secret police were more of a concern. It’s equally improbable that there’s anyone on the far right today (however that is defined) who does not think their central problem is exactly this (compared to which the secret police is a joke).