Comment of the Day

Naomi Wolf’s Guardian article “Fascist America, in 10 easy steps” has been riding high at the top of the paper’s most-read list and has been being feverishly linked to and discussed widely on US liberal blogs. Unsurprisingly so, as it ticks all the boxes and provides the perfect predigested narrative for what Bushco has been up to since ‘elected’. Simple, they’ve been putting in place planned fascism.

Wolf is not exactly what you’d call left-wing; rather she’s in the van of the soft liberal Democrat-ism that enabled Bush in the first place. So why the cries of fascism now? She took her time noticing. and is she actually sincere, or is it more Dem triangulation?

Leninology:

If you ask me, it’s part of this ‘Anyone But Bush’ politics that is destroying the American left and drawing the antiwar movement into the frigid Democratic Party graveyard. The politics of MoveOn.org, Howard Dean’s fan club, and such alignments, are to divert mass disaffection with Bush’s wars into the mainstream of the Democratic Party

Commenter Spartan Weakling takes that view further:

Playing the Fascist Card is calling for the disastrous Popular Front against it: working class organisations will HAVE TO “ally” themselves (read: support without question) with all “progressive” political forces, that is, who seek to return to the “previous” state of political status quo, being oh so much better than the current one (now christened “fascism”).

Therefore, the peace movement, the veterans, the families of the soldiers, the workers who pay for the war MUST come under the leadership of the Democrats (that progressive force in US politics), or else… FASCISM!!! And you don’t want to support FASCISM do you? Then shut up and come under the leadership of the radical (lol) bourgeoisie, because FASCISM!, and otherwise FASCISM!, and if you don’t then FASCISM! and anything else (read: the current state of affairs with no substantial change) is so much better than FASCISM! what’s the matter with you people.

So for me, it’s once again the question of the Popular Front vs the United Front, on which Trotsky had rather A LOT to say…

Now I don’t disagree with Wolf that the framework for fascism is in place and ready to roll, when it so patently is. I don’t disagree on the facts; indeed it’s us left-wing bloggers that have made sure those facts came to light. We’ve been warning of creeping US fascism on this blog since we started in 2001, and before, and there’s thousands of others just like us who’ve been doing the same.

The current US political situation didn’t just happen. Extremists need passive collaborators, or at the very least people too self-absorbed to notice anything that does not directly affect them, to do their nefarious work and Wolf was one, part of the charmed circle of the ‘feminist’ political media establishment, the one that trumpets free markets and the corporate state as empowering for all women despite the empirical evidence. She’s as much a Democratic political operative as she is a writer:

Wolf was involved in Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election bid where she brainstormed with the Clinton-Gore team about ways to reach “soccer moms” and other female voters.

During Al Gore’s unsuccessful bid for the 2000 US presidency, Wolf was hired as a consultant to target female voters, reprising her role in the Clinton campaign. Wolf’s ideas and participation in the Gore campaign generated considerable media coverage and criticism. According to a report by Michael Duffy in Time Magazine, “Wolf [was] paid a salary of $15,000 a month…in exchange for advice on everything from how to win the women’s vote to shirt-and-tie combinations.” This article was the original source of the widely reported claim that Wolf was responsible for Gore’s “three-buttoned, earth-toned look.” The Duffy article did not mention “earth tones.” The Time article and others also claimed that Wolf had developed the idea that Gore is “a beta male who needs to take on the alpha male in the Oval Office”.

In an interview with Melinda Henneberger in the New York Times, Wolf denied ever advising Gore on his wardrobe. Wolf herself claimed she mentioned the term “alpha male” only once in passing and that “[it] was just a truism, something the pundits had been saying for months, that the vice president is in a supportive role and the President is in an initiatory role…I used those terms as shorthand in talking about the difference in their job descriptions.”

It’s all very well Wolf standing up at this too-late stage in a foreign newspaper and saying this, but where was she when it really mattered, when this could have been nipped in the bud? When Alito was up for confirmation, for example? Too busy pushing her career of telling us ordinary women what failures we are compared to her and her privileged sisters, that’s where.

Did it never once occur to Wolf that the reason she made so much money and did so well pushing her personal empowerment agenda through her books is because it suits the long-term propaganda purposes of the very institutions, individuals and organisations she now accuses of enabling fascism?

Oh, how I loathe accommodationist women.