Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Sunday, September 3, 2017

Who The Fuck Is Mark Bray?

Mark Bray teaches at my alma mater.  He is the current leading intellectual voice of antifas.  He has a book!

Inevitably, I'm reminded of my forays onto Twitter to debate anarchists, Bernie Bros and perhaps some antifas supporters about how stupid antifas is as both a tactic and a strategy.  What's dismaying about Bray is that he seems to embrace the ahistorical idea that we are slipping into fascism.  He seems to take the Far Left position that anything to the Left of John McCain is fascism.  The other book review at the above link is about the range from fascism to populism.

There is zero question in my mind that Trump represents a populist movement, rooted heavily in white working class resentment.  His movement is quite old and quite rural.  It represents the dying out areas of America, both literally and figuratively.  Fascism is schematic; it has a plan.  Populism is emotive; it responds to stimulae.

To look at Trump and see fascisms, or for that matter to look at 1500 tiki torch wielding morons and see Germany in 1933 seems to me to represent a real failure to learn real lessons from history.

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