As I noted the other night at the other place, Michael Ledeen is on this kick where he's convinced Obama is a "fascist" hell-bent on "totalitarianism."
This is of course as stupid as it is crazy. But it is good marketing. Ledeen's usual gig is talking demented shit about foreign policy of the "why haven't we nuked Iran yet?" class. But that's no longer fashionable; the economy is. Or, to be more accurate, the real wingnut fun right now is in screeching about how Obama's a "socialist." So Ledeen needs a new hook, a new wrinkle. Glancing around the asylum he notes that all the other inmates are comparing Obama to Lenin. And so in a burst of psychotic genius he decides that his new shtick will be comparing Obama to Mussolini. Brillante!
I am not suggesting that Ledeen is being deliberately disingenuous. Heavens no. I have long admired the capacity of leading "conservatives" to quite sincerely believe all sorts of ridiculous garbage it is to their personal advantage to espouse. But that hardly obligates anyone to take Ledeen seriously. Like I said at FDL, Ledeen is poo-flinging. There is no reason to locate the stimulus bill in Italian Fascism unless you want to call names. Obviously.
Which would be all that needs to be said, except Ledeen wants to keep digging.
The scholarly term for any such allegation of a firm distinction between "politics" and "the economy" is "a comical load of shit."
What Ledeen is doing is very gingerly acknowledging the simple point I made at FDL (and I bet you a nickel Ledeen read that post), that "Mussolini did not invent corporatism; the Catholic Church did. Nobody who is serious about history or indeed anything but poo-flinging would exclude from the definition of 'fascism' the casual brutality, mindless nationalism, worship of physical force, and contempt for the rule of law." If you don't have that shit, you don't have fascism -- as we know Ledeen himself knows, because he pointed it out to Jonah Goldberg in one of the funniest pieces ever posted online for fans of the "this is total crap but I can't say so explicitly" genre of academic reviewing.
Ledeen tries to wriggle out of the trap he knows he's in by distinguishing between "fascist political economy" and Fascism proper. But that's ridiculous. Unless, of course, he wants to argue that "fascist political economy" didn't get mixed up with casual brutality, mindless nationalism, and contempt for the rule of law. I wish him well with that project. The rest of us will just figure Obama and his team are instead not so much looking to Mussolini but to, I don't know, Keynes. Though I suppose Ledeen has a way out here in trying to argue that Keynes was deep down a fascist (exclamation points, ones), which he's more than welcome to do. It would after all put him in excellent company.
The entertainment and illustrative value of Ledeen on this particular point lies in how he seems to know he's full of it. It is truly very, very sad and funny, like a clown with a leaky diaper, that his immediate followup to the "Obama is a fascist" post is an evergreen Internetty conservative thumbsucker about de Toqueville: "Most Americans no longer read Alexis de Tocqueville's masterpiece, Democracy in America, about which I wrote a book (Tocqueville on American Character; from which most of the following is taken) a few years ago." (Ledeen, you'll note, likes to assert that he has written books and that almost nobody is as smart as him. It's part of his charm.)
That this is admittedly just wingnut boilerplate hastily applied as armor to keep afloat a bullshit thesis -- well, what else do you need to know about where The Right is as an "intellectual" proposition? Except maybe that Glenn Reynolds linked it. Or that Dan Riehl, noted asshole, read it and came up with this coda:
Well, sure. The collapse of democratic institutions has always been a desiderata of people with political convictions like Dan Riehl's. That's well known.
