Al Jazeera Opinion: Global capitalism and 21st century fascism

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Obama’s campaign tapped into and helped expand mass mobilisation and popular aspirations for change not seen in many years in the United States. The Obama project co-opted that brewing storm from below, channelled it into the electoral campaign, and then betrayed those aspirations, as the Democratic Party effectively demobilised the insurgency from below with more passive revolution.

In this sense, the Obama project weakened the popular and left response from below to the crisis, which opened space for the right-wing response to the crisis - for a project of 21st century fascism - to become insurgent. Obama’s administration appears in this way as a Weimar republic. Although the social democrats were in power during the Weimar republic of Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s, they did not pursue a leftist response to the crisis, but rather side-lined the militant trade unions, communists and socialists, and progressively pandered to capital and the right before turning over power to the Nazis in 1933.

I feel that a lot of similarities can be drawn between our current political situation, and the social divide of the 60s. But a huge difference nowadays is that only one side has the extremists. You had both right wing and left wing extremists in the 60s, but these days the left is largely apathetic. They certainly have loud voices here and there, but nothing that could be considered “extreme,” and certainly nothing strong enough to counterbalance the neofascist rhetoric of the extreme right. I am a little hopeful though. The pro-labor backlash in Wisconsin and elsewhere shows that Americans aren’t going to take this shit lying down, and contrary to what the media likes to show, the right wing extremists really don’t make up that much of the population. Give it a few years. If you put America into the timeline of the Weimar Republic, we maybe have a decade or more until “fascists” take over. But by the time that’s supposed to happen, our generation will have grown up and matured, and will have started taking our foothold in American politics. In addition, the Republican leadership right now is nothing but a bunch of bumbling oafs who can’t get their shit together. It’ll all depend on if they can find their charismatic alpha male, and on how effective corporate propaganda is on the American people. But I’m even hopeful towards that, since the average viewer of Fox News is in his 60s. I’ve previously been extremely cynical about America’s future, but now I’m not so sure anymore. Both optimistic and pessimistic outcomes seem possible to me. The 2012 election is going to be interesting.