The recent Democratic debate gave a hint of Clinton’s pro-Wall Street ingrained posture, frightening because at its foundation is the fusion of militarism and capitalism, both at a heightened stage of development. The harpy of Cold War intervention and regime change, Clinton has used American foreign policy to maximize a US-defined and sponsored pattern of globalization, based on the encirclement, containment, and isolation of both Russia and China, in order to shape a hierarchical domestic structure of retrograde social and economic policies favoring elite financial and industrial groups now popularized as the 1% but in reality a far more complex system because of its militaristic/expansionist underpinnings. When and if fascism comes to America, if it has not already, it will be deceptively clothed: not hardened far right Republicanism, but respectable, seemingly reasonable Liberalism personified by the Clintons with Obama cultivating the intermediate ground.
Who needs Rubio, Cruz, Bush, etc. etc., when Clinton already possesses, better than they, the articulated paradigm of Wall Street, Pentagon, think tank planning and connections which has propelled America’s counterrevolutionary role in global affairs, all internalized and ready for execution. I say “matriarchal,” then, not to indicate gender per se, but in her concrete case, an overseeing, overarching figure, ready to take command of the full apparatus of power, the new head of the family, using the subterfuge of motherly caring for the disadvantaged and the poor to firm up and tighten a ruling class seeking political-ideological dominance at home and abroad while pursuing traditional imperialist goals of market penetration, a sustained supply of raw materials, the advantages of outsourcing through reliance on a global labor market, and the consequent retardation of Third World modernization and autonomy. Bill Clinton is chimp change compared with what Mrs. Clinton can effectuate under the handle of counterterrorism and neoliberalism: a world open to American spoliation and rapine (including the acceleration of climate change).
Fascism?…Really?
Yes, in any meaningful sense, beginning with continuing the Obama policies of mass surveillance, indictment of whistleblowers, the use of federal regulatory agencies to protect the interests ostensibly to be regulated, then moving to the principal structural criterion of fascism borne out by Germany, Italy, and Japan (see Barrington Moore’s chapter, “Asian Fascism,” in his monumental Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy): the interpenetration of business and government, an integration of political structure which, even in the absence of the military component, fosters unimpeded capitalist development under the auspices of the State. This winning combination ensures the quelling of dissent over industrial and financial practices and power, habituates the populace to consumerism and patriotism, and employs State worship to cover over capitalistic excesses including the degradation of the environment. Add to the foregoing the undoubted place of the military as a synthesizing force in the political economy and carrying out its objectives, and, indeed, fascism is not a species of name-calling but an accurate description of impending reality.…Counterpunch
Matriarchal Fascism: Clinton, Embodiment of US Power
Norman Pollock
