I found this in Anthony Gregory’s piece at LRC, “The Persistence of Red-State Fascism“:
When Ann Coulter expresses skepticism toward Afghanistan, it is the function of a watered-down and vulgar America First sentiment. But America First is only a bulwark for peace when it’s radical, consistent and coupled with a concern for the dignity and humanity of foreign victims of the regime. If the only reason to oppose war is it’s a waste of American blood and money, there will be no stopping the next Republican president from unleashing even more death and destruction than did Bush, so long as it can be excused in the name of “national security.” For Americans to embrace peace, they must accept the notion that foreigners have all the natural rights Americans do, and dropping bombs on them while they sit peacefully in their homes and neighborhoods is every bit as barbaric, monstrous and murderous as 9/11 or any other terrorist act.
But those most skeptical of the notion of a sincere national security rationale typically link their arguments to the inherent wastefulness of government, its nominally private sector counterparts, and to some degree the dynamics of mass media and special interests. I also don’t agree that for Americans to embrace peace, they must attribute natural rights to foreigners. It seems this is part of what got us into this problem to begin with. It’s because Americans are so damned concerned about what is happening with women, gays, Christians or whomever in country X that they feel the need to intervene abroad. Three cheers for indifference. Unless Gregory has some good evidence that this other-oriented stance is going to transform in the particular Rothbardian direction he prefers, I suggest this empathy stance be downplayed. It’s too easy for its premise – the concern for the safety and freedoms of far off strangers – to be co-opted for pernicious, meddling ends.
Related material: Mondoweiss.
Entitled to an Opinion 
September 5, 2010 at 6:30 pm
Indeed, it is because Americans are so concerned about what is happening in country X that they feel the need to intervene abroad. And Americans have been this way for a long time. I Januart of 1824, Daniel Webster proposed that Congress ought to pass a resolution of support for the Greeks in their war for independence from the Turks, and also wished to send American agents to Greece. Here is the response of the incomparable Randolph of Roanoke, giving his three cheers for indifference:
“Sir, I am afraid, that along with some most excellent attributes and qualities – the love of liberty, jury trial, the writ of habeas corpus and all the blessings of free government, that we have derived from our Anglo-Saxon ancestors – we have got not a little of their John Bull, or rather John Bull Dog spirit – their readiness to fight for anyone, and on any occasion. Sir, England has been for centuries the game cock of Europe. It is impossible to specify the wars in which she has been engaged for contrary purposes; and she will, with great pleasure, see us take off her shoulders the labor of preserving the balance of power…
“If we pursue the same policy, we must travel the same road, and endure the same burdens under which England now groans. But… glorious as such a design might be, a President of the United States would… occupy a prouder place in history, who, when he retires from office, can say to the people who elected him, ‘I leave you without a debt,’ than if he had fought as many pitched battles as Caesar, or achieved as many naval victories as Nelson…”
September 5, 2010 at 10:59 pm
You think Americans care so much for the Iraqi people? The millions of Pakistanis displaced by Obama’s drone bombs? The Afghans tortured to death? Absurd. The lip service to humanitarianism abroad is simply cover for these murderous nationalist wars.
Now, you can quip that there’s a persistence in calling things fascist — but guess what, you are not addressing the fact that fascism actually has a meaning, and that its proper application to the US system and the American right has been backed up with heavy scholarship. You can mock the idea that the US corporate state, its military, its prison camps, its torture chambers and all the rest constitute “fascism,” but it would be nice if you could explain, clearly, what makes every other fascist state in history fascist whereas America and its right wing are not fascist.
September 6, 2010 at 12:54 pm
There is a continuom of meddling preferences, with the strongest tendencies coming from elites. The public takes its cue from them, and together they shift in a certain direction.
Yes, I think Americans believe they have a way of life that is superior and enlightened, and that their particular burden is to bring economic freedom, democracy and (relative) secularism to those around the world. Of course most especially when some naitonal threat is percieved. The strong support for charitable activity in civil society is also testimony to this.
So you believe that those crafting foreign policy, that advisors like Samantha Power, or agencies like the State Department, are merely paying lip service to humanitarianism? Does that mean that libertarians too only pay lip service to ideas of natural rights, and that in fact they are merely covers for private sector interests?
Ideology is pervasive among the most educated and most politically active, and “human rights ideology” is one of them: http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/3/1/3/5/0/p313507_index.html
The book I cite above (merely by link admittedly) is by Richard Gamble, a historian who looked at the transformation of American Christians from parochial and individualistic to international and missonary-with-the-aid-of-the-state. This point of view likely has more to with American “fascism” than the actual, and only, Fascism: the Doctrine elaborated by Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile.
I don’t buy the concept of generic fascism. It’s a sloppy catch all word that brings together so many disparate groups – Nazis, American Republicans, Radical Islamists, Hindu Nationalists – that it’s not at all illuminating to deploy it.
You can mock the idea that the US corporate state, its military, its prison camps, its torture chambers and all the rest constitute “fascism,” but it would be nice if you could explain, clearly, what makes every other fascist state in history fascist whereas America and its right wing are not fascist.
I mock it because the above describes communist states too, the sworn enemies of Fascism.
September 7, 2010 at 1:58 pm
“Does that mean that libertarians too only pay lip service to ideas of natural rights, and that in fact they are merely covers for private sector interests?”
No. The State Dept and other govt. agencies are categorically criminal enterprises. Surely libertarians, even the worst of them, are more humanitarian than most of the war party.
Our system is not communistic, since there is more a semblance of private property and the profit system. Communist states might be the sworn enemies of fascism, but if your critique of my description is that communists states, too, share much in common with the US system, I don’t think that’s very compelling at all.
September 7, 2010 at 1:59 pm
Of course Islamists are not fascists in the 20th century meaning of the word. But most Republicans and Nazis are.
September 5, 2010 at 11:03 pm
I must say I find it downright obscene to suggest the problem is too much concern for the natural rights of foreigners. Would Americans support dropping nuclear weapons on Floridians or New Yorkers to stop organized criminals? No. Because Americans recognize, on some level, that _it is wrong to bomb innocent people_. But they do not apply this moral principle to foreigners.
September 6, 2010 at 1:11 pm
Well I will grant that “natural rights” as understood by you and I is probably not what Americans have in mind, because they aren’t educated enough in libertarian theory (or theory period, really) to know it. Instead terms lke, again, “human rights” are more often in play.
Americans wouldn’t support dropping nuclear bombs on domestic folks becuase they believe there are ways of cacthing bad guys that preclude that kind of measure. They don’t believe that about foreign nations with which we have a history of trade and other positive association.
Though I agree that people have an us vs. them mentality wherein moral principles are not applied evently, I think the uncertainty of foreign relations (where the state has more leeway in its actions) and its complex nature is reason to suspect that Americans are not just ditching moral concern (very few are really PRO-war in the Junger sense), but yielding to experts and their judgement that there are no alternatives to war.
They ARE applying moral principles to the legions of foreigners they believe they are rescuing from reactionary and violent totalitarians. Moral obligation.
September 7, 2010 at 2:00 pm
Pro-war is not just a smear term. Plenty of people LOVE war.
September 5, 2010 at 11:09 pm
To the extent that it was concern for Iraqis that brought about the war, it was a utilitarian concern — not an methodologically individualistic natural rights concern. The latter would preclude killing a single innocent person. Utilitarianism, on the other hand, where the ends justifies the means, where individuals are pawns for the greater good — that’s what leads to war.
September 6, 2010 at 1:19 pm
Obviously policy elites are not Rothbardian, so I wont’ disagree that what animates their concern stems from some other moral framework. But I don’t think the realists and skeptics of the Iraq War believe that Bush and Co. were Utilitarians, if they thought much about that at all, on either side.
Your description of Utilitarianism leaves out that this “greater good” individuals are pawns for is the good of the humanity itself. That’s a pretty important thing to include. And you must mean that Utilitarianism IN THIS CASE lead to war? Because it’d far off base to suggest it always does.
I’m partial to Utilitarianism myself, and find the mantra “you can’t measure utility” to be outdated, at the very least: https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2009/02/08/can-procedural-utility-lend-a-hand-to-paleo-libertarianism/
But I still think using something as removed from the day-to-day life of individuals as the state to increase overall utility is wrongheaded, for very Austrian reasons.
September 7, 2010 at 2:01 pm
Utilitarian doesn’t just mean non-Rothbardian. Words have meanings.
September 7, 2010 at 2:38 pm
No. The State Dept and other govt. agencies are categorically criminal enterprises. Surely libertarians, even the worst of them, are more humanitarian than most of the war party.
Well sure, they are categorically criminal enterprises to libertarians.
I wasn’t asking you to defend the idea that libertarians are more humane than an agency of the state, but making the point that organizations are not staffed (at the top, anyway) by people whose goal is purely instrumental – in this case, to plunder and profit – but by ideologues. The State Department et al., in the main, is interested in spreading freedom and democracy, just as libertarian organizations are interested in spreading free markets (and to some extent democracy too I suppose).
Communist states might be the sworn enemies of fascism, but if your critique of my description is that communists states, too, share much in common with the US system, I don’t think that’s very compelling at all.
Well the way you described fascism was generic enough that it included communist states as well. The semblance of a price system, etc. is a more specific point of comparison that helps narrow down the similarities, granted. But our economy is not autarkic, nor is it a garrison state. Foreign policy has in recent decades been marked by humanitarian imperialism, something not a hallmark of Fascism (Italy wanted to reclaim captured lands, no?).
It really depends on what one believes are the most salient characteristics of Fascism, mediated by ideology. Libertarians are sensitive to the bill of rights and free markets, so a deviation from them is enough to constitute Fascism – America’s favorite bugaboo – in their mind.
September 7, 2010 at 2:39 pm
Utilitarian doesn’t just mean non-Rothbardian. Words have meanings.
I don’t think I suggested it did.
September 7, 2010 at 2:47 pm
Of course Islamists are not fascists in the 20th century meaning of the word. But most Republicans and Nazis are.
Wow, I had no idea my uncle and even my own mother are most likely closet Nazis. And that all those Tea Partiers decrying our political and economic system as National Socialist are in fact applauding it.
Somewhere a Republican whose dad died fighting off Nazis is weeping.
Having said, I will grant that there is at least something closer to Fascism in both the Nazis and Republican p.o.v, relative to radical Islamists, because it’s at least modernist.
September 8, 2010 at 3:50 am
I too think that the citizenry just use the convenient human rights argument provided them by their empire to justify their compliance. Then again, it’s not like hey can do anything about it; perhaps it’s just a psychological protective mechanism. I do not – however – believe for a moment that Americans are concerned for the oppressed in foreign lands. Like the Time magazine cover, it’s just cover.
September 8, 2010 at 8:36 pm
Yeah, war policy comes from the elites and “trickles downs” to the masses. I’m sure that-for the most part- the mobs and volunteer spies who turned in the doubters and slackers to be imprisoned, lynched Wobblies and an occasional German, etc. were convinced by the enormous propaganda apparatus of the Wilson regime that they were doing all this in the names of “democracy” and freedom”.
Mosca, Pareto, MIchels and Burnham.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
(…)
According to the BBC interview with Bernays’ daughter Anne, Bernays felt that the public’s democratic judgment was “not to be relied upon” and he feared that “they [the American public] could very easily vote for the wrong man or want the wrong thing, so that they had to be guided from above”. This “guidance” was interpreted by Anne to mean that her father believed in a sort of “enlightened despotism” ideology.
This elitist thinking was heavily shared and influenced by Walter Lippmann, one of the most prominent US political columnists at the time. Bernays and Lippmann sat together on the US Committee on Public Information during World War I and Bernays quotes Lippmann extensively in his seminal work Propaganda.
(…)
Turn control of the major organs of public opinion over to Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan and within a few years most Republicans will become anti-interventionists. The pro-Israel Christian Zionists will be the last holdouts.
September 9, 2010 at 12:16 pm
The trouble with the epithet “fascist” is that too few people have an idea of what Fascism really was. They simply know that the U.S. fought the Axis powers in World War II and that Mussolini was an ally of Hitler. They confuse Fascism with National Socialism, when in fact the two ideologies differed on a number of points.
If we seek the common thread between these two views, putting aside the nationalism and militarism of Italy and Germany (which were after all relatively new nations, eager to demonstrate their right to equal standing with established imperial powers such as France and Britain), it is economic. This becomes evident in studying the example of Sir Oswald Mosley, the British fascist. He didn’t need to appeal to nationalism and militarism because Britain was already a great power, with an empire upon which the sun proverbially never set. He was an ex-Labour party leader, and his politics were basically those of social and economic reorganization.
Whereas classical socialism called for state ownership of the means of production, Fascists rejected this as unnecessary. They believed it would be sufficient simply to take the lion’s share of business profits by taxation, and to take over substantive managerial control of business through regulation, while leaving nominal ownership – and all the liability in the event of failure – in private hands. This was not only the approach of Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, and of Mosley in Britain, but also of Franklin Roosevelt in the United States. Schivelbusch, in his book “Three New Deals,” makes this quite clear, and quotes numerous contemporary sources that show it was clear to them in the 1930s.
It is richly amusing to observe the present American left apply the epithet “fascist” to politics they don’t like, when the foundations of the welfare/warfare state they champion were laid by FDR, whose New Deal was the functional equivalent in this country of Mussolini’s, Hitler’s, and Mosley’s policies. It was Frances Perkins, FDR’s labor secretary, who gushed over Mussolini’s ability to make the trains run on time; FDR himself shared a holiday with Sir Oswald and Lady Mosley in the ’30s, and Mosley made mostly admiring remarks about FDR. This information is easy enough to find if one looks for it, but is (needless to say) conspicuous by its absence from school textbooks and “mainstream” histories.
September 11, 2010 at 9:21 am
Yeah, I think having concern for foreigners is less important to preventing wars than nurturing a stance that requires high evidence for war. If it does anything it offers a diminishing return that isn”t worth the constraint it offers for a nation to act in its own interest.
What will stop wars “like” Iraq and Afghanistan is a cold look at the benefits and costs of action (including opportunity costs) and the real capabilities of opponents. And if this doesn’t then why should empathy stop them? It’s a tautology and a truism to say that “Unless X has a concern for Y’s interest in and of itself, X will not act or refrain from acting purely in Y’s interest” but that doesn’t provide any should, any imperative.
September 12, 2010 at 2:27 pm
“Of course Islamists are not fascists in the 20th century meaning of the word. But most Republicans and Nazis are.”
Under which 20th century meaning of the word “fascist” are “most Republicans and Nazis” fascist?
I assume you mean the most common definition of “fascist” in the modern world – “people I don’t like”.
September 12, 2010 at 2:37 pm
“The State Dept and other govt. agencies are categorically criminal enterprises. Surely libertarians, even the worst of them, are more humanitarian than most of the war party.”
One of the distinctive features of libertarians is that they engage in moralizing with a fervor which an Evangelist Christian might envy.
That aside, for a guy who insists that “words mean something” you seem a tad confused about what makes something “categorically criminal”. The term is not really an antonym for “humanitarian”.