Thanks to Claremont and the AOSHQ, we have another essay by the great Angelo Codevilla, and it contains a warning against what is now operative in the US, as well as against what could be. Warning: if you like your Congress-critter, do not read this.
...Hegel, as well as the positivist and Progressive movements, had argued
for the sovereignty of expert administrators. Fascist Italy was the
first country in which the elected legislature gave up its essential
powers to the executive, thus abandoning the principle, first enshrined
in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, by which
people are rightly governed only through laws made by elected
representatives. By the outbreak of World War II, most Western
countries’ legislatures—the U.S. Congress included—had granted the
executive something like “full powers,” each by its own path, thus
establishing the modern administrative state....
That would make Wilson an ur-Hegelian here, and Roosevelt his most significant disciple and implementer.
...After Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933, Mussolini’s enthusiasm
for likening the New Deal to fascism’s political-economic order was
tempered only by the need not to give additional ammunition to FDR’s
domestic opponents, who were saying precisely that. Yet, ab initio,
he made clear that “the spirit of [FDR’s program] resembles fascism’s
since, having recognized that the state is responsible for the people’s
economic well-being, it no longer allows economic forces to run
according to their own nature.” Mussolini also published a glowing
review of U.S. Agriculture Secretary (eventually Vice President) Henry
Wallace’s 1934 book, New Frontiers. Fascists rejoiced that FDR
had forsaken liberal for corporativist principles, and that the world’s
most powerful country, the country most admired by Italians, had taken
the trail they had blazed....
Note carefully Codevilla's clause "....the US Congress included..."
Congress deliberately gave away its legislative powers during (and following) the Roosevelt imperial rule. The reason? Re-election. The members of Congress, then and now, were popinjays, showboats, drunks, womanizers........in brief, Not Serious People. (Yes, there are exceptions.) To them, responsibility was a burden they would not bear--so they licensed the Fascist-Hegelian State to rule in their stead. Then they could proceed on their merry way with silly proposals designed to embarrass the other party, plenty of in-secret and not-for-the-record votes in committees, and "laws" full of language which begged for "interpretation" by malign parties.
Not. Serious. People.
Congressmen knew: no one elects bureaucrats, therefore no one can UN-elect them. Given the hiring practices of Government, our Bureaucrat rulers are legacy twits with Big Name College education, homogenous social backgrounds, and--of course--a deep and abiding belief that Government Experts Know Best. That's because they ARE the Government Experts, you see?
As a backstop, they have the Ultimate Power: they can say "Nope" to anything.
Mussolini's organization of society is also echoed here.
...Socioeconomic organization was fascism’s defining feature. Only
employers’ and employees’ organizations approved by the government were
allowed. They represented and collected dues from any and all in their
category and territory, whether these had signed up with them or not. In
1925 these had agreed “voluntarily” to recognize each other as
“exclusive representatives,” to subordinate interactions at the local
level to central organizations, and to draw up procedures for their
cooperation under government supervision. The Law of Corporations of
April 3, 1926, codified this political-economic order. No longer would
corporations be responsible to owners. Thenceforth, they would answer to
higher duties as defined in the law. As Mussolini put it, “In a world
of social and economic interdependence…the watchword must be cooperation
or misery.” “Labor and capital have the same rights and duties. Both
must cooperate, and their disputes are regulated by law and decided by
courts, which punish any violation.” This resulted in the orderly
servicing of interest groups, fascism’s daily preoccupation....
Wonder no longer how DEI and CRT became the regnant corporate/labor union philosophy, friends. The Statists made it clear: you can cooperate and implement Our Plan or you can die on the vine. Thus we have FLSA, EPA, EEOC, ERISA, OSHA, and swarms of Fed, State, and local agencies created to "help workers" but more importantly, to beat into submission private organizations using their Unions to assist; and if the Union got uppity? Ask Jimmy Hoffa.
...The view that the New Deal was “fascism without the billy clubs” was
well-nigh universal among FDR’s opponents on the Left (e.g. Norman
Thomas), as well as on the Right (Herbert Hoover). It could hardly have
been otherwise since the essence of the National Industrial Recovery
Act—the involuntary inclusion of all participants in categories of
economic activity and their subjection to government-dictated prices,
wages, and working conditions—was at least as detailed as those in
fascism’s corporate law. The U.S. government had brushed aside the
Supreme Court’s objections to the National Recovery Administration in A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935). By 1942, in Wickard v. Filburn
(still “good law” today), the Court approved regulation of all manner
of enterprise with reasoning stricter than any Mussolini had used in
1926. Today, by the same token, Senator and 2020 presidential candidate
Elizabeth Warren’s proposed “Accountable Capitalism Act” would also
force corporations to enroll into a legal scheme in which the government
would force them to service various stakeholders as government
regulators would decide from time to time. Such tools are far more
powerful than billy clubs....
Warren's proposal is only a matter of degree, not of substance, of course. The substance was baked into the cake decades ago.
(The Managerial-Fascist State bred its own Security State apparatus, too. And when the job is too dirty for the FBI, the CIA steps in. Don't cross them--no matter your position--or else. Ask JFK. Or Reagan. Or Trump. The latter two were near-misses, but warnings to them and to all the rest of us, like the J6 prisoners.)
Little-known factoid: By whose language are today's Conservatives decried as "Fascist"?
...Stalin elaborated the doctrine of “social fascism” which, verbiage
aside, meant that Communists should consider all to the right of
them—essentially all who were not under Communist discipline—as
“fascists.”...
Teodor Adorno (a Communist) adapted Stalin's thought with his ooogledy-booogeldy "scientific analysis" in The Authoritarian Personality.
If you were vaguely suspicious of the multitudes of "People's This" and "Community Thats" throwing the Fascist-bomb around, you now know their source. If you are surprised, you are stupid.
Sad to say, Trump's crusade to reverse Communist- or Communist-inspired programs and crusades along with their millions of bureaucrat enforcers (America First!!) also uses the very same bureaucracies. Congress, the Not Serious People agglomeration, is perfectly fine with that, as Doing Nothing generally assures re-election.
The common thread here is the mal-feasance and/or non-feasance of Congress.
Get it?
