More economic recovery:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12648347

 

The US unemployment rate fell slightly to 8.9% in February, down from 9% the month before.

It is the third month in a row that the jobless rate has fallen, with February's figure marking a near two-year low.

Employers added 192,000 jobs last month, the US Labor Department said, above market expectations.

Paul O'Neill, former US Treasury Secretary, described the data as "very positive".

A Labor Department statement said that most job gains were in manufacturing, construction, business services and transport.

State and local government slashed 30,000 jobs, the most since November as budget cuts continue to bite.

The data showed that the jobless rate for adult men was 8.7%, for adult women 8%, and for teenagers 23.9%.

The unemployment rate has come down from 9.8% in November.

____________________

I'll be the first to admit that this is not what the Obama Administration predicted or really wanted when they wanted unemployment to stay where it was when they were inaugurated. However looking at this, the unemployment figures appear to be showing more, and more effective, growth since the Administration's stimulus package has gone into effect. It makes me curious in fact whether or not a larger stimulus package would have had more effect. What do you guys think?

Comments

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure it's revisionism. Not all fascism needs a "cult of personality" to be fascist.

With that said, can we say those didn't exist in some form around Lincoln and the Confederacy in general?

[http://users.livejournal.com/-wanderer-/]

I think the real definition of fascism requires the use of modern media (i.e., radio and to some extent film) to really spread and become the all-powerful presence that we associate with the word. I mean, I'm sure that Napoleon was at least as authoritarian as Lincoln or even Mussolini for that matter, but the infrastructure of his day didn't support what we could rightfully call fascism. In any case, at least for Lincoln, there was public and vocal opposition in the 1864 election IIRC, which to me puts him in a different category from real fascists.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

That's interesting. So you see fascism as a purely modern (modern being within the last century, give or take) movement?

[http://users.livejournal.com/-wanderer-/]

Pretty much. Whereas I'm sure many tyrants throughout history would have liked as much control as possible, it simply isn't possible to get to the level that, say, Hitler had without a modern state apparatus and modern technology. Likewise, lots of modern dictators are content to rule with an iron fist without building up some of the other, more intangible aspects of fascism (arguably, present-day China and many Latin American dictators have been this way). Now if you wanted to argue that Soviet Communism was a form of fascism, I think there is a lot more evidence for that line of thinking.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

That is something I've argued re: Soviet Communism, but that is an interesting take I hadn't considered.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Not really. The USSR was always about the interest of the working classes. The problem was in the 1920s and early 1930s the USSR was a mostly peasant-farming society, with the working classes a narrow urban minority. This, of course, was a dilemma based in no small part because Marxism wanted a revolution to occur in a place like Germany, where in one of the more interesting instances of reality stepping on theory's face forever communist revolutions happened in predominantly agrarian societies.....

[http://users.livejournal.com/-wanderer-/]

Those that might argue that Soviet Communism was a fascist system would point to the fact that 1) there was an intense cult of personality around the leader(s) and 2) the full powers of the modern state and mass communications were mobilized to promote a state ideology (i.e., what some people call "brainwashing," as well as big brother tactics). I wouldn't make this argument since I think there are aspects of each that make them sufficiently distinct as to not be in the same category, but they certainly aren't polar opposites (as some conventional wisdom might hold).

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

1) Those arguing a counterpoint would ask about the Mandate of Heaven and the concept of the Roman Emperor as the living god, and whether or not that renders the entire concept of a "cult of personality" moot.

2) Er....this is totalitarianism at its core. Qin Shi Huang did all this in the 3rd Century BCE. What separates fascism from communism is the latter explicitly identifies itself with one faction of class warfare while the former rejects the concept altogether and substitutes its own.

[http://users.livejournal.com/-wanderer-/]

1) I'd agree that those two things are examples of cults of personality, but the reach is so limited compared to modern-day cults of personality. I don't know how much the average pre-modern Chinese person (i.e., an illiterate peasant) understood about the Mandate of Heaven, or if he even bought into the concept. I sincerely doubt it affected his life in an everyday sense though. Given that the state co-opted the literati even in those earlier times and indoctrinated them, it would be hard to say how much reach the concept had outside of the ruling classes.

2) I would hesitate to call Qin Shi Huang totalitarian in any way that resembles 20th century totalitarianism. I agree that he was on that spectrum but falls short. Unifying weights, writing, burying your opposition alive, etc. is one thing, but intruding on every aspect of society is quite another, and something that was impossible to do, given the technology of the times.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

1) I disagree with that. The average peasant understanding the Huangdi or the Augustus as such was most likely the only way that he or she would have understood them.

2) All I know as a counter to that is that at one point what is now China had seven ancient states, but after Qin Shi Huang they were forever destroyed in one lifetime. Qin Shi Huang was the most successful totalitarian in world history, and there's a reason he was rehabilitated in Chinese history by Mao Zedong.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

It is one. Fascism, in the historical sense, refers to post-WWI ideologies that blended paramilitaries (the term, after all, was originally fascio de combattimento, referring to extremist gangs on 'roids created by Benny the Moose) with a party-state based on a military ethnocracy. The closest analogues are Velayat-i-faqih and the Jim Crow South, both of which fail on a couple of very vital accounts.

Fascism, like communism, is a word with a specific social-cultural context, and fascism and communism are two vastly different ideologies.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The real definition of fascism requires a paramilitary and an ethnocratic concept of society. Arguably that describes the Solid South to a T, but that would offend too many Right-Wingers to point out that Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond were relics of the US experiment with fascism.

[http://users.livejournal.com/-wanderer-/]

Why use a word out of its historical context though? If that is how you want to define fascism, the word will lose all of its meaning, and instead come to be defined as a bunch of mean rulers that think their race / tribe / bingo group is superior to all others (hardly a rarity in the course of human history).

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I use it thus because in the White League and in the segregation society you had direct precursors of fascism, complete with the same type of pre-condition (a war that mobilized the rich, middle classes, and poor together in one big brawl). The key difference is that Victorian societies had none of the experience needed to create a party state (the war economies of the 20th Century) nor the tools needed to maintain them permanently.

[http://users.livejournal.com/-wanderer-/]

The main reason I don't think you can count the Confederacy as a fascist state is for the very reason you mention: it wasn't a party state, and the state didn't intervene in all aspects of civil society in the way that happened in Germany or Japan (or the Soviet Union).

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Re-read that sentence and the comment originally responded to. I'm not talking about the Confederacy, but the South from the 1870s-1960s. Your rationale is accurate in that it was not a party state, though the Confederate state assumed much more sweeping powers than Lincoln dared to. For ultimately bupkiss as far as good results were concerned.

[http://users.livejournal.com/-wanderer-/]

Ah I see. I agree that you can argue that the South during, say, the 1920s might have had some fascist elements to it.