Paul Street in CounterPunch:
Among the suggestions I would have made to the Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley had I been an editor of his important book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (Random House, 2018), two seem particularly relevant in the present political juncture.
The first suggestion would have been for Stanley to explicitly call out the state-capitalist and corporate-captive Democratic Party in his perceptive discussion of how the fascist-style 2016 U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump got to come off as more “authentic” than his major party opponent while habitually telling untruths and “giving voice to shocking sentiments that were presumed to be unsuitable for public discourse.”
As Stanley rightly pointed out, Democratic candidates “must raise huge sums to run for office…As a result, they represent the interests of their large donors. However, because it is a democracy, they must also try to make the case that they represent the common interest. They must pretend that the best interests of the multinational corporations that fund their campaigns are also the common interest.”
I’m not sure why Stanley thought the United States is “a democracy” (it is no such thing), but he put his thumb on a basic and longstanding conundrum in bourgeois politics.
More here.