In 1966 I was 9 years old. My father was moved from his company in NJ to Florence, SC. I had no idea as a 9 year old what I was headed into. I moved to a developing neighborhood with new homes going up in the sand soil, the pine cones and needles, and the heat and humidity of the south. It didn't take long, just a few walks, excursions into the neighborhood before the kids around my age started referring to me as damn yankee. At my age, all kind of questions made their way into my brain. What, why were they calling me that? As I would age, I realized the old south never ended, neither did the civil war, neither did the categories that separated peoples. It was astonishing how even at a young age we were propagandized, touring places like Fort Sumter from a decidedly confederate slant. As I entered junior high I experienced the integration of the schools and the tension and violence around that, not nearly so much with the kids as with the adults. The so called southern hospitality was nothing more than a cover. All the sweet, slow talk couldn't hide the underbelly, the rot that was there. My father would come home and in his own vernacular would refer to the rebsh** he had run across. Make no mistake my father was a bigot himself, so I think he recognized the same in the populace around him. What was weird about that was that somewhere in that journey my father would say to us, none of us has a choice as to whether we enter this world white or black, so there was no room for us kids to be racist bigots. I still wonder about that moment. But in 1966 it was clear, as you note, fascism was alive and well in my experience as a kid growing up in the south.
Wow! Mike! this is some of the most awesome recapitulation of history I may have ever read! I thank you for your incredible work and contribution to trying to save the republic. We are definitely in the “if you can keep it“ phase.! 🙏🏼❤️🙏🏼
Wow: that was a epicly correct essay of fascism! Much appreciated.
Eons ago in a sumer quarter at Hayward, Calif State college- my American History professor showed on a rough graph the correlation between the Southern Planters mentally & creed which created the KKK to Fascism in Europe. The Professor really upset a lot of students with his lecture. He said the south had never let go of that KKK mind set, it just was in hibernation.
A must read for people who believe in liberty and justice for all. Yarvin, Thiel, Vance, etc. all believe the exact same theory as the slave holders of the US and the facists of the 1920's.
"The apparatus is the postliberal project. The apparatus is Vance and Yarvin and Deneen and Anton and Eastman and Claremont and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and the network of journals and podcasts and Substacks that have, in the years since Pogue’s piece, become the operational center of an American postliberal political theory."
The only things you left out are John Roberts and the Unitary Executive Theory.
I've always marveled at the fact that people that call themselves originalists really do want a king.
“Nixon’s Southern Strategy in 1968 was the first opening.” I suspect Goldwater’s repudiation of civil rights and his nomination in 1964 deserves that recognition. Goldwater provided the door and opened it a crack. Nixon pushed it all the way open and strode right through it, flashing his double victory ✌️ sign.
"Carlyle’s view of slavery as a natural human relationship, like marriage deserves to be understood on its own terms, and that Carlyle’s argument that the innate character and intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery is a serious position that contemporary thinkers should engage rather than dismiss."
Masculine supremacy - the ancient, foolish fascism of the patriarchy.
I've been waiting for you to write this essay for some time. I knew it was coming eventually, but didn't expect it to be tied so beautifully with your previous essays. well done.
This is a GREAT piece of work and I sincerely thank you, Mike Brock, for being able to organize your thoughts so ably, to write so compellingly, for recognizing the right side of history, and for using illustrations from the WRONG side of history to explain why you've chosen to camp out on that right side. I often say the solutions to the problems the USA faces are NEVER - EVER - going to come from the ignorant and the bigoted - and they are NEVER going to one day see the error of their ways, and that leaves us with no choice but to overcome them. I didn't go looking for this fight - it just slowly dawned on me that it's fight or let what is good about our society be destroyed by the rot and corruption that threatens it every single day. My nature is to avoid conflict - I'm a lover, not a fighter - and in my youth I was a draft resister. Ironic that near the end of my days I recognize the draft has come for me again - only this time the cause is right and just. Who knew?
I've been saying for a while the KKK never went anywhere. They just ditched the hoods and cross burning for business suits and think tanks symposiums. The South always told us they would rise again.
All so true. My grandmother, who was from Kentucky, told me in 1976 that if I ever spoke to a black person I would be disowned by the family. I was also told that my grandfather, when he attended a lynching as a young man, was not a racist because he didn't participate. The human mind is hard to fathom and can be cruel and infantile. I was also told by these high-minded southern 'folk' that my sister was a prostitute because she was friends with the black people she worked with. Long after my grandparents deaths I met the man of my dreams, a Mexican person. I know what they would think of that. They had centuries of practice to guide them. The infantile cruelty is hard for me to fathom. I choose to think that means that there is hope. I sincerely hope I am right.
I can't recall the exact quote, but Langston Hughes pointed out that "fascism" was just a new term for what black people in the United States had been experiencing for centuries.
These essays need to be published as a book and sold as any other distribution of books are sold to the public, for a wider audience to read, grasp and understand.
Thank you for once again making clear what should be obvious but is not. My hope is that this becomes part of the ether so that more people understand this moment in time. I do think more people are ‘feeling’ it even if they can’t name it. I long for the day where kids get taught this history.
The scariest part of fascism is how it turns ordinary people into active participants without their awareness. It doesn't succeed by force alone; it hooks people by filling an emotional vacuum and exploiting the deep-seated human desires.
Sussex planters without the primary birthright were the second-best from the beginning, moving to the American colonies in their petulance. The Incorrigibles of the unresolved English-Scottish borderlands (700 years of degradation) were either wiped out when James II ascended the throne, or moved to the colonies' hinterlands, where they scrabbled out an existence while irritating the civilized native tribes. America's other novel revolution -- the marriage of second-best petulant planters and incorrigible ruffians -- at the moment of insane wealth created by the cotton gin and the cotton boom, produced the scurrilous racist fascism explored by Beckert & Rockman's Slavery's Capitalism.
The degenerates are still with us, escaping defeat again by moving west after the Civil War or North during WWII. Those degenerates still left behind are the bottom of the barrel scraping back against possible liberation and reconciliation.
In 1966 I was 9 years old. My father was moved from his company in NJ to Florence, SC. I had no idea as a 9 year old what I was headed into. I moved to a developing neighborhood with new homes going up in the sand soil, the pine cones and needles, and the heat and humidity of the south. It didn't take long, just a few walks, excursions into the neighborhood before the kids around my age started referring to me as damn yankee. At my age, all kind of questions made their way into my brain. What, why were they calling me that? As I would age, I realized the old south never ended, neither did the civil war, neither did the categories that separated peoples. It was astonishing how even at a young age we were propagandized, touring places like Fort Sumter from a decidedly confederate slant. As I entered junior high I experienced the integration of the schools and the tension and violence around that, not nearly so much with the kids as with the adults. The so called southern hospitality was nothing more than a cover. All the sweet, slow talk couldn't hide the underbelly, the rot that was there. My father would come home and in his own vernacular would refer to the rebsh** he had run across. Make no mistake my father was a bigot himself, so I think he recognized the same in the populace around him. What was weird about that was that somewhere in that journey my father would say to us, none of us has a choice as to whether we enter this world white or black, so there was no room for us kids to be racist bigots. I still wonder about that moment. But in 1966 it was clear, as you note, fascism was alive and well in my experience as a kid growing up in the south.
Wow! Mike! this is some of the most awesome recapitulation of history I may have ever read! I thank you for your incredible work and contribution to trying to save the republic. We are definitely in the “if you can keep it“ phase.! 🙏🏼❤️🙏🏼
Wow: that was a epicly correct essay of fascism! Much appreciated.
Eons ago in a sumer quarter at Hayward, Calif State college- my American History professor showed on a rough graph the correlation between the Southern Planters mentally & creed which created the KKK to Fascism in Europe. The Professor really upset a lot of students with his lecture. He said the south had never let go of that KKK mind set, it just was in hibernation.
A must read for people who believe in liberty and justice for all. Yarvin, Thiel, Vance, etc. all believe the exact same theory as the slave holders of the US and the facists of the 1920's.
Wow.
"The apparatus is the postliberal project. The apparatus is Vance and Yarvin and Deneen and Anton and Eastman and Claremont and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and the network of journals and podcasts and Substacks that have, in the years since Pogue’s piece, become the operational center of an American postliberal political theory."
The only things you left out are John Roberts and the Unitary Executive Theory.
I've always marveled at the fact that people that call themselves originalists really do want a king.
Of course, but only so long as that king is on their side...
“Nixon’s Southern Strategy in 1968 was the first opening.” I suspect Goldwater’s repudiation of civil rights and his nomination in 1964 deserves that recognition. Goldwater provided the door and opened it a crack. Nixon pushed it all the way open and strode right through it, flashing his double victory ✌️ sign.
"Carlyle’s view of slavery as a natural human relationship, like marriage deserves to be understood on its own terms, and that Carlyle’s argument that the innate character and intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery is a serious position that contemporary thinkers should engage rather than dismiss."
Masculine supremacy - the ancient, foolish fascism of the patriarchy.
I've been waiting for you to write this essay for some time. I knew it was coming eventually, but didn't expect it to be tied so beautifully with your previous essays. well done.
This is a GREAT piece of work and I sincerely thank you, Mike Brock, for being able to organize your thoughts so ably, to write so compellingly, for recognizing the right side of history, and for using illustrations from the WRONG side of history to explain why you've chosen to camp out on that right side. I often say the solutions to the problems the USA faces are NEVER - EVER - going to come from the ignorant and the bigoted - and they are NEVER going to one day see the error of their ways, and that leaves us with no choice but to overcome them. I didn't go looking for this fight - it just slowly dawned on me that it's fight or let what is good about our society be destroyed by the rot and corruption that threatens it every single day. My nature is to avoid conflict - I'm a lover, not a fighter - and in my youth I was a draft resister. Ironic that near the end of my days I recognize the draft has come for me again - only this time the cause is right and just. Who knew?
I've been saying for a while the KKK never went anywhere. They just ditched the hoods and cross burning for business suits and think tanks symposiums. The South always told us they would rise again.
All so true. My grandmother, who was from Kentucky, told me in 1976 that if I ever spoke to a black person I would be disowned by the family. I was also told that my grandfather, when he attended a lynching as a young man, was not a racist because he didn't participate. The human mind is hard to fathom and can be cruel and infantile. I was also told by these high-minded southern 'folk' that my sister was a prostitute because she was friends with the black people she worked with. Long after my grandparents deaths I met the man of my dreams, a Mexican person. I know what they would think of that. They had centuries of practice to guide them. The infantile cruelty is hard for me to fathom. I choose to think that means that there is hope. I sincerely hope I am right.
I can't recall the exact quote, but Langston Hughes pointed out that "fascism" was just a new term for what black people in the United States had been experiencing for centuries.
These essays need to be published as a book and sold as any other distribution of books are sold to the public, for a wider audience to read, grasp and understand.
But everyone can come read them for free here.
If their library hasn't been shut down.
Thank you for once again making clear what should be obvious but is not. My hope is that this becomes part of the ether so that more people understand this moment in time. I do think more people are ‘feeling’ it even if they can’t name it. I long for the day where kids get taught this history.
The scariest part of fascism is how it turns ordinary people into active participants without their awareness. It doesn't succeed by force alone; it hooks people by filling an emotional vacuum and exploiting the deep-seated human desires.
I just published a deep dive mapping the psychological illusions used to build this compliance. Would love to know your thoughts on it: https://fascisminindia.substack.com/p/why-fascism-still-attracts-millions
Sussex planters without the primary birthright were the second-best from the beginning, moving to the American colonies in their petulance. The Incorrigibles of the unresolved English-Scottish borderlands (700 years of degradation) were either wiped out when James II ascended the throne, or moved to the colonies' hinterlands, where they scrabbled out an existence while irritating the civilized native tribes. America's other novel revolution -- the marriage of second-best petulant planters and incorrigible ruffians -- at the moment of insane wealth created by the cotton gin and the cotton boom, produced the scurrilous racist fascism explored by Beckert & Rockman's Slavery's Capitalism.
The degenerates are still with us, escaping defeat again by moving west after the Civil War or North during WWII. Those degenerates still left behind are the bottom of the barrel scraping back against possible liberation and reconciliation.