One-time home run king had an ignorance of language
We must define our terms
To make us love our country, said Edmund Burke, our country ought to be lovely.
Indeed, most of the land mass is beautiful. I’m a native Oregonian and the natural beauty of my home country, as far as I’m concerned, is second to none.
Beauty and loveliness don’t equate, however.
Burke was concerned with a country’s “distinct system of manners.” The national character.
Manners have eroded in the United States while patriotism is crumbling as well. For a statistical majority of Americans, it is hatred for the other that drives their politics or perhaps motivates them in general.
What remains of national character?
One half of the country—ironically the side with the collectivist strain infused into its politics—thinks the other is “fascist.”
The “Dobbs case” was the latest litmus test for fascism.
Yet, Stanley G. Payne, Professor Emeritus of History at University of Wisconsin-Madison and perhaps the foremost scholar on European Fascism writes in his 1980 tome, Fascism: Comparison and Definition
Fascism is probably the vaguest of contemporary political terms. This may be because the word itself has no implicit political reference, however vague, as do democracy, liberalism, socialism, and communism. … Definition bedeviled the original Italian Fascists from the beginning, since they developed a formal codified set of doctrines only ex post facto, some years after Mussolini came to power, and then only in part.
Ernst Nolte, a German historian who The New York Times called “a respected scholar of fascism,” called fascism a backlash to modernity. Nolte also postulated a set of criteria that defined a “fascist minimum.”
antimarxism
antiliberalism
anticonservatism
the leadership principle
a party army
the aim of totalitarianism
Paul Gottfried, editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, writes in Fascism: A Career of a Concept (2016):
Fascism now stands for a host of iniquities that progressives, multiculturists, and libertarians all oppose, even if they offer no single, coherent account of what they’re condemning. Some intellectuals and publicists may be demonstratively antifascist but feel no obligation to provide a historically and conceptually delimited definition of their object of hate.
Crash Davis called strikeouts “boring” and “fascist.”
I’m beginning to think that Nuke LaLoosh may have been right to criticize his catcher on occasion.
Crash also believed Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. A lot of bones to pick with him…
Then there is the self-proclaimed anti-fascist “Antifa” group, the mostly peaceful band of urban reprobates who have tallied up property damages in the billions of dollars over the last three summers alone and considers anyone to the right of Kim Jong-un a proponent of fascism.
You can’t win with these people. They are violent and committed to their amorphous cause, yet the movement lacks any semblance of seriousness in the intellectual realm.
Sadly, these folks use the anti-fascism LARP in a struggle to claim some sort of identity. Unfortunately, over the last few decades, American soccer has been caught in the crossfire and often becomes a platform for these delusional sports fans to funnel their angst.
Last week, former U.S. soccer star and current television analyst, Alexi Lalas, took to Twitter, calling out some of the drivel that comes out of the soccer world, without mentioning the deluded “antifascists” by name, while offering a diagnosis on the cultural rot that also exists in other mainstream sectors of society.
“I can't change this strange self-loathing of country that manifests in a segment of American soccer fandom. Also, it is not unique to soccer, it happens in music, fashion, politics etc.”
These fans of soccer, music, fashion, politics, et cetera that Lalas mentions do not believe their country is lovely. They have no love for it, either.
These people are not patriots and cannot be expected to fight in any way on behalf of their country.
They actively fight against it with their words and actions.
It’s hard to have a lovely country with people like these inhabiting it.
Cat’s game perhaps?
Encouraged by one of the many daily newsletters of which I am a subscriber, Tom Woods wrote to me in late June:
I'll state the obvious: there is no "fascism" to be concerned about right now, and zero reason to be worried about a resurgence of fascism.
Anyone warning about "fascism" is a moron not worth trying to persuade.
The extended prelude to the question at hand having now ended: Is it thus fascist for one to believe or insist that both laws and consequences for breaking a state law—murder in this case—should be sent back to the states themselves to adjudicate?
A failed presidential candidate once referred to those with the inclination to defend innocent lives as being amongst a “basket of deplorables.”
The charity extended by the “popular vote winner,” called those on the other side of her, “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.” She—in the parlance of our times—cancelled her countrymen as “irredeemable” and “bigots” to boot.
In that 2016 screed against decent folk—simply rhetorical grandstanding for the most part—she forgot to render them “fascists.” In today’s political climate, if given the chance, tossing in such an insult is expected.
Does pushing back against the programs the left wants to stuff down the throats of society, make one a fascist?
For what is the goal of our comrades on the left?
Ex-Marxist and former NYU professor Michael Rechtenwald, in an article in the July 2022 issue of Chronicles wrote:
“Social welfare only increases that which it putatively aims to eradicate: poverty, illness, homelessness, and so on. This is both logically deducible and empirically verifiable. Meanwhile social welfare feeds state power and enables its warfare by placating those it disempowers, both the payers and the payees of the state’s pretended largesse.”
Having myself been a fellow traveler on those “social welfare” roads for over a decade in one form or another, Rechtenwald’s claim hits home like a 2x4 to the left temple.
For years, I remained a cog in the machine trying to “do some good for people who need it.” Meanwhile, I never figured that I was codependent on the disintegrating society around me. 'Twas a stark and sad realization.
In the short-term, almost without a doubt, it would have been better to “go along to get along.” Maintaining one’s codependence is essential in a dysfunctional situation.
Coulda, shoulda, woulda: bent the knee and taken the 30 pieces of silver?
Thankfully, I haven’t yet.
To recuse oneself from the cycle of dysfunction is of more benefit to his mental health and, perhaps more importantly, on the grand scale, it may be the only way back toward common ground on the national level.
Another way to get back to common ground is for us all to appreciate the wonders of “Pitmastered meats” in the way of good ol’ American barbecue.
Although styles of barbecue are distinct amongst our various states and regions, it is a style of cuisine that is downright American to the core.
I prefer Authentic Texas Barbecue and there is no better way to heal the wounds of America or to satiate my own appetite than to feast on the smoked meat offerings of Southside Market and Barbecue.
Smoked sausages, beef briskets, turkey breasts, and more shipped nationwide.
Please heal with me.
Brian O’Leary