Fascism, BOism, The NFL

The left prepares to cash in on Ray Rice | Power Line:

The last couple of weeks it has become obvious that it is time to brush up on our "isms" ... Fascism and Socialism being the main ones that need to be re-understood from time to time, because the last thing The Party (TP) and guys like BO want is truth in political labeling.

If you tend to not believe a lot of what I say (ALWAYS a very wise decision!), you can access some of my own brush up source material from Thomas Sowell and Jonah Goldberg (his excellent book "Liberal Fascism"  (Moosetracks review) ought to be read by all thinking Americans).

First a simple way to sort these out ... and we will throw in Communism for good measure, is:

• Communism -- The State owns everything. No individual property. 
• Socialism -- The State owns "the major industries", you get to keep your house (maybe). 
• Fascism -- The State decrees and regulates business, private life, etc. but it doesn't "own it" ... only the credit when things go well, business owns the blame when it goes bad.
• Freedom -- The State is the servant of the people. It is limited by a Constitution to what it is allowed to do. Man is free because government is limited. (Reagan)  

I actually think that Fascism ought to be re-defined as BOism today, because he is really the perfect embodiment -- it could also be called "Scapegoatism". Here is Sowell on the subject:

What President Obama has been pushing for, and moving toward, is more insidious: government control of the economy, while leaving ownership in private hands. That way, politicians get to call the shots but, when their bright ideas lead to disaster, they can always blame those who own businesses in the private sector.

Politically, it is heads-I-win when things go right, and tails-you-lose when things go wrong. This is far preferable, from Obama's point of view, since it gives him a variety of scapegoats for all his failed policies, without having to use President Bush as a scapegoat all the time. 

Like all human institutions though, these get muddy. Nationalism, a form of Tribalism is a endemic to all humans but especially Fascism. Christianity was a GIANT leap forward because it allowed all mankind to be part of a single "tribe" or "extended family" ... blood brothers in Christ's blood.  BO is an avowed Luo tribalist whose declared identity is in the anti-colonial tribalism of his father and grandfather ("Dreams FROM my Father").

For a long time I sat between the two graves and wept. When my tears were finally spent, I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America— the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago— all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain I felt was my father’s pain. My questions were my brothers’ questions. Their struggle, my birthright.
Obama, Barack (2007-01-09). Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (Kindle Locations 7524-7529). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition. 

In this post-Christian, post-Constitutional America, led by a Fascist Luo Tribesman, even the NFL feels the lash of the Fascist overlords. This is a quote from the linked article:

Whenever an institution becomes as massive as the NFL, the ideologically driven will attempt to enlist the institution for their own purposes. There was a time when some conservatives enlisted the NFL in an ideological sense as a symbol of American virtues. Nowadays, though, it’s the left that wants to use football, not as a metaphor for American virtue (in which it doesn’t really believe), but to advance specific agenda items and/or to shake the NFL down.

The  Powerline column is well done, but I fear it fails to make the proper connections ... in a Constitutional Republic America, there would be no such ideologically driven power, in a Socialist America, the government would own the NFL. Only in a Fascist America is what we see possible :

But the NFL is not in the message-sending business and has no duty to send correct messages to “society.” If the criminal justice system is functioning properly, “society” will receive the proper message about domestic violence. If it isn’t, that’s not the NFL’s fault.

Ah, but in a Fascist / Tribal society, it IS the NFL's responsibility! It is the responsibility of all in "the tribe" to be on the right message -- be that environmentalism, gay marriage, gun control or the war on big-gulps! In MN, Marx Dayton has similarly weighed in on Adrian Peterson.

The non-Christian reader might say, "Well, I don't see how being a Christian nation is any better than this, it is just different rules".

I'm not going to do a long answer to that, but for a few points -- Christianity is a couple thousand years old, Fascism is a "tribalism of the day / the man", it's rules are arbitrary in a way well beyond Christianity, even if you don't recognize divinity. Since Christianity is transcendent (at least in time for a non-believer), it is much more immune from the day to day whims of individuals and groups  -- it short circuits the "a lot of people agree with me" approach to "right" (just a version of might (numbers) make right) ... the question of right and wrong becomes more than only a matter of the biggest armies.

One of my favorite turns of history was Stalin's "How many divisions does the Pope have"?  It turned out, just enough to consign the USSR to the ash heap of history!

May we constantly pray that enough divisions rise up to do the same to modern BOism.

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