Notes on American Fascism | The Point Magazine

“What is happening today worldwide,” he writes in “Notes on American Fascism,” “is a reorganization of ancient or new or newish social classes into two social classes: the economically and technologically sophisticated and the failed and unrooted and not sophisticated.” In the essay on Winchell he puts the point more bluntly: “When I was young, you had two major social classes (as now again, since Reagan): the people who mattered and the trash population.”Due to the consequent loss of “political and social ballast,” awareness of local reality has given way to the seductiveness of mass fantasy. “Moral issues are complex and tangled. The jury system argues tacitly that all issues are arguable. And they are. And that time changes things. And it does. That adjudication and rights and duties are complex matters.” Common sense, but also “almost all culture, literature, history, philosophy, even religion, if studied and pondered, tell us that. The disappearance of common sense and the ebbing of culture and the advance of the dreamed-of and dreamlike are clear signs of social danger.”

What Brodkey wrote against, in “Notes on American Fascism,” was less ideology per se than “idealism of an absolutist kind,” whose growing lack of patience with reality was “built into our present use of language.”

He defined language itself as “articulated consciousness,” a fitting conception for a writer whose idiosyncratic prose takes not the shape of argument but the shape of thought.— Read on thepointmag.com/politics/notes-on-american-fascism/