{"id":495,"date":"2025-11-11T06:51:44","date_gmt":"2025-11-11T06:51:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2025\/11\/11\/notes-on-american-fascism-the-point-magazine\/"},"modified":"2025-11-16T11:16:33","modified_gmt":"2025-11-16T11:16:33","slug":"notes-on-american-fascism-the-point-magazine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2025\/11\/11\/notes-on-american-fascism-the-point-magazine\/","title":{"rendered":"Notes on American Fascism | The Point Magazine"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/head>\u201cWhat is happening today worldwide,\u201d he writes in \u201cNotes on American Fascism,\u201d \u201cis 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.\u201d In the essay on Winchell he puts the point more bluntly: \u201cWhen I was young, you had two major social classes (as now again, since Reagan): the people who mattered and the trash population.\u201d<\/span>Due to the consequent loss of \u201cpolitical and social ballast,\u201d awareness of local reality has given way to the seductiveness of mass fantasy. \u201cMoral 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.\u201d Common sense, but also \u201calmost 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

What Brodkey wrote against, in \u201cNotes on American Fascism,\u201d was less ideology per se than \u201cidealism of an absolutist kind,\u201d whose growing lack of patience with reality was \u201cbuilt into our present use of language.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/head>He defined language itself as \u201carticulated consciousness,\u201d a fitting conception for a writer whose idiosyncratic prose takes not the shape of argument but the shape of thought.<\/span>\u2014 Read on thepointmag.com\/politics\/notes-on-american-fascism\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhat is happening today worldwide,\u201d he writes in \u201cNotes on American Fascism,\u201d \u201cis 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.\u201d In the essay on Winchell he puts the point more bluntly: \u201cWhen I was young, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[14,10,11,12,13],"class_list":["post-495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-common-sense","tag-democracy","tag-fascism","tag-harold-brodkey","tag-propaganda"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=495"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":497,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495\/revisions\/497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}