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element 9 is violence + demonization: this is one of the laws of motion of two-party politics. (the other law is bildung and the will to power--New Deal).  Subsumable under sado-sexual.

elements 2 and 3 are what is missing from the Trump-GOP

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a veritable chaos of competing and overlapping jurisdictions. 14

Hitler's absence from gov't. p.  23

Hitler played little active role in the final solution. 25

charisma. 27

concept of totalitiarianism critiqued. 29

public culture of salacious and self-satisfied bigotry 31

extended definition of ideology. 63

senior administrators educated, professional, not marginal. 78

on USA: a politics that begins to look like fascism. 201

empire and colonialism. 213

Geoff Eley, in Nazism as Fascism,³ argues that the concept of "ideology" should be broadened (pp. 60-61; 83; and 207-8):


reinstate the importance of Nazi ideology, not just as the critical dissection of fascist ideas in the programmatic and philosophical senses, as interpretive readings of key texts, or as the analysis of the fascist outlook, but by studying the nature of the fascist appeal. . . .  Rather, it formed a matrix of common dispositions, what Mussolin called a "common denominator," a set of "master tropes" ordered around violence, war, nation, the sacred, and the abject. (pp. 207-208)

So what is the nature of the present crisis?  Confining myself to the United States and by extension to other parts of the late-capitalist world . . . I want to suggest the following elements.

First, beginning in good Marxist fashion from the current transformations of economic life, I would foreground the still unfolding consequences of fundamental capitalist restructuring.  That would include deindustrialization; the dismantling of Western capitalism's historic manufacturing base; post-Fordist transitions; the transnationalization of labor markets and the re-proletarianizing of labor; a new regime of accumulation ordered around the mobility of capital and the spectacle of consumption; a regime of regulation ruthlessly validating private accumulation and the gutting of public goods; and the hypertrophied dissorder of a deregulated financial center whose dominance is severed (or freed) from any apparent mechanism of accountability or relationship to productive investment [see FF to FDR].  This first element--the fiscal crisis of late capitalism -- has profound implications for the conduct of government, for the reliable stabilities of political order, for the organized distribution of state power, and for the practice sovereignty.

Second, the entailment of late capitalist restructuring is a drastic and thoroughgoing process of class recomposition.  Class formation in the United States is always highly regionalized, always porous to cross-border migrancy on a vast scale, always structure around race, always subject to extraordinarily effective mystification, always construed into being something else [CDP].  Yet, by any objective criteria, the working class of today — as a social category of wage-earners dependent for a livelihood on the sale or exchange of labor power — is larger, less secure, and less reliant on the collective solidarities of residence, workplace, associations, and organized political agency than ever before.  Of course, even in the 1950s and 1960s the social citizenship of some workers ( mainly skilled, male, white) — their job security, higher wages and greater benefits, access to healthcare and housing, expectation of pensions, limited recognition under the law — always presupposed a much wider reservoir of cheap and disposable labor power (mobil, low-waged, insecure, unprotected), whether located inside the sovereign borders or iin the neocolonial elsewhere.  In these terms, the postwar experience of relatively humanized capitalism remained no less beholden to globalized systems of exploitation of natural resources, human material, and grotesquely unequal terms of trade than the preceding era of imperialist expansion.  Postwar gains were embedded in the privileged prosperity of a metropolitan boom whose very possibility rested on historically specific repertoires of extraction and exploition operating on a world scale.  But now even that relative working-class prosperity stands reveal as a finite and passing phenomenon. At an ever-accelerating pace, the social relations of work have been transformed since the 1980s into the new low-waged, semi-legal, and deregulated labor market of a mainly service-based and transnationalized economy.  This as-yet unstoppable story of the de-skilling, de-unionizing, de-benefiting, and de-nationalizing of labor via the rampant processes of metropolitan deindustrialization and global capitalist restructuing has comprehensively undermined the model of significant social improvement around which so much of postwar poltical culture became built.

Not the least of the changes under way since the 1970s is thus a re-proletarianization of labor.  From our vantage point now [2013 pub. date] the relative working-class prosperity of the postwar boom re-emerges as a highly contingent interlude in the life of a capitalist social formation whose ordering principles look very different over the fullest span of its history.  From the mid 1970s, every element in the potentially democratizing architecture of a postwar political imaginary was brought under brutally effective political attack.[Stayin’ Alive; Williams/Pontiac]  By the 1990s, little remained of either the practices or the principles, let alone the material structures and institutional relations previously organizing the political common sense.  The social contract associated with the New Deal and the Great Society was gone. (pp. 215-216) . . . .  This new dialectic of international conflict and societal crisis may well enable a politics that resembles fascism to coalesce.

Fascism is not yet in power.  But it is knocking at the door and the circumstances which allow it to do so--primarily the impoverishment of large swathes of the population through forty years of neo-liberal economics and the consequences of austerity since 2008—remains unaddressed.  xxxi

. . .  the deep psychology. of modernity produces monsters . . . xxxi-xxxii

 . . . Nazism was the most extreme manifestation of sentiments that were quite common, and for which Hitler acted as a kind of rainmaker or shaman. xxxiii

The first years of Nazi rule were characterized by anti-semitic legislation and attacks, an attempt to ‘coordinate’ German society, and the attack on political enemies.  xxxiii

What does the Holoclaust tell us about modernity?  The Holocaust was not the logical conclusion of means-ends rationality but rather the consequence of a modern world that creates and canalizes deep passions that have no obvious outlet.  xliii

 . . . how seemingly minute occurences can illuminate the bigger picture . . .  xlv

Mein Kampf might have been a rambling, incoherent product of a second-rate mind but, in its violence, self-certaintly, limitless hatred and gargantuan fantasy . . .  14

Pontiac busing, telephone threats:  54

carnivalesque scenes . . . the Nazis set in motion a licence to transgress and sparked a shared sense of elation . . . 68

. . . a frenzied need to killl the Jews was an essential part of Nazis’ self-undertanding.  69

ref to US. 78

Alfred Rosenberg speech: “It is not only overcoming the intellectual world of the French Revolution but also directly obliterating all the blood-polluting germs that the Jews and their bastards were able to develop unarrested.  89

genocide 93. PF critique of utility of concept (requires intentionality; neglects process)

The historian Saul Friedländer writes:

One way or another, through every available channel, the regime was convincing itself that the Jews, as helpless as they may have looked on the streets of Germany, were a demonic power striving for Germany’s perdition . . .  Thus, alongside and beyond obvious tactical objectives, some other thoughts werre emerging on the eve of war.  No program of extermination had been worked out, no clear intentions could be identified.  A bottomless hatred and an inextinguishable thirst for a range of ever harsher measures against the Jews were always very close to the surface in the minds of Hitler and of his acolytes.  As both he and they knew that a general war was not excluded, a series of radical threats against the Jews were increasingly integrated into the vision of a redemptive final battle for the salvation of Aryan humanity. 98-99

jews as colonizers and natives.  119

he’s not hurting.  126.  SADISM

east european nations particpate in killing  141

a series of interlocking local genocides carried out under the auspices of a grand project

not only jews.  168-9

non-German perpetrators 174-5

violent masculinity, scapgoating.  187

on Auschwitz: genocidal fantasy: 205. Israeli journalist

227. a wider genocidal paroxysm

anti-semitic violence in DP camps  248

fascist thugs 266.  Holocaust memory being used to out pro-Palestinian scholars

 . . . seeks to expand the discussion beyond the national frame, placing Holocaust memory in dialogue with other massive and contested [by black hole of slave power] histories of race and colonialism.  What both perhaps overlook is that the history of the Holocaust itself is far more than a German affair.  The trans-European dimension of the genocide of the Jews, which can itelf be understood as part of the fallout from the earlier collapse of the European empires and thus ncessarily connected to wider histories of imperial rule and decline, both in Europe and overseas, also throws up questions of responsibility, race, and the role of the state.  290

The Holocaust . . . was the consequence of a modern world that creates and canalizes deep passions that have no obvious outlet. . . .  The radical nature of the Holocaust lay in the way in which modern characteristics such as science, bureuacracy, or railways were used to intensify  and make manifest  a form of non-rational fantasy thinking that underpinned Nazism was itself a product of the modern age. . . .  The aftermath of the Second World War . . . incubated a dark legacy, a deep psychology of fascist fascination and genocidal fantasy that people turn to instictively in moments of crisis—we see it most clearly in the alt-right and the online world, spreading into the mainstream, of conspiracy theory . . .   290-91

How can we argue that Nazism and what it means has been refuted when we witness the rise of the far right across the world, from Brazil to Poland, [and] the shocking slide of America’s Republican Party into fascism? . . . .  In times of perceived crisis fascism offers a style, a vocabulary and a simple set of answers to which some people seem instinctively to turn.  292-3

Nazism drew on reserves of affect which can be found in all societies in crisis. . . .  We see it in the incel culture of the manosphere, in which gender-based complexes merge into fantasies of sexual and racial annihilation . . . and when radical-right Trump supporters, living iin their fantasy world of a stolen election, stormed the Capitol in Washngton, D.C.  300

the nature of history writing tends toward order. 302