THE SURRENDER OF CENTER-LEFT PARTIES

But Milne makes a further point. The rise of neo-fascism in Italy, and elsewhere, is tied to the collapse -- or rather the surrender -- of center-left parties to the pernicious doctrines of the Right. Everywhere, these parties ---

• Democrats in America,

• Labour in the UK, various

• Social Democrats throughout Europe –
  

have turned themselves into pale copies of conservative parties, adopting policies that have

• degraded society,

• destroyed communities,

• entrenched injustice,

• rewarded greed,

• poisoned the earth,

• embraced militarism and aggression,

• inflicted vast suffering on developing nations (through the straightjacket of "market reforms," i.e., corporate-crony welfare),

• subverted democracy,

• diminished liberty and

• gutted the very notion of the common good.

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the Democrats – and New Labour and other craven centre-left parties – have embraced the Right's agenda of elitist domination, militarism and scorn for the common good because they agree with it.

• Any figures with genuinely "progressive" views have been winnowed out or marginalized by the big money machines that run the parties.

• Such people are always a minority amongst the self-interested factions who vie for domination over a nation's affairs, of course. But there used to be a more substantial minority of such folks in U.S. politics, with enough leverage to sometimes affect national policy and even score some successes.

• But this strain has been almost completely bred out, as we have seen in the latest Democratic Congress – the most reviled and unpopular Congress in American history.]

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In the current U.S. presidential campaign, we can see this dynamic of center-left collaboration with the Right – which has been going on for almost a quarter-century in America – playing itself out once again. Barack Obama's "surge" to the Right –

• as exemplified by his vote for the tyrannical FISA measure – is just another iteration of this process.

• Likewise, his embrace of the Terror War; true, he wants to do it more "efficiently," and perhaps add a few more targets – in Pakistan, say – but he still wants to do it.

He makes no bones about continuing this militarist project which has already

• killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people,

• bankrupted the national treasury,

• and is now – through the Terror War oil price spike – strangling the entire national economy.
  

All of this – especially the Terror War's continuing brutalization and coarsening of the national ethos – is meet food for neo-fascism to feed upon.