A billboard recently put up in Orlando bearing a smiling photograph of President Bush with the words "Our Leader" is raising eyebrows among progressives who feel the poster is akin to that of propaganda used by tyrannical regimes.

"The first thing I thought was, when was the last time I have seen a president on a billboard?" wrote resident Dianna Lawson. "Didn't Saddam Hussein have his picture up everywhere? What next, a statue?"

I remember when this happened, I sent it around to my wingnuttier acquaintances, and every damn one of them responded, "but he is Our Leader!"

But I still believe
And I will rise up with fists!!

It resounds with the ring of irrebuttable truth, sorry to say.

when the Brooks Brothers' Brownshirts of DeLay, et al, stopped the Miami-Dade recount.
Perhaps you'll notice the strange synergy: 11/22 being the anniversary of what I have long thought was the first act of the overt Fascist take-over of the US, the assassination of JFK, 11/22/63...I think Allen Dulles, first CIA director under Ike, planned that one.

the "our leader" ones. like the ones telling me to have "courage" and to be "dedicated," i really wonder where the fuck the money is coming from, to keep so many of them all over the goddam midwest for the last six+ years.

then i remember that the republicans have been treating the treasury like the cookie jar, and i have my answer. it's so nice to pay for my own oppression, not.

But surely it isn’t leadership per se you’re objecting to? Everyone has at sometime or another been a part of a committee or group tasked with an objective but without a leader, and nothing could be more frustrating or pointless. If you’re in a book club perfectly fine, no loss but some time; not so fine if you’re a part of a village surrounded by brigands or a citizen of a modern nation-state. Leadership in America isn’t the problem we have today, but rather the lack thereof. Bear with me on this for a bit, while I risk being both weedy and pedantic.

I disagree with your claim that leadership is antithetical to democracy. Looking just at American presidential history, leadership as exemplified by Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Eisenhower was critical to the success of the Nation, both before and during their presidencies. Today we have a figurehead, not a true leader, in the President’s office. As the tidbit about disbanding the Iraqi army shows, Bush is not a leader in any sense but rather a lazy man, an empty suit, a cardboard cutout, a faux-leader who cannot be bothered to actually decide anything at the operational level but delegates command decisions so routinely that underlings have long since stopped asking for direction and rather seized leadership roles in what otherwise would be a vacuum. Putting his face on a billboard with the word “leader” is simply another lie. At the same time, (we disagree on the reasons why but not the fact) there is no functional alternative or oppositional leadership from the Congress (vastleft’s accurate recounting of how much of Bush’s agenda has been blocked shows reactive behavior that however laudable is in my mind distinct from leadership required for actual initiatives.)

Instead we have been governed for a very long while by a criminal cabal with shared interests and objectives but an incoherent strategy, thus the military debacle in Iraq and Afghanistan coupled with an unbounded thievery of the defense budget, the pitiful ineffectiveness of Homeland Security coupled with efficient thievery by exploitation of illegal immigrant labor, an unsustainable economic policy coupled with thievery by an unconscionable tax policy, etc etc etc.

The successively more dictatorial policies from this cabal are not, I think, actually directed towards seizing a Führer-like grip on governmental power but rather on simultaneously posturing governmental authority as a means of raw intimidation and removing governmental safeguards restricting their true criminal intent - the unfettered accumulation of wealth. The model for comparison is not the authoritarian fascist structure but rather its cultural cousin, the greedy mafia. That this cabal operates without an effective singular leader is to our great benefit; had they currently someone with Hitler’s charismatic abilities we would be in very serious trouble.

Part of my issue with your argument, Lambert, lays in consequence of your claiming literal equivalence between leader and führer. Recognizing that you are fond of this construct, and being supportive of your argument that a Führerprinzip style leadership is bad on so many levels, I do think it is incorrect both factually and philosophically to conflate the two. Etymologically they are distinct:

Leader: from the Middle English leden, from the Old English l[ae]dan; kin to the Old High German leiten to lead and the Old English lithan to go, generally since c.1300, a guide;

Führer: from the Middle High German vüerer, from vüeren to lead or bear, from the Old High German fuoren to lead; kin to Old English faran to go, more distantly to the Indo-European root word per, from which also derived the Old English faer (danger, sudden calamity) and the modern English fear, as well as the Germanic feraz (danger) and the Greek peira (attempt, attack) which in turn gave rise to the modern English pirate as well as empiric.

While führer does translate literally as leader it carries a strong connotation of the tyrannical, something oppressive and violent beyond simple guidance. A Führer is always a Leader, but not all Leaders are Führers and leadership in a structured endeavor does not require Führerprinzip in order to effectively operate. You yourself, Lambert, aspire to – have achieved, actually - a significant leadership role and yet no one around you feels the need to snap off a Sieg Heil! salute. (Do they?)

Don’t have, sorry to say, a single word to encompass this cabal, part of the problem in trying to deal with them. Corporatistauthoritariandominionistbigotedlyingthieves does not trip lightly off the tongue. Reaganites is tempting because it would be grand to have his reputation forever tied directly to all the disasters that have naturally resulted from the policies he espoused, but in truth he was just another empty suit mouthpiece for the bad people. Perhaps CD knows something appropriate in Sumerian for Evil Greedy Liar.

Note: Although I surely appear to be often critical in fact I agree with you far more than not, but you have a surfeit of affirmation and in that I would be just one small voice in a crowd. In dissent I am, for better or for worse, noticed. Besides, difference is where things are interesting.

Also, _{MR. SUBLIMINAL} thinks you’re being fair to Hillary because you are a good and decent person.

Being primates, we have dominance hierarchies.

What I am drawing attention to is a habit of thought, manifested in writing and speaking that is at best lazy, that reduces all the various ways in which power, authority, responsibility, command, duty, stewardship et cetera are exercised -- as signified by titles like President, Speaker, Chair, General, Bishop, Archivist -- to a simple function of leadership, as performed by a leader.

From there, it's an easy step to identify leadership with the person of a single leader, a leader of leaders, as poor deluded Monica Goodling indeed did (and as many other authoritarian followers do). A functioning Republic needs multiple centers of power, with power exercised in different ways and for different purposes ("ambition to counteract ambition"). I believe the unnoticed propagation of this noxious meme is a sign that the boundaries between different centers of power are dissolving (leading to the sort of polymorphous perversity in the exercise of power that we call "politicization" in the executive branch, or that we saw as the enlisted men did the "working toward the fuhrer" thing at Abu Ghraib after Bush dissolved the chain of command by communicating through nods and winks that torture was OK.)

I hope this clarifies the post for you; it was certainly not my intent to make a simple-minded claim that "leadership is antithetical to democracy." The Founders were leaders, after all, among other things. In fact, I wrote (emphasis added):

If you think that a “leader” is all-important, and that “leadership” is the only thing that will save the country

then fuhrerprinzip is the word you need to learn. That qualification re-iterated, if you read the thread on Hillary's site, you'll find a lot of posts that read to me like the posts of authoritarian followers who believe this sort of nonsense. (To be fair, I should really look at the other candidates, but I'm betting they won't be like that. We'll see.)

I see the fine etymological and poli-sci distinctions that you are making, but I'm not sure how important they are in the ultimate scheme of things, at least at the level of polemic on which I seek to operate ("... the point is to change it").

We don't have a very large sample size for modern first-world states where authoritarian movements have seized power and ruled that can serve us as precedents. Surely Germany and Spain (farmer thought Franco was a good precedent) are the best we have to work, and the literature on the Nazis is excellent (see Richard Evans (Strether; farmer on Gleichschaltung) So, while I agree that "fuhrer" and "leader" are not identical, but all that shows is something we both know: That history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. I make no claim of "literal equivalence," but if you read Evans book, you can see that all the tendencies, and many of tools, that were available to the Nazis in their day are suggestively available in ours.

As far as Bush and his "empty suit" nature: I've been thinking hard about this for some time, and although it's an easy attack, I think it's wrong. For an empty suit, or a puppet, Bush has achieved an awful lot -- and a very large proportion of the country, millions of people, are still intensely loyal to him. If you view Bush's personal goal as replacing Constitutional government with authoritarian rule -- and enabling his posse to steal a lot of money -- then he's got quite a legacy. He's managed to destroy the rule of law, infest the entire government with operatives, stack the Supreme Court, and destroy the status of Congress as a co-equal branch of government. One can argue that Rove and Cheney did that, but to me it means that Bush did what CEOs do: Hired "good people." Bush is fully a moral agent. Like Macbeth:

For mine own good,
All causes shall give way: I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er:
Strange things I have in head, that will to hand;
Which must be acted ere they may be scann'd.

And as far as the thievery and the strategy: It's taken a long time for me to come round to this, but I think that the thievery is the strategy. They exploit the chaos they create (autocoprophagy) and one way or another, it works out well for them. (So, what we view as bewildering incompetence, they view either as a money making opportunity or a chance to fuck their enemies.) No, I'm not so simple minded as to think that they went into Iraq with a conscious plan to fuck that war up in the way that they did, but I do think they planned, and still plan, to set the whole Middle East on fire, motivations as above. The Iraq war is tactical, in their view.

Anyhow, it's late, and I ramble.

NOTE Personally, I think of myself as a writer, an editor, and an administrator. And whenever I hear the word "affirmation" I reach for my Stuart Smalley Special...

UPDATE Orcinus is the goto guy on fascism in America. Here's his assessment, with which I agree:

If you'll recall, I explained way back when that genuine fascism does exist in America, and has for generations. It continues to exist today in the form of unreconstructed fascists and neo-Nazis, as well as proto-fascists like those found in the Patriot movement.

There has always been, and continues to be, a significant existential difference between these factions and mainstream conservatism, even despite the impetus created by the metastasis of the conservative movement.

We know that the conservative movement is not genuinely fascist because it has not seized power during a crisis of democracy. There are no loyalty oaths, no official suppression of free speech (at least not overtly), no purges, no mass arrests, no street or vigilante violence against political opponents.

Those are the kinds of things we could expect if the neo-Nazis or the Patriots actually ever seized power. Or, more to the point perhaps, if the conservative movement metastasized into a genuinely fascist entity.

When these kinds of things start occurring, then I think we can say we're no longer looking at pseudo-fascism but the real thing. Until then, it's best to recognize that the democratic republic remains more or less (under Bush, decidedly less) intact.

This is consistent with what I observed about Robert O. Paxton's model of the rise of fascism, which holds that fascism usually arises under the auspices of an overtly authoritarian political party that comes to power through a coalition with ruling elites. This would be represented here by the National Socialist Movement becoming a significant third party that gains corporate backing, something that fortunately does not seem even remotely likely at this juncture.

But as I pointed out at the time, there's another possibility: that an existing political party could become increasingly fascistic over time, particularly through its associations with right-wing extremists, and eventually subsumed by them as their worldview came to dominate the party agenda. It is this danger, as the conservative movement metastasizes into a pathological political religion, that we have to confront in the 21st century.

In order to confront it, we have to confront how it's happening: namely, the way that ordinary conservatives are induced to embrace essentially fascistic ideas and ways of thinking, often not out of any genuine conservatism but out of a reflexive anti-liberalism, something that has traditionally more characterized fascists than conservatives. Traditionally.

My context in the post is tracking the tranmission of the "leader" meme. My issue isn't with leadership as such, but with the world view shwono by the use of the word in context. Basically, what I want people to do is ask a question when they hear the word used: "Is the writer or speaker an authoritarian follower?" And I think, many more times than we would be comfortable with, the answer will be "Yes."

We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan

Thanks for the link, Burt. I think.

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.