In this article the Zuesse digs up some very inconvenient facts about the growth of fascism in the USA. He is famous for digging up inconvenient historical facts about the rise of fascism in the US, but he is always careful to disassociate it from capitalism. According to him (and many others) it's an aberration, an infection from the outside.
Zuesse's take on history is through the lens of someone who does not recognize the differences that the rising capitalist class represented from the earlier aristocrats from the era of feudalism. Thus capitalists are simply the modern form of aristocrats. Apparently he doesn't object to aristocrats, but only fascist aristocrats. This is because he doesn't see, or doesn't want to see, that the dynamics of capitalism are different than what existed under the rule of the monarchs and aristocrats during the feudal era. He always steers clear of analyzing the dynamics of capitalism. (It's a mystery to me why this website appointed him as Senior Contributing Editor.)
This lack of discrimination has much in common with the politicos who are now fashionably referred to as paleoconservatives (old-fashioned conservatives). The latter enjoyed top dog status in the US ruling capitalist class for much of the 20th century and earlier, but have been largely replaced by neo-conservatives (more overt fascists) who first infiltrated the Reagan administration and now appear to be top dogs. To be sure, Zuesse has demonstrated via his prolific writings, which are frequently well-documented, that he has a good grasp of history. But by avoiding the reality of capitalism and being extremely careful to always disassociate capitalism from fascism, he is very much like the paleoconservatives (Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, Paul Craig Roberts, etc).
In sharp contrast to such a view of political history, I regard fascism as the end state of capitalism, or capitalism as pre-fascism. For a similar view of capitalism but with a detailed documented analysis, you should read The Apprentice's Sorcerer by historian Ishay Landa.
This blindness provides Zuesse with a certain safety from any repercussions to his career as an historian. (I've never found any references to his career, and I wonder why.) However, it does cause him to make mistakes in interpreting historical events. For example, Zuesse writes:
Under Hitler, hereditary rights and obligations were publicly recognized; and democracy, the rule over a land by the residents on that land, was publicly condemned. .... As an ideology, nazism totally affirms both the hereditary principle, and the imperialist principle. This is what the U.S.-Saudi alliance likewise affirms. And that is why, for example, the CIA has always favored monarchies and opposed democracies (or at least authentic ones, which the U.S. aristocracy cannot control).Did you notice that he doesn't provide any documentation to support his contention about Hitler's support of the "hereditary principle"? Because there is none. In contrast, Landa writes with extensive documentation:
Hitler did not wish to revive the closed caste society of the middle ages, but rather to construct society according to paramount capitalistic-liberal tenet of equal opportunities, competition and individual merit. Like the majority of his right-wing contemporaries, he endorsed open [his emphasis] elitism, which admits into its ranks and promotes new talent from below. Hitler's "aristocratic principle of nature" was thus in fact distinctly meritocratic, i.e., bourgeois.The whole system revolves-- ... at least in theory--on "the principle of achievement". [Capitalists always view their success in business as "achievement" no matter how it is achieved.]In stark contrast to their ideology, in practice the Nazi's always honored the hereditary principles of the capitalist class. This is because the German fascist-capitalists only pretended to be a basic alternative to the ruling capitalist class. They only differed in one way: to the capitalists' strategy of always presenting a democratic facade to their rule.
