But did Johnson's team reject modernism? Did they embrace the hero-death cult? Did they obsess about machismo and weaponry? Did they appeal to and foster a sense of grevience in the population? I've never heard of the New Dealers and technophiles of Johnson's administration espousing such things.
There is a lot of difference between the "Confederate democrats" and the "liberal democrats" in the American Democrat party.
The answer to both these is cowboys and country music.
The chief reason why the Great Society democrats were not fascist, was the lack of a paramilitary crisis which disempowered the old politics. As far as the rebirth of the racial nation through a disguised modernity, sure. Hell, Thatcher would be fascist then. As would Reagan. But they weren't. They didn't require a crisis that broke the old politics to come to power. And neither LBJ (shh: Kennedy), nor Thatcher nor Reagan needed to break active communist movements with the capacity to sunder the bourgeois state apparatus (obv: possibly inserting their own bourgeois state apparatus).
Rejection of modernism: country music and cow boys. Embracing the hero death cult: country music and cow boys. Obsessing about machismo and weaponry: country music and cow boys. Appeal to a fostered sense of grievance: country music and cow boys [the old cause.]
Now the problem with country music and cow boys is that they were black (or rather "hill" poor racial) and hispanic respectively. But this never stopped a national reconfiguration of the racial myth.
What stopped LBJ, or Thatcher, or Reagan was that they didn't need to hand out free helicopter rides: business was operating as usual.
As the British record in India shows
And this is a concommant point: so far no industrial social organisation lasting longer than about eighteen months has managed to avoid the value-form, or the kind of state excesses that people all too readily only associate with fascism. In my locale it is a romanticisation of labourism. That same labourism that put people on missions, dog collar tag mission suburbs, dog collar tag ghettos, and sent the fucking army into the mines. Not that the CPA of the era would have been any better. But the point being that industrial society in general is an awful fucking monster. And fascism is merely worse because it gives out great big "Participation Awards," for the things which other societies try to hide behind the curtain, under the rug, and three feet deep in the back garden.
Of course some people could have chosen freely to take one way free helicopter rides. Or chosen freely to be forced to drink Castor Oil. Or chosen freely to be gassed to death. That's the illusion of freedom discourses and rights discourses in 1789 liberal discourses: the freedom to consent to abhorrent acts.
It is almost as if "this is what people believed and why" discourses are more sustainable around historiographical analyses.
Otoh: McPherson gets points for trying to develop a theory of fascism greater than merely apeing past insults. Theory of fascism is one of the most hotly contested history-as-social-science fields. And my most common suggestion is: how are Peron, and Horthy and Arrow Cross related? As Horthy was the first to mobilise the core consistuents of contemporary scholarly marxist attempts to grapple with fascism, and to be honest, that's the most cogent attempt given that it centres material being, decentres particularly Italio-Germanic fixations, and looks to social function inside market economy.
Long way from Vietnam, despite the adoption of the free helicopter ride tactic, the RVN were pure comprador, and the VWP were arsehole stalinist nationalists (despite the repressed humanist socialist stalinist tendency (Giap), and the repressed village communist tendency in the PRG).
yours,
Sam R.
