With Bush finally getting his act together and calling the Islamic Fascists by their right name, maybe it's time we get our act together and do the same for folks like our precious wackademics.
While I'm sentimentally partial to Orwell's invocation of "Fascifist gang", I think David Ramsey Steele's "The Mystery of Fascism" is a tremendously underappreciated resource in the "right names" department.
When you read Steele's piece you realize that the term fascist is not so far off base to apply to many of today's leftist crowd -- and fits well with the pervasive psychological projection underlying their constant drumbeat of calling us free thinkers "fascists" -- but my nomination of an accurate term is "neo-Syndicalist". Or, in the specific case of the wackademics, "Gramscian neo-Syndicalist". (Gramsci was the author of the idea of the "long march through the institutions" or "capture the culture!".)
Why "neo-Syndicalism"? Here's Steele:
At the beginning of the twentieth century, leftists who wanted to be as far left as they could possibly be became syndicalists, preaching the general strike as the way to demonstrate the workers' power and overthrow the bourgeois order. Syndicalist activity erupted across the world, even in Britain and the United States. Promotion of the general strike was a way of defying capitalism and at the same time defying those socialists who wanted to use electoral methods to negotiate reforms of the system.
Syndicalists began as uncompromising Marxists, but like Revisionists, they acknowledged that key tenets of Marxism had been refuted by the development of modern society. Most syndicalists came to accept much of Bernstein's argument against traditional Marxism, but remained committed to the total rejection, rather than democratic reform, of existing society. They therefore called themselves "revolutionary revisionists." They favored the "idealist revision of Marx," meaning that they believed in a more independent role for ideas in social evolution that that allowed by Marxist theory.
Except for the "more independent role for ideas" part(!), this beautifully describes today's Dem/Leftist Gramscian march through the universities and courts, etc. Just add a "neo" to update for the last century of events and less independence for the "ideas" part. (If you've ever read Milosz' "The Captive Mind", you know to smile with contempt at the "independence" part anyway -- but acknowledge that the popularity of their propaganda "front" would utterly collapse without the pretense.)
Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose...
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