!Discussion paper proposal
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agk's diary 
2 July 2025 @ 07:44 UTC
 --- 
HP 200LX with "calvin" vi editor
visiting family, while daughter naps
 --- 
I'm undecided if I'll attend the conference. I'm
leaning toward "probably yes." I have to figure if
my 4-year-old's naps, need for my attention, and
bedtime will prevent me from participating regard-
less of what I want.

Below find my proposal and basic outline for a
discussion paper. I'm writing the draft as I find
time. I'm happy to take push-back, questions, or
requests as I write it this summer. I'm ok if it's
rejected as missing the point of the conference.
It's just good to have an excuse to try to
articulate this. 

Proposal:

I'm a member of the Kentucky Party. Before that, I 
was a Republican. I voted for Trump against Clinton 
in 2016 and again, against Biden, in 2020.
Nonetheless, the campaigns of Democrat hopefuls in
states where I don't live routinely spam my phone
to warn me fascism's on the rise. A large donation
will help them sweep the senate or take back some-
thing, they claim. text STOP to unsubscribe. I
always text STOP to cynical fearmongers with
nothing to offer.

A hundred years ago, Ottomans ended Armenian, 
Greek, and Assyrian presence in Turkey with death-
marches, conentration camps, massacres, mass rape,
starvation, and deportations. Benito Mussolini
became dictator of Italy after the march on Rome of
30,000 paramilitary Fascist Blackshirts. Did
opportunists milk fear of Fascism for money? Did
they threaten donors with the rise of Jacobins? The
return of Napoleon III?

It doesn't seem so. Anyone living then must have
seen Italian Fascism and dictatorship as a response
to already-existing acute economic crisis. Its
opponents did more than fearmonger and fundraise---
they had a clearly articulated program, also 
radical, as demanded by the severity of the crisis,
a program not guaranteed to be correct.

From American, African, Australian, and Asian
colonies, concentration camps and extermination
campaigns came home to European Turkey, Spain, and
Poland. The Great War's total character returned.
In a span of five years, 27 million Soviets died in
massacres, from starvation, or in war. Across
Europe, 7 million people were killed in ditches and
gas chambers. Cities lay ruined. Villages burned.
Tens of millions were reduced to bare stateless
life.

Intellectuals of the European remnant had the
desperate task of understanding how it could have
happened. How, why, did Europe massacre itself? How
could promised rebirth of mythic ancestral nations
control states? Could barbarism have not ruled?
Could it be forever kept from a return to power?

This discussion paper will apply the answers of 
Hungarian survivor Karl Polanyi in his 1944 book
*The Great Transformation* and German survivor
Hannah Arendt in her 1951 book *The Origins of 
Totalitarianism* to analysis of political economy
and political theology in the United States.

Nazism and the black freedom movement made U.S.
intellectuals rethink segregated white supremacy.
From 1938-1955, historian C. Vann Woodward studied
how interracial, intergender farmer-labor populism
(1877-1896) led to violent imposition of segregated
white supremacy (1896-1910).  He struggled to
understand how Georgia politician Tom Watson and
other white populists could so thoroughly betray
their former fiercely defended black base.

About the first decade of the 20th century and the
second and third of the 21st in the U.S., I ask
with Polanyi and Arendt what happened, what's
happening, under what conditions antifascists flip
like Watson, and what's to be done?

Proposed outline:

I. Woodward question
II. Polanyi thesis: why
III. Arendt thesis: how
IV. Is fascism rising?
V. Answering Woodward