our Mussolini

...under Fascism the middle class took over and identified itself with the power of the State. We cannot foresee the political forms of the future, but in a middle-class country like Italy, where middle-class ideology has infected the masses of workers in the city, it is probable, alas, that the new institutions arising after Fascism, through either gradual evolution or violence, no matter how extreme and revolutionary they may be in appearance, will maintain the same ideology under different forms and create a new State equally far removed from real life, equally idolatrous and abstract, a perpetuation under new slogans and new flags of the worst features of the eternal tendency toward Fascism. Unless there is a peasant revolution we shall never have a true Italian revolution, for the two are identical. Christ Stopped at Eboli

If one is a chronological literalist, the first question would then have to be, Ok, so where was the USian formation of Fascism that has produced the exploitative middle-class ideology we detect in corporate USia, the RIAA, economics of efficiencies, Jaysusian adorers of the status quo, insurance ideologists, advertising modalities, NPR music programmers, real estate pilgrims, pharmaceutical breakfasters, evangelical commodities traders, newspaper publishers, admirers of CNN, soccer SUVistas, churchlady advocates of genocide and transgendered rightwing enterpreneurs?

This would set off a predicable series of hugger-mugger surveys of the academically handicapped diachronic artifact which carries the soubriquet: American History. Theories and candidates would vie for the place of honor - it was Taft who ushered in the middle class! ad naus.

Another possibility holds that the middle class was already given all the necessary tools in the Constitution. Still, the aggressive affirmation of its ideology should at least betray itself in history in the form of some State-determining manifestation.

E.g., the one we have now. So long as we do not think of history as a merely linear series of events, howsoever justified in remembrance, but rather consider that causes can follow effects, as well as precede them, that, indeed, as Benjamin and others have noted, the future can be what is shaping the past, it's possible to argue that Mr. Bush and his incestuous Goonsquad are shoring up USian middle-class protectionism with every breath they take. This administration was necessitated by the gawdfearing millionaires whom it both affirms and metaleptically heralds.

Social security, State security, Secure Security in an insecure World - the haves have, the Lord provides, or doesn't, works in mysterious ways, HE.

The rich are beyond help. It's the poor that must be pulverized before, during and after the State, under the guise of moderating its meddlesomesness, maximizes its expropriative powers of exception, and after the middle class reaches hegemonic consumptive bliss, otherwise known as capital in its purest form, free from the tedious spectacle of labor laboriously laboring.

What is suburbia, if not the Edenic figleaf that disregards any representation of the world of labor?

::(later):: An excerpt from Agamben's book, State of Exception (U.Chic) can be found here (thanks Dean).