294 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographybecause it is too close for comfort to the prevailing foundation-backed racial identities which
require certain groups to act black, act like la raza, and so forth. A few examples will be useful to
show how big a role the “think with your blood” slogan played in fascist agitation, as part of the
more general fascist attack on human reason and critical thinking, which the foundations continue
into our own time. Here blood consciousness finds its place in any array of better known fascist
slogans:
Slogans like “Who has betrayed us, the Social Democrats,” “The Jews are our Misfortune,”
“Think with your Blood,” “One Nation, One Race, One People,” are the slogans of fascist
movements....(Norman Markowitz, “Tom DeLay’s Kampf,” political affairs.net, April 9,
2005)^145
Markowitz observes, in a totally different context and before Obama burst upon the scene,
Ultra-rightists and open Fascists are in effect cheap political crooks whose gaudy patter is
aimed at covering up their corruption, crimes, and drive to establish dictatorial political power.
Sing “God Bless America” (or “Deutschland Uber Alles,” or whatever) hate Communists,
Socialists, liberals, Jews, Muslims, or whomever is convenient in your political market, and
“think with your blood,” a Mussolini slogan that translates as think with your emotions and
ethnicity, not with your head.^146
The prominence of thinking with your blood as a fascist concept has also not been lost on
competent academic writers on the subject, at least until Michelle came along. A recent academic
survey notes:
In this respect, fascism is a reactionary ideology. It took shape in the years following World
War I as a reaction against the two leading ideologies of the time, liberalism and socialism.
Unhappy with the liberal emphasis on the individual and the socialist emphasis on contending
social classes, the fascists provided a view of the world in which individuals and classes were to
be absorbed into an all-embracing whole-a mighty empire under the control of a single party
and a supreme leader. Like the Reactionaries of the early 1800s, they also rejected the faith in
reason that they thought formed the foundation for liberalism and socialism alike. Reason is less
reliable, both Mussolini and Hitler declared, than intuitions and emotions – what we sometimes
call “gut instincts.” This is why Mussolini exhorted his followers to “think with your blood.”
(Terrence Ball and Richard Dagger, Political Ideologies and the Democratic Ideal (New York:
Longman Publishing, 1998), chapter 7; Fascism.)^147
Other students of fascism have stressed the pervasive irrationalism, often tinged with
romanticism, of these movements, an irrationalism that is emphatically shared by Obama:
At its best this way of thinking — or rather, of feeling — is a usually harmless romanticism. At
its worst, and not uncommonly, lies the darker version of romanticism that resembles — to
many scholars, is the essence of — fascism. One such scholar was the great British philosopher,
Isaiah Berlin. According to this review (critical review, by the way) of his collection of essays,
The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton, 1999), Berlin argued that Romanticism’s emphasis on
passion over reason represented “a rupture with the Enlightenment’s commitment to reason and
objectivity.”^148
Irrationalism in the United States received a huge boost 40 years ago with the failure of the
political movements of the 1960s, and the arrival – during the phase of acute demoralization,