© 2012, UrbisMedia
In The Guadian UK of 18 May Naomi Wolf wrote the following:
On Wednesday 16 May, at about 4pm, the republic of the United States of America was drawn back – at least for now – from a precipice that would have plunged our country into moral darkness. One brave and principled newly-appointed judge ruled against a law that would have brought the legal powers of the authorities of Guantánamo home to our own courthouses, streets and backyards.US district judge Katherine Forrest, in New York City’s eastern district, found that section 1021 – the key section of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) – which had been rushed into law amid secrecy and in haste on New Year’s Eve 2011, bestowing on any president the power to detain US citizens indefinitely, without charge or trial, “facially unconstitutional”. Forrest concluded that the law does indeed have, as the journalists and peaceful activists who brought the lawsuit against the president and Leon Panetta have argued, a “chilling impact on first amendment rights”. Her ruling enjoins that section of the NDAA from becoming law.
As I click through the pages in my Kindle reading a book on the early days of Hitler’s Third Reich a little chill comes over me. Am I reading about events in Germany in the late 1920s when Adolph Hitler was just out of prison and assembling his cast of anti-semitic thugs, thieves and murderers, or does this scenario resonate with political trends in the United States in the second decade of the 21st century?
In the beginning of this book Hitler would definitely be classified as poor; yet little work of any kind after the war and, of course was a failure as an artist. It isn’t until he leaves Austria for Munich that he begins to pick up steam, mostly with his oratorical skills, which he marries to hatreds that are simmering from the Treaty of Versailles and the rampant economic inflation of the Weimar. It is fertile ground for bigotry, nationalistic mythology, and racism.
Rather suddenly it seems, Hitler has a whole bunch of material comforts, an expensive Mercedes-Benz car, nice places to live in the city and the country, plenty of food, nice clothing and money to give to his relatives. It’s money that comes from the industrialists, investors and war profiteers who were likely to do very well in the kind of Germany that Hitler paints for them and his flamboyant speeches. Hitler isn’t a 1 percenter or himself, but like a good politician he knows how to play them.
No, I’m not saying that soon we will be invading Poland (they have no oil, for one thing) and rounding up Jews for the camps (although we’re getting good practice with illegal aliens). We don’t have a Gestapo (but it can feel like we do going through TSA). We don’t have a Aryan “master race” complex (but that “birther” thing over Obama betrays an ugly racial attitude). Etc. Not the same degree as the Third Reich, but not different enough in kind to ignore either.
By now you know where I’m going with this and you’re saying “he’s at it again,” but I’ll finish it out anyway. The Third Reich looks a lot like the political/cultural Right in America these days. The same stuff is going on—the same types of fears are being played, of the foreign Islamic enemies, of “foreign” incursions (this time even into the White House itself), but fear of rampant debt, of homosexuals and abortion seekers that “threaten” the very moral fiber of our society and the solidarity of our families, and of course there is always those liberals and progressives who are nothing but a contemporary version of the Communists that Hitler’s brownshirts battled the streets of German cities. They aim to take down Christianity and that other religion, Capitalism.
Bankrolling the fear-mongering is our industrialists, Wall Street investors and money managers, given full reign by a politicized Supreme Court, pouring their money into super packs and shadow political organizations like ALEC to suppress voting rights, flood legislatures with right-wing legislation, especially antiabortion, spread false information about climate change, and to keep oil subsidies and tax breaks for the wealthy and place. It’s a friendlier form of incipient fascism, and Mittler has none of the Hitler flamboyance. The mendacious Mormon might not have the right stuff, although obviously the values, bring it all off, but it would not be the first time that an authoritarian regime needed only the vapid face of a “big brother” figure.
For most Americans fascism is something they once read about, or it comes up on the History or Military channel on cable. It something in jackboots and those black SS uniforms, or Mussolini’s histrionics from the balcony of the Palazzo Venetia. Sort of a “that was then, but this is now and it can’t happen here” attitude. Historically naïve; there’s a friendlier, softer, lighter creeping form that is more insidious and doesn’t use Nuremburg rallies—indeed the leaders of the process don’t realize they can pull it off until a weakened polity allows it to take over.
Fascist states are little bit like religions, they run on fear, to which is added resentment of opposing and faiths, some sort of racial or ethnic purity, and a fabulist historical perspective. These are characteristics that we have seen played out with dramatic and ruinous results in other states in recent times. But there also characteristics that have lain like a dormant virus in America. To think we are immune is the very complacency authoritarians thrive on.
Recently, former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich (no relation to Third) wrote a piece asking the reader to imagine a scenario in which the very richest one-percent of the nation achieves such control of the government through its political lobbying and financing of the campaigns of specific candidates that it literally has too much influence to fail to continue to add to its power and control because its casino like economic activities will be bailed out with our taxes and an ignorant, compliant populace that, through control of the media and political advertising is made to believe the big lie that it is the very rich create their employment opportunities. This is becoming a more familiar scenario, advanced by knowledgeable pundits of the political left, but of course that very scenario describes a countervailing large component of an ignorant and compliant populace. The other chilling component to this scenario is that the putative democratic process becomes sufficiently corrupted as to ensure the hegemony of a ruling plutocracy. Systems do not corrupt people until people corrupt the system.
America may be well on its way to just such an outcome. In America none would dare call it incipient fascism, but then perhaps no country is better at the denial born of its self-deception than in believing the historical exceptionalism that “it can’t happen here.” The effect is that it can, and that it likely is. Not in the manner of a beer hall putsch perhaps, or a violent overthrow, but by process of insidious accretion, of a gradual weakening of the foundations of a democratic system that will wake up one day finding it is only democratic in name.
As with many authoritarian systems one will wake up and wonder why you were unable to recognize the fascist next door. One will only be able to see when it is too late how the language has been corrupted to Orwellian “Newspeak.” Will we even remember George W. Bush’s claim that he was “a uniter, not a divider,” and shortly thereafter in the ferment of 9/11, announcing with steely beady eyes that in his newly announced “war on terrorism” that “you are either with us or against us.” Such contradictions are easily accommodated within authoritarian systems. Moreover, such systems are able to transcend the errors of their leaders. Witness, for example, the literal disappearance of George W. Bush, as though he were some fallen Soviet leader removed from a photograph. It transcends even him. And political party. Consider that not only did President Obama not deliver on his promise to close Guantanamo, but he has attempted to expand executive powers to extra-Constitutional levels that would chill most any dictator.
Increasingly, the American system has been adopting that other Orwellian element of totalitarian systems––ideological purity. This is most evident in the current status of the Republican Party in which its political leaders are all but required to sign off on “no new taxes,” or in the repeal of any extant tax advantages that accrue to the very rich. Just in the way that Jews, Gypsies and other minorities were scapegoated in familiar fascist regimes of yesteryear, immigrants, minorities, homosexuals, and women who do not fit the mold of some right-wing notion of an American lebensborn policy are scapegoated in the current American right wing ideological discourse. And we must not forget good old American racism that has reared its ugly head in the wake of the election of Barack Obama.
The Republican party, grotesquely twisted by its fealty to the Tea Party cretins and right wing religious bigots, fielded a spate of candidates who, in their totality, represent all of the constituent elements that would form of fascist authoritarian society. There was Santorum, the would be moral leader who would return women to their “proper and missionary position places,” and sunder the wall between church and state; there is Romney who would place the plutocrats in their “justly earned” position of rule; there is (was) Gingrich, the weaver of a nationalistic mythology from historical cloth; and even Ron Paul, exponent of the philosophy justifying the selfishness and exclusiveness of it all. Who needs Rhom, Rosenberg, Hess and Himmler.
Finally, it takes a large number of stupid, frightened, and often bigoted pawns in the polity to make it happen. Germany had them in the 20s and 30s, and we have them here. Yes, Romney is a narcissistic political chameleon who will say anything to get power, and even many of the stupid fearful bigoted pawns that reluctantly support him can see that. But if you get any two of the three, people that don’t know anything about economics and usually don’t care to learn more than simple buzzwords that they are fed, or are terrified for example that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice then time corrupting the nations use and undermining marriage, or that anything, anything, even trampling over your own economic interests, and electing someone who will do it with glee, is worth “getting that black man out of the White House”.
Can’t happen here? I would really like not to have to say “I told you so.” But by then, I don’t think they will let me say what I think.
So I’m saying it now.
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© 2012, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 5.19.2012)
See also: 17. 6: Slouching Towards Fascism and 32. 6 Fascism Creep