At this juncture, it’s reasonably safe to say that the right-wingers have long since blown by “crazy” and have drifted pretty thoroughly into “Bizarro-world”, but the unfortunate reality is that they are dragging all of us along with them. The situation over the weekend with the “moderate” New York Republican congressional candidate dropping out of the race due to pressure from wackos supporting a Palin-endorsed candidate shows that these people have “real world” effects that we have to contend with. The concern that Obama has squandered much of his popularity early is not just fretting that the Democrats will lose ground in Congress, but that the people they lose the ground to are, quite frankly, dangerous in their willingness to pander to the Tea-bagging Set.
As we labored through the eight long years of the Bush Administration, the left spent a lot of time comparing Bush and his policies and initiatives to fascism — a tactic which has come back to us in spades, unfortunately. Separating out the personality issues from both the left and right, however, it’s not too hard to see that there are genuine roots of fascism building in the body politic of the United States. Neither George Bush nor Barack Obama are particularly intent on becoming an American Hitler, but our overall political sensibility has accepted hallmarks of fascism and incorporated them into the political structure almost without so much as a passing glance.
I came across this post at a political blog called Cognitive Policy Works that looks at some of the grass-roots ways that creeping fascism can be countered. The POV of the piece is decidedly anti-Republican and needs to open up to the idea that the Democrats are hand-in-hand with the GOP in terms of most of these situations, but the suggestions themselves are not too idealistic or partisan:
- Passing health-care reform — probably the most partisan thing on the author’s list. She argues that this will “restore trust” in government, but given the crap and patently obvious politicking that has gone on since this article was originally posted, I can’t see anyone on the right or left looking at this as a “trust-builder”. On the other hand, it DOES demonstrate that the public is being screwed by both political parties as they cater to their corporate masters, so maybe it might help reunite the ends of the political spectrum against their comon foe: the corrupt political system.
- Re-establishing the rule of law — she speaks here not about curtailing the power grabs of the Executive Branch during the Bush years and the naked efforts of the Obama Administration to hold on to those breaches of the Constitution. Instead, she’s talking about trying to re-assert the idea that all are equal under the eyes of the law. Fascism’s particular flavor in America isn’t the anti-Semitic authoritarian sort that Hitler imposed, it’s the corporatism of Mussolini’s Italy. The legal system we have today treats corporations like private individuals and heavily favors the interests of corporations and their wealthy minions. Our government was created with the specific notion that it was intended to defend the individual and labor mightily to treat all citizens even-handedly, and this particular twisting of our system is insidious and dangerous without being either “conservative” or “liberal”.
- Investing in education — okay, this is the one she hits out of the park. We are in this mess because ignorance and anti-intellectualism have soundly defeated the efforts to educate the public. Americans are pathetically unaware of their own history, since they rarely learn more than the platitudes of 8th-grade history class, and thus unusually susceptible to demagoguery that plays to familiar, patriotic themes. As Sinclair Lewis purportedly said, “Fascism will come to America wrapped in a flag and bearing a cross”. And don’t even get me started on “creationism” and other junk science. We have become a nation of gullible morons, uncurious and sometimes deliberately antagonistic to anything that smacks of sophistication. Credulous people are easily manipulated by messages that play to their fears, even when it is trivial to expose the lies behind the message. Death panels? Socialsm? Really?
- Reversing our economic inequality. I completely agree, but it’s never going to happen. There will be no Cultural Revolution in this country, even though I think we are sorely in need of one. Just as society has always had to suffer the poor, it has also always had to suffer the rich. Economic equality is also not necessarily a counter to the effects of fascism; fascism really doesn’t care about class struggle, because it loads the political deck in favor of corporations so thoroughly.
- Restoring liberal institutions — the crux of this point is in her discussion of the role of religion. American religious institutions are, for the most part, more likely to embrace and disseminate conservative values, and thus ease the path for the acceptance of fascist ideas. The failure of progressive Christian institutions to counter the effects of the fundamentalist right is enormous and largely left unacknowledged by those institutions. Until there is some common context for political progressives and religious progressives, there can be no effective counterbalance to the spread of fascist ideas through the auspices of Christian churches.
