“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face — forever.” — George Orwell

So I guess the Tea Party really IS the future of America.

Thanks to the current flood of posts and arguments about the Tea Party over at MetaFilter, last week I learned about a political movement in France in the 1950s and 1960s called Poujadisme. The movement is named after the man who created it, Pierre Poujade, and was a right-wing countermovement that sought to undo many post-war economic reforms in France. A lot of the rhetoric and ideology behind Poujade’s party, the UDCA (Union de Defense Commercants et Artisans), sounds very much like the complaints of the Tea Party, as this PoliticsUSA article explains. Robert Zaresky, a professor of French history, also explains the rise of the Poujadistes in this NYT op-ed from February.

In the face of incidents like the one in Kentucky this week and the illegal handcuffing and intimidation of a journalist at a Joe Miller campaign event in Alaska, there is the inevitable comparison being made between the Tea Party and the rise of the Nazis in Germany. I have even made this observation myself here, and I continue to believe that the parallels exist. However, I also now see that perhaps the parallel to the rise of the Nazis is merely one possible path, and the parallel to the Poujadistes another. The fulcrum that tips the balance one way or another is likely to be not the short-term outcome of next week’s election, but the longer-term outcome of what actually happens in government once the Tea Party candidates are installed in office. In the case of France and the Poujadistes, the advent of DeGaulle as president co-opted much of the nationalist and center-right elements back into mainstream politics, even as such individuals as Jean-Marie LePen were able to use the UDCA to launch their own more extreme parties. In the case of Germany, the much more radicalized political environment was poorly manipulated by the powers-that-be and in short order the Nazis had completely usurped them.

Even though I’m more than a little disquieted by the willingness of the current campaigns to flirt with violence, I am a bit relieved to learn that there is a way in which a group as unfocused as the Tea Party can be defanged a bit, even if it means having to put up with a much more explicitly right-wing government to mollify them. But I also remain convinced that the Tea Party harkens the specter of something far more sinister that could become an unstoppable force if they ever coalesce around a credible charismatic leader, which, luckily, they still have not done.

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.

The general consensus from the assorted political sites I pass through is that she’s on the right track, but she oversimplifies and overgeneralizes just enough to make her overall point rather weak. I agree with that. For starters, she’s borrowing very heavily from this 2003 Free Inquiry piece by Laurence Britt, which lays out 14 characteristics shared by several 20th century Fascist dictatorships and has often been used as a benchmark to gauge the political swerves made by the Bush Administration over the last few years. She also extrapolates just a bit too far on several of her key points: there aren’t really gangs of neatly-dressed Young Republicans going around smashing store windows, or a full-blown “detain-and-release” model of police intimidation, even though there are early versions of both.

Along those same lines, compare this piece by Donna Thorne at Infomation Clearing House.info, which doesn’t make quite so many claims as Wolf’s but gets to the same basic conclusion: that the American public is being softened up to willingly take on elements of fascist dictatorship through a deliberate effort on the part of the government to undercut democratic institutions.

For all of our rhetoric about freedom and liberty, American history demonstrates that there is a lot of general sentiment for the authoritarian aspects of fascism. Some of that stems from simple human behavior. Fear of the other and the need to create a common identity are just basic responses from our deepest monkey brains present in every single one of us; it takes a degree of enlightenment to work against these impulses and embrace concepts like “all men are created equal”. We Americans are fortunate to have had very enlightened individuals involved in the conception of our national identity who encoded these ideals into the framework of our government, but it doesn’t mean that the average person has genuinely mastered the degree of consciousness required to make sense of them.

America flirted very seriously with fascism in the 1930s in response to the Depression. A group of corporate executives actively recruited a U.S. Army general, Smedley Butler, to act as the leader of a fascist coup to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt. Butler not only refused, he went public with the details, forcing the capitalists to retreat. Many Americans belonged to pro-Hitler organizations like the German-American Bund, which only died off when key members were imprisoned at the beginning of WWII.

I, personally, have very little doubt that between the rabid zealots of the right who presently dominate what passes for “conservatism” in the U.S. right now, and the broad swath of the American public that is totally politically apathetic, the push to accepting fascism would not take very much. But I also think that the right has been greatly weakened in the last year or so as its failures have come home to roost, and the anti-democratic elements of the Bush Administration simply lack the political power to push any further.

This is where I think we need to be careful: the Democratic Party has had to shift rightward in response to the strength of the Republicans, and consequently has been willing to go along with that agenda, offering minor token resistance most of the time. Though politically emboldened at the moment, the spinelessness of our political class in general assures that were the winds to blow the other way again, they would quickly bend back to the right. Moreover, as is demonstrated time and time again whenever so-called “reformers” take control from an unpopular and corrupt government, the likelihood of the reformers simply becoming just as bad as the deposed regime is very high — it’s hard to imagine Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, or even any of the “minor candidates” truly discarding the degree of executive control that Bush has been able to accumulate.