Naomi Wolf’s piece “The 10 Steps To Fascism” in The Guardian yesterday is all over Blogistan, so I suppose I should link to it myself.
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.
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