By Sara Robinson
October 22, 2010 - 12:34am ET
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A Must Read: Fascist America: Is This Election The Next Turn?
-by Sarah Robinson
In August 2009, I wrote a piece titled Fascist America: Are We There
Yet? that sparked much discussion on both the left and right ends of
the blogosphere. In it, I argued that -- according to the best
scholarship on how fascist regimes emerge -- America was on a path
that was running much too close to the fail-safe point beyond which no
previous democracy has ever been able to turn back from a full-on
fascist state. I also noted that the then-emerging Tea Party had a lot
of proto-fascist hallmarks, and that it had the potential to become a
clear and present danger to the future of our democracy if it ever got
enough traction to start winning elections in a big way.
On the first anniversary of that article, Jonah Goldberg -- the
right's revisionist-in-chief on the subject of fascism -- actually
used an entire National Review column to taunt me about what he
characterized as a failure of prediction. Where's that fascist state
you promised? he hooted.
It's funny he should ask. Because this coming election may, in fact,
be a critical turning point on that road.
The Fascist America series of three articles (the other two are here
and here) was built out of Robert Paxton's Anatomy of Fascism -- a
landmark work of scholarship that lays out that specific conditions
and prognosis of fascism as a political form. Paxton defined fascism
as:
...a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with
community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults
of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed
nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration
with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues
with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals
of internal cleansing and external expansion.
Paxton laid out the five basic lifecycle stages of successful fascist
movements. In the first stage, a mature industrial state facing some
kind of crisis breeds a new, rural movement that's based on
nationalist renewal. This movement invariably rejects reason and
glorifies raw emotion, promises to restore lost national pride,
co-opts the nation's traditional myths for its own purposes, and
insists that the country must be purged of the toxic influence of
outsiders and intellectuals who are blamed for their current misery.
(Sound familiar yet?)
In the second stage, the movement takes root, turns into a real
political party, and seizes a seat at the table. Success at this
stage, Paxton writes, "depends on certain relatively precise
conditions: the weakness of a liberal state, whose inadequacies
condemn the nation to disorder, decline, or humiliation; and political
deadlock because the Right, the heir to power but unable to continue
to wield it alone, refuses to accept a growing Left as a legitimate
governing partner."
(Paging the Party of No....)
In the face of this deadlock, the corporate elites forge an alliance
with rural nationalists, creating an unholy marriage that, if it
continues, will soon breed a fascist state. And, of course, this is
precisely what's happening now between the Koch Brothers, the oil
companies, Americans for Prosperity, and the Tea Party.
The majority of history's would-be fascist movements have died right
at this stage -- almost always because of the basic authoritarian
ineptitude of their leadership, which ensured that they'd never gain
anything more than a small and temporary handful of seats at the
political table. The successful fascisms, on the other hand, were the
ones that held together and to gained enough political leverage that
capturing their governments became inevitable. And once that happened,
there was no turning back, because they now had the political power
and street muscle to silence any opposition. (Fascist parties almost
never enjoy majority support at any stage -- but being a minority
faction is only a problem in a functioning democracy. It's no problem
at all if you're willing to use force to get your way.)
According to Paxton, there are three quick questions that let you know
you've crossed that fail-safe line beyond which an emerging fascist
regime has too much power to be stopped:
1. Are [neo- or protofascisms] becoming rooted as parties that
represent major interests and feelings and wield major influence on
the political scene?
2. Is the economic or constitutional system in a state of blockage
apparently insoluble by existing authorities?
3. Is a rapid political mobilization threatening to escape the control
of traditional elites, to the point where they would be tempted to
look for tough helpers in order to stay in charge?
If the answer to all three is "yes," you're probably on for the rest
of the ride, which can run for at least a decade or two before it
burns through.
A year ago, I noted that we were already three for three on these
questions. Now, the "yes" answers are far more resounding. With over
70 Tea Party candidates running for major state and federal offices on
the ballot this November, it's fair to say that the 2010 election is
shaping up as a national referendum on the Tea Party's future
viability. And if they succeed at winning enough of these races, it
may very well be the last vote on the subject we ever get.
The Alternatives
There are only a few ways this plays out. A few scenarios:
1. The Tea Party is rejected outright by the voters on November 2. A
handful of their candidates do win their races; and for the next few
years, the Democrats have a grand time pointing out their sheer
wingnuttitude, bolstering a compelling case against electing any more
of them in the future. The party begins to lose momentum, and in a few
years is defunct.
2. The Tea Party elects a credible number of these 70-odd candidates
-- enough to make a solid showing and establish its political bona
fides, but not enough to get anything serious done. If this happens,
progressives need to work fast and hard. If this right-wing tide
continues to build as we head into the 2012 election, we'll still be
cruising straight into a fascist future -- just not quite yet. There's
time to stop it, but the momentum is not on our side -- and stopping
it only gets harder with every passing week.
3. A solid majority of the Tea Party candidates win their races,
cementing the movement's lock on the GOP and turning it into a genuine
political power in this country. They've already promised us that if
they take either house of Congress, the next two years will be a lurid
nightmare of hearings, trials, impeachments, and character
assassinations against progressives. (Which could, in the end,
backfire on the GOP as badly as the Clinton impeachment did. We can
hope.) Similar scorched-earth harassment awaits officials at every
other level of government, too. And casual violence against
immigrants, gays, and progressives may escalate as the Tea Party
brownshirts become bolder, confident that at least some authorities
will either back them up or look the other way.
In this scenario, the fail-safe point -- the point beyond which no
country has ever turned back from the full fascist nightmare -- may
well be behind us when we wake up on November 3. From there, the rest
will play out in agonizing slow motion; and the character of the rest
of this decade will hinge almost entirely on whether the corporatists,
the militarists, or the theocrats ultimately get the upper hand in the
emerging regime.
Really? Are you serious?
It's fair to wonder if the Tea Party deserves to be taken this
seriously. After all, there's always been this faction in US politics
-- the 10-12% rightwing authoritarian hard core that fueled
McCarthyism and the Bircher movement and the Moral Majority; that
voted for Goldwater and then George Wallace and even put KKK leader
David Duke into office for a time. The far right has always been with
us. It's one of the constants in our political landscape.
But they've always been a fringe movement, and it's mostly kept to
itself. What's different now is that all the crazy ideas of the
radical right -- climate and evolution denialism, banning
contraception, sovereign citizenship, End Times theology, white
nationalism, all of it -- have been catalyzed by the magic of the
Internet and widespread economic disaster into one coherent mass
subculture that, according to a Wall Street Journal poll released
yesterday, has attracted a full 35% of the country's likely voters.
According to Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates, the Tea
Parties are a broad movement that brings together several preexisting
formations on the political right:
-- Economic libertarians who worry about big government collectivist tyranny
-- Christian Right Conservatives who oppose liberal government social policies
-- Right-wing apocalyptic Christians who fear a Satanic New World Order
-- Nebulous conspiracy theorists who fear a secular New World Order
-- Nationalistic ultra-patriots concerned that US sovereignty is eroding
-- Xenophobic anti-immigrant white nationalists who worry about
preserving the "real" America.
This unification of right-wing forces around radical far-right ideas
has never happened on anything like this scale in modern American
history. And it's why we need to recognize the Tea Party as something
unique under the political sun -- and seriously evaluate the future
that awaits us if it becomes any more powerful.
That future is a painful thing to contemplate. I've been called an
alarmist for even daring to use the F-word to describe the situation
we're facing. But that's one of the universal hallmarks of fascism: by
the time everybody finally wakes up and realizes that they're in it,
it's usually too late to do anything about it. Here's how Milton Mayer
described his experience of this as the Nazi thrall descended in
Germany:
In the university community, in your own community, you speak
privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do;
but what do they say? They say, 'It's not so bad' or 'You're seeing
things' or 'You're an alarmist.'
And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this,
and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you
know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or
even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the
regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues
pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic.
And yet the day comes when it's all too clear, Mayer writes -- and on
that day, it's too late to stand up.
Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what
you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done (for that
was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You
remember those early meetings of your department in the university
when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one
stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you
hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your
heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.
There are only a few days left before the election. Whatever you do
between now and then will be a small matter -- a matter of making a
few phone calls, of knocking on some doors, of following up with
friends. And yet any compromise now could be the one we will remember
with breaking hearts five years from now, when the country we knew is
gone, and our future has been seized by people who represent the worst
of everything we are.
Be the one who sees where this is taking us. Be the one who stands
while you still can. The future these people have in mind for us is
one that dozens of countries have already lived through; and all of
them will carry the scars for centuries. It's not fascism yet; but if
the Tea Party manages to get its hands on the levers of power, it will
be.
More:
http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2010104222/fascist-america-election-next-turn
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
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