you ask your psychiatrist (are we allowed to mention psychiatrists after
the NPR CEO's foot in mouth?) for some meds to fix your problems.
On 10/25/2010 04:54 PM, Tommy News wrote:
> Fascist America: Is This Election The Next Turn?
> By Sara Robinson
>
> October 22, 2010 - 12:34am ET
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Facebook537 E-mail
>
>
>
> 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
>
>
>
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