Brow-furrowing Question of the Day: Despite what "legitimate scholars in
the field" might think, why would this be considered a liberal, not
marxist, analysis - which contains within it enough meat for frenzy but
not enough for clarity and program? Or "proper parenting"?
["Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended
to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which
liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline."
Elsewhere, he refines this further 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." Jonah Goldberg aside, that's a basic definition most
legitimate scholars in the field can agree on, and the one I'll be
referring to here. ]
Is the US on the Brink of Fascism? <http://www.truthout.org/080909A>
Friday 07 August 2009
by: Sara Robinson
<http://www.alternet.org/politics/141819/is_the_u.s._on_the_brink_of_fascism/>
*The Campaign for America's Future*
<http://www.alternet.org/politics/141819/is_the_u.s._on_the_brink_of_fascism/>
All through the dark years of the Bush Administration, progressives
watched in horror as Constitutional protections vanished, nativist
rhetoric ratcheted up, hate speech turned into intimidation and
violence, and the president of the United States seized for himself
powers only demanded by history's worst dictators. With each new
outrage, the small handful of us who'd made ourselves experts on
right-wing culture and politics would hear once again from worried
readers: Is this it? Have we finally become a fascist state? Are we
there yet?
And every time this question got asked, people like Chip Berlet and
Dave Neiwert and Fred Clarkson and yours truly would look up from our
maps like a parent on a long drive, and smile a wan smile of
reassurance. "Wellll...we're on a bad road, and if we don't change
course, we could end up there soon enough. But there's also still plenty
of time and opportunity to turn back. Watch, but don't worry. As bad as
this looks: no -- we are not there yet."
In tracking the mileage on this trip to perdition, many of us relied
on the work of historian Robert Paxton, who is probably the world's
pre-eminent scholar on the subject of how countries turn fascist. In a
1998 paper published in The Journal of Modern History, Paxton argued
that the best way to recognize emerging fascist movements isn't by their
rhetoric, their politics, or their aesthetics. Rather, he said, mature
democracies turn fascist by a recognizable process, a set of five stages
that may be the most important family resemblance that links all the
whole motley collection of 20th Century fascisms together. According to
our reading of Paxton's stages, we weren't there yet. There were certain
signs -- one in particular -- we were keeping an eye out for, and we
just weren't seeing it.
And now we are. In fact, if you know what you're looking for, it's
suddenly everywhere. It's odd that I haven't been asked for quite a
while; but if you asked me today, I'd tell you that if we're not there
right now, we've certainly taken that last turn into the parking lot and
are now looking for a space. Either way, our fascist American future now
looms very large in the front windshield -- and those of us who value
American democracy need to understand how we got here, what's changing
now, and what's at stake in the very near future if these people are
allowed to win -- or even hold their ground.
*What Is Fascism?*
The word has been bandied about by so many people so wrongly for so
long that, as Paxton points out, "Everybody is somebody else's fascist."
Given that, I always like to start these conversations by revisiting
Paxton's essential definition of the term:
"Fascism is a system of political authority and social order
intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities
in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and
decline."
Elsewhere, he refines this further 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."
Jonah Goldberg aside, that's a basic definition most legitimate
scholars in the field can agree on, and the one I'll be referring to here.
*From Proto-Fascism to the Tipping Point*
According to Paxton, fascism unfolds in five stages. The first two
are pretty solidly behind us -- and the third should be of particular
interest to progressives right now.
In the first stage, a rural movement emerges to effect some kind of
nationalist renewal (what Roger Griffin calls "palingenesis" -- a
phoenix-like rebirth from the ashes). They come together to restore a
broken social order, always drawing on themes of unity, order, and
purity. Reason is rejected in favor of passionate emotion. The way the
organizing story is told varies from country to country; but it's always
rooted in the promise of restoring lost national pride by resurrecting
the culture's traditional myths and values, and purging society of the
toxic influence of the outsiders and intellectuals who are blamed for
their current misery.
Fascism only grows in the disturbed soil of a mature democracy in
crisis. Paxton suggests that the Ku Klux Klan, which formed in reaction
to post-Civil War Reconstruction, may in fact be the first authentically
fascist movement in modern times. Almost every major country in Europe
sprouted a proto-fascist movement in the wretched years following WWI
(when the Klan enjoyed a major resurgence here as well) -- but most of
them stalled either at this first stage, or the next one.
As Rick Perlstein documented in his two books on Barry Goldwater and
Richard Nixon, modern American conservatism was built on these same
themes. From "Morning in America" to the Rapture-ready religious right
to the white nationalism promoted by the GOP through various gradients
of racist groups, it's easy to trace how American proto-fascism offered
redemption from the upheavals of the 1960s by promising to restore the
innocence of a traditional, white, Christian, male-dominated America.
This vision has been so thoroughly embraced that the entire Republican
party now openly defines itself along these lines. At this late stage,
it's blatantly racist, sexist, repressed, exclusionary, and permanently
addicted to the politics of fear and rage. Worse: it doesn't have a
moment's shame about any of it. No apologies, to anyone. These same
narrative threads have woven their way through every fascist movement in
history.
In the second stage, fascist movements take root, turn into real
political parties, and seize their seat at the table of power.
Interestingly, in every case Paxton cites, the political base came from
the rural, less-educated parts of the country; and almost all of them
came to power very specifically by offering themselves as informal goon
squads organized to intimidate farmworkers on behalf of the large
landowners. The KKK disenfranchised black sharecroppers and set itself
up as the enforcement wing of Jim Crow. The Italian Squadristi and the
German Brownshirts made their bones breaking up farmers' strikes. And
these days, GOP-sanctioned anti-immigrant groups make life hell for
Hispanic agricultural workers in the US. As violence against random
Hispanics (citizens and otherwise) increases, the right-wing goon squads
are getting basic training that, if the pattern holds, they may
eventually use to intimidate the rest of us.
Paxton wrote that succeeding at the second stage "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." He further noted that Hitler and
Mussolini both took power under these same circumstances: "deadlock of
constitutional government (produced in part by the polarization that the
fascists abetted); conservative leaders who felt threatened by the loss
of their capacity to keep the population under control at a moment of
massive popular mobilization; an advancing Left; and conservative
leaders who refused to work with that Left and who felt unable to
continue to govern against the Left without further reinforcement."
And more ominously: "The most important variables...are the
conservative elites' willingness to work with the fascists (along with a
reciprocal flexibility on the part of the fascist leaders) and the depth
of the crisis that induces them to cooperate."
That description sounds eerily like the dire straits our
Congressional Republicans find themselves in right now. Though the GOP
has been humiliated, rejected, and reduced to rump status by a series of
epic national catastrophes mostly of its own making, its leadership
can't even imagine governing cooperatively with the newly mobilized and
ascendant Democrats. Lacking legitimate routes back to power, their last
hope is to invest the hardcore remainder of their base with an
undeserved legitimacy, recruit them as shock troops, and overthrow
American democracy by force. If they can't win elections or policy
fights, they're more than willing to take it to the streets, and seize
power by bullying Americans into silence and complicity.
When that unholy alliance is made, the third stage -- the transition
to full-fledged government fascism -- begins.
*The Third Stage: Being There*
All through the Bush years, progressive right-wing watchers refused
to call it "fascism" because, though we kept looking, we never saw clear
signs of a deliberate, committed institutional partnership forming
between America's conservative elites and its emerging homegrown
brownshirt horde. We caught tantalizing signs of brief flirtations --
passing political alliances, money passing hands, far-right moonbat
talking points flying out of the mouths of "mainstream" conservative
leaders. But it was all circumstantial, and fairly transitory. The two
sides kept a discreet distance from each other, at least in public. What
went on behind closed doors, we could only guess. They certainly didn't
act like a married couple.
Now, the guessing game is over. We know beyond doubt that the Teabag
movement was created out of whole cloth by astroturf groups like Dick
Armey's FreedomWorks and Tim Phillips' Americans for Prosperity, with
massive media help from FOX News. We see the Birther fracas -- the kind
of urban myth-making that should have never made it out of the pages of
the National Enquirer -- being openly ratified by Congressional
Republicans. We've seen Armey's own professionally-produced field manual
that carefully instructs conservative goon squads in the fine art of
disrupting the democratic governing process -- and the film of public
officials being terrorized and threatened to the point where some of
them required armed escorts to leave the building. We've seen Republican
House Minority Leader John Boehner applauding and promoting a video of
the disruptions and looking forward to "a long, hot August for Democrats
in Congress."
This is the sign we were waiting for -- the one that tells us that
yes, kids: we are there now. America's conservative elites have openly
thrown in with the country's legions of discontented far right thugs.
They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their
enforcement arm on America's streets, sanctioning the physical
harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials
who won't do their political or economic bidding.
This is the catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism
begins. It's also our very last chance to stop it.
*The Fail-Safe Point*
According to Paxton, the forging of this third-stage alliance is the
make-or-break moment -- and the worst part of it is that by the time
you've arrived at that point, it's probably too late to stop it. >From
here, it escalates, as minor thuggery turns into beatings, killings, and
systematic tagging of certain groups for elimination, all directed by
people at the very top of the power structure. After Labor Day, when
Democratic senators and representatives go back to Washington, the mobs
now being created to harass them will remain to run the same tactics --
escalated and perfected with each new use -- against anyone in town
whose color, religion, or politics they don't like. In some places,
they're already making notes and taking names.
Where's the danger line? Paxton offers three quick questions that
point us straight at it:
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. 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?
By my reckoning, we're three for three. That's too close. Way too close.
*The Road Ahead*
History tells us that once this alliance catalyzes and makes a
successful bid for power, there's no way off this ride. As Dave Neiwert
wrote in his recent book, The Eliminationists, "if we can only identify
fascism in its mature form---the goose-stepping brownshirts, the
full-fledged use of violence and intimidation tactics, the mass
rallies---then it will be far too late to stop it." Paxton (who
presciently warned that "An authentic popular fascism in the United
States would be pious and anti-Black") agrees that if a
corporate/brownshirt alliance gets a toehold -- as ours is now
scrambling to do -- it can very quickly rise to power and destroy the
last vestiges of democratic government. Once they start racking up wins,
the country will be doomed to take the whole ugly trip through the last
two stages, with no turnoffs or pit stops between now and the end.
What awaits us? In stage four, as the duo assumes full control of
the country, power struggles emerge between the brownshirt-bred party
faithful and the institutions of the conservative elites -- church,
military, professions, and business. The character of the regime is
determined by who gets the upper hand. If the party members (who gained
power through street thuggery) win, an authoritarian police state may
well follow. If the conservatives can get them back under control, a
more traditional theocracy, corporatocracy, or military regime can
re-emerge over time. But in neither case will the results resemble the
democracy that this alliance overthrew.
Paxton characterizes stage five as "radicalization or entropy."
Radicalization is likely if the new regime scores a big military
victory, which consolidates its power and whets its appetite for
expansion and large-scale social engineering. (See: Germany) In the
absence of a radicalizing event, entropy may set in, as the state gets
lost in its own purposes and degenerates into incoherence. (See: Italy)
It's so easy right now to look at the melee on the right and
discount it as pure political theater of the most absurdly ridiculous
kind. It's a freaking puppet show. These people can't be serious. Sure,
they're angry -- but they're also a minority, out of power and reduced
to throwing tantrums. Grown-ups need to worry about them about as much
as you'd worry about a furious five-year-old threatening to hold her
breath until she turned blue.
Unfortunately, all the noise and bluster actually obscures the
danger. These people are as serious as a lynch mob, and have already
taken the first steps toward becoming one. And they're going to walk
taller and louder and prouder now that their bumbling efforts at civil
disobedience are being committed with the full sanction and support of
the country's most powerful people, who are cynically using them in a
last-ditch effort to save their own places of profit and prestige.
We've arrived. We are now parked on the exact spot where our best
experts tell us full-blown fascism is born. Every day that the
conservatives in Congress, the right-wing talking heads, and their noisy
minions are allowed to hold up our ability to govern the country is
another day we're slowly creeping across the final line beyond which,
history tells us, no country has ever been able to return.
How do we pull back? That's my next post.
--------
/Sara Robinson is a Fellow at the Campaign for America's Future
<http://www.ourfuture.org/>, and a consulting partner with the Cognitive
Policy Works <http://www.cognitivepolicyworks.com/> in Seattle. One of
the few trained social futurists in North America, she has blogged on
authoritarian and extremist movements at Orcinus
<http://www.dneiwert.blogspot.com/> since 2006, and is a founding member
of Group News Blog <http://www.groupnewsblog.net/>./
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