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| American Nazi Rally, Madison Square Gardens. 1939 |
American Fascism Isn't New
Elites in both of America's major political parties acted on behalf of corporations and carried out a
savage assault on the working class. Their duplicity has succeeded for decades. These elitists spoke the language of values—civility,
inclusivity, a condemnation of overt racism and bigotry, a concern for
the middle class—but all the while thrusting a knife into the back of the underclass
for their corporate masters.
There are tens of millions of Americans, especially lower-class
whites, who are rightfully enraged at what has been done to them, their families
and their communities. They have risen up to reject the neoliberal - neoconservative
policies and political correctness imposed on them by elites from both political parties: These people; largely lower class whites, are quite willing to embrace an
American fascism.
These particular Americans want a sort of freedom—but it's a freedom to hate. They desire
the right to use vulgar words like “niggers,” “kikes,” “spics,” “chinks,”
“ragheads”, “faggots" etc.
They want the freedom to idealize violence and the
gun culture. They want the freedom to have enemies, to physically
assault Muslims, undocumented workers, African-Americans, homosexuals
and anyone who dares criticize their cryptofascism. They want the
freedom to celebrate historical movements that the
college-educated elites and general decency condemn, including the Ku Klux Klan and the
Confederacy. They want the freedom to ridicule and dismiss
intellectuals, ideas, science and culture. They want the freedom to
silence those who have been telling them how to behave decently. And they want
the freedom to revel in faux hypermasculinity, racism, sexism and white
patriarchy. These qualities are the core sentiments of fascism. These sentiments
are engendered by the collapse of the democratic state.
While Democrats frankly blindly played a very dangerous game by anointing Hillary
Clinton as their presidential candidate because she epitomizes the real or perceived
double-dealing of the elites, those who spoke of "feel-your-pain" while selling out the poor and the working
class to corporate power.
The Republicans, conversely became energized by America’s reality-star version of
Il Duce,
Donald Trump, have been pulling in voters, new voters.
Richard Rorty in his last book, “Achieving Our Country,” which was written in
1998, predicted where our postindustrial nation was headed:
"Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the
old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period,
one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional
governments. Edward Luttwak, for example, has suggested that fascism may
be the American future. The point of his book The Endangered American Dream
is that members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers,
will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to
prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported.
Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar
workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going
to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will
decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a
strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is
elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen,
and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A
scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here
may then be played out. For once a strongman takes office, nobody can
predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about
what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly
overoptimistic.
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the
past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will
be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion.
The words “nigger” and “kike” will once again be heard in the workplace.
All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly
educated and/or dis-informed Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by
college graduates will find an outlet."
Fascist movements build their base not from the politically active
but the politically inactive, the “losers” who feel, often correctly,
they have no voice or role to play in the political establishment. The
sociologist Émile Durkheim warned that the disenfranchisement of a class
of people from the structures of society produced a state of “anomie”—a
“condition in which society provides little moral guidance to
individuals.” Those trapped in this “anomie,” he wrote, are easy prey to
propaganda and emotionally driven mass movements. Hannah Arendt,
echoing Durkheim, noted that “the chief characteristic of the mass man
is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal
social relationships.”
In fascism the politically disempowered and disengaged, ignored and
reviled by the establishment, discover a voice and a sense of
empowerment.
The fascist movements in Europe in the 1930s recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people which other parties had abandoned as too apathetic or too stupid for
their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership
consisted of people who had never before appeared on the political
scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods of
political propaganda as well as indifference to the arguments of political
opponents. Fascist movements not only placed themselves outside and
against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had
never been reached, never been ‘spoiled’ by the party system. Therefore
they did not need to refute opposing arguments and consistently
preferred methods which ended in death rather than persuasion, which
spelled terror rather than conviction. They presented disagreements as
invariably originating in deep natural, social, or psychological sources
beyond the control of the individual and therefore beyond the control
of reason. This would have been a shortcoming if they had sincerely
entered into competition with opposing political movements; but it was not if they were
sure of dealing with people who had reason to be equally hostile to all
parties.
Fascism is aided and advanced by the apathy of those who are tired of
being conned and lied to by a bankrupt establishment, whose
only reason to vote for a politician or support a political party is to
elect the least worst. Fascism expresses itself in familiar and comforting national and
religious symbols, which is why it comes in various varieties and forms.
Italian fascism, which looked back to the glory of the Roman Empire,
for example, never shared the Nazis’ love of Teutonic and Nordic myths.
American fascism will reach back to it's own traditional patriotic symbols,
narratives and beliefs. Hitler and Mussolini, after all, had not tried to seem exotic to their
fellow citizens. No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and
Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute,
but mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance. These symbols contain
no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism
would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting
internal enemies.
Fascism is about an inspired and seemingly strong leader who promises
moral renewal, glory and revenge. It is about the replacement of
rational debate with sensual experience. This is why the lies,
half-truths and fabrications by Trump have no impact on his followers.
Fascists transform politics, as philosopher and cultural critic Walter
Benjamin pointed out, into aesthetics. And the ultimate aesthetic for
the fascist, Benjamin said, is war. The amorphous ideology characteristic of all fascist movements is the leader’s mystical union with some imagined historic destiny of his
people.
The fascist leader promises to bring his people into a higher
realm of politics that they will experience sensually the warmth of
belonging to a race now fully aware of its "identity", historic destiny,
and the
thrill of domination.
America is now in exactly the same place politically the Wiemar Republic was when the political hacks & oligarchs of that time installed Hitler as Chancellor....they thought he was their dupe, that they could use him, that he would be their lap dog. They were wrong.
As for the disenfranchised lower classes who came out in droves to support Mr. Trump, it's doubtful he will do anything to improve their lot. America voted to gamble on someone who promises change... we all understand that yearning. But he's surrounded himself with the worst of the usual hacks from rightwing extremism. Despite yearning for change, America also voted nearly all the same universally despised representatives & senators back into power so it doesn't follow that it really wants change, or is it just plain stupid? Change is inevitable, but not all change is good...as the last living memory of a world on the brink thanks to fascism fades away, as the generation that remembers WWII and the Great Depression disappears... history is poised to repeat itself.
For those Americans who so desired this freedom to hate, it's a great day...not so much for anyone else in the world.
I wish us all luck. And I'm afraid we'll need it.
There is only one way left to blunt the yearning for fascism that coalesced
around Trump. It is to build, as fast as possible, movements that declare war on corporate power, engage in sustained acts of civil
disobedience and seek to reintegrate the disenfranchised—the
“losers”—back into the economy. If this movement does not come out of the Democratic Party, then a different party should be empowered for the task...(though as things stand, there is no path for a 3rd party to win a national election...if the apparatus of the Democratic Party can not be re-engaged to be the vehicle, then the difficult task of funding and creating a COMPETITIVE infrastructure, as well as removing the Electoral College must begin immediately. (The Electoral College gave us the last two Republican presidencies despite those candidates losing the popular vote...Clinton will have won the popular vote by roughly a million votes this election for instance) Not only does the electoral college give us presidents who didn't win the majority of votes, but it prevents any 3rd party from being viable due to it's winner take all construction. I've no doubt that if Clinton won the electoral college, Trump probably would have just disappeared, but the fascist
sentiments he exploited would have only expanded. And another Trump, perhaps even more vile, would be
vomited up from the bowels of the decayed political system. We are
fighting for our political life. Tremendous damage has been done by
corporate power and the political class elites to our democracy. The longer the privileged elites, who oversaw this disemboweling of the
country on behalf of corporations—who believe, as does CBS Chief
Executive Officer Leslie Moonves, that however bad Trump would be for
America he would at least be good for corporate profit—remain in charge,
the worse it gets.
Is the hour too late?
It just may be.
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| Henry Wallace |
Consider the words of Vice President Henry Wallace in 1944.
The Danger of American Fascism
By Henry A. Wallace
The New York Times
From Henry A. Wallace, Democracy Reborn (New York, 1944), edited by Russell Lord, p. 259.
Sunday 09 April 1944
On returning from my trip to the West in February, I received a
request from The New York Times to write a piece answering the following
questions:
What is a fascist?
How many fascists have we?
How dangerous are they?
A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such
an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties,
classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless
in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of
a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may
be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or
may be a culture, religion, or a political party.
The perfect type of fascist throughout recent centuries has been the
Prussian Junker, who developed such hatred for other races and such
allegiance to a military clique as to make him willing at all times to
engage in any degree of deceit and violence necessary to place his
culture and race astride the world. In every big nation of the world are
at least a few people who have the fascist temperament. Every
Jew-baiter, every Catholic hater, is a fascist at heart. The hoodlums
who have been desecrating churches, cathedrals and synagogues in some of
our larger cities are ripe material for fascist leadership.
The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and
in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others.
Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as
thousands of other people who have never been mentioned. The really
dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or
indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous
American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an
American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American
fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the
channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how
best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to
deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or
more power.
If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts
money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly
several million fascists in the United States. There are probably
several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only
those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and
deceitful. Most American fascists are enthusiastically supporting the
war effort. They are doing this even in those cases where they hope to
have profitable connections with German chemical firms after the war
ends. They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest
to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever
they may lead.
American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a
purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of
public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of
demagoguery.
The European brand of fascism will probably present its most serious
postwar threat to us via Latin America. The effect of the war has been
to raise the cost of living in most Latin American countries much faster
than the wages of labor. The fascists in most Latin American countries
tell the people that the reason their wages will not buy as much in the
way of goods is because of Yankee imperialism. The fascists in Latin
America learn to speak and act like natives. Our chemical and other
manufacturing concerns are all too often ready to let the Germans have
Latin American markets, provided the American companies can work out an
arrangement which will enable them to charge high prices to the consumer
inside the United States. Following this war, technology will have
reached such a point that it will be possible for Germans, using South
America as a base, to cause us much more difficulty in World War III
than they did in World War II. The military and landowning cliques in
many South American countries will find it attractive financially to
work with German fascist concerns as well as expedient from the
standpoint of temporary power politics.
Fascism is a worldwide disease. Its greatest threat to the United
States will come after the war, either via Latin America or within the
United States itself.
Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service
to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money
and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to
evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic
extortion. American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned
with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now
preparing to resume where they left off, after “the present
unpleasantness” ceases:
The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and
adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can
be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play
upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power.
It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case
been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some
people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they
hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination against
other religious, racial or economic groups. Likewise, many people whose
patriotism is their proudest boast play Hitler’s game by retailing
distrust of our Allies and by giving currency to snide suspicions
without foundation in fact.
The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate
perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully
cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front
against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy. They
use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism.
They cultivate hate and distrust of both Britain and Russia. They claim
to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by
the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen
for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all
their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using
the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they
may keep the common man in eternal subjection.
Several leaders of industry in this country who have gained a new
vision of the meaning of opportunity through co-operation with
government have warned the public openly that there are some selfish
groups in industry who are willing to jeopardize the structure of
American liberty to gain some temporary advantage. We all know the part
that the cartels played in bringing Hitler to power, and the rule the
giant German trusts have played in Nazi conquests. Monopolists who fear
competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal
opportunity would like to secure their position against small and
energetic enterprise. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any
rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself.
It has been claimed at times that our modern age of technology
facilitates dictatorship. What we must understand is that the
industries, processes, and inventions created by modern science can be
used either to subjugate or liberate. The choice is up to us. The myth
of fascist efficiency has deluded many people. It was Mussolini’s
vaunted claim that he “made the trains run on time.” In the end,
however, he brought to the Italian people impoverishment and defeat. It
was Hitler’s claim that he eliminated all unemployment in Germany.
Neither is there unemployment in a prison camp.
Democracy to crush fascism internally must demonstrate its capacity
to “make the trains run on time.” It must develop the ability to keep
people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must
put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and
decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive
government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and
cartels. As long as scientific research and inventive ingenuity outran
our ability to devise social mechanisms to raise the living standards of
the people, we may expect the liberal potential of the United States to
increase. If this liberal potential is properly channeled, we may
expect the area of freedom of the United States to increase. The problem
is to spend up our rate of social invention in the service of the
welfare of all the people.
The worldwide, agelong struggle between fascism and democracy will
not stop when the fighting ends in Germany and Japan. Democracy can win
the peace only if it does two things:
Speeds up the rate of political and economic inventions so that both
production and, especially, distribution can match in their power and
practical effect on the daily life of the common man the immense and
growing volume of scientific research, mechanical invention and
management technique. Vivifies with the greatest intensity the spiritual
processes which are both the foundation and the very essence of
democracy.
The moral and spiritual aspects of both personal and international
relationships have a practical bearing which so-called practical men
deny. This dullness of vision regarding the importance of the general
welfare to the individual is the measure of the failure of our schools
and churches to teach the spiritual significance of genuine democracy.
Until democracy in effective enthusiastic action fills the vacuum
created by the power of modern inventions, we may expect the fascists to
increase in power after the war both in the United States and in the
world.
Fascism in the postwar inevitably will push steadily for Anglo-Saxon
imperialism and eventually for war with Russia. Already American
fascists are talking and writing about this conflict and using it as an
excuse for their internal hatreds and intolerances toward certain races,
creeds and classes.
It should also be evident that exhibitions of the native brand of
fascism are not confined to any single section, class or religion.
Happily, it can be said that as yet fascism has not captured a
predominant place in the outlook of any American section, class or
religion. It may be encountered in Wall Street, Main Street or Tobacco
Road. Some even suspect that they can detect incipient traces of it
along the Potomac. It is an infectious disease, and we must all be on
our guard against intolerance, bigotry and the pretension of invidious
distinction. But if we put our trust in the common sense of common men
and “with malice toward none and charity for all” go forward on the
great adventure of making political, economic and social democracy a
practical reality, we shall not fail."
Apparently we have failed.
