After reading rcmulliken's intriguing but much too brief
diary on fascism, I couldn't help but weigh in. This was meant to be just a comment, but as you can tell it got out of hand.
Today via Jack Whelan's blog After The Future , Thom Hartmann offers a chilling comparison between Pre-WW II Germany and America today.
[ed. note: As an aside, if you are not reading After The Future on a regular basis, you are missing out on some of the best analysis of the cultural moment we find ourselves in, with some ideas of what we can do about it. Jack's not always comforting, he's not a Democrat though he is on the left, and he does not spare Democrats from criticism. I consider him a must read.]
Anyway's here's a key graf from Hartmann's article:
The American Heritage Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983) left us this definition of the form of government the German democracy had become through Hitler's close alliance with the largest German corporations and his policy of using religion and war as tools to keep power: "fas-cism (fâsh'iz'em) n. A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."
Today, as we face financial and political crises, it's useful to remember that the ravages of the Great Depression hit Germany and the United States alike. Through the 1930s, however, Hitler and Roosevelt chose very different courses to bring their nations back to power and prosperity.
Germany's response was to use government to empower corporations and reward the society's richest individuals, privatize much of the commons, stifle dissent, strip people of constitutional rights, bust up unions, and create an illusion of prosperity through government debt and continual and ever-expanding war spending.
America passed minimum wage laws to raise the middle class, enforced anti-trust laws to diminish the power of corporations, increased taxes on corporations and the wealthiest individuals, created Social Security, and became the employer of last resort through programs to build national infrastructure, promote the arts, and replant forests.
To the extent that our Constitution is still intact, the choice is again ours.
I could go on to give cover to those who keep saying that using the word fascism is too harsh, that it's all too much, but Whelan says it better than I would:
Is all of this overblown? If what I've been saying about the logic that drives power to concentrate itself isn't convincing to you, what does your gut tell you? There is at the very least something very, very creepy going on here. I'm still hopeful tht there will be enough moral ballast in the American population to prevent the worst from happening. But we are more vulnerable than we want to believe. Vigilance.
In a previous post, I linked to another article pointed out to me by Whelan wherein American Conservative magazine (you read that right, American Conservative magazine!) worries that the current administration is leading us down the road to a fascist state. My gut tells me that the unlikely pairing of Whelan and American Conservative magazine have it right: if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it is a duck. And as several of rcmulliken's commentators rightly say, we have to start calling it what it is.