Dick Cheney labored mightily to create an authoritarian state, but he lacked that extra ingredient that fascists parties added - a mob of violent supporters who enforced terror in every neighborhood while police looked the other way.
Now the mob is here, but their authority is gone.
Here's why we have to stop these two from ever getting together.
I have a long-running argument with a friend about the definition of Fascism. He advocates the definition popular among the anti-capitalist Left (of which I am certainly a member) that Fascism is simply the merging of government and private corporate power.
I've just never been comfortable with that. It's right, but it's missing something. I lived at Clark Air Base in the Philippines as a boy during the Marcos era, and while I knew Marcos was a dictator and that you had to watch what you said off-base, I never saw anything like the round-the-clock, full-spectrum public mobilization that we associate with modern totalitarian states. I can't call him a fascist, not because of the size of his crimes, but due to the nature of his organization.
My greatest fear of having to live under fascism came in the early years of the War By Terror, when it seemed the far-right network of lies and intimidation spreading its web from Cheney's office could commit any crime. I figured the Christian Right would sign up like lemmings for Bush's crusade and the Army would easily expand until Cheney could send it to Iran. I feared enough troops would be built up in the continental US to carry out any new signing statement, to arrest any dissident, to deter any resistance.
None of this happened. There was no lack of crimes by Cheney and his neocon cabal, but they did not create a permanent mass mobilization for either foreign or domestic purposes. With all the tools at their disposal, they preferred to keep their followers as passive as possible. They soon had reason to regret it. By 2005, they had reached the peak of their power, and the cracks in the shoddy edifice of lies that won Bush re-election poured out a three-year flood from New Orleans to Wall Street.
Why didn't Cheney finish the job? The Reagan administration set up booths in gun shows 25 years ago to inquire as to the willingness of attendants to join a "replacement" national militia (see James Williams Gibson's book "Warrior Dreams") in case the National Guard were ever tied up by an emergency (a leftist uprising?). The project died out, but the booths survived, routed into a maverick militia movement that couldn't build up the critical mass of support to pose itself as the will of the community.
I think at heart Cheney and the neocons mistrust and even despise the citizenry too much to embrace mass agitation. Their Wall Street friends (who would be the corporate part of fascist power) like their consumers passive and unfocused as well. The neocons recognized Rove's point that they needed the Christian Right movement at the voting booth, and shared with the theocrats a belief that religion was part of mass control. But the cultural gulf between a neocon and Joe The Plumber is not a small thing.
Once Bush and Cheney and all the neocons were lame ducks, the mobilization began. We all recall the Palin rallies a year ago. The market crash had dazed and discredited the two-headed eagle of government and corporate power, and the followers now could move into the power vacuum as leaders.
That is what the Leftist who blames capitalists for fascism hates to consider: fascism truly comes from below. Not all the way from the bottom, but from those who are willing to live badly as long as those they hate live worse. They don't care if it's by market mechanisms, Jim Crow, or God's law. They want to punish and see suffering.
That is the living beating heart of fascism. We've defined it from the wrong end. The combination of corporate and government power is merely the logical way for an antiegalitarian demagogue to rule once in office, for the crisis that elevates him also terrifies the corporations. Corporations support fascism out of their greater fear of redistribution. They would rather maintain normal low-level anxiety, as Marilyn Manson explained to Michael Moore in "Bowling for Columbine", offering their goods as a panacea. Totally panicked consumers won't even leave their homes.
Total panic, however, is good for fascists. The fascist offers the capitalist a devil's deal - to purge the country of panic, defend private property, and redefine government obligations in ways that will ensure lucrative contracts forever.
Cheney disappeared for a while after his party's defeat. After the teabaggers had gotten the ball rolling on dogwhistle racism and incipient sedition, he crawled out of his undisclosed location to try to hitch his wagon to a rabid horse. Chasing alongside him are Terry Sanford and Mitch McConnell and Rick Perry and many others who for many years had said that nothing is ever wrong with America, that business is running things fine, that the people who are poor are the people who deserve to be poor. If they had turned loose the madness in 2004, organized the Swiftboat believers to shout down townhalls and deliver death threats, merely told their base that something was indeed very wrong with America and that good Americans would have to crush bad Americans with their own bare hands to fix it, they might still be in power.
But that never happens. Fascism is always a way to get into power, not something those in power can adopt in mid-stream. Fascism requires that the followers think they personally created victory by phoning death threats and trashing store windows. If capitalism refuses to allow ordinary citizens to have real power over anything good or useful, at least the addition of fascism gives them the sense of accomplishment that they have destroyed license, punished the wicked, and enforced the will of their God over institutions they can't comprehend.
We've already had the combination of corporate and government power in our country, and it has been as authoritarian at times as Bismarck's Germany or Louis the 14th's France. We are in danger now because it has only been weakened, but it claims it has already been defeated by socialism so that it can deflect blame for our current ills to the Democrats. If it claims to "restore" itself to power by the fists of grass-roots racists, theocrats, and militiamen, this creates the narrative of a victorious crusade for a new America, wiping the slate of capitalist abuses clean to be quickly refilled, the resulting profits plowed back into propaganda, intimidation, and the one reward that fascist regimes can reliably promise their followers: war.