While looking up references for a recent post, I rediscovered something Sara Robinson wrote back in 2009 that reads now like a terrible prophecy. Robinson has a number of posts archived at Orcinus that are must reads, along with Dave Niewert’s own writings. (Look down the left side margin of the website.)
The particular piece I’m referencing appeared at OurFuture.org August 6, 2009. Fascist America: Are We There Yet? Reading it now is a look back at opportunities missed, warning signs ignored — and they shouldn’t have been. The George W. Bush administration had taken this country into perilous territory. We chose to look forward, not back, in 2009 and here we are today.
Today, W. seems almost benign compared to Trump — at least he wasn’t a malevolent monster, though he had plenty around him. Here’s a look back at those days which we (thought) we were putting behind us forever. As Robinson put it at the time, while we were watching the Bush administration push the boundaries, people asked about the F word.
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.“
Robinson quotes historian Robert Paxton:
..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...
emphasis added
In 2009, Robinson put us at Stage 3, a critical tipping point.
...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….
Stage 4:
...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…
Stage 5:
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)
The Obama years can now be seen as a pause in this process in which the forces of fascism that rose to the fore in the Bush years recovered from their overreach and regrouped to redouble — in part because we let them. Looking at stages 1 and 2, it’s obvious now the seeds of fascism were starting to sprout, and the GOP cultivated them as a means to power they couldn’t get any other way.
My own assessment is that we are far gone into stage 3, teetering on the brink of stage 4 — with stage 5 one terrorist attack or declaration of war away.
Robinson wrote this as the first part of a 3 part series: Read them all and share them. This is information we need to organize against what we’re fighting.