Scott McConnell has written a compelling
articlefor
The American Conservative that helps to describe the split that is forming in the Conservative Right...and why.
It is refreshing to see this discussion coming out in the open, and among those other than us Kossacks. Traditional and libertarian conservatives appear to challenge what some fear to be growing fascism.
Students of history inevitably think in terms of periods: the New Deal, McCarthyism, "the Sixties" (1964-1973), the NEP, the purge trials--all have their dates. Weimar, whose cultural excesses made effective propaganda for the Nazis, now seems like the antechamber to Nazism, though surely no Weimar figures perceived their time that way as they were living it. We may pretend to know what lies ahead, feigning certainty to score polemical points, but we never do.
Nonetheless, there are foreshadowings well worth noting. The last weeks of 2004 saw several explicit warnings from the antiwar Right about the coming of an American fascism. Paul Craig Roberts in these pages wrote of the "brownshirting" of American conservatism--a word that might not have surprised had it come from Michael Moore or Michael Lerner. But from a Hoover Institution senior fellow, former assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, and one-time Wall Street Journal editor, it was striking.
Several weeks later, Justin Raimondo, editor of the popular Antiwar.com website, wrote a column headlined, "Today's Conservatives are Fascists." Pointing to the justification of torture by conservative legal theorists, widespread support for a militaristic foreign policy, and a retrospective backing of Japanese internment during World War II, Raimondo raised the prospect of "fascism with a democratic face." His fellow libertarian, Mises Institute president Lew Rockwell, wrote a year-end piece called "The Reality of Red State Fascism," which claimed that "the most significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism. Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state, particularly its military wing."
[snip]
That mood, Rockwell notes, dwarfs anything that existed during the Cold War. "It celebrates the shedding of blood, and exhibits a maniacal love of the state. The new ideology of the red-state bourgeoisie seems to actually believe that the US is God marching on earth--not just godlike, but really serving as a proxy for God himself."
The warnings from these three writers would have been significant even if they had not been complemented by what for me was the most striking straw in the wind. Earlier this month the New York Times published a profile of Fritz Stern, the now retired but still very active professor of history at Columbia University and one of my first and most significant mentors.
[snip]
Stern had emigrated from Germany as a child in 1938 and spent a career exploring how what may have been Europe's most civilized country could have turned to barbarism. Central to his work was the notion that the readiness to abandon democracy has deep cultural roots in German soil and that many Europeans, not only Germans, yearned for the safeties and certainties of something like fascism well before the emergence of fascist parties. One could not come away from his classes without a sense of the fragility of democratic systems, a deep gratitude for their success in the Anglo-American world, and a wary belief that even here human nature and political circumstance could bring something else to the fore.
[snip]
It is impossible to overstate my pleasure at being on the same side of the barricades with him today. That side is, of course, that of the antiwar movement; the side of a conservatism (or liberalism) that finds Bush's policies reckless and absurd and the neoconservatives who inspire and implement them deluded and dangerous. In the past year, I had seen Stern's letters to the editor in the Times ("Now the word `freedom' has become a newly invoked justification for the occupation of a country that did not attack us, whose people have not greeted our soldiers as liberators. ... The world knows that all manner of traditional rights associated with freedom are threatened in our own country. ... The essential element of a democratic society--trust--has been weakened, as secrecy, mendacity and intimidation have become the hallmarks of this administration. ... Now `freedom' is being emptied of meaning and reduced to a slogan. But one doesn't demean the concept without injuring the substance.")
[snip]
To an audience at the Leo Baeck Institute, on the occasion of receiving a prize from Germany's foreign minister, Stern noted that Hitler had seen himself as "the instrument of providence" and fused his "racial dogma with Germanic Christianity." This "pseudo-religious transfiguration of politics ... largely ensured his success." The Times' Chris Hedges asked Stern about the parallels between Germany then and America now. He spoke of national mood--drawing on a lifetime of scholarship that saw fascism coming from below as much as imposed by elites above. "There was a longing in Europe for fascism before the name was ever invented... for a new authoritarianism with some kind of religious orientation and above all a greater communal belongingness. There are some similarities in the mood then and the mood now, although significant differences."
[snip]
I don't think there are yet real fascists in the administration, but there is certainly now a constituency for them --hungry to bomb foreigners and smash those Americans who might object. And when there are constituencies, leaders may not be far behind. They could be propelled into power by a populace ever more frustrated that the imperialist war it has supported--generally for the most banal of patriotic reasons--cannot possibly end in victory. And so scapegoats are sought, and if we can't bomb Arabs into submission, or the French, domestic critics of Bush will serve.
Still here? Yeah, I know it is a long read, but it is fascinating for this very reason. The idea you just read is something that has never occurred to me before, and it is the reason we, as in Senator Kerry and the Democrats, lost the election. It is also the reason we should fear failure in Iraq more so than success in Iraq. Failure in Iraq will require scapegoats to be destroyed. And since we failed in Iraq, we cannot destroy more Arabs. And we can't destroy the French. But Blue State America? Sure why not? Failure in Iraq will advance fascism in America. It will not reverse it. Just as failure in World War I and the weakness and failure of the German Economy and the Weimar Republic doomed Germany to experience the rise of Hitler.
...[T]he very fact that the f-word can be seriously raised in an American context is evidence enough that we have moved into a new period. The invasion of Iraq has put the possibility of the end to American democracy on the table and has empowered groups on the Right that would acquiesce to and in some cases welcome the suppression of core American freedoms. That would be the titanic irony of course, the mother of them all--that a war initiated under the pretense of spreading democracy would lead to its destruction in one of its very birthplaces. But as historians know, history is full of ironies.
Thoughts?
Chris Bowers of MyDD has some thoughts.
http://www.mydd.com/story/2005/2/10/131522/916
Indeed, he has produced a list that proves that not only is fascism here in our midst, but that the administration is practicing it. Go there NOW!