It’s pretty amazing. No matter what insane bat guano dribbles from the lips of the current GOP presidential frontrunner (who shall be referred to only as “the hairball” for the rest of this diary), it seems his popularity with the electorate remains unaffected and only grows and grows. Stopping the advance of the hairball is almost like trying to stop the tides of the ocean with a backhoe.
But then again, that’s been true of charismatic authoritarian fascist movements for generations—be they led by the likes of Stalin, Pol Pot, Mussolini, Jim Jones, Saddam Hussein, or Charles Manson. Or even a high school history teacher from Palo Alto who just wants to try out a class experiment to show how easily his students will fall in line and begin to bully and brutalize their fellow students if simply given the right direction and incentive.
Ron Jones was the aforementioned history teacher at Cubberly High in Palo Alto, who in 1967 began an experiment with his students while teaching them about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. He wanted to help answer a simple but obvious question posed by one of his students: “How could the Germans sit back while the Nazis slaughtered all the people around them?”
He called his experiment “The Third Wave,” which became a novel by Todd Strasser and eventually an Emmy and Peabody award-winning ABC television movie in 1981 starring Bruce Davison and produced by Normal Lear (All in the Family, Good Times).
His techniques were fairly simple. He taught them to improve their posture, to stand and formally address him before asking questions, to focus on the needs of the group rather than their own individuality, and gave them a focus through simple slogans.
Strength through discipline.
Strength through community.
Strength through action.
He even devised their own special “Wave” salute, logo, and arm bands.
Conformity and uniformity became the goal. The movement soon swept across the campus, grew, and within a week it had infected most of the student body and even some outside the campus all based on the ingroup/outgroup social dynamic.
In sociology and social psychology, an ingroup is a social group to which a person psychologically identifies as being a member. By contrast, an outgroup is a social group with which an individual does not identify. For example, people may find it psychologically meaningful to view themselves according to their race, culture, gender, age, or religion. It has been found that the psychological membership of social groups and categories is associated with a wide variety of phenomena.
The terminology was made popular by Henri Tajfel and colleagues during his work in formulating social identity theory. The significance of ingroup and outgroup categorization was identified using a method called the minimal group paradigm. Tajfel and colleagues found that people can form self-preferencing ingroups within a matter of minutes and that such groups can form even on the basis of seemingly trivial characteristics, such as preferences for certain paintings.
…
Discrimination between ingroups and outgroups is a matter of favoritism towards an ingroup and the absence of equivalent favoritism towards an outgroup. Outgroup derogation is the phenomenon in which an outgroup is perceived as being threatening to the members of an ingroup. This phenomenon often accompanies ingroup favoritism, as it requires one to have an affinity towards their ingroup. Some research suggests that outgroup derogation occurs when an outgroup is perceived as blocking or hindering the goals of an ingroup. It has also been argued that outgroup derogation is a natural consequence of the categorization process
Those who refused to join “The Wave” soon found themselves being harassed, threatened, and even brutalized. Those inside the group who began to question and doubt felt the worst brunt of this. It wasn’t hard for friends to quickly turn each other, to very easily resort to what had been unthinkable just days before.
Eventually Mr. Jones put an end to things by calling all members of “The Wave” to a huge rally where they would be introduced to their national leader and be given direction on the next phase of their movement. At the rally, Jones revealed that their national leader was Adolf Hitler and that there was no movement, that it was all a hoax to teach them just how they could be led to turn on each other with little more than a few slogans and a salute to unite them.
It’s the same way that a sports team can be united together against their competitive foe, or a political party against another, or how one race of people, or a religion can be pitted against another under the simple concept of, “We’re right, they’re wrong.”
Those who many of us oppose ideologically have argued that “The Wave” explains Obama-ism and Occupy-ism, claiming that both of these are fascist movements.
The themes, the symbolics, the language, and the attitudes were just like those produced by the Obama campaign, Occupy Wall Street movement, Union rallies, and similar collectivist outfits.
That’s a view which fails to recognize that these movements aren’t simply about the ability of a group to accomplish more than an individual. Instead, they are intended to protect the rights of those individuals from the abuse of power and greed of corporations—be they health insurance agencies, hedge fund managers, investment bankers, or corporate management.
Although these examples are selectively chosen targets to justify the demonization of these movements by their opposition, the basic concern that any collective movement can be easily twisted and abused to become something far move dangerous and sinister than may have been intended remains valid.
There but for the grace of God …
The true difference is whether that movement is structured on the basis of authoritarianism.
In this question, authoritarianism is a noun that means government in which the ruler is an absolute dictator. Political scientists use the term authoritarianism to describe a way of governing that values order and control over personal freedom. A government run by authoritarianism is usually headed by a dictator.
Improving access to and affordability of health care by putting some limits and requirements on health insurance agencies using the democratic process is not fascism. Marriage equality, the separation of investment banks and savings banks, the 40-hour work week and guarantee of overtime pay and workers compensation, allowing transgender individuals to serve in the military—those are not authoritarian efforts. They are all increases in personal freedom against greed and the forces of fear and conformity.
Similarly, granting 10,000 Syrian refugees asylum on our shores is not fascism. But barring them, or blocking any and all Muslim persons from entering the U.S. simply because of their religion and because one person—one single person of that religion—was once able to slip through our visa vetting process and launch an attack that generated only a fraction of the casualties that Americans inflict upon themselves each and every weekend, while granting greater voice to those who argue that “America is at war with Islam” and justify increasing anti-Muslim hate speech and violence … pretty much is.
None of us yet know what outrageous and no doubt fear-spawned proposal we’ll see next from the rabid foaming hairball who currently leads the GOP polls, but we can be fairly certain that it will be even more wrong-headed, even more in violation of our ideals, even more unconstitutional and impractical than his last hare-brained scheme.
And that his fans will love him for it, cheer him for it, and salute.
Sunday, Dec 13, 2015 · 9:39:53 PM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
As I can see in the comments the technical definition of fascism — as a melding between government and corporations — may not fit in all the sample cases mentioned such as Stalin who was a totalitarian, or for that matter Jim Jones or Charlie Manson who were death cult leaders. Specifically what I said was they were “authoritarian fascistic” movements, not that each specific person was a perfect example of a model fascist, rather that they were authoritarians who cultivated the ingroup/outgroup dynamic in one manner or another and to varying degrees to deadly murderous effect. This was just a list of some examples, besides Hitler, of the negative consequences of these kinds of authoritarian movements — not a claim that all of these persons Pol Pot, Jim Jones etc, were all equal to or the exact same as Hitler, they clearly aren’t. Some key elements are similar to what happened in Mr. Jones class with “The Wave”, or the Stanford Prison Experiment, or the Jane Elliot’s Blue-Brown Eye-color test, but other specific aspects are clearly different. Understanding and recognizing those similarities can be not only important when we see it happening with others, but also among ourselves because their is no inherent immunity to this trend, we have to remain vigilant in resistance to ingroup/outgroup authoritarianism.
I didn’t get into a detailed discussion of each of these differences because that would have been an extended digression that would have taken things a bit far afield and probably outside my expertise, but I do appreciate the discussion in the threads as illuminating of these distinctions.
