I just started re-reading The Plot Against Against America by Phillip Roth last night. It’s a frightening alternative history in which Lindbergh defeats FDR for President in 1940 and institutes a fascist US government that suspends the civil liberties of minorities deemed a threat to national security (in this case American Jews) and signs a non-aggression pact with Hitler. Naturally this brings out the worst prejudices and nasty behavior from a number of people who feel entitled to act like thugs.
[T]wo years into Lindy’s presidency, killings and riots have begun and many Jews are fleeing over the border into Canada. The nadir is the assassination of the Jewish journalist and broadcaster Walter Winchell, a prominent critic of government policy.
Today I read about how great it was that some dumb “unhinged liberal” b**ch got her head stomped. That is, she deserved to get her head and neck stomped by a Real American Patriot (read comment thread).
I’m not saying there’s any connection, but it did feel a little eerie ton say the least …
Last night I also watched on MsNBC the program “The Assassination of Dr. Tiller” the Wichita late term abortion provider who was gunned down in his own church by Scott Roeder who claimed he acted out of “necessity” and felt no remorse for killing Tiller (much like James Adkisson expressed no remorse for killing a Unitarian-Universalist church member after targeting them in Knoxville, Tennessee because they were liberals).
As one of the characters in Roth’s book says at a particularly poignant moment: “It can’t happen here? My friends, it is happening here.” It’s more than a little disturbing to feel that I am living in a reality that I thought was relegated to writers of alternate history fiction not so long ago.
A reality in which any major right wing politician or nationally known conservative media pundit can say anything – and I do mean anything – to demonize minorities, liberals, Democrats, non-Christians, LGBT people, etc. and suffer no consequences for their words and actions. A reality where police will taser anyone who looks cross-wise at them and then arrest that person for resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer. A reality where the “free speech” of anonymous corporations is more significant than that of real live human beings. A reality where political office is a commodity that the wealthy control.
Don’t think elections matter? Think again, folks.
Of course there’s a connection. One strand of the connection is Rand Paul’s refusal to comment on the assault by a gang of his jugendbund on a totally unthreatening demonstrator. The most he’ll say is that it was “unfortunate”. That would presumably make his teabagger crazies mad at him.
“No consequences” — impunity — is the very definition of tyranny. We have not quite yet arrived at Roth’s dystopia, but the GOP/teabaggers leave not the slightest doubt that, as with their predecessors in post-WWI Germany, their empty whining about “liberty” masks an obsession with destroying freedom for everyone except themselves. This election may be our last chance to take our country back.
the Weimar Republic in the late-twenties, when Hindenburg ruled by decree while the jackboots sounded louder and louder.
Or like any Southern city during the Civil Rights Sixties when the white residents took baseball bats to blacks and whites, men and women alike. They seemed to hit the white outsiders hardest because for them, it was a betrayal of white supremacy. Some ended up dead or maimed for life. As a child, I saw the horror on TV, especially of white college kids who looked as if they had been hit with more than a Mac truck. If it had been in color, I know that I would have lost my dinner.
But that madness passed, and now some new madness has reared up its ugly head, so to speak.
These Baggers have lost their minds. Truly. It was a woman. She was unarmed. She was merely exercising her right to protest even them. They could have killed her, and they wouldn’t have minded one bit. This is a mindset of Nazis.
I repeat, Nazis.
It is happening here.
The only way is to actively fight back.
Been there for a few hundred years now to varying degrees – welcome to the party…
Let me digress —
The typical left-right political spectrum obscures the authoritarian nature of the modern right. Underlying the facade of “small government” and “low taxes” is an ideology based on power relations. The right supports any measures which favor the powerful and opposes measures that aid the less powerful. These ideological stances are reflexive and occur regardless of personal self-interest, which explains in part why poor whites would support so-called “free market” measures that harm their own economic interests. The term “free market” is actually a misnomer in most cases. What they’re actually supporting is a laissez-faire system, and one that is quite conspicuously not a well-regulated and efficient market which would qualify it as a free market.
A full presentation of this topic would — quite obviously — require a long post, but let me discuss some smaller pieces of the problem.
One of the markers for authoritarianism is “outgroup aggression,” and this aggression is often coming from authoritarian followers. Issues as far-flung as gay marriage, abortion, welfare, etc., display a common element. In each case, the ‘right’s-holder’ is asserting a right but has the misfortune of being a member of an outgroup. Although arguments against their asserted right often take on different forms, which only obscures the underlying reason for contesting that right, the relevant question is ‘WHO’ is claiming the right. Claims by members
Another aspect of authoritarianism is authoritarian submission. The dilemma for RWA (Right Wing Authoritarian) followers is when a legitimate authority figure comes from an outgroup, thus leading to cognitive dissonance and attempts to de-legitimize that figure. An obvious example of this attempted de-legitimization is Obama, and this explains the “birther” movement, but another, less obvious manifestation, is the anti-government meme. We see versions of this meme in both the creative revisions in purported originalist interpretations of the Constitution as well as in the likewise creative use of the “big government/high tax” quasi-theories.
Yet another avenue for de-legitimation is through religion. Again, as with the previous (purported) foundational beliefs, religious beliefs are imaginatively contrived to support ideas such as “market fundamentalism,” which was hardly present in the Bible, or to sanction members of outgroups or activities, such as abortion.
An essential frame that facilitates the movement towards authoritarianism is the government V. private sector cognitive frame. In that frame, government actions are equated with tyranny while private enterprise is equated with freedom. This maneuver is executed by using the chameleon-like property of the word freedom to make it mean the opposite of self-determination, which is what freedom actually means. At it’s best, inequality allows the powerful to tyrannize the less powerful, but at it’s worst it is a form of fascism, in which big business colludes with government. This is the ideal form of government that many authoritarians have in mind, even though some of them are not fully aware of the implications of their beliefs.
There’s been a flirtation with fascism here in the U.S. throughout our history and there are points when those authoritarian tendencies might have led to the adoption of a fascist form of government. My first thoughts went to the mockumentary “CSA: The Confederate States of America,” which portrays the alternative timeline in which the Confederacy wins the Civil war. I also thought of the Palmer Raids of the late teens and early twenties along with the events of the McCarthy era. Another episode in U.S. history is the Business Plot in 1933, which was an actual attempt to overthrow the government and install a fascist government.
I recently discovered that Jules Archer’s “The Plot to Seize the White House” was available online, perhaps now in the public domain as a result of his death in 2008.
http://www.wanttoknow.info/plottoseizethewhitehouse