Fascist America: Is This Election the Next Turn?

[marmar]

via AlterNet:



Blog for Our Future / By Sara Robinson

Fascist America: Is This Election the Next Turn?
It's not fascism yet; but if the Tea Party manages to get its hands on the levers of power, it will be.

October 22, 2010 |


In August 2009, I wrote a piece titled Fascist America: Are We There Yet? that sparked much discussion on both the left and right ends of the blogosphere. In it, I argued that -- according to the best scholarship on how fascist regimes emerge -- America was on a path that was running much too close to the fail-safe point beyond which no previous democracy has ever been able to turn back from a full-on fascist state. I also noted that the then-emerging Tea Party had a lot of proto-fascist hallmarks, and that it had the potential to become a clear and present danger to the future of our democracy if it ever got enough traction to start winning elections in a big way.

On the first anniversary of that article, Jonah Goldberg -- the right's revisionist-in-chief on the subject of fascism -- actually used an entire National Review column to taunt me about what he characterized as a failure of prediction. Where's that fascist state you promised? he hooted.

It's funny he should ask. Because this coming election may, in fact, be a critical turning point on that road.

The Fascist America series of three articles (the other two are here and here) was built out of Robert Paxton's Anatomy of Fascism -- a landmark work of scholarship that lays out that specific conditions and prognosis of fascism as a political form. Paxton defined fascism as:

...a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Paxton laid out the five basic lifecycle stages of successful fascist movements. In the first stage, a mature industrial state facing some kind of crisis breeds a new, rural movement that's based on nationalist renewal. This movement invariably rejects reason and glorifies raw emotion, promises to restore lost national pride, co-opts the nation's traditional myths for its own purposes, and insists that the country must be purged of the toxic influence of outsiders and intellectuals who are blamed for their current misery. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/148588/fascist_america%3A_is_this_election_the_next_turn_/

[greytdemocrat]

1. Hmmm...

I thought the "other side" was the master of "FEAR".

Apparently it's alive and well on the Progressive side too.

[marmar]

3. Ours is legitimate.....Have you seen a Tea Party rally?

You can tell it's close to election time. DU is getting its usual coterie of visitors.

[SpiralHawk]

2. "Smirk." - TotaliTeaBagliCons (R)

[OHdem10]

4. Fascism is the Meger of Business and Government. The GOP

is running and promising to repeal the Wall Street Reforms.
This gives the power back to Big Business and Wall Street.
Mussolini tells us Fascism should be called Corporatism.
You decide.

Just be clear--Hitler took his country from Fascism to
Totalanarianism(Nazism)

[RagAss]

5. Maybe this is where we need to be pushed.

Get the "inevitable conflict" over with. Personally, I like our chances with our demographic makeup.

[Bitwit1234]

6. I think it began when the republican corporations bought

up the eight media outlets. That way they can print, broadcast and tell the country only their point of view, which they do. Now they are trying to control the internet. When they do this ALL HOPE FOR THIS COUNTRY WILL BE GONE.