The discussion on fascism that’s taken up the last two
weekly essays here on The Archdruid Report, and will finish
up in this week’s post, has gone in directions that will very likely have
surprised and dismayed many of my readers.
Some of you, in fact, may even be jumping up and down by this point
shouting, “Okay, but what about fascism? We’ve heard more
than enough about Depression-era European dictators in funny uniforms, and
that’s all very well and good, but what about real fascism,
the kind we have in America today?”
If this is what’s going through your head just now, dear
reader, you’re in interesting company.
It’s a curious detail that in the last years of the Weimar Republic, a
large number of avant-garde intellectuals and cultural figures were convinced
that they already lived in a fascist country. They pointed, as many Americans
point today, to the blatant influence of big business on the political process,
to civil rights violations perpetrated by the administration in power or by
state and local governments, and to the other abuses of power common to any centralized political system,
and they insisted that this amounted to fascism, since their concept of
fascism—like the one standard in today’s America—assumed as a matter of course
that fascism must by definition defend and support the economic and political
status quo.
In point of fact, as Walter Laqueur showed in his capable
survey Weimar: A Cultural History, denouncing the Weimar
Republic as a fascist regime was quite the lively industry in Germany in the
very late 1920s and early 1930s. Unfortunately for those who made this claim,
history has a wicked sense of humor. A
good many of the people who liked to insist that Weimar Germany was a fascist
state got to find out—in many cases, at the cost of their lives—that there
really is a difference between a troubled, dysfunctional, and failing
representative democracy and a totalitarian state, and that a movement that
promises to overturn a broken status quo, and succeeds in doing so, is
perfectly capable of making things much, much worse.
It’s entirely possible that we could end up on the
receiving end of a similar dose of history’s gallows humor. To an embarrassing
degree, after all, political thought in modern America has degenerated into the
kind of reflexive venting of rage George Orwell parodied in
1984 in the Two Minutes Hate. Instead of pouring out their
hatred at a cinematic image of marching Eurasian soldiers juxtaposed with the
sniveling face of Goldstein, the traitorous leader of the Brotherhood, the
inhabitants of our contemporary Oceania have their choice of options neatly
stapled to the insides of their brains. For Democrats, the standard target until
recently was an image of George W. Bush dressed up as Heinrich Himmler,
lighting a bonfire using the Constitution as tinder and then tossing endangered
species into the flames; for Republicans right now, it’s usually a picture of
Barack Obama dressed up as Ho Chi Minh, having sex with their daughters and
then walking off with their gun collections. Either way, the effect is the
same.
I wish I were joking. I know people who, during Dubya’s
presidency, were incapable of passing a picture of the man without screaming
obscenities at it, and I know other people who have the identical kneejerk
reaction these days to pictures of the White House’s current inmate. I’ve commented here before how our political
demonology stands in the way of any response to the converging crises of our
time. The same sort of denunciatory frenzy was all the rage, in any sense of
that word you care to choose, in Germany during the Weimar Republic—and its
most important consequence was that it blinded far too many people to the difference
between ordinary political dysfunction and the far grimmer realities that were
waiting in the wings.
To explore the way that unfolded, let’s engage in a
little thought experiment. Imagine, then, that sometime this spring, when you
visit some outdoor public place, you encounter a half dozen young people
dressed identically in bright green T-shirts, surplus black BDU trousers, and
army-style boots. They’re clean-cut,
bright, and enthusiastic, and they want to interest you in a new political
movement called the American Peoples Party. You’re not interested, and walk on
by.
A couple of months later you run across another dozen or
so of them, just as bright and clean and enthusiastic as the first bunch. Now the movement is called the National
Progressive American Peoples Party, NPAPP for short, and it’s got a
twenty-five-point program focused on the troubled economy. You take a flyer,
mostly because the young person who hands it to you is kind of cute. The
twenty-five points don’t seem especially original, but they make more sense
than what either Obama or the Republicans are offering. What’s more, the flyer
says that the economy’s a mess and peak oil and climate change are real problem
that aren’t going away, and this impresses you.
Over the months to come you see more and more of them,
handing out flyers, going door to door to invite people to local caucus
meetings, and doing all the other things that political parties used to do back
when they were serious about grassroots organizing. A news website you follow
shows a picture of the party’s chairman, a man named Fred Halliot;* he’s an
earnest-looking guy in his thirties, an Army vet who did three tours in
Afghanistan and earned a Silver Star for courage under fire. You glance at his
face and then go look at something more interesting.
(*Yes, it’s an anagram. Work it out yourself.)
Meanwhile, the economy’s getting worse in the same slow
uneven way it’s been doing for years. Two of your friends lose their jobs, and
the price of gasoline spikes up to $5.69 a gallon, plunges, and finds a new
stable point again well above $4. Obama insists that the recovery is already
here and people just need to be patient and wait for prosperity to get to them.
The Republicans insist that the only reason the economy hasn’t recovered yet is
that the rich still have to pay taxes. The media are full of cheery stories
about how the 2014 holiday season is going to be so big a hit that stores may
run out of toys and electronic gewgaws to sell; there are record crowds on Black
Friday, or that’s what the TV says, but nobody you know has the spare money to
buy much this year. Not until midway through January 2015 does the media admit
that the shopping season was a disaster and that two big-box chains have just
gone broke.
Through all this, the new party keeps building momentum.
As spring comes, Halliot begins a nationwide speaking tour. He travels in a
school bus painted green and black, the NPAPP colors, and a Celtic tree-of-life
symbol, the party’s new emblem. The bus
goes from town to town, and the crowds start to build. A handful of media
pundits start talking about Halliot and the NPPAP, making wistful noises about
how nice it is to see young idealists in politics again; a few others fling
denunciations, though they don’t seem to have any clear sense what exactly
they’re denouncing. Both mainstream
parties, as well as the Libertarians and the Greens, launch youth organizations
with their own t-shirts and slogans, but their lack of anything approaching new
ideas or credible responses to the economic mess make these efforts a waste of
time.
The speaking tour ends in Washington DC with a huge
rally, and things get out of hand. Exactly what happened is hard to tell
afterwards, with wildly different stories coming from the feds, the mass media,
the internet, and the NPAPP headquarters in St. Louis. The upshot, though, is
that Halliot and two of his chief aides are arrested on federal conspiracy
charges. The trial is a media circus.
Halliot gives an impassioned speech justifying his actions on the grounds that
the nation and the world are in deep trouble, radical change is needed to keep
things from getting much worse, and civil disobedience is justified for that
reason. He gets sentenced to four years
in prison, and the other political parties breathe a huge collective sigh of
relief, convinced that the NPAPP is a flash in the pan.
They’re wrong. The NPAPP weathers the crisis easily, and
publicity from the trial gives Halliot and his party a major boost. Candidates
from the new party enter races across the country in the 2016 elections,
seizing much of the limelight from the frankly dreary presidential race between
Hillary Clinton and Haley Barbour. When
the votes are counted, the new party has more than three hundred city and
county positions, forty-three seats in state legislatures, and two seats in the
House of Representatives. The major parties try every trick in the book to
overturn the results of each race, and succeed mostly in making themselves look
corrupt and scared.
Then Halliot gets released from prison, having served
only nine months of his sentence. (Word
on the internet has it that the whole point of locking him up was to keep him
out of the way during the election—but is that simply a NPAPP talking
point? Nobody’s sure.) It turns out that
he put the time to good use, and has written a book, A Struggle for
the Soul of America, which hits the bookstalls the same week
President Barbour is inaugurated. You leaf through a copy at the public library;
it’s not exactly a great work of literature, and it’s written in a folksy,
rambling style you find irritating, but it’s full of the kind of political
notions that Americans swap over beers and pizza: the kind, in other words,
that no mainstream party will touch.
The book has an edge that wasn’t in NPAPP literature
before Halliot’s prison term, though.
The government of the parties, he insists, must be replaced by a
government of the people, guided by a new values consensus that goes beyond the
broken politics of greed and special interests to do what has to be done to
cope with the disintegrating economy, the challenge of peak oil, and the
impacts of climate change. Time is short, he insists, and half measures aren’t
enough to avoid catastrophe; a complete transformation of every aspect of
American life, a Great Turning, is the only option left. Edgy though his language and ideas have
become, you note, he’s still the only person in national politics who takes the
economic, energy, and climate crises seriously.
The next autumn, as if on cue, the economic troubles go
into overdrive. Petroleum prices spike
again—you start commuting via public transit when the price of gasoline breaks
$8 a gallon—and a big Wall Street investment bank that had huge derivative bets
the other direction goes messily broke.
Attempts to get a bailout through Congress freeze up in a flurry of
partisan bickering. Over the next two months, despite frantic efforts by the
Barbour administration, the stock market plunges and the credit markets seize
up. Job losses snowball. Through the
fall and winter, NPAPP people are everywhere, leafleting the crowds, staffing
impromptu soup kitchens, marching in the streets. You would pay less attention,
but by spring you’re out of a job, too.
The following years are a blur of grim headlines, hungry
crowds at soup kitchens, and marching crowds in green and black. In the 2018
election, there are rumors, never
proved, of NPAPP squads keeping opposition voters away from the polls in
critical districts. One way or another,
though, Halliot’s party seats six senators and 185 representatives in Congress,
and takes control of the governments of a dozen states. The three-way split in
the House makes it all but impossible to get anything done there, not that the Democrats
or Republicans have any idea what to do, and the administration copies its last
two predecessors by flailing and fumbling to no noticeable effect. One thing of
importance does happen; to get NPAPP support to push a stopgap budget through
the House in 2019, President Barbour is forced to grant a full federal pardon
to Halliot, removing the last legal barrier to the latter’s presidential
ambitions.
Fast forward to the 2020 elections, which are fought out
bitterly in a flurry of marches, protests, beatings, riots, and charges and
countercharges of vote fraud. When the dust has settled, it turns out that no
party has a majority in the electoral college.
The election goes to the House, and since neither of the major parties
is willing to vote for the other major party’s candidate, Halliot ends up
winning by a whisker-thin majority on the forty-second ballot. He is
inaugurated on a bitterly cold day, surrounded by NPAPP banners and greeted by
marching files of party faithful in green and black. He announces that he’s about to call a
constitutional convention to replace the government of the parties with a
government of the people, get the country back on its feet, and sweep away
everything that stands in the way of the Great Turning that will lead America
and the world to a bright new future. The crowd roars its approval.
Later that year, the crowds go wilder still when the old
constitution is scrapped and the new one enacted. Those with old-fashioned
ideas find some aspects of the new constitution objectionable, as it lacks such
minor details as checks and balances, not to mention meaningful and enforceable
guarantees of due process and civil rights.
The media doesn’t mention that, though, because the “new values
consensus” is enforced by Party officials—the capital letter becomes standard
usage very quickly—and those who criticized the new constitution too
forcefully, well, let’s just say that nobody’s quite sure where they are now,
and most people know better than to ask.
And you, dear reader? At what point along that trajectory
would you have decided that for all its seeming promise, for all the youth and
enthusiasm and earnestness that surround it, the National Socialist German
Workers Party and the folksy, charismatic veteran who led it were likely to be
worse—potentially much, much worse—than the weary, dreary, dysfunctional mess
of a political system they were attempting to replace? Or would you end up as part of the cheering
crowds in that last scene? You don’t
have to tell me the answer, but in the silence of your own mind, take the time
to think it through and face the question honestly.
What almost always gets forgotten about the fascist
movements of Europe between the wars is just how much promise they seemed to
hold, and how many people of good will saw them as the best hope of the
future. Their leaders were young—Hitler
was 43 when he became chancellor of Germany, the same age as John F. Kennedy at
his inauguration, and Mussolini was only 39 when he became prime minister of
Italy—and most of the rank and file of both men’s followers were younger still.
Hitler’s party, for example, had a huge success among German college students
long before it had a mass following anywhere else. Both parties also drew to a
very great extent on the avant-garde culture and popular ideas of their time.
How many people even remember nowadays that before the Second World War, the
swastika was seen as a pagan symbol of life, redolent of ancient roots and
primal vitality, with much the same cultural ambience that the NPAPP’s Celtic
tree-of-life emblem might have in America today?
The fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s were thus
closely attuned to the hopes and fears of the masses, far more so than either
the mainstream parties or the established radical groups of their respective
countries. Unlike the imagined “fascism” of modern radical rhetoric, they were
an alternative to business as usual, an alternative that positioned itself
squarely in the abandoned center of the political discourse of their eras. In terms of that discourse, in the context of
their own times and places, the talking points of the fascist parties weren’t
anything like so extreme as they appear to most people nowadays—and we forget
that at our deadly peril.
That’s the thing I tried to duplicate in the thought
experiment above, by changing certain details of German national socialism so I could give the
National Progressive American Peoples Party a contemporary slant—one that that
calls up the same reactions its earlier equivalent got in its own place and
time. Antisemitism and overt militarism were socially acceptable in Germany
between the wars; they aren’t socially acceptable in today’s United States, and
so they won’t play a role in a neofascist movement of any importance in the American
future. What will play such roles, of course, are the tropes and buzzwords that
appeal to Americans today, and those may very well include the tropes and
buzzwords that appeal most to you.
There’s a deeper issue I’ve tried to raise here,
too. It’s easy, comfortable, and (for
the manufacturers and distributors of partisan pablum) highly profitable to
approach every political conflict in the simplistic terms of good versus evil.
The habit of seeing political strife in those terms becomes a reliable source
of problems when the conflict in question is actually between the good and the
perfect—that is, between a flawed but viable option that’s within reach, and a
supposedly flawless one that isn’t. The hardest of all political choices,
though, comes when the conflict lies between the bad and the much, much
worse—as in the example just sketched out, between a crippled, dysfunctional,
failing democratic system riddled with graft and abuses of power, on the one
hand, and a shiny new tyranny on the other.
It may be that there are no easy answers to that conundrum. Unless Americans can find some way to step back from the obsessive partisan hatreds that bedevil our political life, though, it’s probably a safe bet that there will be no answers at all—not, quite possibly, until the long and ugly list of the world’s totalitarian regimes gets another entry, complete with the usual complement of prison camps and mass graves. As long as the word “fascism” retains its current status as a meaningless snarl word that’s normally flung at the status quo, certainly, that last possibility seems far more likely than any of the alternatives.
