Could fascism happen here? Dropping the f-bomb.

It had to happen sooner or later. What with Gates, birthers, tea parties, and the rest, fever pitch has been reached and exceeded. The left accuses the right of racism, fanaticism, mob action; the right accuses the left of socialism, atheism and euthanasia. It was inevitable that, sooner or later, someone would bring out the big guns and drop the f-bomb.

And it was Sara Robinson of the Campaign for America’s Future on FireDogLake, who describes herself as one of a “small handful of us who'd made ourselves experts on right-wing culture and politics.” (Sara holds an MS in “Future Studies,” I understand. Interestingly, on her profile she quotes William Blake, “the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God.” I can only presume this means the Tea Party activists are not honest?)

We are, apparently, witnessing the emergence of a fascist America. (h/t: Brilliant at Breakfast; and The Frustrated Teacher) It’s easy, she tells us, to discount current events as political theatre, but “all the noise and bluster actually obscures the danger”:

“These people are as serious as a lynch mob, and have already taken the first steps toward becoming one. And they're going to walk taller and louder and prouder now that their bumbling efforts at civil disobedience are being committed with the full sanction and support of the country's most powerful people, who are cynically using them in a last-ditch effort to save their own places of profit and prestige.

“We've arrived. We are now parked on the exact spot where our best experts tell us full-blown fascism is born. Every day that the conservatives in Congress, the right-wing talking heads, and their noisy minions are allowed to hold up our ability to govern the country is another day we're slowly creeping across the final line beyond which, history tells us, no country has ever been able to return.”

Now, Robinson’s the futurologist and I’m only a simple-minded historian, so I’m undoubtedly not qualified to weigh in on this. But since I happen to be in the process of writing a book partly to do with right-wing extremism in American history, since I am literally right now writing a chapter in this book called “American Fascism” – about how liberals in the 1930s artificially inflated the threat posed by fascism in America in a manner that eerily presaged the arguments of right-wingers in the McCarthy era about the supposed communist menace – I feel it’s almost impossible not to add my two cents.

At least two important points need to be kept in mind before when evaluating Robinson’s argument.

First, ask yourself why it is that people who call themselves “progressives” seem to be so eager to believe that things are always getting worse? I’m reminded of a paper I attended about five years ago about extremist political violence, in which the author spoke about different reasons for the rise of extremist violence in American life in the 1990s (militias, Oklahoma, etc.) and neglected to mention the fact that earlier in the century anti-Semites and white supremacists didn’t need to take out their AK-47s as they had people in Congress explicitly voicing their views and the National Guards doing the marching up and down for them. That is, that the extremist violence was a product of political marginalisation, not the growth of extremism.

So, a bit of perspective, perhaps? Today we are witnessing a movement of grassroots Republican activists funded by rich anti-healthcare PACs who are furiously disrupting Democratic town hall meetings and shouting down elected officials in what I, as a stuck up Brit, confess to consider an extremely uncivilized manner. How does this compare with, say, the destruction of the left after 1968: which included the more or less cold-blooded executions of Black Panthers, the COINTELPRO programme run by the FBI to discredit the civil rights movement and destroy the New Left, the shootings of four students at Kent State University, and the attacks by hundreds of construction workers on anti-war protesters on Wall Street? Or how about the backlash against desegregation of schools following the 1954 Brown decision, in which thousands of Americans gathered at schools and universities to fight integration, when Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called out the National Guard to exclude nine black students from taking their place at Little Rock Central High, or the beatings and murders of civil rights activists during the 1961 freedom rides? The worst thing you can conclude is that things have always been this bad; a more realistic assessment is that things in the past were a hell of a lot worse.

What about the 1930s, about which I’m writing, when workers were systematically denied basic union rights, when employers operated massive surveillance programmes spying on their own workers, and heavies were paid to beat union organizers to within an inch of their lives, when Henry Ford distributed anti-Semitic propaganda on his plants and auto lots and was awarded a medal of honour by Hitler, when Angelo Herndon was given a twenty year prison sentence for distributing communist leaflets, when nearly all black Americans had no right to vote? Or the 1920s, when the Ku Klux Klan was more than five million strong, in the North and South, and spewed a vile combination of white supremacist, anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic propaganda? Or the turn of the century, when lynchings were common across much of the country? Or the nineteenth century when there was slavery? Aren’t every one of these situations substantially more undemocratic, more dominated by “a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline” (Paxton/Robinson's working definition of fascism), than the world we have before us today?

It’s true that violence and reactionary politics were and remain a vital part of American history. But progress happens too. A real danger of this kind of anticipatory approach to a creeping fascism is that we end up legitimizing the view that democratic progress is impossible. If people can't be reasoned with, they can only be repressed.

Indeed, my second point relates to the more general issue of how democracy dies in a country, the issue that Robinson uses Paxton to address. We have plenty of examples of how authoritarian, and in some cases fairly undeniably fascistic, movements have emerged in the Americas in the twentieth century. (Certainly they suggest that the death of democracy in the United States is not impossible.) Each case is unique, but a fairly consistent pattern is that both sides involve themselves in the erosion of the democratic debate before authoritarians ultimately seize control of the state apparatus in the name of social order.

You can find examples in Chile, Argentina, and many other countries that the collapse of democratic politics was fuelled by a complex political process whereby the threat of fascism was invoked to promote anti-democratic activism on the left, usually in guerrilla form, and then the army subsequently seized control and started murdering people when it felt that civil authorities were failing to repress these groups with sufficient vigour. In absolutely no way am I seeking to place responsibility for these dictatorships on anyone but the dictators. They are the ones who ended democracy. And in certain situations democratic progress truly does become impossible and alternative means are necessary. But let’s not play our part in hurrying along the process by looking eagerly around for fascists, shall we?

In this sense, bandying around accusations that the Republicans are, in Robinson’s words, “blatantly racist, sexist, repressed, exclusionary, and permanently addicted to the politics of fear and rage”, adds fuel to a fire that already is laced with lighter fluid.

There is clearly a segment of the American population that is happy to engage in political violence. It’s undeniable. Moreover, the structure of the American party system, the financial operations underpinning each party, and the media culture in America all tend to encourage politically radical views in ways that are not conducive to a healthily functioning democratic system. But there is also plenty of evidence to suggest that most Americans are substantially less radical than their parties – hence the continuing enthusiasm shown during the past thirty years for divided government (a widely-held grassroots belief with virtually no public, institutional supporters).

I wouldn’t presume to speak for the future; anything can happen, even the rise of a fascist movement in America. You don’t need more than a powerful, well-placed minority to destroy a democracy. But the idea that we are on an unstoppable path to fascism is a terribly one-sided reading of America's troubled history. Painfully, slowly, and not without setbacks, for two centuries American life has continued to be perfected. I suppose, rather unexcitingly, it has got better in some ways and worse in others. But we should not undermine our belief in humanity’s ability to organize its society on civilized grounds. Please. Let’s not give up so easily.

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