This past Friday, Sara Robinson wrote a post at Campaign for America's Future, "Fascist America: Is This Election The Next Turn?", in which she returned to piece written in the midst of the Tea Party frenzy of August, 2009, "Fascist America: Are We There Yet?", along with two followup posts (here and here).
First she quickly reviewed the foundations of those posts in Robert Paxton's Anatomy of Fascism, first citing Paxton's definition, then some key stages in the development of fascism, and finally a set of three questions to ask if you've crossed the line to the stage where there's no turning back. There are very few movements that cross this line, but the ones that do enter into decades-long nightmares. Could we be next? With that in mind, she then looks at three possible outcomes of the coming election. All this, obviously, was written before Lauren Valle had her head stomped on by Rand Paul's thugs. But it provides the historically appropriate background for understanding what we saw happening. Perhaps--just perhaps--this violent thuggery got out ahead itself, and tipped its hands to the wider public in time to turn the tide. We won't really know until late election night. But it's well worth reviewing what Robinson warned us of.
First off, there's Paxton's definition:
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.
There there's Paxton's stages. She doesn't go through them all--as she did in her original. But she goes through enough:
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.
(Sound familiar yet?)
In the second stage, the movement takes root, turns into a real political party, and seizes a seat at the table. Success at this stage, Paxton writes, "depends on certain relatively precise conditions: the weakness of a liberal state, whose inadequacies condemn the nation to disorder, decline, or humiliation; and political deadlock because the Right, the heir to power but unable to continue to wield it alone, refuses to accept a growing Left as a legitimate governing partner."
(Paging the Party of No....)
In the face of this deadlock, the corporate elites forge an alliance with rural nationalists, creating an unholy marriage that, if it continues, will soon breed a fascist state. And, of course, this is precisely what's happening now between the Koch Brothers, the oil companies, Americans for Prosperity, and the Tea Party.
And, of course, candidates like Sharron Angle:
This is where most proto-fascist movements die, primarily because of "the basic authoritarian ineptitude of their leadership," as Robinson puts it. Now, however, we have some of the slickest, most experienced professionals around. But there are also some real loose cannons and wild cards as well. So were definitely still could get lucky. We can use all the luck we can get:
According to Paxton, there are three quick questions that let you know you've crossed that fail-safe line beyond which an emerging fascist regime has too much power to be stopped:
1. Are [neo- or protofascisms] becoming rooted as parties that represent major interests and feelings and wield major influence on the political scene? 2. Is the economic or constitutional system in a state of blockage apparently insoluble by existing authorities? 3. Is a rapid political mobilization threatening to escape the control of traditional elites, to the point where they would be tempted to look for tough helpers in order to stay in charge?
If the answer to all three is "yes," you're probably on for the rest of the ride, which can run for at least a decade or two before it burns through.
A year ago, I noted that we were already three for three on these questions. Now, the "yes" answers are far more resounding. With over 70 Tea Party candidates running for major state and federal offices on the ballot this November, it's fair to say that the 2010 election is shaping up as a national referendum on the Tea Party's future viability.
That's Robinson's set-up, and these are alternatives she lays out (she is, btw, a futurist by training, and thinking rigorously in terms of alternative scenarios is key to futurist do):
1. The Tea Party is rejected outright by the voters on November 2. A handful of their candidates do win their races; and for the next few years, the Democrats have a grand time pointing out their sheer wingnuttitude, bolstering a compelling case against electing any more of them in the future. The party begins to lose momentum, and in a few years is defunct.
2. The Tea Party elects a credible number of these 70-odd candidates -- enough to make a solid showing and establish its political bona fides, but not enough to get anything serious done. If this happens, progressives need to work fast and hard. If this right-wing tide continues to build as we head into the 2012 election, we'll still be cruising straight into a fascist future -- just not quite yet. There's time to stop it, but the momentum is not on our side -- and stopping it only gets harder with every passing week.
3. A solid majority of the Tea Party candidates win their races, cementing the movement's lock on the GOP and turning it into a genuine political power in this country. They've already promised us that if they take either house of Congress, the next two years will be a lurid nightmare of hearings, trials, impeachments, and character assassinations against progressives. (Which could, in the end, backfire on the GOP as badly as the Clinton impeachment did. We can hope.) Similar scorched-earth harassment awaits officials at every other level of government, too. And casual violence against immigrants, gays, and progressives may escalate as the Tea Party brownshirts become bolder, confident that at least some authorities will either back them up or look the other way.
In this scenario, the fail-safe point -- the point beyond which no country has ever turned back from the full fascist nightmare -- may well be behind us when we wake up on November 3. [Emphasis mine.] From there, the rest will play out in agonizing slow motion; and the character of the rest of this decade will hinge almost entirely on whether the corporatists, the militarists, or the theocrats ultimately get the upper hand in the emerging regime.
This is how Robinson sees the stakes in the election before us, and while she could, of course, be mistaken, I think the odds are heavily on her side, however, and consequences are certainly enormous. If there were only 10% odds that she was right, would you really want to take that sort of chance? And I think the odds she's right are a good deal higher than that. Which means it's utterly vital that we avoid Scenario 3, and pretty damn important to avoid Scenario 2 as well.
That is the lens I'll be using to look at the world from now till election night. Indeed, it's a crystalization of what's been informing my outlook ever since reading her series last year. It's a big part of why I'm so impatient with the Underpants Gnomes, who seem to persist in thinking there's not really that much difference between the Versailles/Weimar Dems and the growing alliance between corporatist conservatives and their jackbooted thugs. The Underpants Gnomes may not care much for history. But history tells us just how wrong they are.
This election matters enormously, not because the Democrats have been all that good--they clearly haven't. But because this is one of those times where there really is more than an order-of-magnitude difference between the greater and the lesser evil. This time, the difference is between moral and political incompetence, and the possible descent into the pit for a decade or two of pure horror--or, given our nuclear arsenal and end-times theology, possibly much, much worse.
This election is all about beating back the darkness that leads to the abyss. The day after the election--if we are lucky--we can and must turn our attention to the feckless fools that have allowed us to slip so close to the edge in the first place.
