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:
