With all of Germany’s cultural strength, brutality won out; the same analysis can apply to America. Hitler never won clear majorities; yet once he was in power, he crushed all dissent. Consider the parallels to the fateful election of 2000. Hitler’s ascent to power was facilitated by the political elites; again, note the similarities to the last two years. Hitler took advantage of the Reichstag fire to totally change the shape of German institutions and culture; think of 9/11 as a close parallel. Hitler was careful to give the impression of always operating under legal cover, even for the most massive offenses against humanity; note again the similarity of a pseudo-legal shield for the actions of the American fascists. One can go on and on in this vein.

If we look at Stanley Payne’s classical general theory of fascism, we are struck by the increasing similarities with the American model:

A. The Fascist Negations

Anti-liberalism Anti-communism Anti-conservatism (though with the understanding that fascist groups . . .[are] more willing to undertake temporary alliances with groups from any other sector, most commonly the right).
B. Ideology and Goals

Creation of a new nationalist authoritarian state. Organization of some new kind of regulated, multi-class, integrated national economic structure. The goal of empire. Specific espousal of an idealist, voluntarist creed. C. Style and Organization Emphasis on aesthetic structure . . .stressing romantic and mystical aspects. Attempted mass mobilization with militarization of political relationships and style and the goal of a mass party militia. Positive evaluation and use of . . .violence. Extreme stress on the masculine principle. Exaltation of youth. Specific tendency toward an authoritarian, charismatic, personal style of command.
American fascism denies affiliation with liberalism, communism, and conservatism. The first two denials are obvious; the third requires a little analysis, but fascism is not conservatism and it takes issue with conservatism’s anti-revolutionary stance. Conservatism’s libertarian strand, an American staple (think of the recent protestations of Dick Armey, the departing Bob Barr, and the Cato Institute against some of the grossest violations of civil liberties), would not agree with fascism’s “nationalist authoritarian state.” Reaganite anti-government rhetoric might well have been a precursor to fascism, but Hayekian free market and deregulationist ideology cannot be labeled fascism.

Continuing to look at Payne’s list, we note that the goal of “empire,” that much proscribed word in official American vocabulary, has found open acceptance over the last year among the fascist vanguard. Voluntarism has been elevated to iconic status in the current American manifestation of fascism. It takes a bit more effort to notice American fascism’s “emphasis on aesthetic structure. . .stressing romantic and mystical aspects,” but reflection suggests many innovative stylistic emphases. The mass party militia, especially large bands of organized, militarized youth, seems to be missing ? for now. Violence is glorified for its own sake. The masculine principle has been elevated as the basis of policy-making. Command is authoritarian, charismatic, and personal. It is true that a charismatic leader like Hitler is missing from the scene; but one would have to ask if this is not a redundancy in the American historical context. Perhaps we are a society mobilized by very small degrees of charisma, unlike more informed, impassioned, ideologically committed electorates.

Roger Griffin holds that fascism consists of a series of myths: fascism is anti-liberal, anti-conservative, anti-rational, charismatic, socialist, totalitarian, racist and eclectic. If one wishes to argue that American fascism is by no means socialist, one ought to take a deeper look at National Socialism’s conception of socialism. In a sense, America is a socialist society, to the extent that the government is the main driving force behind technology, innovation, and science: the military-industrial-academic complex. National Socialism was comforting to the right-wing capitalists because they believed that socialism was a convenient fiction for the ideology. Nevertheless, fascism’s vitalism and holism militate against any facile interpretations of what socialism means. Fascism is eclectic and ready to abandon economic principle for what it perceives as the greater good of the nation. As Sternhell has described it for Germany, fascism in the American synthesis is a cultural rebellion, a revolutionary ideology; totalitarianism is of its very essence. There are more similarities than immediately apparent between Marxism as it was put into practice by the twentieth century communist states, and “socialist” ideology put into practice by the various fascist states.

Ian Kershaw has evaluated the similarities between Italian and German fascism:

Extreme chauvinistic nationalism with pronounced imperialistic expansionist tendencies; an anti-socialist, anti-Marxist thrust aimed at the destruction of working class organizations and their Marxist political philosophy; the basis in a mass party drawing from all sectors of society, though with pronounced support in the middle class and proving attractive to the peasantry and to various uprooted or highly unstable sectors of the population; fixation on a charismatic, plebiscitary, legitimized leader; . extreme intolerance towards all oppositional and presumed oppositional groups, expressed through vicious terror, open violence and ruthless repression; . glorification of militarism and war, heightened by the backlash to the comprehensive socio-political crisis in Europe arising from the First World War; . dependence upon an “alliance” with existing elites, industrial, agrarian, military and bureaucratic, for their political breakthrough; . and, at least an initial function, despite a populist-revolutionary anti-establishment rhetoric, in the stabilization or restoration of social order and capitalist structures.
Viewed in this perspective, in only the last few months America has advanced tremendously from emerging to realized fascism. Its imperialist and expansionist tendencies need to be couched less and less in Wilsonian idealist terms for mass acceptance. Unions can still be considered an oppositional, populist force, but working class cohesion has nearly been destroyed. Still, it needs to be said that instead of fascism appealing across class and geographical lines, the country remains divided between the liberal (urban, coastal) and proto-fascist (rural, Southern) factions. Also, the plebiscitary leader has not yet fully emerged. Oppositional groups are often self-silencing, but the most of the ruling establishment continues to practice a mild form of liberalism, and hopes that if things get too out of hand it can mobilize public opinion against brutal suppression. Although not all elites have yet been co-opted, think of Dershowitz’s advocacy of torture and Larry Summers’s patriotic swing. There is general agreement on militaristic aims. The attempted stabilization of the social order in the form of the culture wars fought in the previous decade is one of the less appreciated manifestations of emerging fascism.

George Mosse describes fascism as viewing itself in a permanent state of war, to mobilize masculine virile energy, enlisting the masses as “foot soldiers of a civic religion.” As Mosse points out, fascism seeks a higher form of democracy even as it rejects the customary forms of representative government. Propaganda is pervasive in America; we only need to delineate its descent from the Nazi form. Mosse rejects the notion that fascism ruled through terror; “it was built upon a popular consensus.” Fascism is a higher consensus seeking to bring about the “new man” rooted in Christian doctrine. Can there be a better description of the nineties American culture wars instigated by the proto-fascists than the following?:

When fascists spoke of culture, they meant a proper attitude toward life: encompassing the ability to accept a faith, the work ethic, and discipline, but also receptivity to art and the appreciation of the native landscape. The true community was symbolized by factors opposed to materialism, by art and literature, the symbols of the past and the stereotypes of the present. The National Socialist emphasis upon myth, symbol, literature and art is indeed common to all fascism.

Most of this is obvious, except the reference to literature and art; but think of the fetishization of the Great Books and the mythical classical curriculum by Bennett and his like. In thus viewing fascism above all as a cultural movement, the objection might be raised that American fascism lacks a distinctive stylistic expression that iconizes youth and war. Instead, it might be argued that it suffers from callow endorsement by dour old white males, whose cultural appeal is limited in the discredited stylistic forms they employ. To some extent this is true, but one must never underestimate the fertile ground American anti-intellectualism provides for more banal forms of propaganda and cultural terrorism than needed to be deployed by Nazism. (Eminem does electrocute Cheney in his video, but in real life Cheney rules.) American communication technology, as was true of Nazi Germany, has pioneered whole new methods of trivialization of “mass death” and elevation of brutality as a “great experience.”

War is both necessary and great, and that is America’s continuation of the fascist fascination with revitalization of “basic moral values.” Furthermore, the puritanism of American fascism does not necessarily conflict with the Nazi emphasis on style and beauty: Nazism annexed “the pillars of respectability: hard work, self-discipline, and good manners,” which explains “the puritanism of National Socialism, its emphasis upon chastity, the family, good manners, and the banishment of women from public life.” The analogs to Karl May’s widely circulated novels in Weimar and Nazi Germany can probably be found here, as can America’s answer to Max Nordau, rebelling against decadence in art and literature, and maintaining that “lack of clarity, inability to uphold moral standards, and absence of self-discipline all sprang from the degeneration of their [artists'] physical organism.” Think only of the demonization of Mapplethorpe and others, the emasculation of the NEA, and the continued attack on alleged artistic degeneracy. We must be willing to consider expanded definitions of how romanticism has been incorporated by American fascism.

Liberals might complain that in America there hasn’t been a declared revolution, a transformation that asserts itself as such. But as noted above fascism simply takes over the liberals’ language of “clarity, decency, and natural laws,” as well as its ideals of “tolerance and freedom.” That sounds like the sleight-of-hand performed by the fascists here. As Mosse says:

Tolerance. . .was claimed by fascists in antithesis to their supposedly intolerant enemies, while freedom was placed within the community. To be tolerant meant not tolerating those who opposed fascism: individual liberty was possible only within the collectivity. Here once more, concepts that had become part and parcel of established patterns of thought were not rejected (as so many historians have claimed) but instead co-opted – fascism would bring about ideals with which people were comfortable, but only on its own terms.

So to be liberal means to be intolerant, out of sync with the American democratic spirit. That suggestion has taken hold among large numbers of people.

The current American aesthetic appreciation of technology (“smart” bombs) is also of a piece with Hitler’s passion. Fascism is not a deviance from popular cultural trends, but only the taming of activism within revived nationalist myths. Mosse holds that fascism didn’t diverge from mainstream European culture; it absorbed most of what held great mass appeal. It never decried workers’ tastelessness; it accepted these realities. The same principles apply to American fascism.

Umberto Eco, in his essay “Ur-Fascism,” identifies fourteen characteristics of “eternal fascism”: not all of them have to be present at the same time for a system to be considered fascist, and some of them may even be contradictory: “There was only one Nazism, and we cannot describe the ultra-Catholic Falangism of Franco as Nazism, given that Nazism is fundamentally pagan, polytheistic, and anti-Christian, otherwise it is not Nazism.” Eco is intelligent enough to suggest a family of resemblance, overlap, and kinship, and the analyst’s task is to note which particular characteristics apply to a system, and understand the reasons for the absence of others, rather than dismiss the fascist categorization if a single feature from a previous fascist variant doesn’t apply: “Remove the imperialist dimension from Fascism, and you get Franco or Salazar; remove the colonialist dimension, and you get Balkan Fascism. Add to Italian Fascism a dash of radical anti-Capitalism (which never appealed to Mussolini), and you get Ezra Pound. Add the cult of Celtic mythology and the mysticism of the Grail (completely extraneous to official Fascism), and you get one of the most respected gurus of Fascism, Julius Evola.” It is noteworthy about Eco’s matrix that all fourteen of his characteristics of ur-fascism apply to America to some degree: 1. “the cult of tradition” (which may be “syncretic” and able to “tolerate contradictions”); 2. “the rejection of modernism” and “irrationalism”; 3. “the cult of action for action’s sake”; 4. “dissent is betrayal”; 5. “fear of difference,” or racism; 6. “the appeal to the frustrated middle classes” [this seems to cause the most trouble to American liberals; Eco clarifies, "In our day, in which the old 'proletarians' are becoming petits bourgeois (and the lumpen proletariat has excluded itself from the political arena), Fascism will find its audience in this new majority.]; 7. “obsession with conspiracies,” along with xenophobia and nationalism; 8. “the enemy is at once too strong and too weak” [note the simultaneous characterization of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and no doubt future Islamic "terrorists" as capable of irrevocably harming us and being impotent to really do so]; 9. ‘Pacifism is. . .collusion with the enemy,” “life is a permanent war,” and only a “final solution” can herald an age of peace; 10. “scorn for the weak” imposed by a mass elite; 11. “the cult of death” [American fascists ascribe this characteristic to terrorists, when in fact it is one of their own supreme defining characteristics]; 12. transferring of the “will to power onto sexual questions,” or “machismo”; 13. “individuals have no rights,” and fascism “has to oppose ‘rotten’ parliamentary governments”; and 14. “Ur-Fascism uses newspeak.”

No doubt, fascism is a descriptor too carelessly thrown around; but Nixon and Reagan, no matter how reprehensible their politics, were not quite fascist. Bush is the most dangerous man in contemporary history: Hitler didn’t have access to weapons that could blow up the world, and no American or other leader since World War II with access to such weapons has been as out of control. Perhaps a non-controversial statement may be that the fascist tendency always exists, at the very least latent and dormant. But when more and more of the latency becomes actualized, there comes a point when the nature of the problem has to be redefined. We may already have crossed that point. As Eco notes, “Ur-Fascism can still return in the most innocent of guises. Our duty is to unmask it and to point the finger at each of its new forms ? every day, in every part of the world.” And as Eco reminds us, Roosevelt issued a similar warning.

Since liberals don’t understand the magnitude of the crisis global capitalism faces, they don’t understand the extent of the desperate, last-ditch effort to find an ideological glue (“terror”) to hold together the centrifugal forces in the American population. Part of the confusion is that this is fascism but not really fascism ? it is only its simulation, although no less horrifying for that reason ? because all the twentieth-century ideologies (liberalism, conservatism, and socialism) are rapidly dissolving.

ANIS SHIVANI studied economics at Harvard, and is the author of two novels, The Age of Critics and Memoirs of a Terrorist. He welcomes comments at: Anis_Shivani_ab92@post.harvard.edu

http://www.counterpunch.org/2002/10/26/is-...coming-fascist/