In my last article (see below), I attempted to provide a working definition of a Fascist model of politics, drawing on former definitions and examples of Fascist governments, citing Germnay under Hitler, Italy under the leadership of Benito Mussolini, Francoist Spain, and Indonesia under the rule of president Suharto. I concluded with a minimal definition of a Fascist system, which I will apply here, and is as follows: A creation of political and economic centralization into the hands of a class of elites heading an authoritarian system, who maintain power through ideological appeals to nationalist, racist and/or xenophobic feelings of an underclass whose power as workers is suppressed. It is differentiated from Left dictatorships in that it’s authority need not be framed as progressive towards a classless society.
Such a definition is important, I believe, for gauging the changing nature of the American government in the Age of Terror. In our post-9/11 state where war is less a temporary crisis than a state of mind, it seems clear that “democratic” is no longer the best label for our government. Some of the most powerful entities within our government, namely the intelligence-defense apparatus consisting of the CIA, NSA, and US military, have begun to wield disproportionate political power unbeholden to democratic oversight.
Despite the role of America as a leader in the establishment of Human Rights as a concept of international law (indeed, it was an American lawyer who led the prosecution at the Nuremburg Trials of Nazi leaders, which ultimately branded them “War Criminals” for their actions, a novel term in history at the time), American intelligence, military and “defense” organizations have violated human rights conventions (the Geneva Conventions among them) as a matter of course. These violations have continued despite the supposed “public oversight” of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which, while it has produced valuable reports of the CIA’s torture program, has proven incapable of (or uninterested in) stopping them.
Many of these same criticisms could also be aimed at our civil defense institution- the police- who have avoided trial for the murders of innocent civilians through grand jury dismissals, all the while accruing more powerful tools of force (both physical and legal) through a process of encroaching militarization.
As well, the National Security Agency’s clandestine surveillance of American citizens has remained free from public scrutiny, with discretion being given to FISA courts that operate entirely in private. The FISA judge will hear only the government’s arguments prior to deciding the case, and the rulings are immune to appeal or review by the public. The records cannot even be checked.
Even a cursory glance at the process of surveillance (by the NSA) and enforcement (by the CIA and police agencies) reveals a system of extraordinary power insulated from influence by the public, a system capable of parsing through every form of a suspect’s electronic communications, deciding on guilt behind closed doors, and then “interrogating” them via practices which fly in the face of international law, and, frankly, basic moral sensibilities. That these interrogations are also largely believed to be “ineffective” I count as a secondary criticism.
In the face of such a clearly undemocratic system couched within the US Government it is both interesting and useful to contrast the present situation with the historical example of Fascism to better understand in what way and towards what ends such a system operates.
The Waning of Democracy
My critics might say that to assume the intelligence-defense apparatus is significant enough to alter the basic structure of our political system is to overestimate its importance. After all, every American schoolkid knows that the balance of power is maintained through the necessary distinction of Executive, Legislate, and Judicial power into three branches of government that check each others’ influence. The organizations I’ve detailed- they may say- are Executive powers, that are in actuality challenged by actors within the Legislature and Judiciary.
Far from checking the Executive branch, however, the Legislature has been all too happy to support it. In this insightful article from Salon.com documenting the rise of “American Militarism,” writer Tom Engelhardt details the culture of permanent war that has settled on a House and Senate who compete in pseudo-patriotic one-upmanship to provide ever greater resources for the ill-defined War on Terror. This process can become so extravagant that even the military objects to it’s own reckless rewards, like the absurd spectacle of over-funded M1 Abrams tanks sitting unused in bases. Not only is the congressional psyche fixed upon a culture of war towards the horizon, but even if their constituents object then little, apparently, can be done to remedy the situation. We are living in an era where congress as a whole has never been more unpopular, yet the elected officials comprising it retain startling job security. Admittedly the legislature has been fighting the president, a member of the Executive, tooth and nail to derail any sort of progress on environmental issues, healthcare, and corporate regulation, but this has not been an effort to balance the powers of government. Instead, under the gridlocked two party system a conservative congress has been trying to cement corporate power against the last years of an initially (and only then, relatively) progressive president.
Furthermore, the Judiciary, in the character of the conservative Supreme Court has proven in to be decisively on the side of corporate power. While lip-service progress has been made on gay rights through the repeal of DOMA, its far more systemically significant decisions regarding limits on campaign finance (McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission) and the rights of corporations to exercise the religious beliefs of owners over their employees (Burwell v. Hobby Lobby) have cemented its character as a guardian of corporate power. And this is to say nothing of the Citizen’s United decision itself which set the whole madness off.
Of all three branches only the Legislature is mostly constituted by elected officials, but these elections themselves are subject to the power of elites, and not just marginally. Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich (who you may know as “real-life Tyrion Lannister”) recently wrote an article detailing the corruption of American democracy through the growth of powerful financial-political entities and the withering of popular representative groups, such as unions. In it he cites a paper from Princeton’s Martin Gilens and Northwestern University’s Benjamin Page on the influence of elites, business groups, interest groups and average citizens. Gilens and Page found that average citizen has a (to quote Reich’s article and the study itself) “miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” Their influence was virtually nothing compared to well-funded lobbying organizations.
Centralizing Power
For those of you keeping score at home, this waning of democratic fluidity and public oversight should be troubling considering our definition of Fascism as a “centralization of political and economic power into the hands of elites.” Its important to note here that the concept of an “elite” can take many forms: one can be part of a racial or religious “elite” that keeps power over one or more oppressed minority populations, it can be a purely economic distinction marking enormous wealth, or it can represent membership in a socially well-connected and nepotistic political class. It can also be any combination of these definitions put together (racial, religious, economic, and political all at once for instance). As well, a class of “elites” can also exist in a society that is not expressly Fascist.
Given the vast disparities in wealth that have emerged in recent years, it could definitely be said that such a class has taken shape in the States- indeed this gap of wealth and power hasn’t reached such a startling magnitude since the Great Depression (when a Fascist coup, concocted by powerful figures in business and the military, was actually contemplated circa 1933. It has since become known as the “Business Plot”). While the rise of vast personal wealth at the expense of an impoverished public is in itself unsettling, it becomes truly chilling when one considers the consequent political power it has engendered. I don’t mention the Supreme Court’s gusto for corporate power idly- by abolishing the cap on campaign contributions (and considering that increased campaign spending correlates directly with favorable election results), a direct link is established between economic and political influence, without even the trappings of a supposedly universal democracy to dilute it. If money has been made speech, our Judicial branch seems to believe the rich have much more to say.
And this is where things really become unpleasant, because it isn’t as though the elites in our society are arguing for all sorts of things- it’s not as though some multimilloinaires are radical Communists while others are classical conservatives, as though plenty of them support an overhaul of the racial structure of our society while a few old fogeys want things the way they are. The elites share certain interests- namely, the preservation of the status quo that allows them to exist as elites. Put more simply, they have a class interest. Hyper-wealthy capitalists will generally want to preserve the form of capitalism that will allow them to hold onto their large reserves of moolah in the same way that working-class citizens will generally want to expand social programs to provide themselves with a sort of “safety net.”
Of course in America that last clause isn’t quite true, because plenty of working-class Americans have no problem voting for reduced public spending or privatization of public industries like schools and hospitals, and this is where the lynchpin of ideology comes in. Objectively, expanded social programs will help the least well-off in a society, and the creation of public housing, schools, hospitals and other necessities have their roots in working-class political movements. Despite this, in a well-documented phenomenon of American democracy, poor, uneducated (and usually white) voters will support the repeal of these programs at the suggestion of charismatic, socially conservative politicians funded by almost comically wealthy donors.
To be frank the process is so wide-spread at this point a list of examples would be redundant. How did George Bush get elected? Was it his intelligent economic policies or his strong stance on defending civil liberties, two causes for which classical conservatives would be ecstatic? No, it was a persona, a character of a simple, tough, determined individualist- a straight, white, christian, married, father- who would defend our civilization, our culture, from threats both internal and external, at home and abroad. Sarah Palin was, unbelievably, elected by popular vote to office in her home state of Alaska- was this because she was thought to be a well-studied expert in public policy? A woman the extent of whose education is a Bachelor’s degree in Communications from the University of Idaho? Or did it have something more to do with the fact that she was a lifetime NRA member, an opponent of gay rights and abortion, and thought that creationism had a place in biology classes alongside the “theory” of evolution?
It’s difficult to convince anyone of that doesn’t want to hear it, but American politics have become, well…stupider. And why? Again I point to campaign financing, and the ballooning of advertising budgets that have resulted. The answers provided by town hall meetings and public debates matter less than appeals to irrational, emotional impulses among an uneducated electorate, and with the financial segregation of education through privatization of schools (a process which, infuriatingly, these same voting blocs support), this means that the poor have become easy prey for unscrupulous politicians. Truly it does not matter if Sarah Palin produces irrational answers in the same way that (as I mentioned in my last article) it did not matter if Mussolini’s voice actually cured a child of his deafness at a rally. By making elections a process of advertising rather than debate, candidates have been made more “personalities” rather than officials with informed opinions on the issues at their discretion.
It shouldn’t surprise us, either, because if we find a disparity of power in either the economic or political realm, we can expect the other sphere to become disrupted. If economic power becomes truly unbalanced, then the hyper-wealthy can be expected to subvert the political sphere for their own aims, to decrease regulation and privatize industries so they can rake in the profit. And the same is true of political power- if it becomes undemocratic and unchecked it will allow corrupt officials to monopolize wealth ostensibly owned by the state. One could see this unfold during the Soviet Union, when a powerful political class secured all manner of economic privileges for itself and padded statistics to accrue more funding for the industries they headed. Without freedom there is no equality, and without equality freedom is untenable.
In our society not only does this lack of education does damage democratic discourse, but we can also see the same appeals to a patriotic, nationalistic identity as a tool to unify the working class in the interests of the elite, and the use of “boogeymen” external threats to control them through fear that occur in Fascist societies. The threat of the “terrorist” and the necessity of “patriotism” hang over us in equal measure: the first is used to curtail the rights of citizens, the second is to get them to be happy about it. Need we look any farther than the CIA torture report itself to appreciate the disproportionate fear that the threat of terror invokes in us, and the cruelty that that fear justifies?
Because the fact of the matter is that since 9/11 we haven’t had suffered an attack of anywhere near the magnitude which these programs take as justification. For more than thirteen years we have accepted the encroaching militarism and rolling back of civil rights as a matter of course, the whole process suspended within the narrative of a cataclysmic evil ready to strike at any moment, in any place, and rob us of the world we love. Not only that, but we are told that this evil is so insidious, so perverse, that the public cannot be involved in the battle, cannot know its true parameters, lest they endanger our stalwart forces fighting a war of shadows. Americans are only now emerging from a deep slumber of mass consciousness to argue this narrative, and the temptation to rest and forgo answering the important questions remains strong.
A Tally
My goal in writing these two articles was, as I said, to provide an ideological measuring stick by which to gauge the progress of our country in recent years. I will not (do not wish to) defiantly proclaim that we are living in a Fascist society. We are not. Not yet. We are not a Fascist nation, but we have suffered for a while now from an infection of fear and authoritarianism which is begin to show strong symptoms of Fascism. We are hearing cries regarding police brutality that “This cannot continue,” regarding torture that “This has to end.” They are both right, “this” cannot go on, and “this” must end. For progressives the “this” is a system of hatred and brutality at odds with a just society, but it is not hard to imagine that neoconservatives might use the same language, only referring to “this” as “democracy.” Torture, oppression and secrecy cannot go on in a democratic society where the public holds power, but a democratic society can be overthrown. We are not going to find any government officials willing to go toe to toe with the CIA and end its torture program- no popularly elected official has near that much power, Obama included. We face a crisis of identity when we consider the irreconcilability of a secret torture program with the responsibilities of a democratic society, but the crisis has two answers: End the torture, or end the democracy.
For my part, it should be clear, I believe we must end the torture, and then wonder if we really had democracy in the first place; discuss if democracy could have produced these results in the first place. For a long time the American identity took democracy as its keystone, and beyond that the idea of equality before law which made democracy possible. We must retake this identity without attempting to return to the past, where offenses of power along vectors of class, race and religion have been routinely overlooked. We must abolish private campaign financing and radically overhaul our institutions of defense. We must give up our tools of dominance over other nations before these tools are turned against our own citizens (or rather, given the number of innocent Arab American citizens tortured by their own government, I should say turned against us en masse). We must lay down the sword and the rectal feeding tube, because the first begets the second.
The reigns of our society are held by a class of wealthy and politically-connected elites that have subverted the very institution of democracy to retain their privileges. We live in constant fear of an abstract threat whose conjurers produce concrete injustice. We have come to a moment of crisis, not economic, but political. We are not yet a Fascist nation, and we must not become one.
STOICYNIC 
