crypto-Fascism

"If I were a dictator, which I always aspire to be..." -John McCain

This is a long one, so you may want to get some snacks.

In the Oct. 27 New Yorker, Steve Coll writes, "McCain is right in detecting signs of growing class resentment; some of the angry are turning up at McCain–Palin rallies, where the mood has been not so much socialist as national-socialist."  I'm frequently surprised by how few people know what National Socialism is: in German it's Nationalsozialismus—Nazi, for short.¹  It's interesting that Coll left the N and the S uncapitalized; there are all sorts of reasons why he might do this, and I recently concluded that I am incapable of reading people's minds, but I can't help but think that he left it all in lowercase so that fewer people (maybe only educated people?) would notice the reference.

And why might someone want to bury the reference?

Because you're not allowed to say that a politician is a fascist, no matter what—even if he is.  This, I think, is based on a basic confusion about what fascism is.  Two reminders:

1. Fascism is not synonymous with anti-Semitism.  The indignant defense "You're accusing me of genocide, now?" makes no more sense in this context than it would if the accusation were merely that you had broken the law.  The Holocaust is the Nazis' greatest crime, but it is not the essence of fascism itself.
   
2. A fascist is not a demon, but rather a human being—a leader or a follower who subscribes to a particular political philosophy.  Yes, it is a terrible and arguably evil political philosophy, insofar as any philosophy is evil—not to mention crazy, sadomasochistic, disturbed and disturbing—but if our understanding of fascism goes no further than that it's evil, then we have absolutely no defense against neo-fascist politicians because we cannot identify them unless they actually wear swastikas on their arms and talk about ethnic cleansing.  I'm no historian, but I'm pretty sure Hitler did not self-identify, when campaigning, as "evil."  This, by the way, is part of the reason why people are sometimes surprised to learn what Nazi was short for: it's like, "They weren't called the Anti-Semitic Megalomaniacal Inhuman Monster Party?"

Umberto Eco wrote an article in The New York Review of Books (Jun. 22, 1995) called "Ur-Fascism," in which he attempted to explain what fascism actually is...the problem being that, as Lewis Lapham laid it out in an Oct. 2005 Harper's "Notebook,"² fascism comprises an "assortment of fantastic and often contradictory notions—Nazi paganism, Franco's National Catholicism, Mussolini's corporatism, etc."  So what's the common ground?  What makes fascism fascism?  Here are a few of the key shared features, according to Eco.

[By the way, I said I'd talk about why Sarah Palin is not just infuriating but terrifying.  Here it is.]

• Fascism implies "the rejection of modernism... The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.  In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism."
• "Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering's alleged statement ('When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun') to the frequent use of such expressions as 'degenerate intellectuals,' 'eggheads,' 'effete snobs,' 'universities are nests of reds.'"
• "For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason."
• "Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference.  The first appeal of a fascist...movement is an appeal against the intruders."
• "...obsession with a plot, possibly an international one.  The followers must feel besieged.  The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.  But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside."  [Muslims work well in today's America.]
• "The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth...of their enemies."  [This one has seriusly backfired for McCain, which is part of the reason why he's losing.]
• "...pacifism is trafficking with the enemy.  It is bad because life is permanent warfare."
• "...a selective populism, a qualitative populism...individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will.  Since no large quantity of human beings have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter...  Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism."

I was thinking of including a link to an article or a video for every single one of these, but is it even necessary?³

Let's focus just on one moment from the VP debate.  Sarah Palin says, "I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you [Sen. Biden] want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to the American people."  Of course the pretense, at least, of a televised debate, is that you are talking to the American people by answering questions.  Right?  The moderator is there to ask you questions with the assumption that your answers will be important for Americans to hear; your opponent is there to challenge your position so that you can clarify it—again, for the benefit of Americans.  What Palin did in the debate was to say, effectively, that only she speaks for America, only she gets to define America (e.g, which America is "real" and which is "fake"⁴), only she is America.  Sarah Palin answers to America, not to the polls of public opinion or to the people's elected representatives—o-or ethics laws!

You can even see it in "Country First": the campaign slogan is an abbreviation of "Country First, Party Second," which of course (since the McCain–Palin ticket is solidly Republican, even more so than McCain himself was a year ago) is really just a response to the fact that Americans currently prefer Democrats to Republicans and want to vote Bush's party out.  So when they say "Country First," they're obviously not actually saying "Forget G.O.P. Politics" (except, of course, in a "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" kind of a way); they're saying "Choose America, not the Democrats," which of course means "America = the G.O.P.," which, given that (again) America currently prefers the Democratic positions on the major issues, means "The G.O.P. Knows What You Want Better Than You Do" or, more to the point, "If You Disagree with Us, You Are an Enemy of America."

So is the Republican ticket set on the extermination of the Jews?  Absolutely not. But are the politics of McCain (and particularly Palin) scary? problematic? reminiscent of, or even identifiable with, some of what makes fascism fascism?  Afraid so.  Emphasis on afraid.

[If McCain gets to appoint a Supreme Court Justice like Roberts, Alito, Scalia, or Thomas,] the Constitution will be under the severest siege in its history. There can be no higher stakes.

-Garry Wills

Which is why this is better than just good news:

[538]

¹ Actually, Nazi may be an abbreviation of the full party name, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, but the point is that when somebody says "National Socialism," he's talking about the Nazis.

² Which is what first directed me to Eco's article.

³ One of the reasons why I had so much trouble with the Clinton campaign (particularly once Obama started winning) had one of its weirdest and most naked expressions when Paul Begala said (and I happened to see this live on TV), "We cannot win with eggheads and African-Americans"—emphasis here on the eggheads.

⁴ Jon Stewart: "So, if small towns are Real America, that would make big cities, like Washington D.C. and New York City, the capitals of Fake America, like the, the epicenter of Fake America, the, the—oh, what's the word I'm looking—the Ground Zero, if you will, of Anti-America.  I bet bin Laden feels like a real asshole now, huh?  'What?!  I bombed the wrong America?!'"