Red, white and ... blue, not black

So Apostropher pointed me to this annotated photo essay about a military recruiting rally. It's long and a downer. Before you decide to skip this one, take a quick look at the money shot of soldiers, Jesus, and a great big American flag all together, and reflect that this photograph was taken in a church.

Those pictures make the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

In a minute, I'll start to answer whether this is serious business or not by linking you to the place where I found Robert O. Paxton, Mellon Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus at Columbia University, and his 1998 essay “The Five Stages of Fascism.” First, let me give you a quote from him.

[O]ne can not identify a fascist regime by its plumage. George Orwell understood at once that fascism is not defined by its clothing. If, some day, an authentic fascism were to succeed in England, Orwell wrote as early as 1936, it would be more soberly clad than in Germany. The exotic black shirts of Sir Oswald Mosley are one explanation for the failure of the principal fascist movement in England, the British Union of Fascists. What if they had worn bowler hats and carried well-furled umbrellas. The adolescent skinheads who flaunt the swastika today in parts of Europe seem so alien and marginal that they constitute a law-and-order problem (serious though that may be) rather than a recurrence of authentic mass-based fascism, astutely decked out in the patriotic emblems of their own countries. Focusing on external symbols, which are subject to superficial imitation, adds to confusion about what may legitimately be considered fascist.

...[E]ach national variant of fascism draws its legitimacy, as we shall see, not from some universal scripture but from what it considers the most authentic elements of its own community identity. Religion, for example, would certainly play a much larger role in an authentic fascism in the United States than in the first European fascisms, which were pagan for contingent historical reasons.

Looking at those pictures, I see what I imagine that a distinctly American fascism would look like, as Paxton says. On the surface, it doesn't look like a Nazi rally, but if fascism comes to the US, it won't look like Nazis, it will look like Norman Rockwell. The pictures look too much like my lefty dystopian fantasies. Am I overstating the case? Lefties have been making jokes since the election about expatriating. They're getting less and less funny. Are we overreacting?

We mustn't overstate the case. We aren't running murder factory concentration camps around the clock. We don't have secret police carting away dissidents every day. You can make fun of the President on national television. America is not a fascist state, not a totalitarian state, not a genocidal state, not a police state, not a military junta, not a one-party state, not a dictatorial cult of personality. But it is not hard to argue that aspects of these things are creeping in around the edges, with our damaged civil liberties, our endorsement and participation in torture, in too much of the rhetoric in our public discourse and so on. How do we talk about these things without running afoul of Godwin's Law?

As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin's Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in those groups. However there is also a widely recognized codicil that any intentional triggering of Godwin's Law in order to invoke its thread-ending effects will be unsuccessful.

David “Orcinus” Neiwert has done some very deep thinking on this subject. His blog is largely concerned with his observations in the wake of covering the Patriot movement as a journalist. He has three essays that I believe are importanr—essential—to read.

First, his award-winning essay The Political and the Personal. It's long for a blog post, but not too long, and he talks about his personal experiences of the shift in our nation's political winds. I think it's important to read because it makes clear that he's not some effete lefty urbanite like me: he's a sober heartland working-class American who knows whereof he speaks. It's also a heartrending essay on its own terms, and my hope is that it will hook you on his writing.

And as my oldest friends can tell you, the truth is that I used to be fairly conservative myself. I come from a working-class family—my mother's side of the family was in road construction, and my dad's was mostly a farming family, though his father actually was an auto mechanic.

Working-class values, and my belief in blue-collar virtues—like integrity, decency, hard work, honesty, common sense, and fair play—all were quite deeply ingrained. When I was younger, I really believed that conservatism best embodied those values.

Over the years that morphed, especially as I worked as a newspaperman (beginning in about 1976, when I was just turning 20). I was confronted innumerable times with realities that conflicted with my old preconceptions. I came to know hard-working Democrats who had the highest integrity and greatest decency (people like Frank Church and Cecil Andrus). I got to know Republicans who were prolific liars of the lowest integrity (like George Hansen, Steve Symms and Helen Chenoweth). And, of course, I got to know scumbag Democrats and honest Republicans as well, people who jibed with my old worldview. But it was obvious that the old construct was not really valid.

What became especially clear was that—even though I had always believed, and still do, that upper-class and urban liberals are prone to a phony compassion that only extended to various victim classes, rather like a parlor game, often rationalized with a tortuous intellectualism—conservatives likewise were fond of wrapping themselves in my old-fashioned, working-class values (along with the American flag, of course) while utterly undermining the ability of ordinary, working-class people to make a decent living and obtain equal opportunity.

Second, and most important, his very long, very thoughtful essay Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism. He describes in detail the fundamental characteristics of fascism, the ways in which this strain in politics has cropped up throughout the last century in America, and then examines how right-wing rhetoric in the mass media is implicated in its recent manifestations. If you follow the fulminarions of the right, you'll be reassured that you aren't wrong to be spooked. If you don't, you'll be discomforted to know how spooky it is. And how it does matter.

The line between right-wing extremists and “the conservative movement” has been increasingly blurred in the past 10 years. The distance between them now has grown so short in some cases as to render them nearly indistinguishable.

Certainly it is hard to distinguish between George Bush's contempt for the United Nations and the kind that a John Bircher might harbor. Moreover, Bush panders to these sentiments; he reportedly waxed nostalgic before a group of visiting Southerners about the old “Get us Out of the U.N.!” billboards that were common in Bircher country.

This, in addition to sloppy thinking, is why some on the left will offhandedly label Rush Limbaugh or George W. Bush “fascists.” I'm here to explain why, despite all appearances, they aren't. Yet. And how we'll know when they are.

Third, he follows up with another not-quite-so-long essay, The Rise of Pseudo-Fascism, talking about how the current state of the American right really isn't fascist, but is implicated in being something at least related to it.

Certainly, one only needs review the current state of affairs to recognize that the “conservative movement”—especially as embodied by the Bush administration—has wandered far astray from its original values. Just how “conservative” is it, after all, to run up record budget deficits? To make the nation bleed jobs? To invade another nation under false pretenses? To run roughshod over states' rights? To impose a radical unilateralist approach to foreign policy? To undermine privacy rights and the constitutional balance of power? To quanitifably worsen the environment, while ignoring the realities of global warming? To grotesquely mishandle the defense of our national borders?

Mind you, it is not merely liberals who have observed this transformation. It includes a number of longtime conservatives who remain true to their principles as well.

The “conservative movement,” in the course of this mutation, has become something entirely new, a fresh political entity quite unlike we've ever seen before in our history, but one that at the same time seems somehow familiar, as though we have seen something like it.

What's become clear as this election year has progressed—and especially in the wake of the Republican National Convention—is the actual shape of this fresh beast.

Call it Pseudo Fascism. Or, if you like, Fascism Lite. Happy-Face Fascism. Postmodern Fascism. But there is little doubt anymore why the shape of the “conservative movement” in the 21st century is so familiar and disturbing: Its architecture, its entire structure, has morphed into a not-so-faint hologram of 20th-century fascism.

It is not genuine fascism, even though it bears many of the basic traits of that movement. It lacks certain key elements that would make it genuinely so ....

Which brings us back to the pictures that started this. Those pictures are not a demonstration of fascism, but a sample of how it might taste, a look at our fascism in potentia. Orcinus quotes Billmon describing the fear this provokes in those of us who see it.

The truly sinister thing—and the reason why that Slate story made the hair stand up on the back of my neck—is that even as these people move, like sleepwalkers, towards a distinctly American version of the cult of the leader, most of them honestly appear to have no idea what they're doing, or creating. I'm not even sure the Rovians themselves entirely understand the atavistic instincts they've awakened in Bush's most loyal followers. But the current is running now, fast and strong. And we're all heading for the rapids.

Please, even if you don't follow the link above to my long comments, take the time to go read what David Neiwert has to say.

• The Political and the Personal
• Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism
• The Rise of Pseudo-Fascism