Mr. Moderate

Calling some group “fascists” is the rough equivalent of comparing the leader of some group to Adolph Hitler. In both cases, the mere use of the label “fascist” or “Hitler” is enough to cause any set of discussion or debate participants to lose their temper. And many people would see that as justified anger, as the very terms are among the worst labels which can be applied to anybody in polite company. In other words, only swear words not used in polite company, could even possibly be viewed as more justifiably intended to cause anger and outrage at the mere fact of applying the label. But I wish to consider the word “fascist” as being actually descriptive of a particular set of political and social circumstances and not as just a vague epithet to toss out at your political opponents. But before we get to that discussion, let me offer an introduction to the topic by relating some stories about my own personal political evolution over the past several decades.

I am asked repeatedly to explain why I no longer call myself a Republican even though my self-description of my political stance remains that “I am a Goldwater Republican.” This is all the more poignant today, in September of 2008, now that Goldwater’s successor in office (as Senator from Arizona), John McCain, is running for President of the United States after McCain swung his positions on most issues so far to the right that he would be considered to be acceptable to the neo-fascists who now run the Republican Party. As late as 2000 I still personally liked, respected, and would have voted for John McCain for President. But in view of his now extreme right-wing views, I can no longer stomach the man, and can only wish him less success than Goldwater had in his run to be President (in 1964, Goldwater carried 6 states and won 54 electoral votes).

The real difficulty for me today is that fascist-leaning elements have hijacked the Republican Party of my youth and what is now considered “mainstream Republicanism” is actually a sort of moderate fascism that in my day would have been (and sometimes was) justification for expulsion from, or at least shunning by, the organized Republican Party.

I recall one incident from the 1970s where most affected Republicans agreed, with the blessings of the California Republican Party, to vote for the Democrat instead of John G. Schmitz, who had managed to secure the Republican nomination with far less than a 50% vote among Republicans. Schmitz was known for, among other things, denying the holocaust, a stance which I now view as one possible marker of fascism. The fact that Schmitz is now viewed with honor by so many Orange County Republicans is itself an indicator of rampant fascism in the modern Republican Party.

As I intend this to be an intellectually-valid discussion, and not just “name calling” in order to start a highly-emotional and heated debate over whether or not Republicans are neo-fascists or not, this will require a considerably long discussion which leads up to my actually regretted conclusion: it is true that the modern Republican Party is actually now a moderate fascist party and that is a large part of why I, a Goldwater Republican, am now advocating for the election of most Democrats (but of course, not all; I still have principles). My hope is that sooner or later one of two things will happen. Either Republicans as a group will come to their senses and reject the fascist elements which have taken control of their party, or else enough non-fascist Republicans will leave the party, as I have, eventually consigning the Republican Party to the fate of its predecessor party, the Whigs. The third alternative, which is that the modern fascists continue to expand their power base through their continued use of the Republican Party is just flatly unthinkable to me.

Once upon a time (so you know this is a true story), the two main wings of the Republican Party were the conservative wing, led in 1964 by Barry Goldwater, and the liberal or “progressive” wing, led in 1964 by Nelson Rockefeller. It is rather sickening to me to realize that today neither of these men would be at all comfortable within the modern Republican Party. Rockefeller would be excluded due to his liberalism for certain. But even Goldwater would find it extremely uncomfortable to retain the Republican label if he were alive today, as Goldwater was on the “wrong side” (according to modern Republicans) of two major “litmus test” issues of today: abortion and gay rights. I also like to think that Goldwater, as a veteran of World War II, would have spoken out strongly against the fascist elements who have snatched control of the Republican Party. And I like to think that if he were still serving in the Senate today, he would make a principled decision to switch his party affiliation over to the Democrats. Above all else, Goldwater was a man of principle! And wouldn’t that be a shock to the body politic if Mr. Conservative (as Goldwater was known) would switch over to the Democrats! Well, by and large, that is what I have done, and I believe I have done it for exactly the same principles which Barry Goldwater held so dearly. In one of the last interviews he gave before he died, to the Washington Post, Goldwater had this to say about the radical religious right:

When you say “radical right” today, I think of these moneymaking ventures by fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican party and make a religious organization out of it. If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye.

And shortly after he died, one of his obituaries had this to say:

In 1996, Barry Goldwater sat in his Paradise Valley home with Bob Dole and joked about his strange new standing as a GOP outsider.

”We’re the new liberals of the Republican Party,” Goldwater told Dole, who was then facing criticisms from hard-line conservatives in the presidential campaign.

”Can you imagine that?”

It was difficult to picture, but by the time he reached his mid-80s, Barry Goldwater had become something of an outcast in the political movement that he pioneered.

Though he continued his support of a strong national defense, Goldwater aggravated so many conservatives on other issues that some in Arizona once suggested stripping his name from party headquarters.

I felt outcast by the Republican conservative movement as early as 1982, by which time President Reagan had adopted his own version of Johnson’s “guns and butter” budgetary policies. What had angered me so much about Lyndon Johnson as a profligate spender also then angered me about Ronald Reagan. It took Goldwater himself until the mid-1990s before he felt the same sort of sense of abandonment by his beloved Republican Party, and at that point it was the beginning stirrings of the Republican fascist movement which alienated Goldwater.

True conservativism is focused primarily upon ensuring and/or enhancing individual liberty. What passes for conservatism today, in 2008, is focused primarily upon depriving individuals of personal liberties, and part of that focus is to weld as many people as possible into the prototypical fascist focus upon creating cults of unity, energy, and purity, and that is what I will discuss in the main part of the essay, below. But let it suffice to say here that fascism is the antithesis of true conservativism, and thus the modern Republican Party is now the enemy of true conservatives everywhere.

With that lengthy introduction out of the way, I turn now to my main thesis: that the Republican Party of 2008 is actually a moderate fascist party. It merits the adjective “moderate” only because it has not used violence to obtain its position of power in the United States. In the three primary countries where it is deemed to have once had political control, Italy (where the word “fascism” originated, under Mussolini), Germany (under Hitler), and Spain (under Franco), the fascist elements in all three gained power at least in part through the use of street violence or, in the case of Spain, actual war. The Republican Party has not found it necessary to employ the tactics of armed struggle as it has been quite willing to restrict itself to a propaganda war in order to build its power base. Propaganda is one of the key instruments of control for any political movement which is outside of the mainstream of human thought. Otherwise, the majority of the people would come to realize the truth of the matter and attempt to put an end to control by the fringe elements of their own political establishment.

Some modern thinkers attempt to constrain the definition of “fascism” to such a degree that it can only be legitimately applied to self-announced fascist states, such as Mussolini’s Italian fascism. I believe that definition is deliberately narrow so as to prevent people from legitimately using the word “fascist” to describe any modern political movement which refuses to acknowledge its fascist tendencies. This is, of course, largely a propaganda effort, as most people find fascism repugnant. This is what leads the very word, fascism, to be considered an extremely-insulting epithet.

Wikipedia has two lengthy articles attempting to clarify exactly what is legitimately called “fascist” and what is not. The first article is entitled “Definitions of fascism” and the second is entitled “Fascism and ideology.” Neither of these two articles is without ongoing controversy, largely because so many people holding so many similar ideological stances all wish to avoid having the label “fascist” applied to their own particular point of view. I want to look at a series of quotes taken from those two articles and discuss just how I feel that the modern Republican Party exactly fits the description of fascism for each of those definitions of fascism. Taken as a whole, then, this is my justification for why the modern Republican Party is legitimately labeled as “fascist.”

Fascism as a label was coined by Benito Mussolini, so his writings on the topic have substantial weight in determining what is a fascist ideology. Let us begin with the first quote of his from the article on Definitions of fascism:

Granted that the XIXth century was the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy, this does not mean that the XXth century must also be the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy. Political doctrines pass; nations remain. We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the ‘right’, a Fascist century. If the 19th century was the century of the individual (liberalism implies individualism) we are free to believe that this is the ‘collective’ century, and therefore the century of the State.

Thus, the first key idea about what makes a regime “fascist” is that in a “fascist” regime, the individual is subservient to the State of which he is a citizen. This is a matter of degree, of course. At all times, all citizens and other residents of any State are necessarily subject to the laws of the State. But the key point which makes a regime “fascist” is the refusal to tolerate individual dissent. The more individual dissent is suppressed by “authority,” the more “fascist” the regime in power can be viewed as being. Fascist regimes thus tend towards authoritarianism.

I agree with John Duckitt who “suggests a link between authoritarianism and collectivism, asserting that both are in opposition to individualism. Duckitt writes that both authoritarianism and collectivism submerge individual rights and goals to group goals, expectations and conformities.” Collectivism is today is sometimes taken as a more-generic descriptive term for what was traditionally called Communism. In the old Soviet Union, for example, farm workers were assigned to “collectives” (or “communes,” if you are calling it “communism”) where they were expected to labor together for the group goal of raising agricultural products. During the early years of the Soviet Union, all labor was organized into “communes” or “collectives” of one sort or another, and individual economic initiative was suppressed. While fascism characterizes itself as strongly opposed to Communism, we can see from the Mussolini quote, above, that fascism too embraces the idea of collectivism. The difference between fascist and communist systems in this regard is totally with respect to how the government treats the ownership of business enterprises. In a communist system, private businesses (at least, the largest, wealthiest, and/or most visible businesses) are “nationalized” and placed under direct control of the State. In a fascist system, private business enterprises are maintained under private ownership by the wealthy, but all individuals and businesses are required to subordinate their individual wishes to any superseding commands issued by the State (”authority”). Thus, fascists put business under the direction of the State while communists absorb business ownership into the structure of the State government. In either case, however, the leader of the State has effective control over all individuals and business interests existing or operating within the State.

So, what makes the modern-day Republican Party at least moderately fascist under the above standard? There are several concurrent factors, the most important of which include a refusal to accept any dissent about an increasingly broad range of issues, such as a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion, the rights of gays to marry their partners, and the war in Iraq (even going so far as to call dissenters “traitors,” or to at least imply that is the case). The word “fascist” is applied by many former Republicans (including myself) to the leadership of the Republican Party who refuses to allow any dissent from certain key party dogmas, such as those I’ve enumerated herein. Since Republican office holders, like Congressmen, are all products of this system which refuses to tolerate any dissent from accepted party dogma, it is not at all surprising that on such key controversial issues as abortion, you can pretty much count on most of the Republicans to vote the way that the party wants them to vote. The symbolism of unity among the constituent parts is a key element of fascism in and of itself (see the etymology of fascism). Of course, this is again all a matter of degree, as one would expect coordinated political action by members of a particular political party. The key point that makes it fascist is that dissent on a range of topics is not tolerated, and the failure to vote “correctly” can lead to removal from office at the next election, if not sooner by some other means.

Also, we have to consider the strong entanglement between the Republican Party and “big business.” We are still in the realm where “big business” largely controls the government, not the other way around. So, in that sense at least, we are not yet at the point where we can legitimately claim that the United States has “gone fascist.” But how much change will it take before the same folks from “big business,” placed into positions of power by the Republican Party, then take it upon themselves to begin issuing commands to their old business fiefdoms from their positions of power within the government? We have already seen some troubling cases of this type of interference in the natural course of the free market system by Republicans operating within the Bush/Cheney administration. One example would be the bail-out of Bear Sterns by the US Treasury. In a free market economy, Bear Sterns would have just been allowed to fail and the bankruptcy courts would have sorted out whatever was left over. But somehow, some official within the Treasury, for some still unknown reason, ordered J. P. Morgan-Chase to absorb Bear Sterns at fire-sale pricing (subsequently quintupled from $2 per share to $10 per share after Bear Sterns shareholders objected).

Let’s look at another quote from Mussolini about what fascism is:

The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State—a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values—interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people.

This is where Goldwater’s quote about mixing religion and politics bears repeating: “When you say ‘radical right’ today, I think of these moneymaking ventures by fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican party and make a religious organization out of it. If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye.” In my view, Goldwater was noting exactly the point I’m trying to make here: the modern Republican Party is developing into “a religious organization” and the religion which is being sold is the fascist “all-embracing” idea which holds that “outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value.” Again, many people who have voluntarily departed from, or who have been cast out by, the modern Republican Party appropriately label that party as “fascist” since it is attempting to enforce this exact sort of religious orthodoxy among at least Republican office holders.

What the “radical religious right” wishes is “totalitarian” in nature— “a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values” which “interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people.” Thus, it is increasingly necessary for a “good Republican” to also be an evangelical Christian and to evangelize a wide range of values which have little or nothing at all to do with the Christian religion as that religion is normally understood. A troubling example of just this point is the fact that John McCain now claims to be a Southern Baptist when he was formerly listed as an Episcopalian. Was this change in religious affiliation made out of political necessity? Only John McCain himself knows the true answer to that question.

This leads naturally into the final quote from Mussolini contained within the Definitions of fascism article (as of the date I write this):

Fascism is a religious conception in which man is seen in his immanent relationship with a superior law and with an objective Will that transcends the particular individual and raises him to conscious membership of a spiritual society. Whoever has seen in the religious politics of the Fascist regime nothing but mere opportunism has not understood that Fascism besides being a system of government is also, and above all, a system of thought.

The Christian religion is naturally based upon an authoritarian model. God is in charge and gives the orders to His followers through the Holy Bible. The followers are expected to obey God and follow His orders. The fascist model of the State follows directly from this Christian conception. This explicitly illuminates just exactly why it is fascist to insist upon a Christian authority model for the Republican Party. If you go around the Internet, and if you check out the web sites of the various state party organizations which are part of the Republican Party, you will find a large percentage of them devoting a great portion of their state platforms and other web site content to the enforcement of what must be deemed to be religious concepts (anti-abortion, anti-gay-marriage; anti-evolution; etc.). While I would not claim that the Republican Party is yet an exemplar of fascism, it is certainly well along the path towards getting there, as a careful consideration of these concepts should demonstrate.

And yet, it must be noted, this is a stirring departure from patterns set by past Republican Party stars. President William Howard Taft, a key member of an ongoing Ohio Republican political dynasty, was by no means “Christian” (he was a life-long Unitarian and explicitly denied the divinity of Christ). Historians debate at length the religious views of Abraham Lincoln, but few would label Lincoln as a faithful Christian. Somehow, over the past few decades, Christianity has become a requirement for any person who desires to be a leader within the Republican Party. This requirement is a direct result of the evolving Republican fascism.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt had this to say about fascism (as quoted on the Definitions of fascism web page):

The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism–ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

It is a common claim among Democrats that the Republican Party is owned and controlled by “big oil.” This has been a large part of the debate over the Iraq War and the rise of gasoline prices since the beginning of the Bush/Cheney administration, particularly in view of the reported profits of the big oil companies, such as Exxon-Mobile. Republicans have been viewed as the party of business since at least the late 1800s, in spite of occasional actions taken against the interests of big business (such as the trust busting of Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft). But when it becomes impossible for the political branch to take actions against the wishes of its main source of funding (”big business,” in the case of Republicans), that is the point where the external power “becomes stronger than their democratic state itself.” Again, we are not yet to that point in the United States, but we are a lot closer now than we have ever been in the past.

Ernst Nolte defined fascism as reactionary:

Fascism is anti-Marxism which seeks to destroy the enemy by the evolvement of a radically opposed and yet related ideology and by the use of almost identical and yet typically modified methods, always, however, within the unyielding framework of national self-assertion and autonomy.

From at least the Eisenhower administration, the Republican Party has tried to cast itself as the worst enemy of Marxism. As Marxism was a philosophy based upon power asserted by the workers, and as the workers were largely associated with Democrats and unionism, this was a natural stance for the Republicans to adopt. And it led to a great deal of political success during the Cold War. However, it also led to fascist excesses such as McCarthyism. But many political scientists are forced to admit that there is a lot of commonality between fascism and communism, at least in “the use of almost identical and yet typically modified methods” of controlling the people and business entities of the nation. But again, an overarching idea within fascism (and within some forms of communism as well) is the idea of “national self-assertion and autonomy,” which we naturally call nationalism.

The extreme form of nationalism popular within fascist regimes includes the concept that the nation can do no wrong. This runs parallel to the idea that dissent is at least unpatriotic, if not downright treasonous. Democracies tend to view bordering nations as equals, and thus democracies tend to try to be good neighbors. Nationalistic fascism, on the other hand, attempts to annex or otherwise control any and all neighboring nation-states because it is viewed that the leader of the particular nation has the right and duty to rule the rest of the world for the benefit of his or her nation. To me, this seems to lie at the core of the reason why fascist regimes seem to collapse in a relatively short period of time. They do so because they tend to involve themselves in more warfare than the nation can reasonably sustain. (Sound familiar yet? The realization of this idea here in America is part of my hope for avoiding fascism.) As the truly-fascist regime refuses to admit defeat early enough to exit its adventure before actually losing, it will generally fight on until actually defeated in combat. But again, there are exceptions to every rule, such as Spain under Francisco Franco declaring itself to be neutral during World War II. In at least this sense, Franco proved himself to be a heck of a lot smarter than any other major European fascist leader, as he survived to die peacefully in old age.

Let us now turn to the main page on fascism and look at two recent and widely accepted definitions of what fascism is. First:

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.

In view of the prior discussions, above, here we see almost an epitome of what the modern-day Republican Party is all about. It is “marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood.” Anybody who listens to Rush Limbaugh preaching about how “liberals” are oppressing the “majority of the people” through “elitist” “left-wing” judges and how our entire nation is in decline, and if we don’t get active and replace these “liberal elites” only more decline awaits us, must see the core of fascism within those preachments. It is also easy to characterize the Republican Party as “nationalistic.” The “uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites” embodies the “uneasy but effective” alliance between the radical religious right, who provides a mass of foot soldiers for the Republican Party, and “big business” (the “traditional elites”), who provides huge quantities of money to keep the movement afloat.

What is most disturbing is this part, where a fascist movement “abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.” Once again we return to Guantanamo Bay, the War on Terror, and the Iraq War. The attempts to strip the Guantanamo Bay prisoners of all legal rights, the attempts to authorize the federal government to abandon all “ethical or legal restraints” in pursuing the War on Terror (which all recognize can never be “won” in any traditional sense), and the “external expansion” inherent in the Iraq War (which the Republicans refuse to commit to ending), all point to a fascist ideology at the core of the modern Republican Party. The only part really missing is “internal cleansing,” and the attempts to pursue even that goal are obvious in the right-wing mass media, led by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage, Neal Boortz, and a host of lesser celebrities. For decades now, the right-wing mass media has been mounting a propaganda campaign to “cleanse” America of all who dare to oppose the radical religious right and its adopted party, the Republicans. The political propaganda spewed by all these mass media sources is expressed in religious terms to appeal to and incite the Republican base to action.

Admittedly, we have not yet reached the point where armies of stooges attack dissenters in their homes and other places. But we have seen at least one documented incident of violence motivated by anger at “liberals” generated by the above mass media characters. This was a shooting at a Unitarian church in Knoxville, TN on July 27, 2008. The church was targeted precisely because it was a home to the hated “liberals,” and at least three books were found in the hands of the perpetrator, all authored by members of the right-wing mass media enumerated above. And the perpetrator explicitly stated to police that his motivation for the crime was “his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country’s hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of major media outlets.” This is exactly the hate-filled propaganda spread by those very same mass media celebrities! Thus, the real question is this: when will this sort of “cleansing” become “acceptable” within the American political scene? If that ever does happen, then we will have reached a state of fascist control comparable to Germany under Hitler, Italy under Mussolini, or Spain under Franco. At that point, the United States will be a fascist nation, and it sure as heck won’t be the Democrats who are in control! No, it will be the modern-day Republican fascists who will run all of our lives at that future point in time.

The trend in the direction of unity/purity cults can be clearly seen in several recent scandals of the George W. Bush administration. In one scandal, several US Attorneys were fired for what appears to be political reasons. In another scandal, a political appointee admitted using political considerations for the hiring of employees for non-poltical jobs (jobs where poltical considerations were not legally supposed to be used). In all such cases, the motivation would appear to be to maintain the unity and/or purity of the workforce. This is just an early step on the road to fascism.

And now let us return to the main page on fascism and look at the other recent and widely accepted definition of what fascism is:

[Fascism is] a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anti-conservative nationalism. As such it is an ideology deeply bound up with modernization and modernity, one which has assumed a considerable variety of external forms to adapt itself to the particular historical and national context in which it appears, and has drawn a wide range of cultural and intellectual currents, both left and right, anti-modern and pro-modern, to articulate itself as a body of ideas, slogans, and doctrine. In the inter-war period it manifested itself primarily in the form of an elite-led “armed party” which attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to generate a populist mass movement through a liturgical style of politics and a programme of radical policies which promised to overcome a threat posed by international socialism, to end the degeneration affecting the nation under liberalism, and to bring about a radical renewal of its social, political and cultural life as part of what was widely imagined to be the new era being inaugurated in Western civilization. The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation’s imminent rebirth from decadence.

We have already seen, above, how the modern Republican fascism characterizes itself as “anti-liberal.” In fact, the essence of the right-wing media propaganda campaign discussed above is to preach constantly about how “liberals” are leading the United States to “decadence,” in some way, shape, or form. What is not so obvious is how this is also “anti-conservative.” I consider myself to be the epitome of the type of traditional conservative which must necessarily oppose Republican fascism on principle. Traditional conservatives are pro-individualism and strongly in favor of individual rights (this is, after all, the primary concept upon which our nation was founded: the idea that individuals had rights to assert against any king or other ruler), and, as we have seen from the discussions above, fascism is anti-individualism. In some sense, fascism is reactionary, as it is a return to the kind of totalitarian authority which people lived under in the days of a monarchy.

In the modern right-wing mass media, as discussed above, we definitely see promises “to end the degeneration affecting the nation under liberalism,” and promises “to bring about a radical renewal of its social, political and cultural life.” Again, the core motivating idea “is the vision of the nation’s imminent rebirth from decadence.” This is a core element of fascism, and it is also a core promise of the modern Republican Party, which is the current proponent of fascism within the United States of America.

It is a goal for my remaining life to do everything within my personal power to prevent Republican fascism from coming to rule the United States which I love.