RSS FeedAmerican Fascists: Kudlow, Rush, Hannity
This is a posting about the distortions and tactics of extremist right-wing entertainers and lawmakers who keep saying we’re moving toward Socialism. If they’re right, then Major League Baseball and the National Football League are really Communist fronts. Fortunately, the GOP will be punting on these bozos soon.
LAS VEGAS, NV (February 24, 2009) – Answer this. Would you prefer to live in Sweden today or Germany in the 1930s?
For most of us the answer would be Sweden today. Sweden has a high standard of living and it’s a peaceful country. Germany in the 1930, however, began the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich, a totalitarian regime that would terrorize many of its citizens and other European countries.
Why do I ask such a rhetorical question?
Listen to some of the Right-wingers. They could be blindly conservative friends who listen to the majority of GOP lawmakers and the TV news entertainers like CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity. They keep telling us we’re becoming a communist state. We’re running toward Socialism, they say.
These folks are not necessarily wrong, but, as usual, they’re way off base.
It’s typical of their strategy: take a kernel of truth and then twist it for their purposes. They dramatically try to make us think we’re becoming the Havana of today or Moscow in the 1970s. When in reality, these uneducated demagogues are becoming the Fascists of the 1930s.
Furthermore, their behavior has destroyed the GOP and is giving rise to a new GOP that, thankfully, won’t resemble anything like we see today. Let me explain.
Here’s the kernel of truth. We are moving in the direction of Socialism. And what is Socialism? Answers.com gives this definition without bias.
It’s a political-economic doctrine that, unlike Capitalism which is based on competition, seeks a cooperative society in which the means of production and distribution are owned by the government or collectively by the people.
Are we moving toward that today? Yes, we are — but on a short-term basis. It’s the same thing America did in the 1930s. The New Deal was a move toward cooperation where the central government stepped in on a larger scale to help end the Depression. Today, we’re trying to get the credit markets moving again while keeping people in their homes.
We can argue at length if the New Deal worked or not. The truth is this. If the New Deal was implemented in 1929 right after the stock market crash, and not in 1933 four years after so much wealth was destroyed, the economy might have rebounded before World War II and the post-war economic infusion from the government.
The point is this. We leaned toward Socialism for good reason: to rebuild the economy. However, we never became Socialists. The closest we came to Socialism was in 1912 – 20 years before the Depression — when Eugene V. Debs got one million votes or 6% of the presidential vote. Imagine if a Socialist today garnered 6% of the popular vote? The TV news entertainers would be touting the wisdom of Joe McCarthy.
Another reason America failed at Socialism: a strong union movement. Like it or not, the American union movement of the early 1900s saved us from real Socialism. I’m not advocating unions, even though I am a member of AFTRA and SAG; I just don’t think unions will have much of a place in our future entrepreneur-internet society.
So, we’ve never become a true Socialistic state in America. To say we’re Socialists is like saying anyone who has had a glass of wine is an alcoholic.
But this myopic bunch of doomsayers make that case by also distorting what a Socialistic state is. Sweden today is considered Socialistic. Many Americans would be comfortable living in Sweden. The European brand of Socialism offers more worker and family protections we don’t have. Granted, their GDP is not ours and the chance for huge profits are not the same as in America.
Still, you can’t compare Sweden today to the Moscow we witnessed during the Cold War. But many of the TV news entertainers would make you think that Stalin’s Gulags, military May Day celebrations, and long bread lines are happening in Stockholm and other European nations.
What’s worse is that Sweden had a major banking collapse in the 1990s – that they survived by nationalizing their banks. I’m not saying that’s what President Obama should do. But because of the Right-wing loud mouths and their distortions, we can’t even consider bank nationalization as an option now.
I believe the majority of Americans are rejecting these fear-mongers. As much as we want to think the election was a love-fest for Obama, it was just as much a rejection of the previous eight years of the Bush-Cheney reign.
Although I wouldn’t call Bush and Cheney fascists, they leaned toward Fascism.
What is Fascism? Let’s go to the Answers.com dictionary.
A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
Was George W. Bush a dictator? For six years, he had no opposition since the GOP controlled both houses of Congress.
Did the Bush Administration suppress the opposition through terror and censorship? Well, they certainly weren’t locking up Democrats on trumped up charges or killing them. But go back to the dissent against the War in Iraq. People like Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins were shamed into not attending the Baseball Hall-of-Fame because they disagreed with the march to war. They were considered treasonous and President Bush did little to publicly negate that thinking.
And was there belligerent nationalism and racism? Yes. President Bush told the world, “You’re either with us or against us.” He used the term “crusade” about the war in our effort to bring American democracy to the Middle East.
I’ll give President Bush a break here. I think he had good intentions. I think naively he believed he could change the world for the better – if everyone became American. We discovered that most of the world likes the peaceful, innovative Americans – not the ones on the other end of a bayonet, rifle, or missile.
Mr. Bush was misguided by Vice President Dick Cheney who was frightened to death about another 9/11. Mr. Cheney himself said the biggest accomplishment of the Bush years was that another attack did not happen on our soil. That’s a staggering and stilting fear. Even worse, they failed to place any blame on American foreign policy that had been guided way too much by their political backers who demanded cheap oil prices for our economy. As a result, the Bush White House took on a bunker mentality.
What’s worse, this bunker mentality became intertwined with the oppressive thinking of the Religious Right, a group whose goal is the end of the world and biblical version of The Rapture.
Read the book American Fascists by Chris Hedges. It’s an interesting theory that shows how the Religious Right – and the Bush Administration – took on many of the themes of Nazi Germany: racism, nationalism, fear of the intruder, disagreement is treason, and a rejection of modernism.
Hedges quotes Dr. James Luther Adams, PhD from the Harvard Divinity School who predicted that Fascism would happen in America.
Resentments and bigotry lurk below the surface of all democratic societies and can be roused under the right conditions, to promote a creed that calls for the destruction of democracy. What is evil about these systems of intolerance and persecution is not the foot soldiers who carry out the crimes, but the organization that mobilized and unleashes these dark passions.
Among the thinking was the gospel of Christianity became bastardized into American greed – where you were holy if you were rich. And America’s big business gladly embraced this.
This wave of American Fascism was also embedded in almost every GOP presidential candidate. Even the business-smart Mitt Romney fell for it. His speech on religion that was supposed to be a JFK-like moment turned into an “us versus them” speech: believer versus non-believers. That speech of exclusion sunk what could have been a good campaign.
So, it’s evident that while we have turned toward Socialism, we have also turned toward Fascism in America.
What strikes me is the lack of demagoguery on the political left to use this notion. Why haven’t we heard extremist bloggers calling Bush, Cheney, Boehner, and others Fascists? I think it’s because we associate Fascists with Hitler and anti-Semitism and most GOP are pro-Israel, so the argument would fall deafly.
And frankly, I’m glad no one has made those claims. The GOP is not a group of Fascists – despite leaning toward elements of Fascism.
Furthermore, I think the majority of the nation, though not articulating it, saw those Fascist tendencies in the GOP and rejected them in the previous two elections.
Still, a number of Republicans continue these Fascist tendencies. Alabama Senator Richard Shelby the other day mentioned again that Obama might not have a legitimate birth certificate so he is not eligible to be president. The message is clear: he’s really a Muslim.
However, I think we’ll see the emergence of a different Republican Party soon. Conservative columnist David Brooks wrote about this in May of last year. He says the Conservative Tories in Britain have adopted a new breed of conservative thought that is catching on in the UK, but not yet here.
The British conservative renovation begins with this insight: The central political debate of the 20th century was over the role of government. The right stood for individual freedom while the left stood for extending the role of the state. But the central debate of the 21st century is over quality of life. In this new debate, it is necessary but insufficient to talk about individual freedom. Political leaders have to also talk about, as one Tory politician put it, “the whole way we live our lives.”
That means, first, moving beyond the Thatcherite tendency to put economics first. As Oliver Letwin, one of the leading Tory strategists put it: “Politics, once econo-centric, must now become socio-centric.” David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader, makes it clear that his primary focus is sociological. Last year he declared: “The great challenge of the 1970s and 1980s was economic revival. The great challenge in this decade and the next is social revival.”
In another speech, he argued: “We used to stand for the individual. We still do. But individual freedoms count for little if society is disintegrating. Now we stand for the family, for the neighborhood — in a word, for society.”
This has led to a lot of talk about community, relationships, civic engagement and social responsibility.
That’s not what you hear from GOP leaders like House Minority Leader John Boehner and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal.
The future GOP leaders are people like Florida Governor Charlie Crist who worry more about the immediate needs of their people, not their own future positions in government or their party.
We will never be a Socialistic state. It’s not in our DNA. Look at our two most important sports – football and baseball.
Like capitalism, these sports thrive on competition. But if you look closely at the business of baseball and football, they have taken on the so-called Socialistic tendencies the GOP extremists have been railing about.
Baseball now has a luxury tax that takes money from big-market teams – like the Yankees, Red Sox, and Dodgers – and gives it to the small market teams like Kansas City Royals, Tampa Bay Rays, and Pittsburgh Pirates. That’s a form of Socialism, but I don’t think I’d baseball players secretly call each other “comrade”.
And the NFL does the same. Each team gets the same amount of salaries to spend on players. Talk about a collective. But I don’t see Dallas Cowboys Owner Jerry Jones in brotherhood with Trotsky and Lenin.
But here’s what’s really happening with both sports. They’re thriving. Yes, there are some cutbacks due to the economy. But what both sports have done is create a level playing field.
Look at the recent results of leveling the playing field. We have had different Super Bowl and World Series winners over the past ten years. There has been very little hint of any dynasty: maybe the Patriots in football but their teams have turned over during the three championship years. Literally every team in the NFL has a chance to win the Super Bowl each year. The lowly Phoenix Cardinals were a few seconds away from their first championship in 60 years. And last year, the Tampa Bay Rays, a doormat since their inception, won the American League pennant.
Your thoughts.
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