Is America 'Yearning For Fascism?'

The language of violence always presages
violence. I watched it in war after war from Latin America to the
Balkans. The impoverishment of a working class and the snuffing out of
hope and opportunity always produce angry mobs ready to kill and be
killed. A bankrupt, liberal elite, which proves ineffectual against the
rich and the criminal, always gets swept aside, in times of economic
collapse, before thugs and demagogues emerge to play to the passions of
the crowd. I have seen this drama. I know each act. I know how it ends. I
have heard it in other tongues in other lands. I recognize the same
stock characters, the buffoons, charlatans and fools, the same confused
crowds and the same impotent and despised liberal class that deserves
the hatred it engenders.

"We are ruled not by two parties but one
party," Cynthia McKinney, who ran for president on the Green Party
ticket, told me. "It is the party of money and war. Our country has been
hijacked. And we have to take the country away from those who have
hijacked it. The only question now is whose revolution gets funded."

The Democrats and their liberal apologists
are so oblivious to the profound personal and economic despair sweeping
through this country that they think offering unemployed people the
right to keep their unemployed children on their nonexistent health care
policies is a step forward. They think that passing a jobs bill that
will give tax credits to corporations is a rational response to an
unemployment rate that is, in real terms, close to 20 percent. They
think that making ordinary Americans, one in eight of whom depends on
food stamps to eat, fork over trillions in taxpayer dollars to pay for
the crimes of Wall Street and war is acceptable. They think that the
refusal to save the estimated 2.4 million people who will be forced out
of their homes by foreclosure this year is justified by the bloodless
language of fiscal austerity. The message is clear. Laws do not apply to
the power elite. Our government does not work. And the longer we stand
by and do nothing, the longer we refuse to embrace and recognize the
legitimate rage of the working class, the faster we will see our anemic
democracy die.

The unraveling of America mirrors the
unraveling of Yugoslavia. The Balkan war was not caused by ancient
ethnic hatreds. It was caused by the economic collapse of Yugoslavia.
The petty criminals and goons who took power harnessed the anger and
despair of the unemployed and the desperate. They singled out convenient
scapegoats from ethnic Croats to Muslims to Albanians to Gypsies. They
set in motion movements that unleashed a feeding frenzy leading to war
and self-immolation. There is little difference between the ludicrous
would-be poet Radovan Karadzic, who was a figure of ridicule in Sarajevo
before the war, and the moronic Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin. There is
little difference between the Oath
Keepers and the Serbian militias. We can laugh at these people, but
they are not the fools. We are.

The longer we appeal to the Democrats, who
are servants of corporate interests, the more stupid and ineffectual we
become. Sixty-one percent of Americans believe the country is in
decline, according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, and
they are right. Only 25 percent of those polled said the government can
be trusted to protect the interests of the American people. If we do not
embrace this outrage and distrust as our own it will be expressed
through a terrifying right-wing backlash.

"It is time for us to stop talking about right and left," McKinney told
me. "The old political paradigm that serves the interests of the people
who put us in this predicament will not be the paradigm that gets us out
of this. I am a child of the South. Janet Napolitano tells me I need to
be afraid of people who are labeled white supremacists but I was raised
around white supremacists. I am not afraid of white supremacists. I am
concerned about my own government. The Patriot Act did not come from the
white supremacists, it came from the White House and Congress. Citizens
United did not come from white supremacists, it came from the
Supreme Court. Our problem is a problem of governance. I am willing to
reach across traditional barriers that have been skillfully constructed
by people who benefit from the way the system is organized."

We are bound to a party that has betrayed
every principle we claim to espouse, from universal health care to an
end to our permanent war economy, to a demand for quality and affordable
public education, to a concern for the jobs of the working class. And
the hatred expressed within right-wing movements for the
college-educated elite, who created or at least did nothing to halt the
financial debacle, is not misplaced. Our educated elite, wallowing in
self-righteousness, wasted its time in the boutique activism of
political correctness as tens of millions of workers lost their jobs.
The shouting of racist and bigoted words at black and gay members of
Congress, the spitting on a black member of the House, the tossing of
bricks through the windows of legislators' offices, are part of the
language of rebellion. It is as much a revolt against the educated elite
as it is against the government. The blame lies with us. We created the
monster.

When someone like Palin posts a map with
cross hairs on the districts of Democrats, when she says "Don't Retreat,
Instead-RELOAD!" there are desperate people cleaning their weapons who
listen. When Christian fascists stand in the pulpits of megachurches and
denounce Barack Obama as the Antichrist, there are messianic believers
who listen. When a Republican lawmaker shouts "baby killer" at Michigan
Democrat Bart Stupak, there are violent extremists who see the mission
of saving the unborn as a sacred duty. They have little left to lose. We
made sure of that. And the violence they inflict is an expression of
the violence they endure.

These movements are not yet full-blown
fascist movements. They do not openly call for the extermination of
ethnic or religious groups. They do not openly advocate violence. But,
as I was told by Fritz Stern, a scholar of fascism who has written about
the origins of Nazism, "In Germany there was a yearning for fascism
before fascism was invented." It is the yearning that we now see, and it
is dangerous. If we do not immediately reincorporate the unemployed and
the poor back into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from
crippling debt, then the nascent racism and violence that are leaping up
around the edges of American society will become a full-blown
conflagration.

Left unchecked, the hatred for radical
Islam will transform itself into a hatred for Muslims. The hatred for
undocumented workers will become a hatred for Mexicans and Central
Americans. The hatred for those not defined by this largely white
movement as American patriots will become a hatred for
African-Americans. The hatred for liberals will morph into a hatred for
all democratic institutions, from universities to government agencies to
the press. Our continued impotence and cowardice, our refusal to
articulate this anger and stand up in open defiance to the Democrats and
the Republicans, will see us swept aside for an age of terror and
blood.