Seeing the Trend. Tho most Americans like to think it impossible that the United States could descend into dictatorship, I am not alone in seeing dangerous tendencies becoming more and more open.
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My colleague in Durham, England sent me this email today:

Have you read The Reality of Red-State Fascism by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr? Excerpt:

In 1994, the central state was seen by the bourgeoisie as the main threat to the family; in 2004 it is seen as the main tool for keeping the family together and ensuring its ascendancy. In 1994, the state was seen as the enemy of education; today, the same people view the state as the means of raising standards and purging education of its left-wing influences. In 1994, Christians widely saw that Leviathan was the main enemy of the faith; today, they see Leviathan as the tool by which they will guarantee that their faith will have an impact on the country and the world.

Paul Craig Roberts is right: "In the ranks of the new conservatives, however, I see and experience much hate. It comes to me in violently worded, ignorant and irrational emails from self-professed conservatives who literally worship George Bush. Even Christians have fallen into idolatry. There appears to be a large number of Americans who are prepared to kill anyone for George Bush." Again: "Like Brownshirts, the new conservatives take personally any criticism of their leader and his policies. To be a critic is to be an enemy."

In short, what we have alive in the US is an updated and Americanized fascism. Why fascist? Because it is not leftist in the sense of egalitarian or redistributionist. It has no real beef with business. It doesn't sympathize with the downtrodden, labor, or the poor. It is for all the core institutions of bourgeois life in America: family, faith, and flag. But it sees the state as the central organizing principle of society, views public institutions as the most essential means by which all these institutions are protected and advanced, and adores the head of state as a godlike figure who knows better than anyone else what the country and world[ ] need[ ], and has a special connection to the Creator that permits him to discern the best means to bring it about.

The American right today has managed to be solidly anti-leftist while adopting an ideology – even without knowing it or being entirely conscious of the change – that is also frighteningly anti-liberty. This reality turns out to be very difficult for libertarians to understand or accept. For a long time, we've tended to see the primary threat to liberty as coming from the left, from the socialists who sought to control the economy from the center. But we must also remember that the sweep of history shows that there are two main dangers to liberty, one that comes from the left and the other that comes from the right. Europe and Latin America have long faced the latter threat, but its reality is only now hitting us fully.

The article quoted above, published December 31, 2004, starts with this paragraph:

Year's end is the time for big thoughts, so here are mine. The most significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism. Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state, particularly its military wing.

Republican strategists have been giddy for years over a "permanent Republican majority" that they have cobbled together only by combining groups that are natural enemies: social conservatives and libertarians; fiscal conservatives and rightwing guardians of public morality who are only too happy to spend huge amounts of money to empower the state to crack the whip over nonconformists; plutocrats who adore illegal immigration because it gives them a huge pool of people who will work dirt cheap and put up with all kinds of abuse because if they complain, their employer can have them deported, and nativists who want illegals deported; internationalist Zionists and isolationist superpatriots; uneducated religious fundamentalists and highly educated rationalists. These various unnatural — or should I say "unholy" — alliances are now starting to 'uncobble' the 'permanent Republican majority'.
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Democrats are the natural allies of social libertarians for embracing "diversity" and the traditional American value of tolerance: "live and let live".
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Democrats not merely balanced the budget but actually gave rise to a huge budget surplus under Clinton, enuf to start to pay off the national debt. So fiscal conservatives have to see that Democrats are a better partner. They don't care if the rich are taxed at a higher rate if that's what it takes to balance the budget and pay off the national debt.
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Nativists are a portion of the social-conservative movement. They want the government to be powerful enuf to deport millions of illegal aliens and don't want even temporary guest workers here. That puts them at odds with the plutocrats who want a free flow of cheap labor. Plutocrats want millions of illegals to remain here, in the workforce, even if the price for this present cheap labor pool is the eventual grant of citizenship to those millions — most of whom are then likely to vote Democratic.
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Neocon Zionists are natural allies of radical-right "End Times" fundamentalists, but most of those fundamentalists are also superpatriots, who don't want to see Americans die in foreign wars.
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The college-educated plutocrats who bankroll what Rockwell calls the "kept think tanks" of the 'conservative movement', are embarrassed to tears to be allied with the yahoos they use but despise.
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And the yahoos are perilously close to understanding that they are being used by the rich. There's only so long the plutocrats can keep the poor voting for policies that hurt them by waving "the homosexual agenda" in their face. And what happens if the anti-gay program is actually approved? What will they then wave in the face of the yahoos to keep them voting to keep themselves poor? Foreign wars?
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Adventurism abroad is a time-tested way for leaders to distract their people from domestic problems, but we don't have the masses of disposable underclass soldiers needed to maintain war after war after war, and fiscal conservatives won't stand for the massive outpouring of national treasure and a steeply mounting national debt to pay for such wars.
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Few Americans nowadays really believe in an afterlife. They aren't willing to lay down their one, irreplaceable, immeasurably precious life for causes they don't understand. Wars 7,000 miles and more away just don't have the real, obvious connection to national defense necessary to sustain the superpatriotism that could get yahoos in abundance to risk their lives.
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Creating artificial hardship for the poor by offshore outsourcing and bringing in millions of illegals increases the desperation level for the unskilled. If you then increase pay rates and benefits for the military, you can somewhat increase the pool of people willing to risk death for a better life. But risking death in wars abroad is very different from obeying orders to suspend the Constitution at home, which is the only way Republicans can stay in power much longer.
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It's all falling to pieces for the Republican cabal. They see a permanent Democratic majority unless they do something drastic. If they cannot choke off dissent and intimidate the opposition, the game will soon be over. The only way Republicans can maintain control over government and its levers of power is by a powergrab. Whether that powergrab amounts to actual dictatorship depends upon timing, 'justification', and the blind obedience on the part of the military, FBI, and other instruments of coercion that the cabal is or is not able to command. It's one thing to say "We move at midnite!" It's quite another to get hundreds of thousands of loyal Americans to overturn the Constitution. That doesn't mean the cabal accepts that it cannot make their poster boy, George Bush, into our first President for Life.
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It's all a matter of conditioning, perceived degree of change, and using a "national emergency", real or imagined, to justify drastic measures, on a "temporary" basis that keeps getting extended until it becomes permanent.
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The Bush Administration has taken step after little step to condition Americans to erosion of their rights and acceptance of an all-powerful government needing extraordinary powers to "protect" us. Searches at airports turned into searches at public buildings, and in public transit; prohibition on taking fotografs in public. Then eavesdropping on international fone calls. Then surveillance of domestic fone records. Then a raid upon a Congressman's office and carrying away his files and computer. Next? Searches of anybody on the street, in the home. All the apparatus necessary to prevent people from acting in concert against a dictatorship is being put in place, step by step, one after the other in quick succession.
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Can the Republican cabal manufacture an emergency grave enuf to seize total power and suspend the Constitution "temporarily"? Will soldiers enuf, police enuf, obey orders to impose dictatorship, or will they mutiny and turn their guns against their superiors, to arrest them — or shoot them — for treason?
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We'd like to believe that Americans will not throw away a form of government that has given us freedom and prosperity for over 200 years, but the people who would be given the orders to enforce that rule haven't shared in that prosperity, and without prosperity, who needs freedom?
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Other societies have descended into dictatorship. Are we really immune?
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The answer, in large part, depends upon whether the Constitution and "American way of life" are what the typical soldier or policeman see as "Americanism", or if "patriotism" has become geography-based tribalism, and what matters is not the form of government but the "security" of the tribe. If the Republican cabal can persuade enuf people in the military and police that the Constitution is destroying the Nation, our democracy is doomed.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,465.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:51 PM