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Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Series on Fascism: Part VII
The Rise of Pseudo Fascism
By David NeiwertThis essay started out as a kind of extended review of Robert O. Paxton's 2004 book, "The Anatomy of Fascism." At least, that was what I had in mind when I sat down to go through Paxton's text carefully. But it pretty quickly grew into something else.
I had heavily referenced one of Paxton's preceding essays, "The Five Stages of Fascism," in my extended blog essay "Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism." In many ways, Anatomy was an extended version of Paxton's earlier essay, with essentially a great deal more substantiation and historical evidence. And in reviewing it, I hoped to update readers on the trends I discussed in that earlier piece.
Paxton also explores in more detail both the history of fascism in America as well as its potential for emerging as a potent political force sometime in its future. Interestingly, he identifies both the United States and Israel as being among the few nations remaining capable of being host to real fascism.
But Paxton concludes – as did I in the "Rush" essay – that we are not there, at least not yet, saying the nation would "have to suffer catastrophic setbacks and polarization" for such a transformation to occur. Nonetheless, he sees real danger in what he calls "movements that employ authentically American themes in ways that resemble fascism functionally."
It was this latter stipulation that sparked my examination of the changing nature of the American political landscape that I describe in this essay. Because it became clear that forces on the ground, particularly the pressure cooker of a national presidential election, were moving much more rapidly in driving mainstream conservatism farther to the right and closer, perhaps inexorably, to fascism.
The key was in comparing Paxton's list of "mobilizing passions" that form the essence of fascism with current events, and realizing that conditions had changed noticeably if not dramatically in the period of just a little over a year. It became clear that, at the point at which Paxton was composing his text, the underlying conditions were changing in a way that made American "conservative movement" politics take on the striking resemblance of fascism. The ground was shifting on us, rapidly.
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Click here for the full text of "The Rise of Pseudo Fascism" by David Neiwert.
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Posted by fm on October 25, 2005 at 12:19 AM