Fascism: Are We There Yet?
Fascism is not an ideology; it’s a process for taking and holding power.
(I wrote the following commentary a couple of years ago. As we enter the final stretch to the elections/Armageddon, it’s as relevant now as then.)
“We have buried the putrid corpse of liberty” ~ Benito Mussolini
I had a cousin who fought for fascist Italy in World War II. He had the good fortune of getting himself captured in North Africa and sent to a POW camp in the United States (in northern New York State, close to where my family lived as luck would have it). It was the best thing that ever happened to him. As with thousands of other Axis POW’s, Luigi liked it here so much that he immigrated, married an American girl and lived happily ever after.
Whenever I injudiciously raise the subject of Mussolini, my Italian cousins wince, mumble something about the Italian people were misled and quickly change the subject. Fascism is still a sore subject with Italians, many of whom lost family members in Mussolini’s pointless military adventures and under the brutal Nazi occupation. In fact, political violence didn’t end with liberation. Anti-fascist partisans continued to hunt down the Duce’s henchmen and murdered them in the immediate post-war years. The American and British military had to intervene to halt the bloodshed.
But just when you thought fascism ended with the putrid corpse of Mussolini hanging upside-down at a Milan gas station, bada bing! it rises from the political graveyard and rears its ugly head right here in the land of the free and home of the brave.
If Benito Mussolini could resurrect himself from the dead, paint himself orange and don a ridiculous dyed-blond toupée, he’d be Donald Trump. The histrionics, buffoonery, incompetence, bullying, lies and bluster are all right there in The Donald. Mussolini had his March on Rome. Trump had his January 6 putsch. The difference, of course, is the former succeeded and the latter did not. But Trump isn’t finished yet. And he has his very own slavish party of MAGA blackshirts to pull it off.
So then. Are we there yet? Has fascism come to America in rip-roaring form, infecting the people like some zombie virus? Stomping democracy to death and hurling it on the trash heap of history?
Timothy Snyder, history professor at Yale, in his book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, provides us with handy clues to answer just such questions:
A fascist guide to commentary on elections would have eight parts: contradict yourself to test the faith of your followers; tell a big lie to draw attention from basic realities; manufacture a crisis; designate enemies; make an appeal to pride and humiliation; express hostility to voting; cast doubt on democratic procedures; and aim for personal power.
Sound familiar?
I’d add another key element: purge your ranks of all opposition. With the booting of Liz Cheney from the GOP leadership, the blackshirt Republicans have done just that — along with many others previously. In their place they have scary violence-embracing thugs like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar, Jim Jordan and a growing list of other democracy-bashing baboons. Folks who, in saner times, wouldn’t rise from extras in B-level horror films.
Now, the blackshirt Republicans are methodically dismantling our voting system, imposing voter suppression measures, conducting sham “audits” of legitimate election results and gerrymandering the democratic life out of America’s hinterland. Their aim is as effective as it is cynical: salami-slicing rights and freedoms until there aren’t any left, resulting in one-party rule.
“Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century,” Snyder writes. “Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.”
Color me doubtful. First, Americans, citizens of a young country and always looking ahead, not in the past, are largely ignorant of history and fail horribly the most basic civics tests. Two-and-a-half centuries of the good life on a continent oceans-distant from the Old World, Americans, I regret to say, have had the luxury of being fat, dumb and happy. And they’ve taken our freedoms for granted.
We may not be a fascist country yet. But one of our two political parties has made the grade: a disciplined, belligerent, racist, anti-democratic movement supported by paramilitary militias in the wings, hell-bent on destroying the American Experiment for the sake of power and racial supremacy.
As Madeleine Albright explained about her book, Fascism: A Warning, “Fascism is not an ideology; it’s a process for taking and holding power.”
It may take us all being imprisoned, like cousin Luigi, to come to our senses. But by then, it may be too late.
See also:
Fascism: Are We There Yet? Part II
Bring On the Firing Squads! Republicans Make the Case for a Coup d’Etat
Enjoyed your article Jim. The fascists also kept emblazoning “Mussolini has done everything right” on buildings and posters throughout the country. Does that sound familiar?