American Proto-Fascism?

I've posted on what I see as gathering evidence of precursors of American fascism and have also recommended Robert O. Paxton's very excellent book, The Anatomy of Fascism. Here is another example which you can see for yourself on Keith Olbermann's "Countdown" TV program. To see a video go here and look for the August 17 "Worst Person in the World" segment which can be played online.

Melanie Morgan is a right-wing extremist commentator who recently has several times viciously attacked Jon Soltz of votevets.org because, although he is a veteran of the Iran War, he has been publicly critical of the Bush administration and the war.

Here's what patriot Melanie Morgan had to say about him: "[Soltz is a] hypocritical cockroach. He needs to be stomped on and neutralized...."

Hmmm. In case you missed the rise of the Nazis before WW II and haven't read Richard Evans' book "The Coming of the Third Reich", perhaps you'll get a replay in the not too distant future of the US. I guess Supporting Our Troops stops once they become critics of US government policy. Freedom of Speech on political issues is one of the most fundamental values on which America was supposed to have been based; I find it remarkable that these patriotic Americans don't see any contradiction between their support for America and their concurrent violation of its most basic principles.

Why do I call this proto-fascist? This is precisely the kind of hate speech that Nazis used against their political enemies. Morgan doesn't say who should carry out the "stomping" and "neutralizing" but the Nazis had the Brownshirts as an organization that carried out extra-legal political violence against its enemies. If we see the formation of extra-legal groups prepared to carry out political violence then that would constitute one more step toward full-blown fascism.

Why Authoritarians Have a Fundamental Advantage

I have been reading an interesting book, Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea, by linguist and cognitive scientist George Lakoff. This is a good book with many good ideas. One of his most fundamental ideas is that 'progressives' have a very different concept of 'freedom' than right-wing 'conservatives'. He believes these different concepts of 'freedom' are based upon differing conceptions of the family: 'progressives' are committed to a "nurturant parent" family model and 'conservatives' are committed to a "strict father" family model. This is a reasonable attempt to organize the fundamental differences between so-called 'conservatives' and 'progressives' or liberals. This task is one that needs to be done: how do we understand and organize the fundamental differences between 'conservatives' and 'liberals'?

While reading Lakoff it occurred to me that Karen Stenner's book "The Authoritarian Dynamic" might really have more to say about these differences (see my several earlier posts on Stenner's book beginning with this) than Lakoff. Lakoff simply posits that different people have different conceptions of the family while not going deeper to ask why. Stenner argued that there are perhaps 30% of people who are born with a biological disposition to be authoritarian. I wrote:

In an excellent book, The Authoritarian Dynamic, political scientist Karen Stenner gave a brief description of the predisposition to be authoritarian; she wrote (p. 16) that the stances taken by the authoritarian “have the effect of glorifying, encouraging, and rewarding uniformity and of disparaging, suppressing, and punishing difference.” Ad hominem attacks are attempts to glorify uniformity and suppress difference. On the other end of the continuum from authoritarianism is libertarianism.

I frankly think it is at least plausible that approximately 30% of humans are born with a biological predisposition to be authoritarian and that this means they feel compelled to glorify, encourage, and reward uniformity and disparage, suppress and punish difference. It is these people who would naturally be drawn to Lakoff's "stern father" model of the family.

The fact that authoritarians glorify uniformity and punish difference gives them a fundamental political advantage: their stress on uniformity and rejection of difference allows them to share a reasonably common set of beliefs that give them solidarity. Liberals, on the other hand, stand for a diversity of beliefs and the right to disagree and be different. This puts them at a fundamental disadvantage to authoritarians! Look at Hitler's emphasis upon the necessity that members of the Nazi Party declare absolute allegiance to his 25 points (see Richard Evans, "The Coming of the Third Reich", pp. 179-180). As Evans points out these 25 points were "soon declared 'unalterable', so as to prevent it from becoming a focus for internal dissension." Although I haven't got a ready citation for this think of Lenin's emphasis upon the need for "democratic centralism" in the Bolshevik Party so that once a position or strategy had been agreed to all discussion and criticism must stop. Totalitarianism has this fundamental advantage over liberals and progressives because the latter prize diversity and believe that free discussion will eventually bring one to the truth.

In fact it seems to me that a very basic belief of liberalism is that humans are not in possession of the truth and thus using tools like free public discussion, or the scientific method, or continued search for innovation in technology and industry are at the very heart of liberalism. On the other hand, the authoritarian believes we know the truth (the Bible is the unerrant word of God, America is always right and thus you must love it or leave it, questioning the government in wartime is tantamount to treason, etc.) and thus diversity and differences are simply annoying discomforts that should be punished and suppressed. The uniformity, discipline and subordination to a leader (father) gives authoritarians a very strong advantage over liberals and this is at least worth being aware of.