Wrapped in the American Flag?

It’s hard to believe that it has been nearly nine years, but I vividly remember the night the Iraq War began. 

I was in graduate school at the time, and I was walking with a friend toward the University Union to have a cup of coffee.  As we approached the door, a woman thrust an antiwar leaflet at us – “Stop the invasion!”  My friend waved her away.  As we walked off she hissed, “Fascists!”

I was taken aback, and a little bemused.  The leaflet lady didn’t know me, of course, but I had spent much of that week engaged in various campus activities concerning the impending conflict.  I’d participated in two antiwar demos already and had been part of a panel symposium on the war and its likely consequences.  But the epithet stung.

For many in the American left, “fascist” is a catchall label for people and ideas they oppose, a word thrown around much in the way right-wingers so often did with “Communist” in earlier generations and do with “anti-American” and “terrorist” today.   All these terms can be thought-terminating clichés.  But remembering that encounter all those years ago outside the University Union has made me reflect on what fascism is and whether it could take root on American soil.

This is a worrisome question that has recurred in times of social ferment since the 1930s.  In fact, we often allude to it in everyday discourse—consider the popularity of the reductio ad Hitlerum as a rhetorical device.  However, since 9/11 there has been particular cause for concern.  In spite of the best efforts of civil libertarians to raise the alarm the American public as a whole has been remarkably quiescent in the face of the PATRIOT Act, no-fly lists, increased surveillance, ever-tightening airport security measures, and a policy of extrajudicial killings abroad.  Although Americans have unprecedented access to news and information most seem to believe ignorance is bliss.     

As they did in many Western countries, various fascist movements took hold in the United States in the years before the Second World War.  While none of them had large memberships or gained widespread support, the German-American Bund and the Silver Shirts are still mentioned in histories of the time.  Similarly, demagogic public figures such as Huey Long, William Dudley Pelley, and Fr. Francis Coughlin were characterized by their detractors as fascist. 

After the defeat of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, it became socially unacceptable to openly espouse fascist ideologies.  However, the anti-Communism engendered by the Cold War represented the sort of sociopolitical reaction that too often aped fascism, albeit loosely.  To this day, currents of fascist tendencies run beneath the surface of American political discourse.

Fascism is one of those elusive concepts that form in the eye of the beholder, as we saw in my opening anecdote.  But we do have a few good rules of thumb for recognition.  For instance, Umberto Eco points to characteristics such as preoccupation with tradition, anti-intellectualism, intolerance of dissent, xenophobia, middle class fears of economic distress, populism, and the need for an external enemy to provide unity.  Stanley Payne identifies like attributes, among them the belief in a need for strong political authority, anti-liberalism, and anti-Communism. 

Certain character types may be particularly attracted to fascist ideas, such as the authoritarian personality described by Hannah Arendt.   Similarly, Richard Hofstadter’s description of American anti-intellectualism incorporates fascist tropes such as resentment of cosmopolitan urbanites and foreigners.  The American preference for practical pursuits over the contemplative life is reminiscent of the pronouncement of Benito Mussolini’s in-house philosopher, Giovanni Gentile, that while fascism wasn’t opposed to intelligence per se it was emphatically against intellectualism.

While we like to see ourselves as individualists, and while our national self-image is largely built on this belief, there is a strong current of conformism and deference to authority in our daily lives.  I don’t think this is case just with blue collar red staters, either.  Training in the top-down group ethos begins early regardless of social background, whether we recognize it or not.  Parenting practices may range from strict, “Because I said so” demands for unquestioning obedience to presenting a narrow range of “choices” to follow, but few parents teach their kids to be truly autonomous.  Starting in elementary school, we sit in orderly rows reminiscent of soldiers in ranks.  By high school, our teachers and administrators choose our leaders and heroes for us; they seldom if ever rise from below.  We’re also told, sometimes overtly, sometimes by default, who doesn’t fit in and should thereby be socially excluded. 

As adults our work is often highly structured.  We attend church much more frequently than our brethren in other Western countries -- a belief in revealed religion is not normally conducive to independent thought.  Our heavily corporatized media presents a homogeneous viewpoint that doesn’t challenge the status quo.  The propaganda function of the mainstream media is well-documented and we can’t blame it all on Fox News or AM talk radio, either.  Minor editorial differences aside, news content varies little from source to source.  Rarely do we ever see or hear progressive views.   

And so we're always ready to rally ‘round the flag.  Patriotism is defined as unquestioning support for our leaders, politicians of all ideological stripes sport flag lapel pins as a silent protest of their loyalty, and anyone who questions the direction in which the country is heading clearly “hates America.”  The chilling effect on dissent over the past ten years has been significant; peer pressure and deference to authority has become the norm.  While we look away from the acts of the powers that be, we focus all the more on the powerless.

The current economic crisis has the middle class groping blindly for culprits.  Not the obvious ones, mind you.  Since your typical suburbanite feels a stronger affinity for CEOs, hedge fund managers, and investment bankers than for the poor and marginalized, it’s the latter whom he blames for the subprime mortgage meltdown.  In his mind it was Democrat-imposed legislation forcing banks to lend to low-income borrowers, particularly minorities, that pushed us down the slippery slope to disaster.  In this climate it’s no surprise that James O’Keefe’s prank on ACORN resonated with conservatives and that President Obama’s past work as a community organizer raised hackles during the 2008 campaign.  It’s probably best for him that he didn’t try to organize immigrants.       

Nativism is alive and well in America, as a cursory look at recent events shows.  It’s hardly new, though.  The escalating war on immigrants, documented or not,  reflects a cyclical phenomenon in our history stretching back all the way to the Know-Nothings of the early nineteenth century.  But despite the progress we tell ourselves we've made since the Civil Rights Movement, the enactment of SB 1070 in Arizona and HB 56 in Alabama lays bare a decidedly ugly vein of bigotry.  Another example is our exaggerated fear of Muslims and people who are or are perceived to be Middle Eastern.  Racial profiling in general is a result of a deep-seated fear of people unlike us.            

The phrase, “people unlike us” may well apply to the so-called Red/Blue state divide though this is hardly a new development.  The rapid urbanization of American society a century ago engendered a deep-seated distrust of cities among rural and small-town people.  For them cities were breeding grounds of sin and magnets for un-American elements.  The Scopes Trial, rural support of Prohibition, and the revival of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s were all signs of a emerging social chasm that has persisted to this day.           

Another hint of a latent fascism shows in how we’ve constructed our national identity.  Our society valorizes toughness and violence.  It isn’t just our penchant for action films, first-person shooter video games, and other escapist pastimes.  It’s interwoven in our heritage of conquest and global hegemony.  The cult of strength also reveals a certain misogyny—if masculinity is good, its inverse, femininity, is implicitly bad for its presumed weakness.  Moreover, this bias is reflected in statements from our national leaders.  President Bush’s taunt to Iraqi insurgents to “Bring it on” played well with the public, despite the backlash from his political opponents.  When Donald Rumsfeld claimed “weakness is provocative,” he was not just pointing out the need for a strong defense.  He was expressing a contempt for those who fail to live up to the ideal of the taciturn lone hero of our popular self-imagination. 

I suppose we don’t notice these tendencies as we’re a steadfastly apolitical people not given to reflection.  We’re put off by the drone of daily coverage in no small part because we aren’t offered any real choice with the two major parties.  We vote—that’s the extent of our political activity.  Otherwise, we tune out.  Without any meaningful outlet for involvement we turn inward to our private concerns.  Because we’ve largely abandoned the public sphere, the vacuum has been filled by those who don’t have the public good as their priority.  And their manipulation of public sentiment puts us at risk of being ultimately complicit in our own oppression.   

Do I believe that the United States is fascist?  Of course not.  Do I believe that our country has the potential to become fascist?  I believe that we're susceptible given our cultural proclivities.  If and when fascism does come, it won’t be with banners, black shirts, and jackboots.  Sinclair Lewis’ pronouncement is as prescient now as it was 75 years ago: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar