City on a Hill or Great Society….
US & the World hope, but is Obama The Man?
The internet is a curious place in many ways. Nowhere is that more true than how it affects time. What someone wrote or said in the past gets picked up in real time via search engines and lives again, at least for a moment. I suspect we are just at the threshold of a phenomenon that will influence many aspects of our lives in ways we cannot now envisage, mostly positive.
This week I got an e.mail from a Mr Cedric Sagne in the UK about an article I wrote in this column in September 2004 in the run-up to the US presidential elections of November, 2004. In that article I shared my dismay at the dawning realization that the world was about to face a further four years of a Bush/Cheney administration (see “Proto-Fascism & the Indentured Classes”, http://www.baliadvertiser.biz/articles/altvoice/2004).
Mr Sagne wrote:
I was looking at your article and recommend the following link: http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_blackshirt.html
Umberto Eco wrote it and while your list does include some elements, I believe Eco has a better point. Now the odd thing is they both contain 14 elements (defining Fascism).
And as for the US, well I think they’re still very far off from anything related to fascism, although in the 1930s they were possibly very close to falling too.
In case any readers fear I’m going to re-hash old history and indulge in a fit of retro-Bush bashing, don’t worry. I won’t. In fact I gave up excoriating Bush the minute he got re-elected back in 2004. Far as I was concerned he was a lame duck from that moment on, unworthy of further comment, save as to his ranking on the list of Worst American Presidents.
No, what interests me now, apart from being compared, however negatively, in the same breath with the author Umberto Eco, are the two dangerous assumptions, the seemingly liberal and well-informed Mr Sagne makes in his final sentence.
In my article, a brief journalistic opinion piece, I listed the 14 characteristics I saw as defining the much overused word fascism’, as it related to the 20th century. I went on to comment on what I likened to indentured labour in Bush Jr’s America. In a longer altogether more scholarly article in the New York Review of Books published June 1995, Umberto Eco also listed his 14 defining characteristics. They were pretty much the same. Eco, however, took a much longer historical perspective, which he termed Eternal or Ur-Fascism, overarching back to the agricultural/urban beginnings of civilization in Sumer. The interesting point about both articles was that you could have just one or any number of these 14 characteristics and still not be a full-blown fascist state. On the other hand, just one could do it. In other words, as often as not, we are talking proto-fascism. What I invited readers to do is to check-off their country of choice on a scale of 1 to 10 against the list. As an indication, I subjectively cited UK as scoring 4 and Nazi Germany a 10.
The essential conclusion drawn in both cases was that as Jefferson enjoined constant vigilance is required on the part of citizens to ensure their imperfect societies do not evolve into fully-fledged fascist ones.
Says Eco, “it would be so much easier for us if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying ‘I want to re-open Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian squares’. Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and point the finger at any of its new instances - every day, in every part of the world.”
He went on to quote Franklin Roosevelt’s words of November 4, 1938: “If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land”. Freedom and liberation are an unending task, concluded Eco.
Let us be clear here. Shameful as Guantanamo is, no one can seriously claim it is comparable to Auschwitz.
The UK currently has some of the world’s most intrusive CCTV surveillance of its citizens in the world. Its security services are similarly empowered to eavesdrop without much public scrutiny or oversight. There is very limited public access to government records. However an independent judiciary, common law and to an extent, the press, serve to protect the public from authoritarian government. No one seriously accuses the UK government of being fascist. But what if a British Dick Cheney was PM, or the British Nationalist Party were to win power?
We have already seen in the US how quickly apparent constitutional absolutes can be subverted. In eight short years since George W. Bush came to power we have seen torture and rendition, justices being removed from the bench for political reasons, government scientific research distorted, partisan manipulation of political boundaries and elections, the manipulation of culture and religion for political purposes, cronyism and corruption in Iraq and elsewhere, trumped up evidence for external and internal enemies of state, exaggerated expressions of nationalism, militarism and overseas adventure and an economic system skewed to favour the rich. Still, most people would not call the US a fascist state even then. But cause for concern? Most definitely!
Fortunately for the US and the world, after two terms the US electorate had had enough, though the financial meltdown of the economy must have had as much to do with it as anything. They voted into office a very smart young African American Chicago pol, who promised change without scaring the pants off them. Even Republicans too had had a bellyful of Bush, selecting a decent independent-minded war hero as their presidential candidate, albeit with a bizarre Palinesque sop to red America. However imperfect, the American political system worked. But, what if Vice President Cheney had been ten years younger and in good health, run and won…. establishing the permanent Republican rule of which the Bushite cabal dreamed? What then?
In his e.mail Mr Sagne states the US is “far off from anything related to fascism”. I don’t agree. It satisfied to an arguable degree far too many of the criteria listed by Eco and myself for comfort. That the country has taken a step back from this is encouraging but there remains plenty of cause for concern.
Mr Sagne also says the US was in much more danger of becoming a fascist state in the 1930s. This is not correct. Roosevelt, while loathed as a communist Satan by a minority of hard Right big business Republicans, enjoyed large majorities and three consecutive terms in office, during which he enacted unprecedented progressive social reforms. The Republican Eisenhower warned against, took on and curbed what he called the Military Industrial Complex. In the 1960s Lyndon Baines Johnson passed a huge raft of social reform of historic proportions on the way to transforming the US into The Great Society. Tragically the Vietnam War derailed this epic venture. Since then history has taken another lesser and meaner course. In fact much of the Republican Right seeks not just to undo FDR’s New Deal but roll back social reform to an un-reconstructed capitalism c. 1908.
Why is there no talk in the US today of The Great Society?
History shows that with the right kind of inspirational leadership a great majority of Americans will follow John Winthrop’s dream of The City on a Hill in 1620, rearticulated by John F. Kennedy in 1961. They do believe in an exceptional America that is a beacon to the rest of the world. The World too, for the most part would like nothing better than to look to an America that pursued such a dream. Unhappily Americans have had few grounds to sustain such a belief in the past 40 years.
Is Obama the man to inspire America to such a vision? For a while it looked as though he could be. It’s too soon to count him out, but it looks awfully like politics as usual. And when it comes to standing up for fundamental individual freedoms, the freedom from torture most particularly, it is not a good sign that the Obama administration equivocates and does not take the clear steps necessary to strengthen the constitution to protect civil and human rights against future abuse.
The Brits and the Greeks usually have something to say on the subject:
“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.” - William Pitt, The Younger.
“The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs, is to be ruled by evil men.” - Plato
But let an American have the final word:
“Under any conditions, anywhere, whatever you are doing, there is some ordinance under which you can be booked.” - Robert D. Sprecht
