EITHER/OR:

Is America ‘Yearning For Fascism?’ (Chris Hedges, 30 March, 2010, TruthDig)

The language of violence always presages violence. I watched it in war after war from Latin America to the Balkans. The impoverishment of a working class and the snuffing out of hope and opportunity always produce angry mobs ready to kill and be killed. A bankrupt, liberal elite, which proves ineffectual against the rich and the criminal, always gets swept aside, in times of economic collapse, before thugs and demagogues emerge to play to the passions of the crowd. I have seen this drama. I know each act. I know how it ends. I have heard it in other tongues in other lands. I recognize the same stock characters, the buffoons, charlatans and fools, the same confused crowds and the same impotent and despised liberal class that deserves the hatred it engenders.

"We are ruled not by two parties but one party," Cynthia McKinney, who ran for president on the Green Party ticket, told me. "It is the party of money and war. Our country has been hijacked. And we have to take the country away from those who have hijacked it. The only question now is whose revolution gets funded." [....]

These movements are not yet full-blown fascist movements. They do not openly call for the extermination of ethnic or religious groups. They do not openly advocate violence. But, as I was told by Fritz Stern, a scholar of fascism who has written about the origins of Nazism, "In Germany there was a yearning for fascism before fascism was invented." It is the yearning that we now see, and it is dangerous.

Except that the appeal of fascism is that imposes at least a semblance of unity and defends institutions at times when societies are so fractured that the two parties (of the left and of the right) are irreconcilable. So when you point out that there's no difference between our parties--as there very seldom has been in our history--you're conceding that we have no need for fascism. Which is why Ms McKinney and Mr. Hedges want a revolution. It is America they abhor.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 31, 2010 5:35 AM