Though Cowards Flinch

Bewildered by the alliance between certain business interests, Right wing populist pundits and faux grassroots organisations, liberals in the United States seem altogether too willing to cry “Fascism!”

An article on AlterNet today cites Robert Paxton’s book, Anatomy of Fascism, to the effect that the ever more shrill emanations from this alliance – e.g. the Birthers – represents a progression to Stage 3 of five stages in the progression towards a fascist conquest of power in the USA. First, formation of a rural movement of nationalist ‘renewal’; second the welcoming of the ‘fascist’ elements by more traditional Right governing elites, third, the systematization of the links between traditional elite and new movement.

The contention of the AlterNet article is that the Tea Parties against high taxes represent this systematization of links between corporate muscle and the rural movement for renewal. It’s not a difficult contention to substantiate bearing in mind that the populist overtones by which high taxes are denounced are just as common when attacking evolution, state spending, socialized medicine and so forth. And often come from the same people: names like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity are par for the course in this regard. Dick Armey, with his guide to disrupting town-hall meetings organised by Democrats to discuss health care plans, is also becoming well known.

Behind such groups stand various billionaires and corporate interests. This is nothing new. But it doesn’t count for much as regards a progression towards fascism, and if representative of Paxton’s analysis in Anatomy of Fascism, I can’t say I think much of that either. To start off with, I don’t think the danger of fascism can be assessed simply through analogizing by rote events in the US and events in any of the fascist states of Europe or elsewhere. More on that in a moment. Second, even were we restricted to drawing analogies, the populist stunts of the tea parties etc notwithstanding, there has been no dramatic increase in political violence in the US beyond what normally exists.

Vigilante border patrols and a Homeland Security department which is the political weapon of bosses over workers hardly match up to the heyday of political violence in the US during the era of the civil rights movement. Even if it did (and there are some disturbing signs), the political character of the movement is not fascist. Capitalism has not grown so desperate that organised Capital will set out on a course to destroy representative government; after all, representative government is delivering to business substantial proportions of what it wants. Despite some unhappiness, the Obama administration has very good credentials insofar as American capitalism is concerned.

More importantly, as anyone watching how workers got screwed by the bailouts of the automotive industry will have noticed, there is no organised socialist movement that can stymie the passage of pro-capitalist legislation through the organs of representative democracy. The unhappiness of many workers is manifest – factory occupations, limited strikes and the slowly declining popularity of the shining knight of the Left indicate that well enough. But, unlike Europe during the 1930s, there is no genuine danger of the total collapse of capitalist hegemony (even though we should like to see it) and the outbreak of a revolution that would endanger the existence of private property and the means of ruling class ascendancy.

Of course, the crisis has not ended yet. During the 1930s, capitalism could not solve global economic problems within national limits – and a new world order required a global war. Today, the crisis may be solved without a war, just as previous crises have not descended to war. If World War II cleared the decks for US supremacy and its choice of world financial system, it is by no means clear that we have reached the point of a realignment towards a new hegemon (in Wallerstein’s sense of the term). Despite the need for Chinese and Arabian capital, there’s a good argument to be made that China is far from ready to shoulder the world economy just yet.

Absent the need for militarism, and the sustenance that nationalism can derive from a tense global context, here is another factor which should deflate arguments about the potential for fascism in the United States. The significance of the cry about fascism is, I think, that urbane liberal commentators from think-tanks have no idea how to factor in genuine, radical, popular participation to their political calculations – and this is why even the shallow popular anger exhibited from the Right, however propped up and artificially whipped, scares such people. The purpose of popular movements is to get people elected and then disperse, not disrupt democratic institutions from governing!

This democratic mysticism obfuscates the real battle of class against class, every bit as much as Republicans do when they line up big business and workers for whom the depredations of business should logically be anathema. I suspect, therefore, that without a more organised socialist movement, dilettante claims of Republican fascism will be fairly common whilst Obama and the Democrats represent a relative consensus of the American ruling class. It escapes the more difficult questions of the contradictions which Obama and the Democrats embody – born of a popular movement but allied to and presiding over a capitalist system which opposes the demands of that movement. Pity.

(Appendix 1: Some good material on Obama’s health care plans at the Third Estate)