Reaction through the breach
One’s outrage these days can feel like you’re trying to drain the ocean a cup at a time. You get very tired, but the ocean seems to take little notice. So I spend far less time riveted to what passes for news. It’s a self-care imperative.
But there is a belly-bug going around, one that begins with nausea that lasts for a full day and winds up with a couple days of abdominal cramps that break you out in sweats and curl you into a fetal position. It hit me three nights ago, and on day-two I said to hell with this and scrounged up an old bottle of Vicodin the doctor had prescribed last year for an inflamed gall bladder. Within about 20 minutes, my stomach being empty, the opoid started to turn down the volume on the belly pain, my muscles released the tension I had been unaware of, and I became a kind of flaccid, supine, passive receptor – perfect for tv. So I channel-surfed and popped Vicodin for two days until this morning.
I re-discovered two things: cable television is creepier than a Hieronymus Bosch painting of Hell, and the latent reactionary current of American politics is actively and effectively self-organizing. People will say I’m nuts – some already do – but if you haven’t been watching tv, especially that crap they call news, then you ought to start. It’s the semiotic conduit that is being used to energize this reactionary self-organization… even when it’s pretending to be highly critical.
During the Bush years, one could more easily and effectively point this out with little difficulty, even though this reaction is becoming far more well-organized now that it’s vanguard is out of power. Opposition to the war merged with Democratic Party political maneuvering, at the expense of the effort against the war, which has survived Bush and is shifting into an expanded and even more perilous Af-Pak theater. This put the Bush-Cheney reactionary vanguard that was in power on the defensive, whereupon they diluted their message and appeal. Being in power constrains and conservatizes, while being on the outside liberates our impulses. Note the difference between Democratic rhetoric before the elections and Democratic actions afterward. Warnings about the fascistic impulse were heeded and echoed by liberals when their target was Bush. They have fallen silent now that their party is in power.
I watched with fascination – perhaps amplified by the Vicodin – as blatant racial signaling between the racial-right, in their demonstration on the DC Mall, in the planned outburst by the political offspring of Strom Thurmond, in the continued din of birther-lunacy, and the dust-ups over aspects of the health care debate, are met by the White House with a studied refusal to name that racism. The Obama administration is thoroughly trapped in the Game; and the reactionary-right has been liberated to re-capture the initiative.
If I had been a right-wing strategist during the last primary season, I’d have been in hog-heaven. The economy had tanked. The war – a disaster – had become a finger-trap. The Democrats were surely about to take the White House (and the inevitable responsibility for the mess), and their field had been narrowed to a black guy and a pre-demonized woman.
I hesitate to draw direct parallels between the emergence of 20th Century European fascism and the current US; but some of the similarities are still pertinent: most particularly, in this context, the class, racial, and gendered contents of fascism’s appeal.
In October 2006, I published an article on this topic with Truthdig, entitled “Sowing the Seeds of Fascism in America.” In that article, I wrote:
In each of the European cases, the trigger bringing fascist demagogues to power was a profound economic crisis. This is a tendency buried within an ever-expanding regime of capital accumulation, because the “logic of capital” inevitably comes into conflict with the “territorial logic of power” (David Harvey, “The New Imperialism,” Oxford Press, 2003). The mobility of capital eventually liquidates or abandons all spaces, including living space, and this throws middle classes into both economic and psychological disorder. They can break both ways: embracing a progressive path of “going through to the other side” of the crisis by creating new social models, or embracing the (often idealized and mythical) past.
Giovanni Arrighi, writing in “Hegemony Unravelling” (New Left Review, March-April 2005), made the point that “[a]s Karl Polanyi pointed out long ago, with special reference to the overaccumulation crisis of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, devastations of this kind inevitably call forth the ‘self-protection of society’ in both progressive and reactionary political form….”
That hasn’t happened in the United States … yet. The anxiety has been building, along with an increasingly precarious social existence in the ‘burbs, where car infrastructure is running into record oil prices, pension funds are being wiped out in strategic bankruptcies, and the household debt overhang is beginning to resemble a plank suspended over a canyon with a couple of nails. Not coincidentally, militarization has been one of the processes that has postponed the inevitable.
Since then, the nails have worked loose and the plank dropped into the abyss a year ago this week.
Now, here is the abstract from “The Nazi Party and the German New Middle Class, 1925-1933,” by William Brustein of the University of Minnesota (American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 41, No. 9, 1237-1261, 1998)
In studies of the social origins of the German Nazi Party, the new middle class of white-collar employees and civil servants has received scant attention. This inattention is surprising given that the German new middle class was the fastest growing segment of the German population during Weimar. This article applies an interest-based model of political behavior to the German new middle class between 1925 and 1933 to assess the model’s ability to explain the appeal of the German Nazi Party to joiners from the new middle class. The data for this study come from the Brustein-Falter sample drawn from the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) master file of 42,004 individuals who joined the Nazi Party between 1925 and 1933.
Hmm.
There’s the class analysis, or at least some empirical data. I’ve hollered about this for several years now, the danger of a destabilized, suburbified middle-class. I have also been annoying people for some time about the gendered content of reaction (which gets blown off like a gnat by many even on the left). The racial stuff is coming into the open now.
I post this now to ask that anyone who is willing and able revisit the article of 2006, and hold that analysis up alongside the images of the reactionary gathering last week at DC, alongside the cultural ciphers of the Sotomayor nomination, and alongside the refusal of a still-marginal but not negligible right-wing that flatly refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of a black president. To me, at least, it appears that the fault lines are shifting, and the tension is palpably building.
Furthermore, the white-black, male-female, intra-class fault lines (the middle class usually breaks both ways in a crisis, more to the reactionary column) are creating the tremors under a group of people who seem tangential in the tv drama, but who are about to become the victims of a good-cop-bad-cop dynamic between Republicans and Democrats – immigrants, especially Hispano-Latina immigrants.
Put that in your cap, then take this challenge. Watch CNN tonight and check out Lou Dobbs, a preening self-important fascist demagogue of the first order who could make Fox commentators appear almost legitimate. Watch this nasty poseur, who is a fomrer Wall Street shill, and then consider this.
Liberalism sacralizes liberal law; and liberal law is obtuse. The system is revealed, unmasked; and we refuse to see.
I’ll stop there, so we can have a conversation.
Stan:
Okay, I’ll clarify a bit further. Contemporary popular terminology defines liberal against conservative, both tendencies within the liberalism mentioned above – a modernist, capitalist ideology closely associated with the notion of “progress.” It’s abstraction of equality (“before the law”) serves to prohibit the intrusion of the law into situation of concrete inequality. The net result of this abstract equality has been the most dramatic concrete inequalities in history. The point above is that this form of law is helpless, in fact complicit, in the face of this ratcheting toward reaction.
Example: free speech seems like a nice constitutional guarantee, but it is most often used in court to protect things like campaign contributions, advertizing, and hate speech. There were ads on tv last night from anti-immigrant groups that cost big bucks; and this is protected speech, even though none of us have the money to counter that speech effectively.
Liberal law is constitutionally (pun intended) incapable of grasping actual situations, because the abstract rule takes precedence over the concrete situation. Revelatory understanding, on the other hand, is based on discernment of the concrete moment… dynamics that cannot be anticipated by static (obtuse) abstracted law. We celebrate this notion with statues of “Justice” that are blindfolded, because the abstraction of the law has been sacralized exactly at that point where the reality is profaned. (Who was it who said that if you smash an idol, the instrument of destruction becomes the new idol?)
The relevance of this for me – as a Christian, a revelatory faith – is that honest discernment and ruthless revelation supercede law. This was a capital offense around 33 AD in Jerusalem.
Keirkegaard warned Christians not be be sucked into modernism/rationalism, that it is itself a form of idolatry making godlike and totalizing claims about reality, even in the face of this obtuse-ness. For us, Chistians, the temptation to make nice with dominant cultural beliefs and practices – to fit it – has led us to participation in one form of violence after another, a betrayal of our most fundamental calling: peace. That applies not only to Christian rightists, but to Christian leftists as well (think Cromwell or Luther or clerical supporters of revolutionary violence in the 20th C). It’s going along with the crowd.
Here is the Google-book link to Keirkegaard’s Attack on Christendom. Bon apetit!
15 September 2009, 11:07 amMichael Anderson:
Point made on liberal (WTF???—smile) abstraction. The law is an extremely malleable thing, and is malleable only with money and the barrel of a gun. Them who has more of THAT will do the working of the material. Your article addressed some of my concerns directly, as far as white supremacists and the gun culture.
I’ve seen Lou Dobbs in vid clips on the net–’nuff said there. Your comparison of cable TV to a Bosch painting is right on the money, and that is why I don’t watch TV anymore. The “news” we get on the net CAN be just as biased, but there is room, at least in my view, to STOP it, and think about it…something Lou Dobbs and the rest of the Corpo hate punditry DON’T want you to do. A quote from Milton Mayer’s book:
“You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time.”
“Those,” I said, “are the words of my friend the baker. ‘One had no time to think. There was so much going on.’”
“Your friend the baker was right,” said my colleague. “The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?”
I know many, many people in the ASMC (using your acronym) who don’t want to think. Many of them own guns.
I read something on Jim Craven’s website this AM that has to do with nonviolent threats to power (referenced, in this instance, to indigenous people) that I will quote:
“It is very clear from the internal documents of the U.S. and Canadian Governments, as well as from the internal documents, diaries and memoirs of the missionaries and “Indian Agents”, that the core and defining values, institutions, practices, priorities, relationships and other dimensions of the culture of Indigenous nations, were not simply regarded and dismissed as “inferior” or backward; rather, they were first and foremost regarded as direct challenges (without any evangelical intentions by Indigenous Peoples to do so) to the core values, practices, relations, theologies and institutions—cultures—of capitalism and those of the settlers. Just as some capitalist nations have regarded the mere existence of socialism and socialist values as an existential threat, without any alleged overt or covert acts of aggression by socialist social formations like China, so Indigenous cultures and systems, with definite communalist and non-capitalist practices and values, were regarded as existential threats and banned.”
There are some good graphs, too, on native American values referenced by the 4 points of the compass.
15 September 2009, 1:34 pmMichael Anderson:
Excuse me…Mayer’s book is “They Thought They Were Free”
15 September 2009, 1:41 pmStan:
Watch this with Jacques Ellul.
15 September 2009, 4:02 pmsam:
Re: Ellul. Hmmm. I think Ellul’s perspective on responsibility was exactly Juan’s point back there on another thread. You didn’t seem to like that post.
15 September 2009, 4:14 pmChuck Fager:
BTW Milton Mayer, author of “They Thought They Were Free,” was a Quaker of Jewish heritage. (In his “who’s Who” listing, he listed his religion as: “Jewish; member, religious Society of Friends” (That’s the official name of Quakers).
“They Thought They Were Free” is his masterpiece, and has been in print ever since it was published by the U of Chicago Press in the mid-1950s. My own view is that it was one of the most important books by an American friend in that half-century.
Just about the only significant profile of Mayer online is here, by historian H. Larry Ingle from my journal “Quaker Theology”: http://www.quaker.org/quest/issue-8-milton-mayer-1.htm
Some other quotes from it that are key for me are in this Op-Ed piece I published in “Friends Journal” a few years back,FYI:
Survival & Resistance
A Message from Quaker House
Fayetteville/Ft. Bragg, NC
Quakerism was born in a time of revolutionary upheaval. Yet it learned how to survive when the revolution failed and was followed by decades of persecution.
I sometimes hear Quakers waxing nostalgic about recovering the fire and fervor of “early Friends.”
This longing is understandable. In my view, beyond the fire and fervor, the best things to recover from “early Friends” are the toughness and determination that brought the body through the years of repression.
This communal history looms large today because we are in an increasingly similar plight, facing an all-but established police state, repressive within and truculent without. The grim details are described daily, if ever more faintly, in the remaining dissident media outlets here. While many Americans recoil, the majority shrug and submit.
Unlike early Friends, we are not being singled out – but we are not exempt either. The process is more sweeping and sinister now. Its essence was best described fifty years ago, by Friend Milton Mayer, in “They Thought They Were Free.” Mayer showed in calm, harrowing detail how ordinary, virtuous 1930s Germans were seamlessly reduced from citizens to subjects, cogs in the Nazi machinery.
One of the most telling features of this malevolent transformation was that for most, all it entailed was doing nothing. As Mayer put it: “the rest of the seventy million Germans, apart from the million or so who operated the whole machinery of Nazism, had nothing to do except not to interfere.”
Or as one of his German friends confessed, in abject shame: “Suddenly, it all comes down at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing).”
“Doing nothing” does not mean cowering in a corner, but rather, focusing fixedly on daily life: family, job, religion, entertainments, even quiet political hand-wringing. All while being careful “not to interfere.”
By tracking how this tsunami of evil quietly engulfed so many “good people,” Milton Mayer became one of the most truly prophetic Quaker voices of the last century.
This discernment defines the elements of the task now before us. We can also learn of it from the costly but fruitful ordeals that overwhelmed Friends after their first upsurge. The heroes who endured the “sufferings,” and even wrested from them a real measure of freedom–they are our examples.
The watchwords for such a time of trial are two: Survival and Resistance, and they are offered here as a motto for our life and witness today, and for many tomorrows.
“Survival” does not yet mean preserving our physical lives. Rather, it means thwarting the soul-consuming program of compliant denial and submission starkly charted by Milton Mayer. Thus our first duty is to find the courage to banish illusion and face our plight, clear-eyed. This is a daily task.
“Resistance” means being faithful to this undeceived awareness, becoming “wise as serpents and harmless as doves,” persistently refusing “to do nothing”: challenging, undermining, and igniting sparks of liberation in what George Fox called “this thick night.”
Yet this summons to “survival and resistance,” is not simply a call to the barricades, or even to more activism. There will be much of that, still. But the early Friends’ experiences suggest – as does Mayer’s book– that to be enduring, its wellspring will come from within, more than without. Deepening our own personal and communal spiritual roots, making them our “strongholds” – these are the deepest “action” priorities.
There are sound theological reasons for this emphasis, but just as powerful practical ones too: when the new police state (or its enemies) begins to target Friends, and those with whom we are culpably connected, it is these “strongholds” that we will be forced to fall back on. They will become our ultimate redoubt, our basic line of defense, or we will have nothing.
Until recently, Friends’ mainly middle class status has seemed to protect us – not because we are strong, but because the rulers think us weak, gullible, easily intimidated, incapable of interfering. However, they are wrong about us. Quakers, after all, pioneered the making of steel, and in their early crucible, Friends learned steely resolve, doggedness, and courage. With God’s help, we can re-learn these abilities to survive and resist again, and our witness can again have impact.
Indeed, a few of the rulers’ minions have begun to glimpse this subversive potential, as shown by the reports of spying on Quaker witness. There will be more of that. And in due time, if some persist in refusing the demand to do nothing, surveillance can be followed by more stringent measures.
So: Survival and Resistance. That is our call. Early Friends rose to it, and left us models and warnings. Our recent prophets have shown us that such a time of trial could come to us again. And so it has.
15 September 2009, 4:35 pm- – - – -
Stan:
Wow. Thanks Chuck. Drop by again… please.
15 September 2009, 8:13 pmDanielle Zora:
Condolences on the stomach flu- I had it also , followed directly after with a nasty headache, dizzy URI like flu. Don’t have much to add but agree-and just months ago the liberal press was gloating about the break down of the political right.
15 September 2009, 8:34 pmMichael Anderson:
I believe Brig. Gen. Smedley Butler,USMC, who wrote “War Is A Racket”, and was a leading figure in the U.S. peace movement in the 30′s, was a Quaker, also…and damn plain spoken.
15 September 2009, 10:46 pmStan:
Here is the thread that Sam references above, in case anyone wants to see what that is about.
16 September 2009, 5:05 amrootlesscosmo:
I hesitate to draw direct parallels between the emergence of 20th Century European fascism and the current US; but some of the similarities are still pertinent: most particularly, in this context, the class, racial, and gendered contents of fascism’s appeal.
No question about those deep similarities. What’s missing so far is the particular political conditions in which Fascism organized those contents into a movement. Part of its appeal–I mean to non-elites–was that it offered a revolutionary way out of the capitalist crisis that mimicked a lot of features, or supposed features, of Bolshevism, while not raising the fear that private property would be expropriated. (This meant one thing to big capitalists and a very different thing to shopkeepers and homeowners and middle-class sections of the public; it was the latter groups that supplied the bulk of Fascism’s mass supporters, while the big capitalists, as usual, covered their bets by supporting the Fascists and the other parties of the Right more or less impartially.) In the “classic” examples of Italy and Germany, there seemed to be a plausible outcome in which the revolutionary Left would seize power; whether this was a real possibility or an inflated scare-tactic is debatable, but substantial numbers of people thought it was real, and agreed that some sort of “revolution” was necessary–just not the one the Communists seemed to be aiming at. So Fascist leaders knowingly adopted the trappings of Leninism, as they perceived them: the mass Party which aims at becoming, or subduing, the State apparatus, the mass organizations of workers and women and farmers and youth (etc.) that give scope to “the leading role” of the Party, the mass paramilitary organizations alongside, and proposing to merge with, the professional Army. This combination of circumstances hasn’t occurred again in the capitalist world, though something analogous may have happened in Indonesia in 1965; one reason is that the Red Menace (as a homegrown political force) isn’t credible and the external Red Menace is gone. Another reason is that capitalism found an alternative, non-revolutionary way out of its crisis, along Keynesian lines (with some structural borrowings from various schemes of state -monopoly convergence), and something of the same kind seems to be working in the present slump; of course it favors elites and leaves tens of millions out in the cold, but it holds off the possibility of revolution from the Left, and thus cuts the ground out from under a “classic” Fascist alternative.
In short what I think we have here is a mass base for a Fascist program–one that’s made its presence known before, in the George Wallace campaigns of the 60′s for example; we also have a crisis of capitalism, but its worst horrors are mitigated by the Keynesian mechanisms left over from the 30′s (and later–Medicare for example) and most crucially we have no visible Left revolutionary threat that can only be checked by a pseudo-revolution from the Right. There are plenty of other murderously repressive kinds of regimes–we had one right here in the form of the institution of slavery. But I’m inclined to agree with Robert Paxton that Fascism as such was a product of a particular historical conjuncture that probably won’t be replicated in the future.
18 September 2009, 7:33 pmrootlesscosmo:
This combination of circumstances hasn’t occurred again in the capitalist world
I should have written “in the capitalist core.”
18 September 2009, 10:27 pmMelissa:
There are no direct parallels to the beginnings of fascism and USA now, because, as Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” Close enough to destroy a nation.
20 September 2009, 7:02 pmStan:
Interesting piece about the split between evangelicals and tea-partiers.
23 September 2009, 5:57 amMichael Anderson:
The article seems to tell it pretty straight…I think the Conservative Christian Right prefers to have racism talked about in “polite” coded terms, at least in public, just like a lot of folks in the Old South (and the NW, too)used to talk about it. The distinction the author draws between the secular outlook of the teabaggers versus the religious outlook of the Christian right is interesting….and one that the powers-that-be (Corpos) can use to keep BOTH factions on their side, while effectively hamstringing them from doing TOO much harm to the system…kinda like FDR, huh? What concerns me is that things seem to be moving back, publicly, towards de jure segregation, at least in the rhetoric of these creatures.
The article talks about the makeup of the Christian Right, specifically the inclusion of traditional Catholics. Some impressions—-Went to a traditional Catholic wedding last weekend—I have never been in a conservative Catholic Church before—and the first thing that struck me when I walked in the door, besides the baptismal pool permanently installed in the front foyer; was GRAVEN IMAGES everywhere…the usual Christ on the Cross (nicely done…my art training there) with two statues of women beneath the cross looking submissive; statues of the virgin with babe, bas-relifs of Christ’s face at various stages of the Passion, and all of them very, very White. Part of the service was a bit of the High Mass, in which prayers were asked for “nation and state”, and for the “underprivileged”….I thought “how about for the underprivileged who got that way because of the actions of Nation and State?” The bride was white, the groom Peruvian Indian, so the wedding was racially mixed. (Piercing Societal Membranes?)
Out in the front hall, the bulletin board included posters asking “how big is your carbon footprint?”, illustrated with pictures of poor Africans, and a notice that stated, “If you have been molested by someone claiming to be affiliated with the Catholic Church, call…”
A very mixed bag of messages…still sorting it out.
23 September 2009, 3:57 pmStan:
Welcome to church, brother. (:
No matter what kind of wretch one may be, though, being “a wretch like me” is an admission ticket.
-Wretch
23 September 2009, 5:13 pm