It Can't Happen Here (Until . . . . )

America's ongoing descent into a corporate state roused me finally to pick up "It Can't Happen Here", Sinclair Lewis' cautionary novel about the rise of a Fascist regime in the United States.  Published in 1935, when Fascism already had rooted itself in Europe, the story captures troubling tendencies in American popular media and popular mentality. Think demagoguery and mob psychology.

The passage below testifies to the timeliness of Lewis' cautions. Senator Windrip is a political rising star who runs for president and whose ascendance is fueled by his skillful exploitation of jingoism and other populist sentiments. Speaking is R. C. Crowley, the local banker of Fort Beulah. He is addressing an informal gathering of the modest town's professional class. But in particular he is addressing a skeptical Doremus Jessup, the local newspaperman and the novel's protagonist.

"I don't like all these irresponsible attacks on us bankers all the time. Of course, Senator Windrip has to pretend publicly to bawl the banks out, but once he gets into power he'll give the banks their proper influence in the administration and take our expert financial advice. Yes. Why are you so afraid of the word 'Fascism,' Doremus? Just a word—just a word! And might not be so bad, with all the lazy bums we got panhandling relief nowadays, and living on my income tax and yours—not so worse to have a real Strong Man, like Hitler or Mussolini—like Napoleon or Bismarck in the good old days—and have 'em really run the country and make it efficient and prosperous again."

How well does this shoe fit the politics of the United States in 2012?

Then Lewis comments on the integrity of political campaigns, when a Windrip supporter admits that the candidate's promises amount to air, "just molasses for the cockroaches." 

Then there's this timely partisan snipe, from the mouth of Karl Pascal, the Communist,

". . . Freedom, Order, Security, Discipline, Strength! All those swell words that even before Windrip came in the speculators started using to protect their profits! Especially how they used the word 'Liberty'! Liberty to steal the didies off the babies! I tell you, an honest man gets sick when he hears the word "Liberty' today, after what the Republicans did to it!" 

I'm just sayin'.

Chirality of Ethos

Chemists call molecules chiral when the molecules come in mirror-image pairs.  The term is applied to molecules that share a common chemical formula and are built from the same numbers of the same kinds of atoms. They differ in the geometrical arrangement of the atoms. That’s all. Same content, just rearranged to create mirror-image reflections. The right- and left-handedness of chiral chemistry provides a handy metaphor for the politics of Left and Right: mirror images built from a common substance and a common formula.

For reasons probably unimaginable, chemistry came to mind when I found the movie Return Engagement on the Internet Archive (it follows the Bob Costas interview). The movie documents a series of debates between notorious pitchman for the colorful ‘60s psychedelic counterculture, Timothy Leary, and G. Gordon Liddy, notorious henchman for the disgraced U.S. president Richard M. Nixon. This odd couple toured the U.S. in the 1980s, staging debates that pitted Leary’s libertine individualism against Gordo’s conservative authoritarianism.

In debate Leary preaches a gospel of self-discovery and invites individuals to liberate themselves from the suffocating conventions of polite society, to spread their wings and fly free from the strictures of the hive. Liddy counters by accusing Leary of reckless self-centeredness and hedonism, sounding like the soviet pundits who dismissed Leary's anti-establishment campaign, because, by stressing the transcendent, he de-politicized young people. Liddy argues for the duty of individuals to subordinate their desires to the needs of social orderliness. Gordo preaches a communitarian, collectivist ethos.

WAIT A MINUTE.

Liberal? Conservative? Is anybody paying attention?

Tune into partisan polemic today and you get a mirror image of the Leary-Liddy debates. The Left is all about community, and if you hear invocations of freedom and liberty, it’s more likely coming from the Right. Listen to right-wing talk now and you’d think community was synonymous with gulag. An hour of MTV or network prime time makes clear how diligently capitalism works to de-politicize young people and encourage their hedonism. So, between 1984, a fitting year to make such a movie, and today, what happened to political Left and Right?

They became what they beheld.

The Right adopted the “Do your own thing” ethos and adapted it to the cult of the business entrepreneur. The Left internalized a tut-tutting stance, condemning the “greed” of the self-centered striver, while striving itself to be “socially responsible.”

How long before the mirrors switch again and Lefties snap, “Don’t tell me what to do with my brain,” and the Righties castigate them for their recklessness?  Stay tuned.

Mockery of Democracy: Federal Reserve

Is the U.S. federal government not to be trusted, because it is the tool of socialists who want to centralize power and control? Or is the U.S. federal government not to be trusted, because it is the tool of capitalists who want to centralize power and control? What do these questions have in common? Are they operationally indistinguishable?

Fearful Symmetry

The political Left and Right perfectly balance each other in a coordinated pincer movement, the objective of which is to skewer the middle class (well under way) and ultimately institute a global slave economy—packaged as protection and care.

At the behest of the financial controllers, the left and right departments of the political system expand government’s coercive power from behind blustery rhetoric about the evils of intrusive government (intrudes too far into markets says the Right, too far into personal privacy says the Left).

Global warming and terrorism illustrate this Left-Right symmetry.

Here’s a passage from George Will’s 6/22/09 Newsweek column:

“Nowadays, green reasoning is the first refuge of scoundrels. Global warming has become like God: It is an explanation for everything and an all-purpose excuse for the political class to do whatever it wants to do—what it has a metabolic urge to do—and that is boss people around. It can maximize its opportunities for doing that if it maximizes the number of people dependent on government, and the number of ways in which they are dependent.”

The ostensibly observant Will fails to note that homeland security reasoning is another first refuge of scoundrels and that terrorism also has become like God, explaining everything and giving the political class an excuse to boss people around (have you tried boarding a plane lately?)

Whether climate change is imminent and if so whether human industry plays a role, I don’t have the scientific understanding to say. Whether terrorists are at our doorstep, however, seems doubtful. The U.S.-Mexican border has remained wide open since 9/11, with uncounted thousands of visitors crossing into the U.S., backpacks full of God knows what, undocumented and untraceable. And yet, the border states have not suffered terrorist bombings, suicidal or otherwise. The door is open, the bad guys are not walking through. The threat is overblown.

But the terrorist threat functions for the political Right exactly as the climatological threat functions for the political Left. Both are pretexts for monitoring and controlling you and me.

Bush's Homeland Security Wisdom

I figured out why President Bush is so certain that his policies will make us more secure.

He believes that the terrorists hate us and want to kill us because we are prosperous and free. At least, that is what he says.

So, his strategy has been to make us less prosperous and less free, a strategy that, with the help of Congress, he has successfully implemented.

Therefore, the terrorist threat is reduced.

And, therefore, to completely eliminate the threat, all we need to do is completely eliminate our prosperity and freedom.

That guy is smarter than I thought!

The Racist Heart of Conservatism

I’ve tried to keep polemic out of this blog. I always admired McLuhan’s ability to spew psychosociological aphorisms inflected politically but without ever being overtly political. It’s largely because you can’t pin him to any position on a left-right spectrum that McLuhan floats without a natural home in the academy. But I must lack McLuhan’s savoir faire, because I can’t find an indirect way to put it:

THE HEART OF CONSERVATIVE POLITICS IS RACIST.

Why do they want to live in gated suburbs? To be far from dark skin. Why do they commute to work in quasi-military vehicles? To protect themselves from dark skin. Why are they fanatical about owning guns? To make sure dark skin keeps its distance.

They love free markets and consumer choice and despise the “nanny state.” But they love to regulate markets in the most severe way and deny consumers choice and arm a supernanny state in the name of the drug war. They love “federalism” and “states’ rights” and celebrate the autonomy of the states to function as “laboratories of democracy.” But when the citizens of a few states voted to make marijuana available to medical patients, the federal government flexed its muscle and threatened doctors with de-licensure. No one on the conservative side complained about this federal interventionism. Why when it comes to drug policy do conservatives run from their principles? Because the primary effect of drug policy is to lock hundreds of thousands of dark-skinned people in cages.

They despise the “death tax” but love the death penalty. Why? Because it disproportionately kills dark-skinned people. Why did New Orleans suffer such a horrible neglect from the Bush administration after hurricane Katrina? Because the skin of New Orleans was too dark. Why do they hate mass transit? Because it might deliver dark skin to their gated suburbs.

And so on.
The blood that runs through the veins of conservatism is racist.


Eugenic Dreams of the Power Elite: Part 1

Eugenic Dreams of the Power Elite: Part 2

Eugenic Dreams of the Power Elite: Part 3

Eugenic Dreams of the Power Elite: Part 4

Synchronicity Dept.

A couple weeks ago I posted about Conservatives using the rhetoric of "the Nanny State" to feign Libertarianism (here) and the hypocrisy of this rhetoric in light of Conservative support of the drug war. I mused about Conservative drug warriors launching into protest should drug-war logic be used to protect us from the greater threat of unhealthy food. A few days ago Mallard Fillmore proved me clairvoyant: