The Question of a US form of fascism

The question of fascism in the US is being raised now with a certain urgency (Naomi Wolf 2007). Governmental contempt for citizens’ rights has grown, along with instances of corporate corruption and an executive arrogation of more centralized police power. Massive imprisonment and the use of torture have been valorized; habeas corpus has been eroded; the US has wantonly invaded other nations.

Lawrence Britt (2003) lists 14 characteristics of fascism, leaving it to his reader to notice their emergence in our present political situation. They include extreme nationalism, disdain for human rights, destruction of unions and suppression of the labor movement, the invention of enemies, a political desire for war, an obsession with national security, control of mass media, prioritization of corporate interests, massive corporate and political corruption, and an obsession with prisons and policing. Naomi Wolf lists ten such criteria.

But the idea of a US fascism is not new. It approximates what Pierre Van den Berghe pointed out in 1967 in his discussion of white racism, and which he called “herrenvolk democracy” (aka “democracy for white people”), a form of racial despotism that coexisted with constitutionality. In his book “Friendly Fascism” (1980), Bertram Gross argues that the US under Reagan began moving toward a form of governance closely analogous to 1930s’ European fascism, and compares it in its social consequences to what Mussolini described as the “corporate state.” George Jackson (1970) finds no better word than “fascism” to describe the psychotic use of power and violence by which white prisoners relate to black, or by which the prison administration maintains its hierarchical system of social control.

Many find this idea objectionable, seeing little correspondence between the situation in the US and the European experience. In the European model, there are stormtroopers routinely stamping out freedom of speech, labor organizations, and popular resistance, while governing concentration camps for dissenters. If SWAT team operations fit that image, they don’t roam the streets acting on whim. There is still a reliance on courts, warrants, electoral parties with their campaigns, and representatives in government with their terms limits. Most, especially the Marxists, do not see police rule as systemic yet. And they understand the underlying motive for a fascism as a specific and extreme political response to capitalist crisis (Guerin 1973; Sohn-Rethel 1987), for which a nationalistic and anti-labor demagoguery is used to militarize society. Uniformly, dissenters will invoke the specter of a virulent right-wing, openly despotic seizure of political power as an essential element.

Yet in the European experience of the 1930s, one finds that different countries (Germany, Italy, Spain) produced different forms of fascism. And in each case, a different ideology and/or mythology was deployed. If each country produces a different form of fascism, attuned to something deep in its culture, as well as being something utilized by capitalism for its own class defense, then perhaps evaluating or judging whether the US were fascist through a European lens would lead to a false conclusion. The US is very different from Europe.

To use the term "fascism" to signify government violence appears superficial. The videos of the police shooting unarmed people in the back, or in the process of surrender, the specter of the largest prison system in the world, and the confluence of policies designed to insure high rates of recidivism, all seem somehow to have a legalist rationale. The Citizens United blank check of power given corporate political organization by the court, the refusal to label adulterated foods, the technological destruction of the oceans, etc., are different kinds of examples, but also with a kind of legalistic aura, though increasingly dehumanized and anti-democratic. They fall short of the horror associated with the European instances.

Nevertheless, the extremism of US government violence demands to be understood. Does it reflect an evolution toward something new (but still under the purview of acceptible policy and authority), or do these policies instead express and represent the surfacing (or resurfacing) of an underlying structure, something crouching at the center of US economic and cultural history?

Why is the question even relevant? Would it actually change the way we understand and deal with the dehumanization and violence of the political system?

There are three reasons why the question is relevant. The first is that it would displace the US from the historical space that it reserves for itself, that world stage upon which it proclaims "US exceptionalism." That self-proclamation would lose its foundation. Second, it would demythologize the degrees of violence that today couch themselves in traditional explanations (those of class, or profit-oriention, or market forces). It is precisely the weakness, the fragility, even the sham of equating the republican form of government with democracy that would be exposed. But finally, there is a "we" in contemporary populist thinking that presumes that "we" can regulate corporations, change the priorities of government and corporate policy, and institute programs that have a human-orientation over a profit-orientation. This "we" assumes a connection between the people and the political structure, rather than the disconnect that we actually experience (or blind ourselves to).

While the traditional sense of connection requires a high degree of “faith,” the disconnect is structural. Our inability to conceptualize that disconnect undermines us. It displaces every attempt at gaining social justice from dehumanizing policy, while using the attempt to gain that justice as honor given to what withholds it. All recognition given the power structure from our exclusion and powerlessness only affirms the legitimacy of the structural disconnect. It betrays an inability to see the disconnect as a form of structural violence against the people.

If there is a US form of fascism, the distinctions between it and fascism in Europe will need to be spelled out. The cultural and economic structures that a study of this question would have to examine are the folloing:
• The structures of racialization
• The structure of policing – from the slave patrols to the SWAT team
• The prison industry and the police-prison nexus
• a critique of white skin privilege,
• the corporate structure and its role in the entire history of the US
• what it means that class relations are racialized,
• the notion of cultural identity,
• The extent to which the concept of cultural membership is relevant to whiteness

It goes without saying that the US economy is capitalist. But is it just capitalist, or has the corporate structure grown beyond that to the development of superseding forms of exploitation and oppression?
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These issues will be the subject of a class at a free university called the Bay Area Public School, at the Omni, 4799 Shattuck Ave. in Oakland, on Mondays, 6:30-8:30 pm, starting on July 6.