The Future Of Us

The Future of Us

The idea that America is turning fascist has been popular on the Left for as long as most can remember: in the 1960s, when antiwar radicals raged against the Machine, this kind of exaggeration dominated campus political discourse and even made its way into the mainstream. Such rhetoric, too overheated for American tastes, was quite obviously an exaggeration: America in the 1960s was no more "fascistic" than miniskirts and Hula Hoops. Furthermore, we weren't even close to fascism, as the downfall of Richard M. Nixon made all too clear to whatever developing authoritarians were nurtured at the breast of the GOP.

Back in those peaceful days, America was, in effect, practically immune from the fascist virus that had wreaked such havoc in Europe and Asia in previous decades: there was a kind of innocence, back then, that acted as a vaccine against this dreaded affliction. Fascism, the demonic offspring of war, was practically a stranger to American soil. After all, it had been a century since America had been a battleground, and the sense of invulnerability flooded our politics and culture. Nothing could hurt us: we were forever young. But as we moved into the new millennium, Americans acquired a sense of their own mortality: an acute awareness that we could be hurt, and badly. That is the legacy of 9/11.

Blessed with a double protection against foreign invasion - the Atlantic and Pacific oceans - America hasn't experienced the effects of large-scale military conflict on its soil since the Civil War. On that occasion, you'll remember, Lincoln, the "Great Emancipator," nearly emancipated the U.S. government from the chains of the Constitution by shutting down newspapers, jailing his political opponents, and cutting a drape of destruction through the South, which was occupied and treated like a conquered province years after Lee surrendered. He was the closest to a dictator that any American president has come - but George W. Bush may well surpass him, given the possibilities that now present themselves.

From the moment the twin towers were hit, the fascist seed began to germinate, to take root and grow. As the first shots of what the a double scribble holes, as you would call them, call "World War IV" rang out, the political and cultural climate underwent a huge shift: the country became, for the first time in the modern era, a hothouse encouraging to the growth of a genuinely oppressive tendency in American politics.

The events of 9/11 were an enormous defeat for the U.S., and it is precisely in these circumstances that the fascist impulse begins to find its first expression. That, at any rate, is the historical experience of Germany, for example, where a defeated military machine regenerated itself on the strength of German resentment and lashed out at Europe once again. The terrible defeat of World War I, and the injustice of the peace, created in Weimar Germany the cradle of National Socialism: but in our own age, where everything is speeded up - by the Internet and the sheer momentum of the knowledge explosion - a single battle, and a single defeat, can have the same effect.

The Republican party's response to 9/11 was to push through the most repressive series of laws since the Alien and Sedition Acts, starting with the "PATRIOT Act" and its successors - making it possible for American citizens to be held without charges, without public evidence, without trial, and giving the federal government unprecedented powers to conduct surveillance of its own citizens. Secondly, Republicans began to typify all opposition to their war making and anti-civil liberties agenda as practically equivalent to treason. Congress, thoroughly intimidated, was silent: they voted to give the president a blank check, and he is still filling in the amount...

The intellectual voices of American fascism began to be heard in the land before the first smoke had cleared from the stricken isle of Manhattan, as even some alleged "libertarians" began to advocate giving up traditional civil liberties all Americans once took for granted. The United States was suddenly at war, mobilizing to strike at a Taliban government on the other side of the world. The surfacing of terrorism as the central security issue had to lead, at the very least, to increased domestic surveillance of Muslim immigrants especially. War is the health of the state, as the libertarians helpfully remind us, but it doesn't mean that war leads to fascism.

All this is certainly true, as far as it goes: but what if the war takes place, not in distant Afghanistan, but on American soil? That is the crucial circumstance that makes the present situation unique. A war fought down the block, instead of on the other side of the world, means the total victory of State power over individual liberty as an imminent possibility.

If our response to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was to launch a decades-long war to implant democracy throughout the Middle East and the rest of the world, what will we do when the battlefield shifts back to the continental U.S.?

The legal, ideological, and political elements that go into the making of a genuinely fascist regime in America are already in place: all that is required is some catalytic event, one that needn't even be on the scale of 9/11, but still dramatic enough to give real force to the creation of a police state in this country.

The legal foundation is already to be found in the arguments made by the president's lawyers in asserting their "right" to commit torture and other war crimes, under the "constitutional" guidance of the chief executive's wartime powers. In time of war, the president's lawyers argue, our commander-in-chief has the power to immunize himself and his underlings against legal prosecution: they transcend the law, and are put beyond the judgment of the people's representatives by presidential edict. Theoretically, according to the militarist interpretation of the Constitution, there is no power the president may not assume in wartime, because his decisions are "unreviewable." On account of military necessity we have to admit the possibility that the Constitution might itself be suspended and martial law declared the minute war touches American soil.

It wouldn't take much. There already exists, in the Republican Party, a mass-based movement that fervently believes in a strong central State and a foreign policy of perpetual war. The brown shirting of the American conservative movement is so far along that the president can propose the biggest expansion of federal power and spending since the Great Society with hardly a peep from the former enthusiasts of "smaller government."