Everyone's a Fascist - Unless you Know History

It's funny how both the extreme right and left in American politics like to throw the "F" word around when describing one another.  The real question is, when you look at their backup material, you begin to see that one side wants to limit free speech and shut down religion, while the other wants to protect the family and children, not by taking away rights, but by putting some balance back into the phrase "limited rights."

OK, so I'm painting the liberals as the bad guys.  I'm sure someone on the left will have a better description of how conservatives are being "fascists."  In fact, you can check out American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America if you like, as well as the conservative accusations of fascism in Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview.

American Fascists was recently reviewed recently in the LA Times:

Thus, Hedges concludes, the United States today faces an internal threat analogous to that posed by the Nazis in Weimar Germany.

There are problems with this analogy....In fact, the differences between today's Christian right and the movements led by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini are greater than the similarities. Hitler was more pagan than Christian. Street violence was a key tactic of Mussolini's Brownshirts; the Christian right has focused on nonviolent demonstrations outside U.S. abortion clinics and on changing laws at the ballot box. And there's a big difference between supporting laws against gay marriage and putting gays in concentration camps.

Nevertheless, Hedges concludes that the Christian right "should no longer be tolerated," because it "would destroy the tolerance that makes an open society possible." What does he think should be done? He endorses the view that "any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law," and therefore we should treat "incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal." Thus he rejects the 1st Amendment protections for freedom of speech and religion, and court rulings that permit prosecution for speech only if there is an imminent threat to particular individuals.

Here's a chapter of American Fascists.

Comments

[Louis]

Good, seeker, so subtle. Liberals=bad, conservatives=good.

What bothers me is the authoritarianism expressed by the xian right. I not a big fan of the left either. However, the far left is powerless while the xian right is pretty powerful right now.

That being said, I see little chance of a fascist dictatorship establishing itself (bar something wild happening). What I see is a slow whittling away at our liberties (ie, "limiting rights")like boiling a frog. And that's the tactic of the present-day right wing.

[seeker]

What bothers me is the authoritarianism expressed by the xian right. I not a big fan of the left either. However, the far left is powerless while the xian right is pretty powerful right now.

OK. I think that the authoritarian gestures of the right are not as large as the alarmists say, but I am glad, actually, for the counterbalance of the lefts, since I am somewhat of a moderate. For example, on stem cell research, I think that as long as we have safeguards that keep us from working on mature embryos, we should be fine.

I don't really see any rights disappearing with the right, but I do think that both left and right probably infringe on them a bit.

Anyway, I thought it funny that both have books out calling one another fascists, and perhaps there's a little truth in both, but I think (of course) that strictly speaking, the far left matches the historic definition better. But that's mostly just a bit of posturing, I guess.

[Cineaste]

The real question is, when you look at their backup material, you begin to see that one side wants to limit free speech and shut down religion...

OK, so I'm painting the liberals as the bad guys. I'm sure someone on the left will have a better description of how conservatives are being "fascists."

I wouldn't be so sure. I'll have someone from the right wing explain. Perhaps you will listen more to her considering her conservative credentials. As you will see, it's not just liberals who are concerned with the role of religion in politics and a potential fascist theocracy.

"Heather Mac Donald is John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Well known for her realist take on immigration reform and law enforcement, of late she has been the center of a small controversy precipitated by a piece in The American Conservative where she expressed her atheism rather forcefully. Below are 10 questions and Heather's answers (here is an exchange Heather had with Luke Ford from a few years back)."

1) OK, I'll get this out of the way. What prompted you to "come out" as an atheist in The American Conservative earlier this year? A friend of mine suggested that you might have become frustrated with the lack of a "reality based" conservatism during this administration, in particular in its attitude toward immigration. Is he going down the right track?

I wrote The American Conservative piece out of frustration with the preening piety of conservative pundits. I attended a New York cocktail party in 2003, for example, where a prominent columnist said to the group standing around him: "We all know that what makes Republicans superior to Democrats is their religious faith." This sentiment has been repeated in print ad nauseam, along with its twin: "We all know that morality is not possible without religion." I didn't then have the courage to point out to the prominent columnist that quite a few conservatives and Republicans of the highest standing had no religious faith, without apparent injury to their principles or their behavior.

Around that time, I had started noticing the puzzling logic of petitionary prayer. What was the theory of God behind prayer websites, for example: that God is a democratic pol with his finger to the wind of public opinion? Is the idea that if only five people are praying for the recovery of a beloved grandmother from stroke, say, God will brush them off, but that if you can summon five thousand people to plead her case, he will perk up and take notice: "Oh, now I understand, this person's life is important"? And what if an equally beloved grandmother comes from a family of atheist curs? Since she has no one to pray for her, will God simply look the other way? If someone could explain this to me, I would be very grateful.

I also wondered at the narcissism of believers who credit their good fortune to God. A cancer survivor who claims that God cured him implies that his worthiness is so obvious that God had to act. It never occurs to him to ask what this explanation for his deliverance says about the cancer victim in the hospital bed next to his, who, despite the fervent prayers of her family, died anyway.

As I was pondering whether any of these practices could be reconciled with rationality, the religious gloating of the conservative intelligentsia only grew louder. The onset of the Iraq war expanded the domain of religious triumphalism to transatlantic relations: what makes America superior to Europe, we were told by conservative opinionizers, is its religious faith and its willingness to invade Iraq. George Bush made the connection between religious beliefs and the Iraq war explicit, with his childlike claim that freedom was God's gift to humanity and that he was delivering that gift himself by invading Iraq.

I need not rehearse here how Bush's invocation of the divine gift of freedom overlooks the Bible, the persistence throughout history of hierarchical societies that have little use for personal autonomy, and the unique, centuries-long struggle in the West to create the institutions of limited government that underwrite our Western idea of freedom. Suffice it to say, the predictable outcome of the Iraq invasion did not convince me that religious belief was a particularly trustworthy ground for political action.

So in the American Conservative piece I wanted to offer some resistance to the assumption of conservative religious unanimity. I tried to point out that conservatism has no necessary relation to religious belief, and that rational thought, not revelation, is all that is required to arrive at the fundamental conservative principles of personal responsibility and the rule of law. I find it depressing that every organ of conservative opinion reflexively cheers on creationism and intelligent design, while delivering snide pot shots at the Enlightenment. Which of the astounding fruits of empiricism would these Enlightenment-bashers dispense with: the conquest of cholera and other infectious diseases, emergency room medicine, jet travel, or the internet, to name just a handful of the millions of human triumphs that we take for granted?

My hope in writing the piece was that the next time a conservative pundit, speaking for and to other conservatives, assumes that he is surrounded by like-minded believers because of course to be conservative is to be religious, that for just a moment a doubt might pass through his mind whether some in his audience may be without faith. And the worst part would be: he couldn't tell who they are.

Heather McDonald sounds like a right winger I can trust to be reasonable. Full Article

[Louis]

Doubt pass through the mind of a religious conservative? Perish the thought!

[Lawanda]

I think fascism could rear its ugly head from either side of the political see-saw. And I think it will happen someday. Mostly due to that slow process of rights and liberties being whittled away...you think it is all on you minorities, but trust me, poor folk who don't want to act like normal poor folk get enough of it too. And religious people, as well, sometimes.

I can see it happening here at some point.

But maybe I watch too many movies.

Heather McDonald sounds reasonable enough. She is apparently not satisfied with her college experience. I wonder that doesnt make people step back and see how over-rated a degree really is.

[Louis]

Yes, Heather MacDonald is quite interesting:

"The most important characteristics of the Christian God, as I understand them, are his love of man and his justice. If one were to posit a god who is capricious, ironic, absent-minded, depraved, or completely unknowable, I’d be on board. Any one of those characteristics would comport with a deity superintending the world as I see it. But not the idea, as a Bush administration publicist put it to me, that every one of us is “precious in God’s eyes.”'

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OGYxNDFiMzdiZjZjMDExZjYxYmUxODExMzBkYmUyYmQ=