Years ago, I lived in a country where a brilliant, but evil man won a narrow election. His principal electoral challenger and an important labor leader had both been assassinated during the campaign, and many people wondered if that was our last free election.
In the next few years, police overtly murdered many leftists, and encouraged the murders of others. Hundreds of thousands of folks demonstrated against the evil leader, and suffered violent police attacks and illegal mass arrests. The Army murdered students on college campuses.
The next election was farcical. Another political challenger to the evil leader was gunned down in the street. Another leading labor figure died in questionable circumstances. The evil leader “won” re-election with a wave of illegal tactics.
Yet two years later, the evil leader resigned in disgrace. His second in command, his director of law enforcement, and a score of the leader’s key co-conspirators went to prison.
I’m talking, of course, about the reign of Richard Nixon, brought down by more and better Democrats like Barbara Jordan, in coalition with a nearly extinct entity, the ethical Republican.
I remember those days, and recall reading about real fascism and totalitarianism, often directed by Nixon and his crime partners, in Chile, Argentina, and many other countries.
Real fascism features a one-party State, where the State is everything, and everything; businesses, churches, unions, schools, law enforcement, and culture, all serve the state and none else. Anyone foolish enough to dissent would be lucky to receive a prison sentence, because agents of real fascism would welcome an excuse to commit unspeakable acts on you, until you would welcome a simple prison sentence.
Nixon was a crook, but not a fascist. And I demur from folks loosely tossing around words like fascism or even “proto-fascism” to describe our current national situation.
I am utterly appalled at our current state. Many corporations and banks have committed massive, unpunished crimes to rip off our pensions and equities. However, the responsible people are criminals. Some are reactionary. They are not fascists.
They haven’t recruited a blackshirted private army to kick down our doors and beat us to death. They haven’t even eroded the democratic process back to the days of Nixon, when police were killing Black Panther Party members in their beds, the National Guard was murdering students, and Democratic Party headquarters and other centers of opposition were burglarized.
We have two major political parties and a score of minor parties. We have free elections, even though money doesn’t talk, it swears, in those proceedings. The economic playing field is not level, but the government won’t put you in prison without a trial for competing with Chevron. We have unions. Although unions are severely weakened and under attack, no one is machine-gunning the union picket lines. We have free practice of many religions. A few yahoos specialize in attacking Islam these days, but that’s not general government policy. These and other issues are enormously serious and an uphill challenge to overcome, but it isn’t fascism.
I feel it can degrade our efforts, when folks overstate the situation and call the current situation “fascist,” when it isn’t. Here is why.
In the Nixon days, many leftists looked around at their murdered brothers and sisters and decided we already had fascism, and we were already mired in the endless wars described in Orwell’s novel 1984. They abandoned political and labor organizing. They formed cadres and went underground. They took up illegal tactics. They allied with hoodlums because they thought they had no choice against fascism. They exposed themselves to set-ups by undercover agents. They made horrifying mistakes that inflicted tragedy onto themselves, and onto innocent persons.
And by then, they contributed little or nothing to alter our political landscape for the better, much less overthrow Richard Nixon. They were very wrong about us hovering on the edge of fascism, and squandered their misdirected energy. When we needed them to rebuild our progressive movement, many of them were in prison, in hiding, or in graves.
I would hate to see a new generation actually believe we are currently under fascist attack, and repeat these tactical mistakes of the 1960s and 1970s. Or alternatively, decide that it was simply hopeless to fight against such overwhelming odds, and retreat into caring only for “me and mine.”
Call our economic and political situation awful. Call it almost impossible to reverse without decades of effort. Call some conservative Democrats next-to-useless. Call the Republicans corporate tools who despise the working class. I agree. But please don’t call it fascism.