I keep having flashbacks to my youth as the situation in our country deteriorates more and more rapidly. First there were the newsreels of WWII and the horrible pictures right after the concentration camps were liberated. The evil of fascism was as real as could be given the distance and the fact that they were newsreels.
Here we had the lynchings and other racially motivated terrorist acts. The 1960 election was my first chance to vote for president. I grew up in Chicago and was very well informed about how a Democratic Machine could rule with a dictatorship that was “benevolent”. The machine was organized from the block level on up and worked very well for the people who ran it.
I guess that you could say I was at best cynical about “democracy” even though I was still very naive. I was a Catholic until 1957 and then became an evangelical protestant. It was not hard to distrust JFK because I had been under the influence of the Catholic Church all those years. I ended up voting for Nixon and from that mistake I learned a lot about myself and my inability to sort things out in the context of our political system.
The other thing that had a big influence on me was McCarthyism. It was clear that what had gone on in Russia made their “Communism” something to be avoided yet I still instinctively knew that Capitalism was also a trap. Mixed in with the anti-Communist propaganda that was everywhere was something more subtle. It took Barry Goldwater and the John Birch Society to bring me to the point where I could put it all together. Anti-Communism, Anti-Semitism, Racism and Capitalism the way it was done here were all part of one thing. We tend to break things apart and not see the connections.
I read a lot of Norman Mailer’s writing and a few things stand out from back then. For example he wrote:
“I really am a pessimist. I've always felt that fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It's something essentially splendid because it's not at all routine or automatic. Fascism goes back to our infancy and childhood, where we were always told how to live. We were told, Yes, you may do this; no, you may not do that. So the secret of fascism is that it has this appeal to people whose later lives are not satisfactory.”
― Norman Mailer
Later George Lakoff wrote extensively about the nature of radical conservatism and used a very similar family analogy . The radical conservatism he described was very much like what Mailer saw as fascism. Then there was this: The Conservative 1960s
ON July 16, 1964, Senator Barry Goldwater, of Arizona, approached the podium at the San Francisco Cow Palace to accept the Republican presidential nomination. Many moderates in the audience expected a conciliatory speech pledging party unity. But Goldwater gave them something very different. "I would remind you," he thundered, "that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And ... moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." Liberal Republicans were shocked. The party they had controlled for so long had fallen into the hands of extremists. Political commentators were equally taken aback. After hearing the speech, one reporter expressed their dismay: "My God, he's going to run as Barry Goldwater."
Then there was this:
Goldwater also dispelled the notion that conservatives were a privileged elite out to promote its own economic interests. "Conservatism," he wrote, "is not an economic theory." Rather, it "puts material things in their proper place" and sees man as "a spiritual creature with spiritual needs and spiritual desires." According to one right-wing magazine, Goldwater gave conservatives humanitarian reasons for supporting policies usually "associated with a mere lust for gain."
But perhaps the greatest achievement of Goldwater's book--and the reason for its startling success with the right--was that it gave conservatives, for the first time, a blueprint for translating their ideas into political action. In his introduction Goldwater rejected the idea that conservatism was "out of date."
I can’t find the place where Mailer reacted to this all with a kind of relief. That feeling came from something I’ll never forget. He wrote about giving this movement a face and how important that was. As long as they were seen as a fringe and thought to be inconsequential they could grow and infiltrate and propagandize under the guise of being Americans exercising their free speech. It took exposure to reveal that they were determined to be the only ones allowed to speak.
So now we are living in another time but when you look closely not much has changed. Racial hate goes largely unchecked. Freedom only applies to the “real” Americans, etc…….. etc
It is time to see that the killings of Black People, the xenophobia, the inequality, the imperialism, the hate for all that is natural and the ecosystem that sustains us, and the need to degrade and dominate women are all part of a worldview and the resulting mindset that is allowing some very evil people take over much of local and state government.
It is a being given a face now. The republican party has made its intentions clear for some time. Yet they were not so bad at keeping it hidden behind people who were able to appear as if they believe in ideals having names like “freedom”, “liberty” “constitutional rights”, etc.
Now their frontrunning candidate has let it all hang out. No matter who becomes their candidate they can not erase the ugly face their party has been given right out front.
The media have helped without knowing what they are doing. They are good a causing hate and sensationalism to inflame the population, but they have lost sight of how very repulsive what they are dishing out really is.
That is not any assurance that they will fail to gain power one way or another. But the face of what we are up against is becoming more well defined by the day. We will see what the American people are really like before long.