Is America Descending Into Fascism?
If you’re an American who is at all active or interested in politics in 2022, regardless of what side of the aisle you align with, one thing is for sure…you think the people on the other side are a bunch of fascists.
That word is being thrown around a whole lot these days, and it’s not just bitter social media users doing it at the end of hard fought Twitter dunk contests.
Case in point…remember Joe Biden? He’s our current president. We elected him after Trump.
During a speech in August, he said this about the MAGA movement.
“It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something — it’s like semi-fascism.”
Gasp! Fascism? In the United States? The hell you say!
Those comments elicited an immediate firestorm of angry responses from the right. Like how Ted Cruz tweeted that “the communists have always called their enemies fascists,” as if the exact reverse of that isn’t also true.
A few months before Biden dropped the semi-f-word, American writer Thom Hartmann wrote a legitimately unsettling article about how it’s time to start thinking about what American fascism is gonna look like, because it’s for sure coming.
So I guess this all raises an obvious question. Is America descending into fascism, like so many voices seem to be warning us about?
I think you can best answer that question with another question. Since when has America not been fascist?
Or at least tell me when we stopped? Because I can tell you when we started being fascist. Immediately. Right away. Before we were a country, even! We had to commit a whole entire genocide just to free up enough space to become the United States. Then a bunch more so we could keep growing. The state I live in was taken through violence.
In his 1992 biography of Hitler, writer John Toland points out that the idea for concentration camps in Nazi Germany were inspired in part by the reservation system in the United States:
“Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination-by starvation and uneven combat-of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.”
What’s not fascist about that? Is it the lack of a dictator? If so, I’d argue you’re being a little too nitpicky about the “textbook” definition of fascism (and I’d follow that up by quietly wondering why). Fascism doesn’t really work that way. Sure, you can look the word up in a dictionary and find a definition…
…but even then there’s some wiggle room. You’ll note that it says “often race,” for example. That probably comes down to the fact that, before Hitler came along, Mussolini wasn’t all that interested in race as a talking point. History still agrees he was a fascist, though. He did invent the word, after all.
Or is that the problem? Is it that the genocides that built this nation happened before Mussolini coined the term and therefore cannot be considered fascist acts? If so, I’m assuming we also have to strike slavery from the discussion, which seems like a huge oversight.
In a Washington Post article by Ishaan Tharoor about the debate over American fascism, he quotes writer Jonathan Katz, who in turn tags historian Robert Paxton, who then jumps into the ring with this quote about what constitutes fascism, from his 2004 book Anatomy of Fascism:
“Fascism in power is a compound, a powerful amalgam of different but marriageable conservative, national socialist, and radical right ingredients, bonded together by common enemies and common passions for a regenerated, energized and purified nation, whatever the cost to free institutions and the rule of law.”
Now we’re talking! Take the need for an actual “dictator” out of the discussion and things start to sound a lot more familiar.
However, the argument from Katz and Tharoor both is that everything in that quote fits perfectly when you project it onto “modern-day Republicanism.” While that is indeed true, I still question at what point in history the United States in general, regardless of what side was in office, didn’t mostly fit that description?
Or, to make it easier, tell me when — post World War II — have we not fit that description?
Just a reminder, we did kinda team up with the Nazis after that conflict ended by way of a scheme called Operation Paperclip. For years and years the claim was that we just took the “good” ones who didn’t commit war crimes, but a torrential downpour of declassified documents have since shown that to be an obvious lie.
One especially heinous example is that of Aleksandras Lileikis, a Nazi linked to the machine gun massacre of 60,000 Jews in Lithuania.
Another, SS officer Otto von Bolschwing, worked closely with Adolf Eichmann, the guy who came up with the “Final Solution,” and enjoyed writing papers about how to best terrorize Jews in his downtime.
We not only hired them both as spies in Europe, we let them immigrate to the United States a few years later.
You can read more about all of that in this 2014 New York Times article, which also brings up a highly underrated aspect of Operation Paperclip. That being FBI head J. Edgar Hoover’s involvement in and enthusiasm for bringing Nazis into the law enforcement fold.
Operation Paperclip is almost always portrayed as a thing the United States did in the name of keeping a leg up on the Russians in the fight against Communism and the race to the moon. We wanted Cold War spies and Wernher von Brauns exclusively, to hear history tell it.
But that same New York Times article mentions that records show then CIA chief Allen Dulles thought “moderate” Nazis (hilarious to think people believe that can be a thing) would “be useful” for America. Meanwhile, Hoover was personally approving ex-Nazis as informants and dismissed any mention of their wartime crimes as commie propaganda.
The article also brings up that Hoover authorized the FBI to wiretap a journalist named Charles Allen in 1968. Why? Because he was writing critical stories about Nazis in America. This earned him the designation of “threat to national security” from Hoover himself.
That’s pretty damn alarming! And pretty damn interesting when you consider what the United States became domestically after Hoover started recruiting Nazis. The jump forward from the end of WWII to 1968 is a convenient one, because it brings us to another important facet of fascist ideology: the common enemy.
Richard Nixon took office in 1968. Here’s what his domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, told a Harper’s reporter in 2016:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Does that sound like some fascist shit? No, actually. It sounds like some straight up Nazi shit. We’re (rightfully) calling Trump and his ilk at least Nazi-adjacent these days, and it’s because of that crowd’s stance on things like Black Lives Matter and calls to defund the police (which is the closest thing we have to an antiwar movement in this country at the moment). So what does that make America under Nixon?
We’re talking about a period in American history when the entire top level of the progressive movement was literally assassinated. JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X…with the exception of Fred Hampton, who was shot dead by the police while asleep in bed, we’re supposed to believe all that other stuff was the work of lone wackos and not our recently Nazi-fortified government. How convenient!
And fine, then let’s talk about MK-ULTRA.
We didn’t just bring over Nazi spy doctors and rocket doctors, we also brought over a heaping helping of Nazi medical doctors as a result of Operation Paperclip. If you have even the scantest of knowledge of what kind of “medical” stuff the Nazis were getting up to, that should be concerning.
It’s worth noting here that the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, aka the Tuskegee Experiment, had already been underway for years by the time Operation Paperclip happened. So, if you’re disinclined to believe the United States would team up with the Nazis to conduct human experiments on our own people, get over yourself. We were already doing it.
MK-ULTRA is not a conspiracy theory. It is the CIA’s Watergate, except the CIA was involved in that too, so Watergate is also the CIA’s Watergate.
Anyway, after that scandal broke, then-CIA Director Richard Helms decided all MK-ULTRA related documents should be shredded. Unfortunately for Helms and the Agency, some dunderhead stored a box of 20,000 or so files in the wrong location. Those files were never shredded and, when they were found, they revealed that MK-ULTRA was a for real human experimentation program conducted at hospitals and universities all across the United States and Canada for decades.
The argument has always been that nothing ever came of it. Is that true? Maybe! However, it is also true that, at the same time a decades-long CIA x Nazi mind control experiment collabo was happening, all of this country’s progressive leaders were getting gunned down in the streets by glass-eyed Catcher In the Rye enthusiasts at a highly alarming rate.
The existence of MK-ULTRA came to light during the Church Committee hearings, which some would argue is the point in history when the American government finally took the CIA and their rogue activities to task. Maybe this is where you can argue that the United States gave up on its Nazi ambitions? The Church hearings happen, Jimmy Carter’s liberal ass is elected President, and the CIA is told they can’t do their weird Third Reich psychological experiments on American soil anymore. Problem solved!
Except what happens next would beg to differ.
The CIA did indeed get told to calm down by the Church hearings and the Carter administration, but that administration only lasted one term. Carter faced off against Ronald Reagan in the election that would decide if he’d have a second term. And who ran alongside Reagan as his VP? Then Director of the CIA, George H.W. Bush. It was the first time a person who held the title of CIA Director ran for that high of an elected office. Go figure!
I think we all know what happens next. Not long into his first term, former actor Ronald Reagan is nearly assassinated in very weird MK-ULTRA fashion.
This is obviously just a coincidence. But still, from that point on, the CIA spends most of the ’80s wreaking havoc all over Latin America in the name of “fighting communism” and the Executive branch was back to being all for it.
Those are all things that happened, whether they sound like conspiracy theory ramblings or not.
Speaking of conspiracy theories, let’s talk about crack!
We will completely ignore the rumblings (and mountains of evidence) that the CIA might have had a hand in introducing crack to black communities in the 1980s. If true, that amounts to chemical warfare against a population of “undesirables,” which is definitely something those fascist Nazis loved.
Still, that’s just a conspiracy theory, right? No one knows where crack came from. The science is still out. You’re doing your own research. I get it.
That said, there’s no debating how the American government responded to that situation. We imposed heinously unfair drug laws that led to the mass incarceration of black and brown people and then used those prisoners as slave labor to further the interests of untold numbers of American businesses and industries, all while demonizing black youths as “super predators.”
Then, at the point in American history when we were supposed to be going to the polls to vote against fascism, the architect of the crime bill that made that mass incarceration possible was elected president!
Again, I accept that we haven’t been ruled by a charismatic dictator, which is a thing a lot of definitions of fascism require. But that’s because America IS the charismatic dictator, and we have been inflicting our own unique version of fascism on as much of the globe as we possibly can from the moment WWII ended.
Remember? We are the greatest nation on earth! God blesses America! We do things right and if other countries do things in a manner that is contrary to our version of “right” we deal with that disobedience through intimidation and violence. Our definition of “subhuman” doesn’t end with the minority groups we brutalize within our own borders. It extends to any regime anywhere in the world that doesn’t fall in line with our way of thinking.
With that in mind, let’s look at another attempt to define fascism. To hear Wikipedia tell it, several reliable sources buy into historian Stanley G. Payne’s definition, which is a three-parter:
“Fascist negations” — anti-liberalism, anti-communism, and anti-conservatism.
“Fascist goals” — the creation of a nationalist dictatorship to regulate economic structure and to transform social relations within a modern, self-determined culture, and the expansion of the nation into an empire.
“Fascist style” — a political aesthetic of romantic symbolism, mass mobilization, a positive view of violence, and promotion of masculinity, youth, and charismatic authoritarian leadership.
We nail that first one with flying colors. And there’s no arguing that we have empire building down to a science, so point number two is a big check mark as well.
Let’s focus on that third one. Does it seem like we have a “political aesthetic of romantic symbolism” at all?
For a lot of my life it legitimately seemed like we did not. I was born in the post-Vietnam war ’70s and grew up during the Cold War ’80s under the twin specters of Ronald Reagan and nuclear annihilation.
While it’s true that Reagan won 49 of 50 states in the 1984 election, which is horrifying in retrospect, I don’t recall patriotism being a thing either side demanded or talked about much. When they did, it was usually just because they were listening to “Born In the USA” in the wrong context.
Then the first war in Iraq happened. Despite being a remarkably short conflict, the media blitz that surrounded it set the stage for how every subsequent war would be covered going forward. For the mainstream press in this country, that generally means maximum flag waving and minimal opposition.
Since then, thanks in large part to a team up between the military and the NFL, the nation has been getting absolutely pounded with “romantic symbolism” and messaging about American exceptionalism and military dominance. And that was all way before 9/11, which made that and pretty much everything else about this country significantly worse.
The issue at hand isn’t that we’re just now finally descending into fascism. It’s that we’ve at least been “semi-fascist” this whole time, but now the voices of the people who don’t like it are getting too loud to ignore. Being quietly fascist was a lot easier before the internet and social media. We’ve officially reached the point where we have to either fundamentally change who we are as a country (unlikely) or just openly and loudly embrace fascism as a policy of the American government (so very likely).
What exactly are we expecting to be the tipping point where this country goes from chill democracy to fascist nightmare? Will it be when a bunch of psychologically manipulated zombies start murdering progressives and set back any social justice progress that might have been achieved by another few decades? Because, again, that happened already in the 1960s. It’s just that we’ve reached the point where, to keep this country operating the way it always has, that kinda has to happen again.
We didn’t blame the government when it happened before, and we won’t blame the government the next time either. We’ll chalk it up to the Oath Keepers or Qanon or some combination of the two, and then we’ll get mad at Trump or DeSantis or whatever right-wing monster takes power for exploiting the actions of violent fringe extremists to destroy our once pristine democracy.
Maybe instead of asking if we’re descending into fascism, we should be asking why that democracy is so good at producing violent extremists willing to kill in the name of upholding the status quo?
Originally published at https://adamtodbrown.substack.com on October 5, 2022.
