Guest Blog: How Fascism Will Come to America

November 2, 2008

This is How Fascism Comes: Reflections on the Cost of Silence

by Tim Wise
October 11, 2008, 7:26 pm

For those who have seen the ugliness and heard the vitriol emanating
from the mouths of persons attending McCain/Palin rallies this past
week–what with their demands to kill Barack Obama, slurs that he is a
terrorist and a traitor, and paranoid delusions about his crypto-Muslim
designs on America–please know this: This is how fascism comes to an
ostensible democracy.

If it comes–and if those whose poisonous, unhinged verbiage has been so
ubiquitous this week have any say over it, it surely will–this is how
it will happen: not with tanks and jackbooted storm troopers, but
carried in the hearts of men and women dressed in comfortable shoes,
with baseball caps, and What Would Jesus Do? wristbands. It will be
heralded by up-dos, designer glasses, you-betcha folksiness and a
disdain for big words or hard consonants.

If fascism comes, it will spring from the soil of middle America, from
people known as values voters but whose values are toxic, from simple
folk whose simplicity, far from being admirable, is better labeled
ignorance, from “all-American” types whose patriotism is a dagger
pointed at the very heart of the national interest, for it so forsakes
all the best principles upon which the republic was founded, choosing
instead to elevate and ratify the narrow-mindedness, the bigotry, and
the intolerance that also marked our country’s origins.

If fascism comes, it will be ushered in by tailgaters at the big
football game, by Joe Six Pack, who, upon finishing his sixth beer and
belching forth the stench of a mediocre life lived, will gladly announce
its arrival, so long as it comes with a steady supply of Pabst Blue
Ribbon and hot dogs on the grill, and giant foam hands with a “We’re
Number 1″ finger, some Mardi Gras beads and a good titty bar.

If fascism comes it will dress like a hockey mom, or a NASCAR dad. It
will believe Toby Keith to be an artist, Larry the Cable Guy to be a
comic, and that the world was made in six literal days less than 6000
years ago.

If fascism comes it will come from the small towns; the ones Sarah
Palin, quoting a famous racist and Jew-hater, said “grow good people,”
and which occasionally do, but which, just as often grow provincial,
isolated, fearful and superstitious ones.

If fascism comes it will come from faux populism, from anti-immigrant
hysteria, from persons who have more guns in their homes than books, or
whose books, when they have them, are principally volumes of the Left
Behind series, several different copies of the Bible, and a plethora of
romance novels.

If fascism comes it will be welcomed, lock stock and barrel by persons
who pray at every meal to a God they visualize as white, whose son they
also think was white, and who they believe is going to rapture them all
into the sky upon the blowing of some heavenly trumpet, after which
point all those who don’t think as they think will be burned in an
eternal lake of fire. Their vision and version of God is itself
fascistic–to love a God who would do such a thing is to love an
abusive, sadistic and evil deity after all–so it should come as little
surprise that their conception of the state would be equally
authoritarian or worse.

If fascism comes it will be at the behest of those who hold a contempt
for what they call “book learnin,” who prefer Presidents who
mispronounce basic words because they make them feel smarter, and who
are looking for nothing so much as a commander-in-chief with whom they
would enjoy having a beer, or two, or twelve at some backyard barbecue.

If fascism comes it will be interviewed, lovingly, on talk radio, by
hosts whose cerebral inadequacies are more than made up for by their
bellicosity, their bombast, their willingness to shout down those with
whom they cannot argue, for argument requires knowledge, and this is a
commodity with which they have not even a passing familiarity.

If fascism comes it will come wrapped in red,white and blue, carrying a
crucifix and a shotgun, projecting its own sexual confusion and
insecurity onto others, substituting volume for veracity and rage for
reason, and landing on the New York Times best-seller list as a result.

If fascism comes it will have a pajama party at Ann Coulter’s house, pop
pills with Rush Limbaugh, and go gay-bashing with Michael Savage, all in
the same weekend. And it will refuse to learn another language or get a
passport, because doing either of those would make one
cosmopolitan–which is just another word for “faggot.”

If fascism comes it will come because a lot of people who aren’t like
the folks I’m talking about here, won’t stand up to the ones who are.
Because we’re too busy, don’t want to make waves, don’t want to lose
friends, or alienate family. It will come, in other words, because those
who know better are cowards, more concerned with getting along, making
nice, and being liked than with telling the truth, calling out evil and
saving their country.

If fascism comes it will come because of the silence, and thus,
collaboration of those who think themselves good, and certainly superior
to the knuckle-draggers they can see on YouTube at the McCain rallies,
but who in the end are no better and in some ways worse than they: after
all, at least fascists stand up for what they believe in. They are
telling us, in no uncertain terms what kind of United States they want
and are willing to fight for, and maybe even to kill for. But many
“progressives,” many liberals, many of the so-called enlightened are
doing nothing at all.

If fascism comes it will come because those liberals thought voting for
Barack Obama was all they needed to do; it will come because they
allowed themselves to believe that politics is what a person does every
four years, but not at work, and not in the neighborhood, and not at the
dinner table. Meanwhile, know-nothings filled with hate, nurtured on
racial and religious bigotry and who have overdosed on the kind of
hypernationalism that has always proved fatal to those places foolish or
craven enough to allow it a foothold, talk of their visions for America
at every opportunity. They raise their kids on that sickness, they build
churches whose very foundation is rooted in that cancerous rot, and they
will think nothing of steamrolling those who get in their way.

So when, exactly, do we fight back? When do we say enough? When do we
stand up to our relative or friend who sends us the e-mail about Obama
being a Manchurian Candidate or al-Qaeda sympathizer, or the one about
the decency of Midwestern flood victims as opposed to those stranded
after Katrina, or about how God was punishing New Orleans because of its
tolerance of homosexuality, and tell them what we think: namely, that
they are a bunch of racist, heterosexist loons, whose friendship or
familial connection we neither want nor intend to pursue unless they get
help. When do we decide that we love our country and humanity too much
to allow these people one more day of decent sleep, one more day of
self-assured confidence in their craziness and the willingness of the
rest of us to just take it? When do we decide that every irrational,
Jeezoid, racist thing that comes from their mouths will be attacked,
will be rebutted, until they can no longer take for granted the ability
to say any of it in mixed company without being called out?

Why, in the face of the fascism they would surely introduce if given the
chance, are we intent on being so nice? Why are we not more offended?
Offended not merely at what such persons say about others–like Obama,
or Latino immigrants, or whatever–but even about we who look like them?
After all, their open exhortations of racism presuppose that they are
speaking for us, and that this kind of brain-dead ventilation is
something to which all white folks should aspire as though it were
virtually the essence of enlightenment.

If fascism comes it will come because we did not see in their actions a
sufficient threat, or because we allowed ourselves to believe that it
couldn’t come, that our institutions were too strong, our people too
good, for that to happen. If it comes it will come because we allowed
ourselves to believe the rosy and optimistic version of America spun by
Obama, without tempering that optimism with a clear-headed appraisal of
the way that (sadly) a still huge number of Americans actually think:
because we allowed the vehicle of our hopes to outrun the headlights of
truth; because we convinced ourselves that we actually lived in the
country of our aspirations, rather than the nation we have at present.

And if fascism doesn’t come–if, rather, democracy does–it will come
because good people said no. It will come because we saw in this moment
the opportunity to demand the full measure of our humanity and to pour
it forth upon the national soil. It will be because we understood that
democracy isn’t what you have, it’s what you do. But if we are to issue
that demand, if we are to stand straight and fulfill the potential we
possess to do justice, we had best exercise the option quickly, for the
opponents of justice are on the move. They are preparing to enter on the
winds of our silence and indifference, and complacency. Let them find no quarter here.

<http://www.redroom.com//blog/tim-wise/this-how-fascism-comes-reflections-cost-silence>

Written by admin · Filed Under Uncategorized