Hi, Fascism!

Fascist! is a word that gets thrown around a lot by abstractly angry people who don’t like what their governments are doing. But sometimes those people don’t really know what “fascist” means. People like me, for example. The word has a viscerally ugly ring to it, and suggests all sorts of nonspecific nastiness, and it’s kind of fun to say. But it’s occurred to me recently that someone might ask me what exactly I mean when I say fascist, and I’d have to stammer something like: “You know … fascist! It’s sort of like an asshole, but meaner.” And that would be super embarrassing. So I decided to look it up:

Fascism is an authoritarian political ideology (generally tied to a mass movement) that considers the individual subordinate to the interests of the state, party or society as a whole. Fascists seek to forge a type of national unity, usually based on (but not limited to) ethnic, cultural, racial, religious attributes. Various scholars attribute different characteristics to fascism, but the following elements are usually seen as its integral parts: patriotism, nationalism, statism, militarism, totalitarianism, anti-communism, corporatism, populism, collectivism, autocracy and opposition to political and economic liberalism.

What the fuck. No wonder I’m confused. Fascism seems like an umbrella term for every species of government-fomented evil, ridiculously broad-ranging in its scope. There are lots of governments around that satisfy some of these criteria, but there can’t be one that satisfies all of them, can there? Because, seriously, where would you look to find a group of people who use a particularly pernicious form of faux-populism to whip up nationalist feelings in order to justify their impulses toward militaristic totalitarianism and anti-individualistic corporatism? Who will use all statist/autocratic means at their disposal to quash any efforts toward liberalism and sanity?

Hmmm. Let’s see. Think think think.

Oh, that’s right:

These guys have done more to wreck our democracy than anyone in recent memory. But whenever you tick down the list of outrages, they invoke the judgment of “history”. Bush in particular. Truman left office with a 24% approval rating, he says, and now he’s one of the most respected statesmen in the 20th century. That’s me, he says. I’m basically a brush-clearing version of Truman.

Unless history develops a pretty severe case of amnesia, this is doubtful. Here’s what it’s going to look back on:

1. A fruitless and unnecessary war that plunged a country into chaos, killed a hundred thousand Iraqis and over 3000 Americans (so far), cost us a trillion dollars — all in pursuit of an objective that turned out to be completely illusory.
2. An economy in shambles, the result of ill-advised tax cuts (that chiefly benefited very rich people) and out-of-control spending.
3. The elimination of many of the civil liberties that made us the beacon of freedom that Bush still talks about. It is now possible for the federal government to incarcerate American citizens for any reason, hold them indefinitely without charge, and torture them.
4. The establishment of an entrenched surveillance society. It’s a matter of record, now, that the government has used its ties with the telecom community to monitor our phone calls, our email, our browsing habits. They’ve used National Security Letters to peruse the books we’ve checked out of the library. They’re stealthily building a national database that aggregates all of the details of our lives in one place.
5. The merging of government and corporate interests. Installing corporate lobbyists in government agencies that are supposed to monitor their former clients, bringing in a rogues gallery of serial polluters to vet energy bills, enshrining legal immunities into law to protect their corporate allies from being sued for spying on their customers.

I don’t mean to say that we live under the thumb of fascism right now. But most of the new elements that these guys have introduced into our government and our lives are the ingredients for the formation of a fascist state. If history looks at all this and still comes to the conclusion that Bushco did a bang-up job, then history’s an idiot.

My guess is that, in thirty years or so, the textbooks will say something like this:

The Bush Era (2000-2008) marked a low point in American history. President Bush and his neo-conservative allies ushered in a series of changes that were designed to enshrine the executive branch as kind of oligarchical dictatorship, answerable to no one but their corporate partners and the bankrupt ideology that drove them.

Mr Bush used the time-honored method of fear and endless war to cow the American populace into allowing many of their rights to be taken away, in the interests of defending the nation against “evil-doers” in an ongoing, and never-ending, “war on terror”. It is a matter of considerable debate among historians whether the trajectory that the neo-conservative agenda placed the country on would have eventually resulted in the establishment of a de-facto Fascist state, in which the Executive “branch” became the sole wielder of power, with the legislative and judicial reduced to nothing more than puppets.

Thankfully, this is all speculation. President Obama’s first acts in office were to turn back most of the Bush Administration’s more egregious policies. Civil liberties regained their place of primacy, signing statement were banned, corporate influence waned, and the balance of powers that had sustained the country since the Revolution was restored.

If that last bit seems a little strained, it’s because it’s me being optimistic. I’m not very good at optimistic. But without that paragraph, things become pretty much unthinkable — the same passage, for example, would look something like this:

The Bush Era (2000-2008) marked [ REDACTED FOR REASONS OF NATIONAL SECURITY ]

Maybe that’s why Bush keeps insisting that history will judge him favorably — because he knows that his ideological descendants are going to make sure it does.