{"id":283626,"date":"2024-12-30T12:00:17","date_gmt":"2024-12-30T12:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=283626"},"modified":"2024-12-25T06:57:00","modified_gmt":"2024-12-25T06:57:00","slug":"how-fascism-came","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/12\/how-fascism-came\/","title":{"rendered":"How Fascism Came"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Inside Out – by Mr. Fish<\/p><\/div>\n

US democracy was destroyed by the two ruling parties that sold us out to corporations, militarists and billionaires. Now we pay the price.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

23 Dec 2024 <\/em>– For over two decades, I and a handful of others \u2014 Sheldon Wolin<\/a>, Noam Chomsky<\/a>, Chalmers Johnson<\/a>, Barbara Ehrenreich<\/a> and Ralph Nader<\/a> \u2014 warned that the expanding social inequality and steady erosion of our democratic institutions, including the media<\/a>, the Congress, organized labor<\/a>, academia<\/a> and the courts<\/a>, would inevitably lead to an authoritarian or Christian fascist state. My books \u2014 \u201cAmerican Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America<\/a>\u201d (2007), \u201cEmpire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle<\/a>\u201d (2009), \u201cDeath of the Liberal Class<\/a>\u201d (2010), \u201cDays of Destruction, Days of Revolt<\/a>\u201d (2012), written with Joe Sacco, \u201cWages of Rebellion<\/a>\u201d (2015) and \u201cAmerica: The Farewell Tour<\/a>\u201d (2018) were a succession of impassioned pleas to take the decay seriously. I take no joy in being correct.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe rage of those abandoned by the economy, the fears and concerns of a beleaguered and insecure middle class, and the numbing isolation that comes with the loss of community, would be the kindling for a dangerous mass movement,\u201d I wrote in \u201cAmerican Fascists\u201d in 2007. \u201cIf these dispossessed were not reincorporated into mainstream society, if they eventually lost all hope of finding good, stable jobs and opportunities for themselves and their children \u2014 in short, the promise of a brighter future \u2014 the specter of American fascism would beset the nation. This despair, this loss of hope, this denial of a future, led the desperate into the arms of those who promised miracles and dreams of apocalyptic glory.\u201d<\/p>\n

President-elect Donald Trump does not herald the advent of fascism. He heralds the collapse of the veneer that masked the corruption within the ruling class and their pretense of democracy. He is the symptom, not the disease. The loss of basic democratic norms began long before Trump, which paved the road to an American totalitarianism. Deindustrialization<\/a>, deregulation<\/a>, austerity<\/a>, unchecked predatory corporations<\/a>, including the health-care industry<\/a>, wholesale surveillance of every American<\/a>, social inequality<\/a>, an electoral system that is plagued by legalized bribery<\/a>, endless and futile wars<\/a>, the largest<\/a> prison population in the world, but most of all feelings of betrayal, stagnation and despair<\/a>, are a toxic brew that culminate in an inchoate hatred of the ruling class and the institutions they have deformed to exclusively serve the rich and the powerful. The Democrats are as guilty<\/a> as the Republicans.<\/p>\n

\u201cTrump and his coterie of billionaires, generals, half-wits, Christian fascists, criminals, racists, and moral deviants play the role of the Snopes clan in some of William Faulkner\u2019s novels,\u201d I wrote in \u201cAmerica: The Farewell Tour.\u201d \u201cThe Snopeses filled the power vacuum of the decayed South and ruthlessly seized control from the degenerated, former slaveholding aristocratic elites. Flem Snopes and his extended family \u2014 which includes a killer, a pedophile, a bigamist, an arsonist, a mentally disabled man who copulates with a cow, and a relative who sells tickets to witness the bestiality \u2014 are fictional representations of the scum now elevated to the highest level of the federal government. They embody the moral rot unleashed by unfettered capitalism.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe usual reference to \u2018amorality,\u2019 while accurate, is not sufficiently distinctive and by itself does not allow us to place them, as they should be placed, in a historical moment,\u201d the critic Irving Howe wrote<\/a> of the Snopeses. \u201cPerhaps the most important thing to be said is that they are what comes afterwards: the creatures that emerge from the devastation, with the slime still upon their lips.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLet a world collapse, in the South or Russia, and there appear figures of coarse ambition driving their way up from beneath the social bottom, men to whom moral claims are not so much absurd as incomprehensible, sons of bushwhackers or muzhiks<\/em> drifting in from nowhere and taking over through the sheer outrageousness of their monolithic force,\u201d Howe wrote. \u201cThey become presidents of local banks and chairmen of party regional committees, and later, a trifle slicked up, they muscle their way into Congress or the Politburo. Scavengers without inhibition, they need not believe in the crumbling official code of their society; they need only learn to mimic its sounds.\u201d<\/p>\n

The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin called our system of governance \u201cinverted totalitarianism,\u201d one that kept the old iconography, symbols and language, but had surrendered power to corporations and oligarchs. Now we will shift to totalitarianism\u2019s more recognizable form, one dominated by a demagogue and an ideology grounded in the demonization of the other, hypermasculinity and magical thinking.<\/p>\n

Fascism is always the bastard child of a bankrupt liberalism<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe live in a two-tiered legal system, one where poor people are harassed, arrested and jailed for absurd infractions, such as selling loose cigarettes \u2014 which led to Eric Garner being choked to death by the New York City police in 2014 \u2014 while crimes of appalling magnitude by the oligarchs and corporations, from oil spills to bank fraud in the hundreds of billions of dollars, which wiped out 40 percent of the world\u2019s wealth, are dealt with through tepid administrative controls, symbolic fines, and civil enforcement that give these wealthy perpetrators immunity from criminal prosecution,\u201d I wrote in \u201cAmerica: The Farewell Tour.\u201d<\/p>\n

The utopian ideology of neoliberalism<\/a> and global capitalism is a vast con. Global wealth, rather than being spread equitably, as neoliberal proponents promised, was funneled upward into the hands of a rapacious, oligarchic elite, fueling the worst economic inequality<\/a> since<\/a> the age of the robber barons. The working poor, whose unions and rights were stripped from them and whose wages have stagnated or declined<\/a> over the past 40 years, have been thrust into chronic poverty and underemployment. Their lives, as Barbara Ehrenreich chronicled in \u201cNickel and Dimed<\/a>,\u201d are one long, stress-ridden emergency. The middle class is evaporating. Cities that once manufactured products and offered factory jobs are boarded up-wastelands. Prisons are overflowing. Corporations have orchestrated the destruction of trade barriers, allowing them to stash<\/a> $1.42 trillion in profits in overseas banks to avoid paying taxes.<\/p>\n

Neoliberalism, despite its promise to build and spread democracy, swiftly gutted regulations and hollowed out democratic systems to turn them into corporate leviathans. The labels \u201cliberal\u201d and \u201cconservative\u201d are meaningless in the neoliberal order, evidenced by a Democratic presidential candidate who bragged<\/a> about an endorsement from Dick Cheney, a war criminal who left office with a 13 percent<\/a> approval rating. The attraction of Trump is that, although vile and buffoonish, he mocks the bankruptcy of the political charade.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe permanent lie is the apotheosis of totalitarianism,\u201d I wrote in \u201cAmerica: The Farewell Tour\u201d:<\/p>\n

It no longer matters what is true. It matters only what is \u2018correct.\u2019 Federal courts are being stacked with imbecilic and incompetent judges who serve the \u2018correct\u2019 ideology of corporatism and the rigid social mores of the Chrtistian right. They hold reality, including science and the rule of law, in contempt. They seek to banish those who live in a reality-based world defined by intellectual and moral autonomy. Totalitarian rule always elevates the brutal and the stupid. These reigning idiots have no genuine political philosophy or goals. They use clich\u00e9s and slogans, most of which are absurd and contradictory, to justify their greed and lust for power. This is as true for the Christian right as it is for the corporatists that preach the free market and globalization. The merger of the corporatists with the Christian right is the marrying of Godzilla to Frankenstein.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The illusions peddled on our screens \u2014 including the fictitious persona created for Trump on The Apprentice \u2014 have replaced reality. Politics is burlesque as Kamala Harris\u2019 vapid, celebrity-filled campaign illustrated. It is smoke and mirrors created by the army of agents, publicists, marketing departments, promoters, script writers, television and movie producers, video technicians, photographers, bodyguards, wardrobe consultants, fitness trainers, pollsters, public announcers and television new personalities. We are a culture awash in lies.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe cult of the self dominates our cultural landscape,\u201d I wrote in \u201cEmpire of Illusion\u201d:<\/p>\n

This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation, and the inability to feel remorse or guilt. This is, of course, the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality. In fact, personal style, defined by the commodities we buy or consume, has become a compensation for our loss of democratic equality. We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy, and to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. Once you get there, those questions are no longer asked.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My book \u201cEmpire of Illusion\u201d begins in Madison Square Garden at a World Wrestling Entertainment tour. I understood that professional wrestling was the template for our social and political life, but did not know that it would produce<\/a> a president.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe bouts are stylized rituals,\u201d I wrote, in what could have been a description of a Trump rally:<\/p>\n

They are public expressions of pain and a fervent longing for revenge. The lurid and detailed sagas behind each bout, rather than the wrestling matches themselves, are what drive crowds to a frenzy. These ritualized battles give those packed in the arenas a temporary, heady release from mundane lives. The burden of real problems is transformed into fodder for a high-energy pantomime.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is not going to get better. The tools to shut down dissent have been cemented into place. Our democracy cratered years ago. We are in the grip of what S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard called \u201csickness unto death\u201d \u2014 the numbing of the soul by despair that leads to moral and physical debasement. All Trump has to do to establish a naked police state is flip a switch. And he will.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe worse reality becomes, the less a beleaguered population wants to hear about it,\u201d I wrote at the conclusion of \u201cEmpire of Illusion,\u201d \u201cand the more it distracts itself with squalid pseudo-events of celebrity breakdowns, gossip and trivia. These are the debauched revels of a dying civilization.\u201d<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for\u00a0<\/em>The New York Times,\u00a0where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief. He previously worked overseas for\u00a0<\/em>The Dallas Morning News,\u00a0The Christian Science Monitor, and<\/em> NPR. He used to be the host of the Emmy Award-nominated <\/em>RT America show\u00a0<\/em>On Contact.<\/em><\/p>\n

Copyright 2024 Chris Hedges<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – chrishedges.substack.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

23 Dec 2024 – US democracy was destroyed by the two ruling parties that sold us out to corporations, militarists and billionaires. Now we pay the price.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":283627,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[867,1161,3225,276,542,112,249,2841,2200,95,70,1594],"class_list":["post-283626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-anglo-america","tag-arms-industry","tag-billionaires","tag-democracy","tag-fascism","tag-pentagon","tag-trump","tag-tyranny","tag-us-empire","tag-us-military","tag-usa","tag-war-economy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283626"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":283628,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283626\/revisions\/283628"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/283627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}