The Election of Reaction

"Fascism has no agenda"--Benito Mussolini

A Greenberg poll, which has devastating news for Democrats, reveals that 55% of Americans believe President Obama is a socialist. A poll commissioned by House Democrats reveals that the national debt is a major concern of Americans but for symbolic and emotional reasons not associated with this fact alone. Americans view China holding such much our debt and China's economic growth as prime indicators of America's decline as a nation. And this has the country deeply concerned.

While I've written about the need for America to make deep structural changes in the economy. it's clear that the idea of such change is terrifying to a great portion of the nation. John Boehner's cynical statement that Obama is trying to sink the country I grew up in feeds into the right's two-year campaign of "I want my country back." Bob Inglis, a conservative Republican who lost his primary to a teabagger, complained to the Associated Press that Republicans have now descended to the lowest form of political demogoguery. Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson proclaims that the failure of Republicans to denounce the extremes in the party has created the seeds for their own destruction.

I disagree. The whole plan for the Right has been to push every button of fear possible about President Obama and the Democrats to distract attention from their own legacy and how they got us here. Today, the national Republican Party is sending out damage control people to quiet teabagger candidates like Susan Angle and Rand Paul from exposing their extreme positions. A new communication strategy is simply to run away from the press or appear on Fox news shows where they aren't challenged. The right has put the old program of God,Guns and Gays on steroids with no concern about any consequences of allowing the theocons, white supremacists or the John Birch Society into office. The whole strategy was to create a wave of reaction through the manipulation of the most off-the-wall accusations--birthers, death panels, sharia law, socialized medicine. It's not that any of this has any remote factual basis but that it creates a wall of emotional content/or discontent that can be used to frame a debate and motivate the base.

Don't think any of these teabaggers will be allowed to do anything once elected. As we have seen by Republican obstructionism during the first 18 months of the Obama Administration, the congressional GOP has an authoritarian discipline, which they will maintain even after the election. Remember when House Republicans said they wanted to hold a dialogue with the American people about policy ideas. That's off. John Boehner has asked lobbyists to develop the GOP agenda. There is very little government that the GOP cares about. They are banking on an inexhaustible supply of corporate and special interest money to buy their way back into power. It's estimated this year they will spend upwards of $300million for the congressional elections. Their sole agenda is to ratify the old Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and corporate America and to go for their final goal of eliminating the social welfare net of social security. As I've explained in other posts, the deficit is only a tool to prevent subsequent Democratic administrations from embarking on any extensive social programs.

Republicans will not pay for their votes against extending unemployment benefits or the jobs bill that bails out the impoverished states. They simply do not care. Besides, failure to pass these measures will cut the benefits of the stimulus program by one-third. So much the better. Remember unemployment reached 10.4% under Reagan and that didn't phase them.

They have two basic constituencies--corporate America and the Pentagon. Other than that, everyone is on their own. That's why the drumbeat about how the unemployed are lazy and drug users. They have escalated the rhetoric once used on the black underclass to embrace a larger population. For over a decade, the American middle class has been eviscerated. It was telling to me that the middle class was never mentioned at the 2008 Republican convention. They don't matter. Just give them some bones like nationalist rhetoric and invocations of God. The politics of symbolism is all important here because the looting of America continues off stage. At the state level, it matters little to them that the public educational system is on the verge of collapse or that services must be severely cut back.

One of the tactics of fascism was to generate the sense in European societies that democratic structures can not work. The appeal was for the symbolic renewal of a mythical national spirit, a revival based on distant past. The old conservative parties believed they could coopt the fascists as in Italy and Nazi Germany and the corporations believed that such parties could control the population so they would economically benefit. What modern students of fascism tend to neglect by their focus on Germany and Italy was the integration of the Christian religion into the fascist project in other European countries.

Sinclair Lewis wrote,"It Can Happen Here" about the prospects of fascism for the United States. What we didn't learn in our history classes was about the Businessman's Coup Plot against FDR. The BBC this past week released tapes from its archives about this plot. Captains of Industry were going to use 500,000 World War veterans to topple the Roosevelt Administration and adopt policies modelled after Mussolini's Italy, which was all the rave among the American industrialists and conservatives, who included William Randolph Heart, the Koch Family and Prescott Bush.

Liberals and progressives have fallen into the type of defeatism the Right was banking on. A wave of Republican victories would simply validate their darkest view of America as a bastion of reactionary thinking and that change really is not possible and that the great hope of Obama was an illusion. You don't need to read conservatives to hear all the complaints about President Obama. Progressives have been more exacting. The stimulus was inadequate; healthcare reform was a sham because it lacked the public option, wall street reform is meaningless unless it contained measures on Too Big Too Fail, the administration has not done enough for gays. The list goes on. So the Democratic base has its own program of demoralizing itself.

I must confess I read horoscopes. We know from psychology why people read horoscopes, tarot cards and are into numerology. It's called the Forer Effect, it is subjective validation. It reinforces what we think we already know. We are in for a period of frustration and then by 2011 there will be the movement to profound change and in 2012 we must make our decisions. Of course, the horoscopes use 2012 because it is the end of the Mayan calender and our fundamentalist Christians believe it is the year for Rapture.

But politically, I think we may be hearing the death cries of the past right now. They may get a dead cat bounce this year but they are brain dead. The Right scream machine is working at high decibels. During times of economic unrest and uncertainty, all of the skeletons from our national basement emerge--the racism of a Rush Limbaugh, the nativism against immigrants in Arizona, the Christian nationalists and the whole raft of conspiracy theories. We have to be scared of Muslims, the Chinese, illegal immigrants, the New Black Panther Party, Saul Alinsky, the Chicago machine, the Gay, high taxes, inflation, the Depression, progressive socialism, legal progressivism, eugenics, FEMA camps, death panels, the demographic winter and fill in the blanks.

Those interested in any progress have to reframe the debate. They can't just respond to every lunatic statement and idea but push the question to the other side. "What are you do going to do?" What positive ideas and solutions are you proposing to today's problems? What is important is not to disinform ourselves. We have become masters of disinformation. During the run-up to the Iraq War, we saw how the media and the political elite not only disinformed the American public but themselves as well.

As of today, it is looking like the political season is starting at a tie. Will the two-year campaign by the Right pay the large benefits? Can corporate America really buy as many seats in Congress as they hope? Or will we have simply a normal mid-term election with the president's party having the usual historical losses?

Unfortunately, I do believe the stakes this year are incredibly high as I did in 2008. Just Vote! Early and often.