StickWithANose

Despite my propensity for publishing posts that take, let us say, a bleak view of education policy, economic issues, and politics, I really don’t consider myself to be all that cynical. [Although my friends might beg to differ...] I find joy in the small stuff like enjoying the roar of cicadas in the early evening and embracing minor inconveniences as opportunities to attend to the things we often ignore. [A boating fiasco that ended in an amazing midnight stroll through beautiful countryside comes to mind...] That said, today’s post is truly bleak. I offer you two perspectives from two very different bloggers on the possibilities for the emergence of an American version of fascism. That doesn’t mean that I see this as being inevitable as much as I see the conditions for its emergence falling into place.

While my primary focus on this blog is to highlight education policy and issues related to schooling, I believe it is important to keep the context in which these issues play out in mind. The public looting I identify in the charter school movement is part and parcel with the looting carried out by Wall Street firms and military contractors. The move to tap public treasuries for private profiteering is expanding across the political economy of the U.S., and I see no reason to expect a pull-back any time soon. Likewise, the on-going growth of a corporately-funded knowledge industry tasked with constructing common sense understandings of the socio-political world is the early 21st century version of the political propaganda and yellow journalism that enabled many of the atrocities of the previous century. In short, I would argue that understanding the dynamics of any one issue in contemporary American society demands that you situate it within the totality of relations in which it operates. Unfortunately, the picture that emerges from that perspective is a dire one.

With that in mind, I would encourage you read Ed’s post on how the emergence of Teabaggery in American politics is indicative of a necessary pre-condition for the rise of authoritarian politics.

[I]f we can step outside of the comfort zone of our cushy life of contesting politics in the confines of a liberal democracy, an objective view of this country is pretty scary. I struggle to think of modern democratic state in which the conditions for the success of fascism would be better. I mean, we have it all: simmering racial hatred, extreme xenophobia, sharp class distinctions, a ravaged economy, and the grandiose belief in our own exceptionalism. That thought is simultaneously paranoid and plausible. Watch a Teabagger rally and tell me those people would not fall in line behind the right charismatic fascist leader if given the opportunity. And I don’t mean Tom Tancredo. I mean a real, honest-to-god, working from Hitler’s playbook fascist. Because as the Ground Zero mosque story underscored in yesterday’s post, most Americans don’t believe in rights except for themselves. Sure, we talk about rights a lot, along with freedom, liberty, the Constitution, and all kinds of other high-minded concepts. But when the chips are down, we are willing to deny (other) people rights at the drop of a hat. The cry of the American right quickly changes from “Constitution! First Amendment rights! Freedom of religion!” to “Yeah, but I hate Muslims more than I love any of that stuff.” [...]

Hannah Arendt may have written some of the most important political analysis of the 20th Century when she characterized the post-War analysis of Nazi Germany as “the banality of evil.” The people seated on witness stands were not horned monsters or satanic comic book villains (even if they committed acts that we’d expect from Satan himself). They were your parents, your neighbors, and your dentist. Arendt concluded that just about any person was capable of committing Nazi-style atrocities under the right circumstances. How much urging do you think a crowd of Teabaggers would need to burn down a mosque or start rounding up brown people? It’s like Bill Hicks said about alcoholics – anyone can become one. All it takes is the right bar, the right friends, and the wrong woman.

Jesse offers an equally bleak view from an economic perspective.

The argument that ‘tax cuts for the wealthiest few stimulates growth’ aka the trickle down theory needs to be buried alongside the ‘efficient markets hypothesis’ and the other principle beliefs of voodoo economics that have brought the US from the world’s greatest nation to third world status in a generation.

It was the irresponsible tax cuts enacted by Bush II while increasing military spending on two wars, one highly discretionary, along with the increasing financialization of the economy through deregulation, fraud, ‘one way globalization,’ and crony capitalism that have undermined the foundation of the American economy…

Can ‘the many’ continue to borrow to maintain a constant standard of living? Can a democracy be maintained in conditions that start to resemble a third world country? How long before a ’strong man’ rises to take control of the political situation on behalf of the national society of workers? And how long after that would it be before the industrialists and oligarchs lose control of this strong man, as they always seem to do?

Can the US afford to maintain 800 overseas military bases while the domestic tax base continues to erode through a parasitical transferal of wealth from the many to the few based on leverage, speculation, monopoly, asset bubbles and fraud?

Like I said, this is a bleak view of contemporary America, but I would not be so quick to dismiss these perspectives. Viewed in its totality, the nation has a lot of problems, and the majority of “answers” being proffered are built on the ideological framework that got us into this mess in the first place.