The Coming US Fascism
from LewRockwell.com, 2001
In 1944 the Old Right journalist John
T. Flynn wrote:
"The test of fascism is not one's
rage against the Italian and German war lords. The test is
how many of the essential principles of fascism do you accept
and to what extent are you prepared to apply those fascist ideas
to American social and economic life? When you can put your finger
on the men or the groups that urge for America the debt-supported
state, the autarchial corporative state, the state bent on the
socialization of investment and the bureaucratic government of
industry and society, the establishment of the institution of
militarism as the great glamorous public-works project of the
nation and the institution of imperialism under which it proposes
to regulate and rule the world and, along with this, proposes
to alter the forms of our government to approach as closely as
possible the unrestrained, absolute government then you
will know you have located the authentic fascist.
"But let us not deceive ourselves
into thinking that we are dealing by this means with the problem
of fascism. Fascism will come at the hands of perfectly authentic
Americans, as violently against Hitler and Mussolini as the next
one, but who are convinced that the present economic system is
washed up and that the present political system in America has
outlived its usefulness and who wish to commit this country to
the rule of the bureaucratic state; interfering in the affairs
of the states and cities; taking part in the management of industry
and finance and agriculture; assuming the role of great national
banker and investor, borrowing millions every year and spending
them on all sorts of projects through which such a government
can paralyze opposition and command public support; marshaling
great armies and navies at crushing costs to support the industry
of war and preparation for war which will become our greatest
industry; and adding to all this the most romantic adventures
in global planning, regeneration, and domination all to be done
under the authority of a powerfully centralized government in
which the executive will hold in effect all the powers with Congress
reduced to the role of a debating society. There is your fascist.
And the sooner America realizes this dreadful fact the sooner
it will arm itself to make an end of American fascism masquerading
under the guise of the champion of democracy.
"It should be equally clear that
all this is in no sense communism.... [A] reason for the confusion
is the character of the men who are authentic and honest New Dealers
but who were not communists.... They began to flirt with the alluring
pastime of reconstructing the capitalist system. They became the
architects of a new capitalist system. And in the process of this
new career they began to fashion doctrines that turned out to
be the principles of fascism. Of course they do not call them
fascism, although some of them frankly see the resemblance. But
they are not disturbed, because they know that they will never
burn books, they will never hound the Jews or the Negroes, they
will never resort to assassination and suppression. What will
turn up in their hands will be a very genteel and dainty and pleasant
form of fascism which cannot be called fascism at all because
it will be so virtuous and polite." (As We Go Marching [Garden
City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1944], pp. 252-255.)
In 1969, at the height of the so-called
Sixties, a New Right essayist alarmed, apparently, that
Jane Fonda still enjoyed freedom of speech and that college administrators
were too spineless to have the police clear student radicals out
of their offices called for "some variety of expediential
fascism":
"The very nature of the situation
creates competing codes and doctrines extreme in content and alien
to the balancing compromises of liberal polity. The stringent
demands of such a rudimentary struggle of power and ideas invites
political approaches that are totalitarian in nature: not quite
in the original fascist sense that puts all aspects of life under
the aegis of political authority, at least in the general sense
that political theory can no longer restrict itself to general
conditions and procedural rules, but must offer a comprehensive,
authoritative resolution of a number of specific political and
social questions." (Donald Atwell Zoll, "Shall We Let
America Die?", National Review, December 16, 1969, pp. 12-62-1263,
italics added.)
The phrase emphasized above ("political
theory can no longer restrict itself to general conditions and
procedural rules") abolishes constitutions and expresses
the long-standing wish of some "conservatives" for a
Government of National Emergency. FDR and Truman taught them well.
National Review lives in a mental state of siege. There may be
no antidote for it, but the following quotations may be of some
use:
"Perhaps it is a universal truth
that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions
against danger, real or pretended, from abroad."
James Madison, 1798 (italics added)
"Is it not just possible that we
may become corrupted at home by the reaction of arbitrary political
maxims in the East upon our domestic politics, just as Greece
and Rome were demoralised by their contact with Asia?"
Richard Cobden, 1850
"Wartime brings the ideal of the
State out into very clear relief, and reveals attitudes and tendencies
that were hidden. In times of peace the sense of the State flags
in a republic that is not militarized. For war is essentially
the health of the State."
Randolph Bourne, 1919
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