Fascist America: Have We Finally Turned The Corner?

The author offers one of her periodic assessments of America's potential to go fascist. And the news is better than it's been in years.

May 1, 2012  |  

 

Photo Credit: JoelInSouthernCA

America has never been without fascist wannabes. Research by Political Research Associates estimates that, at any given time in our history, roughly 10-12 percent of the country's population has been bred-in-the-bone right-wing authoritarians -- the people who are hard-wired to think in terms of fascist control and order. Our latter-day Christian Dominionists, sexual fundamentalists and white nationalists are the descendants -- sometimes, the literal blood descendants -- of the same people who joined the KKK in the 1920s, followed Father Coughlin in the 1930s, backed Joe McCarthy in the early '50s, joined the John Birch society in the '60s, and signed up for the Moral Majority in the 1970s and the Christian Coalition in the 1990s.  

Given its rather stunning durability, it's probably time to acknowledge that this proto-fascist strain is a permanent feature of the American body politics. Like ugly feet or ears that stick out, it's an unchanging piece of who we are. We are going to have to learn to live with it.

But it's also true that this faction's influence on the larger American culture ebbs and flows broadly over time. Our parents and grandparents didn't have to deal with them much at all, because the far-right fringe was pushed back hard during the peak years of the New Deal. It broke out for just a few short years in the McCarthy era -- long enough to see the rise of the Birchers -- and then was firmly pushed back down into irrelevance again.