America: A Nation Crawling Toward Fascism – Dick Rauscher
America is a nation in crisis. Our emotional political divisiveness, frustration, sense of powerlessness, and anger are distracting us from the deeper reality that our nation is in crisis and is crawling day-by-day toward fascism. Our democratic American rights, our democratic values, and our constitutional checks and balances are all intentionally under attack by forces historically reminiscent of autocratic political leaders of fascist nations. The most recent were Stalin and Hitler.
We have essentially become a one-political-party nation that is intentionally dismantling the foundational checks and balances the founders of our Nation wrote into our Constitution; checks and balances that were designed to protect our democracy and prevent the very misuse and abuse of power we are currently witnessing in our Nation.
Human Nature: The Reality That Power Corrupts
The designers of our American Constitution understood human nature and the tendency for humans to instinctively move toward a vertical accumulation of power and corruption. They understood the insatiable human desire for power. They knew from personal experience that power corrupts. They understood the day would come when the democracy they were creating would come under attack by future political leaders who would use their greed for power to undermine the power of truth, the freedom of speech, the free press, and the values of equality and justice. To protect our Nation from such future leaders, they built in the checks and balances that would be needed to protect us from these self-serving politicians, their insatiable need for power, and their inevitable abuses of that power.
Here We Are Again: History Does Repeat Itself
Our nation has survived almost 250 years because every attempt to destroy or undermine our constitutional checks and balances has failed. But unfortunately, history does repeat itself. Once again we find ourselves needing to fight the forces of corruption and the addictive abuses of power that can infect political leaders. We are once again facing another of those dangerous Constitutional challenges to our democratic form of government. The protection of political party has taken priority over the protection of our Nation. Our elected politicians in Congress are failing to check and balance the Executive powers of the President, and the Supreme Court is no longer politically neutral; it has become biased toward the one-political party’s conservative agenda.
This intentional erosion of our constitutional checks and balances is rapidly increasing the dangerous divisiveness and anger that we are currently witnessing in Washington, and in our nation. Our nation is in crisis and it’s time to take action. Unfortunately, the hardest things for humans to embrace is a) change, and b) accept the reality that aggressive action in the voting booth is required. Human nature would prefer to ignore the danger and pretend all is well in the world. Devaluing the power of an individual vote is a common form of denial.
The Political Instability in Washington Is Now A Crisis
The ideologically rigid thinking that has taken root in the rich soils of power in the halls of Washington has rapidly created a dangerous level of political instability and the demonization of “other” as evil; an evil that needs to be totally destroyed. This same ideologically rigid thinking has led to an intentional erosion of critically needed Constitutional checks and balances not seen in generations.
Bipartisan cooperation, teamwork, and compromise have devolved into acidic zero-sum political divisiveness, an intentional deflection of political responsibility, and the use of blame to demonize political opponents. Reflection and compromise are no longer part of our American political system. This deflection of responsibility and use of blame is aggressively eating away the foundational structures and values of our democracy.
A Cancer Called Fascism
The resulting radical political instability in Washington is a growing cancer in our American democracy; a cancer called fascism. When a political leader emerges that intentionally creates division, and intentionally attempts to amass personal power by eliminating the checks and balances that would limit their ascension to power….that leader is embracing a political process called fascism. There have been many such people historically, but history is clear, no fascist leader or fascist nation has ever survived. All fascist leaders, and the nations they infected, eventually die when the fascist cancer destroys the nation that allowed the fascist cancer to spread.
We are a nation far too powerful to die at the hand of external forces. The only way we will cease to exist or succumb as a democratic nation is through infection of an internal cancer; when the checks and balances of our democracy succumb to the cancer and are no longer functional. The cancer of fascism is currently attacking our American democracy.
Conclusion
We are in grave danger of becoming a one-party fascist nation in which a fascist autocratic leader has intentionally and aggressively undermined the Constitutional democratic checks and balances that would have limited their power. To augment and support their climb to power, fascist leaders agree to protect and increase the power and wealth of the nation’s elites (1%) by promising to eliminate the checks and balances that could limit the ability of the 1% to acquire more power and wealth. It is not uncommon that members of the wealthy elite (1%) are often already part of the nation’s ruling political system.
Summary
Democracy is based on liberty and equality and a free press that has the ability to speak truth to the people and to those in power. If you are lied to, you are not free. Think of North Korea. They are not free!
Fascism intentionally destroys truth. It is an ideology based on hyper-nationalism, hyper-masculine, and hyper patriarchal….. and an unquestioning loyalty to the leader and his political party.
And most importantly, fascism is an ideology based on power. The single goal and purpose of an autocratic leader’s fascist propaganda and hate-mongering is power. The sole purpose of both are divisive attempts to create fear, and emotionally inflame the autocratic leader’s political base. The common targets of a fascist leader’s propaganda and hate-mongering are feminism, racism, illegal alien immigrants, and anti-Semitic.
The future isn’t what it used to be. There are dangerous attacks and challenges directed at the rights and values of our Nation. Threats that need to be addressed; and addressed quickly. We are on a dangerous path toward fascism. Ignoring that sobering reality will not bode well for our future.
We can’t afford to wait for change to come from the top…..the movement for change will need to begin at the grassroots level. Change will happen, when voters insist on a basic return to the checks and balances our nation’s founders embedded inside our nation’s constitution.
Those in power will not give up their power easily or voluntarily.
Waiting is not an option!!
Vote out of hope, not anger! Hope will survive. Anger will quickly dissipate into indifference.
“Predicting the future is easy….believing it is hard!!
Whenever I’ve made mistakes in predicting the future,
it’s because I wasn’t willing to believe or trust the data.”
Kevin Ashton
Personal Note:
I intentionally did not point fingers at our President or Congress in this article. I attempted to stick to the facts of fascism and let the reader apply them where they deemed appropriate.
Rather than listing the “tools of fascism” in the contents of the above article, I decided it would be more useful and efficient for the reader if the material was presented as a numerical list of tools and techniques used by authoritarian fascist leaders to gain power. Please read them carefully. Our Nation is at a very dangerous crossroad. The path we choose to walk will have a major impact on our future as a democratic nation.
I will let the list speak for itself.
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The following material on the tools of fascism is based on the book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them by Jason Stanley, philosophy professor at Yale University, and an interview of the author by www.democracynow.org
Another good book on the subject of fascism is Fascism: A Warning by Madeleine Albright
THE TOOLS OF FASCISM and AUTOCRATIC/AUTHORITARIAN LEADERS
the focus on a lost mythic glorious past that the autocratic leader continuously harkens back to in his or narrative.
use of propaganda in which everything is inverted. For example, the news of a free press is fake news. Anti-corruption is corruption. A fascist autocratic leader knows to always control the narrative. If they lie, they will tell that lie over, and over, and over. They know the more emotion and anger they can manifest when they tell the lie, the more people will believe the lie to be true.
propaganda is intentionally anti-intellectual….it’s emotional! Rage gets people to the polls. Propaganda should appeal primarily to the least educated people. (Hitler’s Mein Kampf).
(Anti-intellectual =is an attack on the truth, an attack on expertise, an attack on education and an elevation in stature of those who are non-educated).
focus on unreality and attack truth…..replace truth with conspiracy theories. The only thing important is loyalty.
hierarchy: those loyal to the dominant group are better than everyone else
victimhood: members of the dominant group are the greatest victims….e.g. women are attacking men, blacks are attacking whites, Jews are attacking Germans, immigrants are attacking all Americans, etc.
Americans are victims of the out-groups…..immigrants, drug dealers, and rapists.
the real values come from conservatives in the heartland, the city liberals are decadent.
the outgroup is lazy.“Arbeit yacht frei’”——work shall make you free! It’s all about winning!
those who would be autocratic, fascist leaders want you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears…..because truth and reality are the greatest threat to fascism! The leader is reality. The leader is greater and stronger than reality! Fascism is always about power, not truth.
Fascism is about the creation of loyalty to a one-party political system. Demonizing those who are not members of the one-party is a common pre-fascist technique. The one-party of the autocratic leader is presented as the ultra-nationalist party.
fascist ideology =the one-party of the autocratic leader is always a victim of liberalism. Because fascism is based on power, the one-party always has to rule. Any competing political party that attempts to gain equality is represented as really trying to take over!
Everything in fascism is about smashing the truth and replacing it with loyalty and power.
fascist leaders and fascist politicians seek to connect people’s anxiety to a sense of loss of the “glorious past”.
fascist leaders fear feminism and socialism…i.e. ideologies and movements that would distribute the power of the fascist leader and the one-political party back to “the people”…..leftists, all opponents, racial minorities, sexual minorities, the trade unionists…….are all enemies of fascist politics.
Fascism increases fear of “other”…..immigrants, the opposing political party, socialists, feminists, blacks, latino’s, drug dealers, rapists, liberals, and political extremists of leftist political party’s, etc. The propaganda and hate-mongering are designed for only one purpose…..increasing the power of the autocratic ruler.
Fascism is challenged by a “culture of democracy”…..the norms and values of equal respect for all people, respect for truth, respect for trade unions, respect for a free press, respect for the right for all citizens to vote, respect for the right to openly resist politically, and the recognition that “we the people” are all humans. Humanity is not limited to just one superior race or one political ideology, etc.
fascism focuses on its own mythic version of truth and history, public education teaches a more accurate, truthful version of history…..not just the mythic greatness and strength of white Christian “men” of the past.
The values of fascism are patriarchy…..the lost mythic past when men protected their women and children…….ie. from all out-groups that pose a threat to their women and children….immigrant rapists, the mythic black rapist, etc;
fascism works by suppressing the vote, by gerrymandering and voter suppression,disenfranchisement of 1.4 million felons, making voting irrelevant, stacking the supreme court with hyper-partisans, attacking the judicial system, attacking the justice system, attacking the free press, attacking opposing political party’s, attacking minority groups, etc……..essentiallyattacking anything and anyone who poses a threat to their autocratic power……and by propagating hateful false conspiracy theories eg. against Jews, immigrants, blacks, Hispanics, Latinos, women, politicians in opposing political parties, or anyone perceived to be disloyal to the fascist leader and his political party. etc.
When autocratic leaders begin to lead a nation down the path toward fascism, expecting members inside the leader’s political party to confront the autocratic leader and provide a check and balance on the power of the autocratic leader will not happen. The moment anyone is considered disloyal to the autocratic leader, they will be disenfranchised or removed from the one-party. Loyalty to the autocratic leader is mandatory and absolute.
