Nazifying America?

 Is this what this country is becoming, or what it always has been? Has there always been a native distrust, even fear, of its creed of all people being created with equal rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? I keep open the link to what Ross Lockridge, Jr. wrote back in 1948 without attracting any interested readers. He set his novel around the Civil War, the Northern opposition to a Southern ideology antagonistic to equality and freedom. I recall reading back in high school John Toland's biography of Hitler, how the Nazis learned much from America on the subject of genocide. More recently, The Atlantic published What America Taught the Nazis. 

Every day brings fresh reminders that liberal and illiberal democracy can entwine uncomfortably, a timely context for James Q. Whitman’s Hitler’s American Model, which examines how the Third Reich found sustenance for its race-based initiatives in American law. Upon docking, the Germans attended a reception organized by the New York City Bar Association. Everyone in the room would have known about the recent events in Nuremberg, yet the quest by leading Nazi jurists to learn from America’s legal and economic systems was warmly welcomed.

Whitman, a professor at Yale Law School, wanted to know how the United States, a country grounded in such liberal principles as individual rights and the rule of law, could have produced legal ideas and practices “that seemed intriguing and attractive to Nazis.” In exploring this apparent incongruity, his short book raises important questions about law, about political decisions that affect the scope of civic membership, and about the malleability of Enlightenment values.

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But even indisputable evidence of the Germans’ intense interest in American models doesn’t clinch a formative role for U.S. racial law, as Whitman himself is careful to acknowledge. After all, Nazism’s intellectual and political leaders may well have utilized American examples merely to make more legitimate the grotesque designs they already planned to pursue. In any case, answering the question of cross-national influence is ultimately less important than Whitman’s other goal, which is to examine the status of racial hierarchy in the United States through Nazi eyes. “What the history presented in this book demands that we confront,” he writes, “are questions not about the genesis of Nazism, but about the character of America.”

This week, I came across The Nazification of American Society and the Scourge of Violence from Counterpunch:

 The threat of violence not only functions as political performance in the interests of political opportunism and the stoking mass violence, it also is used by MAGA Republicans to conquer major critical institutions of society that extend from public schools and libraries to the courts. Dark money now drives such extremism and the repressive laws aimed at women’s reproductive rights, the banning of books, the weakening of voting rights, and assaults on the rights of trans-gender people, among other attacks. Many of these attacks are  driven by the modern Republican Party’s central fear of living with difference.[2]

Across the globe, violence is being marketed to further white supremacy, racial purity, and the notion that some groups do not deserve citizenship and as “non-citizens [are] therefore not human.”[3] Politicians such as Orbán in Hungary talk openly about the dangers of “race mixing” in Europe echoing the discourse of white supremacy that now dominates the modern Republican Party. National memory is now corrupted in the name of fascist politics. As G. M. Tamas observes this narrowing of citizenship “is a form of civic death, often followed by “violent death.”[4] As civic culture is undermined, it becomes easier for the GOP  to market violence at a time when far right extremists groups such as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and QAnon are “rapidly mutating,” particularly in the United States.[5] The threat of violence has become a standard GOP response to almost any issue. Such violence is aimed increasingly at women fighting for reproductive rights, trans gender youth, those who support gun restrictions, and educators and librarians who oppose banning books.

Right wing language reduces politics to theater and spectacle, while using a neo-fascist echo chamber to spread a fascist logic of neoliberal cruelty, a racist politics of disposability, and a celebration of white, male Christian nationalism and supremacy. Echoes of an earlier fascist past combine the language of  cruelty and dehumanization with policies designed to eliminate, repress, and kill those considered marginal—that is, those considered a contaminating and contemptable force in the script of hardcore fundamentalisms. Cruelty has now become ingrained in the DNA of the Republican Party, and much of it is aimed at children.

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Former President Trump now provides cover  for domestic terrorists such as the Proud Boys and radical conspiracy groups such as QAnon. Governor Abbott of Texas rejects Biden’s pardon of untold numbers of people convicted of simple marijuana charges, condemning thousands of people in his states’ prisons to the further injustices of a race-based malignant policy of incarceration. Liberal and mainstream language with its embrace of Biden’s notion of “semi-fascism” both obliterates the long history of fascist politics, genocide, and mass violence in the United States as well as the full-fledged fascist politics now driving the current nightmarish moment both in the U.S. and globally. And these examples barely touch the cruelties inflicted on those Americans considered unfit to claim the mantle of human dignity and universal political, economic and social rights.

 America has long had its quarrels with itself. We slaughter Indians and up springs opposition to genocide. We enslave Africans, and up springs the abolitionist movement. Bull Connor turns on the water hoses and white America says we are better than that. Whites marched with Black Lives Matter groups. We can rise to the aspirations of the Declaration, we can follow our better angels.

But rising means action. Following those better angels requires a struggle. We democrats relied too much on our belief that reasonable minds could not disagree about the value of democracy itself. I never thought I could find anything to admire in Liz Cheney, but I do agree that our democratic institutions are what makes America great. What makes America weak and despicable is our racism, our bigotry towards minorities. These make us small and common-place. We called too many who questioned the wisdom of our ideas as fascist, until we immunized the body politic against any distrust of the real fascism. We thought our righteousness sufficed to protect the nation from dictatorship.

Once upon a time, I went a little crazy from being told my view of the world was essentially delusional. That all was well with the country. That what I sensed as being very wrong with Republican politics was me being a fool, being cut off from the good sense of the zeitgeist, of being too contrary to see the good sense and rightness of conservatism and the Republican Party. Having being proven right that no good for the country exists with the Republicans does not make me feel any better. My Zoloft prescription does make me feel better, makes me wish I had had it back in 2008, as I might have better expressed what I did see as for democracy wrong with conservative ideas.

Only one thing remains to do with this resurgent fascism: fight. I think Barack Obama tried too hard to be reasonable with Republicans. We cannot be reasonable with the unreasonable. 

I do not have the money to donate to the causes sent to my email. I can sign petitions. 

I cannot run for office, but I can expect my elected officials to stand against fascism. Donald J. Trump needs to be indicted, and so do all his co-conspirators. 

I will do what I can to see that those politicians I support stand up for their ideas, and that those ideas are what will lead to a more democratic country.

Most importantly, for those who wish the country to remain a democracy, there is one action we must all take in November: vote.

sch 10/15/22