SAVING AMERICA
E. N. Anderson
Fascist America?
The United States is teetering on the edge of fascism or some very similar totalitarian regime, and only prompt action can save it. The modern United States is hopelessly lost trying to deal with long-term, wide-flung concerns, notably environment and education. Steady deterioration of social solidarity—from civics education to politics to plain personal responsibility—is the immediate problem; corporate narrowness lies behind it.
My wife Barbara Anderson and I have now spent several years researching genocide and its epidemiology. The present posting derives from that systematic research and analysis.
Historical precedent from dozens of cases in dozens of countries makes it very hard to escape the conclusion that, if certain present trends continue, the United States will very soon have a totalitarian regime. It will bring racial and religious discrimination and will become massively corrupt. It will go on to eliminate liberal and minority leadership by torture and extermination, The current combination of economic decline and virulent hate produced exactly that scenario in dozens of cases in the 20th century. To my knowledge, no country reached the levels of hatred combined with economic decline now seen in the United States without going through a brutal, totalitarian period. The fact that the United States is a democracy, and the fact that very few of even the extreme right wing really wants to kill large numbers of people, both do offer protection. But one could say the same of Germany in 1932, or Iran in 1953, or most of the other countries with bloody records. Past a certain point, totalitarianism takes on a logic of its own. (On this and what follows, see esp. Kiernan 2007; Rummel 1994, 1998.)
Recent examples are too numerous to list, but consider just the democracies that have endured dictatorial periods in recent decades: Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Iran, Lebanon, Philippines, Serbia, Thailand, and quite a few more. The above nations span the supposed “spectrum” from “left” to “right.”
The situation facing the United States, in which the giant production interests have joined forces with the most repressive and bigoted elements of society to rule the nation, now exists in Burma, China, Equatorial Guinea, Iran, Nigeria, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkmenistan, Venezuela, and a couple of dozen other countries. If you want to see what is possible, look at Burma and Iran in particular. Not only is there mass killing; there is economic stagnation. China’s supposedly impressive economic growth, which has made many people look to it as a model, is an illusion; the figures have no relation to reality (see e.g. Abe and Nickum 2009; Tilt 2009).
In the 1930s, most of Europe went fascist under similar circumstances: apparently hopeless economic decline coupled with virulent ethnic and political hates. England and America stayed out because the people were still hopeful. Only fear of continued decline, and thus of increasing competition from those hated minorities, makes a majority actually choose fascism. Sadly, it is universal human nature under such circumstances to take out one’s fear and anger on scapegoats.
With any kind of hope or stability, one can bear downward mobility and go on, but individuals hit by multiple problems are almost certain to fall into denial and hate.
Most Americans have a vague sense that fascism means hating Jews. In fact, fascism is an economic and political system, designed largely by Benito Mussolini in Italy in the 1920s. It was not originally anti-Jewish, and many fascists have not cared one way or another about the Jews; Hitler’s anti-Semitism was widely but wrongly equated with fascism. Fascism is actually defined by totalitarian government and by fusion of government with giant firms, so that both politics and the economy are controlled by rigid, top-down, authoritarian hierarchies. Religion was also controlled that way in Mussolini’s and Franco’s Catholic countries, providing a symmetrical picture. Fascism is also characterized by oppression of women, the poor, and minorities; any minority may be hated if it provides a convenient scapegoat.
Fascism led to mass murders when its authoritarian leaders were challenged. All the great fascist massacres have occurred under three circumstances: when a regime was new and consolidating itself; when its power was threatened by popular uprising and civil unrest; and when it was in a war and fearing loss. Hitler’s “final solution” came only when the tide of World War II turned against it. Later fascist genocides (Guatemala in the 1980s, Sudan in the 2000s, and so on) occurred when guerrilla activity broke out in areas suffering from government neglect and discrimination.
In the United States, nascent fascism appears in the Patriot Act and other measures that limit or suspend Constitutional freedoms and guarantees, and in the extreme racism, religious bigotry, and political hatred that now characterize the nation. The G. W. Bush administration instituted torture, “rendition,” illegal wiretapping, illegal covert surveillance of other kinds, and a general attitude that the executive branch could do anything they wanted to, without consulting Congress or anyone else. They eliminated oversight on several levels, tried to limit Constitutional freedoms, and did everything they could to allow arbitrary arrest and detention. The ostensible excuse was “terrorism”; administration personnel, apparently quite seriously, accused the National Education Association of being a terrorist organization for opposing some of Bush’s educational reforms, and accused environmentalists across the board of terrorism because a few did indeed indulge in sabotage and violence—deplorable, certainly, but hardly an adequate excuse for apparently condemning a whole movement. In general, the Bush administration moved toward secrecy and totalitarian actions on all fronts. The Obama administration has done essentially nothing to reverse this, and totalitan repression is firmly in place in the United States as an option.
This is not to say that anyone right now intends to take over and heat up the gas ovens. Our work shows that leaders very rarely start out to be despots. They move into that position gradually, as their policies make the economy worse and often bring civil unrest or rebellion. Worsening economies cause worsening social tensions, and if there is a genuine civil outbreak, the temptation to crack down is harder and harder to resist.
The recession since 2008 has made worse the already serious levels of hatred. Religious bigotry, racism, political hatreds, and class tensions have been intense and dangerous for years, and are now out of control, as anyone can see by watching Fox News or looking at the comments at the ends of on-line news stories. These comments—the voice of an increasingly numerous and vocal group, obviously—are really quite incredible.
In the United States today, hatred is shared by right and left, which is, of course, particularly disturbing. Both old-time liberals and old-time conservatives would have little patience with the current mix of authoritarianism, subversion of the Constitution, government favoring of big business, and social hatreds. The stalwart conservatives of my youth—anti-Communist, pro-small business, patriotic, and so on—seem to have disappeared. The old-time liberals, devoted to helping the ordinary worker by leveling the political playing field, also seem embattled. Labels like “capitalism” and “socialism” are also markedly unhelpful today. We are dealing with a new and really ugly system that does not respect the old-fashioned political lines. It is not what used to be called “capitalism.”
Hatred of, and scapegoating of, “different” people is a human universal, and must be constantly fought or else it takes over and dominates politics. We have seen this in every nation and group on earth.
“It can happen here,” and it will happen unless major efforts are undertaken immediately.
Economic Decline Leads to Reactionary Politics
We are now rapidly moving toward lowered hope in the United States—at least the polls of consumer hopefulness say so.
This recession differs from the 1930s in two very important ways. First, it comes after a long decline in wages—real wages and real working-class incomes have been declining (unevenly) since 1972. A great deal of this decline has come about through progressive offshoring of manufacturing and other skilled and high-wage jobs, and the rise of abysmal dead-end service jobs.
Most of it, however, has come from the concentration of more and more economic and political power, as well as wealth, in fewer and fewer hands (see e.e. Kutter 2008; Rothkopf 2008). The extreme gap between wealth and poverty is bad enough, but more serious is the dominance of American life by a relatively small number of giant firms. Almost all areas of economic activity are now dominated by a few majors. The hundreds of drug and medical firms of the 1960s have narrowed down to half a dozen “Big Pharma” companies. Oil is concentrated in a few giant firms. Chemicals, agribusiness, food processing, and, increasingly, retailing have followed. They are now transnational, and are taking over the world, with catastrophic effects for many (Ellerman 2005; Collier 2007; Humphreys et al. 2007).
The giant firms can use their immense wealth to buy political power—donating to candidates, influencing regulatory agencies, threatening activists and whistle-blowers, and bribing politicians outright (cf. Wedel 2010). One thing they buy is subsidies. The US taxpayers hand over uncounted billions of dollars to giant firms (see Waxman and Green 2009). The big oil corporations get the biggest chunk (see Antonia Juhasz 2008). Farm subsidies also go to the biggest farmers, and specifically to those who produce “commodity crops”: Staple grains, soybeans, cotton. This encourages the large-scale monocropping that is maximally dangerous to the environment. Small farmers get little or no subsidy money, and thus go under. This is uneconomic, but is favored by the Farm Bureau (ever the representative of the larger farmers) and kept going by farm-state politicians. Another trick is getting tax breaks and tax cuts, or simply making sure that tax laws are not enforced (Johnson 2003, 2007). The George W. Bush administration cut enforcement almost completely (Johnson 2007).
ExxonMobil, the biggest corporation in the world, made $11,680,000,000 profits in the second quarter of 2008 and $14,800,000,000 in the third, setting an all-time world record. This company has been an extremely bad corporate citizen. It has funded the disinformation campaign on global warming. It have been involved in underhanded dealings and local violence in many countries. It funded a great deal of the Republican national convention in 2008, and the result is clearly visible in the natural-resource components of the Republican platform—especially the focus on more oil drilling and the downplaying of both alternative energy and global warming. And it gets millions of dollars in direct and indirect subsidies—including freedom from worry about regulations and rules being enforced very strictly.
Gigantism has invaded government and education too. One of the worst problems here is that the waste and boodling in the system is concentrated at the top, but any cuts—including those intended to eliminate waste—are taken out of the bottom, where the actual work is done. The high bureaucrats can protect their positions and salaries, passing all cuts downward through the system. The University of California (where I work) is typical. A rapidly increasing mass of higher administrators do little (if anything) beyond making sure their huge salaries are not seriously cut as libraries, student services, and teaching positions are being cut to the bone. Fast-increasing student fees are increasingly going to support a vast, parasitic bureaucracy. One can sympathize with anti-government agitators, but when they get their way and cut government spending, the libraries and students suffer even more, while the fat cats continue to protect themselves.
The rise of managerial bureaucrats has come at the expense not only of workers but also of old-fashioned bosses. The boss had a literally vested interest in his firm. If it went down, he was ruined, financially and socially. Not so with today’s CEOs and managers; they go on to the next big job, no matter what their performance. Time magazine reported that the motto around Goldman Sachs before the crash was “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone” (often shortened to IBG YBG). We all know about the revolving door between government, big business, and education. Such administrators have no incentive to look out for anything but themselves, and ever-increasing incentive to look out for themselves at the expense of the system.
The US decline after 1980 was addressed by massive deregulation in the 1990s and 2000s. This was counterproductive. The 2008 economic meltdown occurred because of deregulation and failure to enforce even the regulations that survived. Steady pullback on government regulation and oversight of business began with Reagan and continued unabated through the Clinton presidency, then shifted into high gear under George W. Bush. From the Securities and Exchange Commission to the IRS, oversight and enforcement agencies were both cut back and told to serve their rich clients (as opposed to the country). The rich thus shifted from profitable investment to speculation, predatory mergers, offshoring of capital, and other techniques that paid better in the short run. By 2008, the country had hemorrhaged jobs, capital, and investment. The economy was in the position of a man sawing off the branch he is sitting on. The branch fell in November.
Not only were regulations repealed; the regulations that survived were not enforced. By 2008, when the roof fell in, Bernard Madoff could get away with stealing over $170 billion dollars (see National Public Radio, Seattle Times, New York Times, etc., for March 11-12, 2008). The Securities and Exchange Commission and other enforcement agencies never made a sound; SEC employees interviewed on National Public Radio on March 12, 2008, said they knew about the problems but were scared to go after Madoff. They reported that the higher-ups in the Bush administration had made it clear that important people were not to be bothered. Thousands of similar cases of shady dealings also surfaced, as well as many stories of corruption in government.
Basically, people are getting poorer—not necessarily in nominal dollars, but certainly in resources. Meanwhile necessities are increasing; a functional American has to have credit cards, a cellphone, a computer, and all sorts of other things we did not need 30 years ago.
The poor currently make up 1/6 of Americans, with rapid increases in desperate poverty—even among those with steady jobs, for bosses are no longer under any pressure to pay even living wages. (See Tony Pugh, “Many Americans Are Falling Deeper into Depths of Poverty,” McClatchy Newspapers, Feb. 26, 2007; Seattle Times, p. A3.) The result was a situation in which both parties vied to see who could repeal the most regulations protecting the economy
To keep up with necessities, everyone but the super-rich has to cut back steadily on quality. Also, consumerism is promoted not only by the corporations but also by the government; we are supposed to buy, to keep the economy going. Efficiency, throughput minimization, recycling, and above all simplicity would make infinitely more and better economic sense, but we are living in a world where the giant corporations impose accounting and measuring systems that count throughput as “gain” and savings as mere loss. Eventually resources will have to run out. Cuts are naturally kicked down the socioeconomic scale, making the poor worse and worse off.
Of course, the poorest have to turn to crime to stay afloat, but more and more of the rich turn to crime also, as enforcement breaks down. This is already the rule in semiperipheral countries that often supply dubious commodities to the core nations: Mexico and Colombia, eastern Europe, Thailand. It is fast becoming the rule in the United States.
All this adds up to one thing: loss of grassroots action due to passivization. The rise of bigness, specifically of giant corporations that fuse public and private, not only destroys everything directly; it structurally disempowers people. The elites of giant organizations want everybody passive, and they work deliberately toward that end, but the real force making people passive is the sheer hopelessness of going against the system. (Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert Simon made this point already in 1991, as quoted by Ellerman 2005:220.)
People have lost control of their lives. They have become mere passive consumers, their lives dominated entirely by giant corporations (business, government, education, and even church—the new megachurches and the old hierarchic organizations). What was different about the early 20th century was that people had to work—usually physically, and in ways that forced them to show initiative and responsibility. Above all, they had to work together. Mutual cooperation and mutual aid are what make folk society, social life, sane politics, and real concern for social issues. Passivity leads to giving up on nature, exercise, and civic life, and leads also to overeating, TV and internet addiction, and educational apathy (Putnam 1993, 2000). It also leads to the political extremism of our time (on emotion in politics, see Westen 2007). This is less “passive” but no less a denial of personal and social responsibility.
Another result of gigantism and nonaccountable bureaucracy has been the steady deterioration of the quality of life. Consumer goods, the urban environment, the media, and eeducation are all getting steadily shabbier, uglier, and worse. America is becoming a vast suburban sprawl punctuated by shopping centers that are all identical—the same chain stores selling the same bottom-quality stuff, everywhere. People have become increasingly used to this, and insist less and less on quality.
If there is one most dangerous change in the United States, though, it is the disappearance of newspapers and other thoughtful media (see Bennett et al. 2007). Investigative reporting is now down to a tiny residual presence at perhaps half a dozen newspapers nationwide. People now rely on Fox News and the blogosphere for information.
In the absence of investigative reporting and full accurate journalism, everything from biological evolution to the dangers of smoking is denied. Scientific findings on the absurdity of racism are denounced as “mere political correctness.” We are now in a world where information is managed by people who model themselves after Joseph Goebbels and his “Big Lie.” A world in which people can deny global warming and claim that inoculations are a bad thing is a world on the edge of collapse. The giant firms are behind this, funding “think tanks” and disinformation campaigns (see Bowen 2008; Michaels 2008; Mooney 2005; Oreskes and Conway 2010; Stauber and Rampton 1996). To the extent that the firms and think tanks depend on government subsidies, taxpayers’ dollars are going to support campaigns of lies, intimidation, and deception that are hurting said taxpayers seriously. Junk physics, junk biology, junk nutritional science, junk psychology, and other campaigns of lies have created a whole worldview based on denial.
This goes far beyond the ostensible issues—global warming and so on. The goal of the right has been to discredit science in general, leaving the regulatory agencies and public health authorities with no credibility. Virtually all scientists who are not long retired or in the pay of the giant corporations are aware that evolution and global warming are real. There is really no debate on this. The right wing, however, is not content with claiming there is debate; they portray evolution, global warming, the problems with pesticides and pollution, and other issues as actual lies fabricated by science because science is a “liberal establishment” that is devoted to spreading liberal causes rather than truth. On the other hand, certain scientists have not helped the situation by militantly pushing atheism, often in ways maximally calculated to offend anyone even slightly religious. It is not lost on the religious that this atheism is mere opinion, and uninformed at that; this puts the whole scientific enterprise under a cloud.
The whole scientific enterprise is under total attack. This was characteristic of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. It is also the natural heir of the wild-eyed religious movements of the Dark Ages. Fake science is our equivalent to the lunatic-fringe heresies and millennarian movements.
The United States today also gives maximum opportunities for impulsiveness and for ruining one’s life. Drugs, in particular, are freely available; the “war on drugs” never got anywhere, partly because of selective political donations by large-scale drug-lords in Miami and elsewhere.
Cultural Moves
The Tea Party movement had early appeal to small-government activists and other dissidents who could at least theoretically be well-meaning and hopeful. However, under constant pressure from the Fox News crowd, it now seems increasingly dedicated to traditional hatreds and to repressive government. More and more, Tea Party activists support such things as the Patriot Act (which undercuts the U. S. Constitution seriously), and such outright fascist legislation as Arizona’s “immigration” law. (The latter was quickly followed by a ban on Chicano Studies; the association proved that the target of the law was Mexican-Americans in general, not illegal immigrants.) If the Tea Party actually opposed big government, they would start by attacking subsidies and corporate welfare. They have been totally silent about those.
The current right-wing extremism in the United States is a resurfacing of a general set of ideas that have been associated since the days of John Calhoun and the Know-Nothing Party. They surfaced in the Ku Klux Klan and later in McCarthyism and Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrats, then George Wallace’s and Orval Faubus’ brief flourishing in resistance to the civil rights movement. They have not changed much. They unite racism, anti-immigrant zealotry, militarism, and sexism including hysterical hatred of gays and “liberated women.” They have always combined claims of being “against big government” with aggressive attacks on First Amendment freedoms and on civil rights in general. They have even come to view advocating a healthy diet as “food Nazism”—apparently because of disinformation spread by giant food corporations.
There is steady growth in the reactionary religious movement that seeks to return women to “submission,” homosexuals to the closet (or prison), and people in general to subservience. It has gained tremendous political power (Donke and Coe 2007; Phillips 2006; Spence 2007). The George W. Bush administration almost made fundamentalist Christianity into an official state church, and claims that the United States is a “Christian country” continue to surface. (Not only was the United States founded by a mix of Christians, deists, Jews, and atheists, but fundamentalism—now equated with Christianity in the political rhetoric—did not exist in the 18th century; it was created in the late 19th century.) The Bush administration also apparently stopped enforcing civil rights laws, except when whites were the aggrieved parties.
Extremism in earlier days were evenly distributed between parties. In fact, the real racist-jingoist leaders of the 1950s and 1960s were Democrats—southern senators and congressmen like Strom Thurmond (a Democrat back then), or governors like George Wallace. Both the Democratic and Republican parties also included plenty of good people. Even the stuffy small-business persons that were the mainstream Republicans of my childhood were generally well-meaning and harmless.
In the 1950s, well-to-do people voted Republican and poorer ones voted Democrat, with little except regional traditions to confuse that division. In the 2000s, both the rich and the poor were split 50-50. The Republican vote was associated with the primary-production world, and with the less educated, more religious, more rural voters. The Democrat vote was overwhelmingly urban, and most Democrats were involved in secondary and tertiary economic sectors. Maps showing “blue states” and “red states” were misleading; more detailed maps showed all states as urban spots of bright blue in a vast sea of red. In the 2004 and 2008 elections, the Republicans’ biggest single base of support was actually the white poor.
Today, the Republican Party has narrowed down until it is little more than the voice for the Know-Nothing element. Only 24% of American voters are registered Republicans. Most of the traditional conservatives seem to have split from the Republican Party and become independents.
The Republican Party still contains a fair number of the old-fashioned honorable conservatives, but the party leadership has been assumed by the outright extremists; Rush Limbaugh declared himself head of the party in 2010, and no one contradicted him. Basically, the American right—from the center rightward—is organized by the most conservative 24%, and that conservative 24% is organized by its most extreme and irresponsible members.
It is sobering to think how different things were as recently as the Nixon presidency. Nixon signed into law the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act, several wilderness bills, and a flock of other responsible civil measures. The Republicans were solidly behind all these, almost no one opposing them. Today, such measures would be unthinkable. Even the most trivial and obviously needed energy bills cannot get through. Even later, Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” was downright liberal compared to the brew of religious hate, militaristic and authoritarian rhetoric, and general extremism coming from Fox talk radio and Rupert Murdoch’s other media.
The diversity of conservative thought that flourished in the United States 30 or 40 years ago has virtually ceased to exist. Formerly challenging and exciting journals like National Review and Wall Street Journal simply toe the Murdoch line—in fact, the latter is now owned by Murdoch, and has become a dismal shell of its former self. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and their group have taken over public discourse in the United States. Rarely in a democracy has public discourse been so dominated by a small, extreme group. Parallels are closer with Germany in the 1930s and Mao’s China in the 1960s.
The opposition to big government claimed by the far right is very selective; it applies only to governmental programs that help minorities or restrict the freedom of giant firms, polluters, and environmental wreckers to do what they please. Any program that works for the public good is targeted, apparently on the assumption that it benefits disproportionately “those people” (liberals, people of color, the young…). Anti-intellectualism guarantees that public education, libraries, and museums are second only to “welfare” on the lists of “wasteful spending” to eliminate.
Conversely, however, the right wing powerfully supports subsidies to giant firms, government interference with freedoms, huge military programs, and indeed the majority of government programs and spending. The far right also supports a huge range of restrictions on civil liberties, and now is beginning (e.g. with Rand Paul) to come out in open opposition to civil rights protection. Sexual puritanism and repression of women is also a major part of right-wingism today; the government is expected to act as bedroom police. Small government and personal liberty are obviously not part of the agenda, the Tea Party to the contrary notwithstanding.
Small government would be bad enough, given current rapid deterioration of schools, libraries, museums, infrastructure, and law enforcement, but what we are really facing is far worse.
American right-wing extremism (including the active support of Hitler in the 1930s) has always been largely connected with the South, including the border south and southern Midwest. It grows from the ideology that developed around slavery. This includes idealization of powerful top-down hierarchies, with leaders firmly in control and minorities expected to “keep their place.” It also includes the Southern code of honor. It also incorporates attitudes from puritanism and extremely conservative religious traditions.
In recent decades, it has spread farther, largely because it has been manipulated to an enormous degree by the giant primary-production corporations. This explains a number of contradictory beliefs that seem quite widely held in spite of what would appear to be mutual incompatibility, especially the opposition to big government while favoring huge subsidies to primary-production firms, and also favoring restrictions on freedom of speech—including criticism of said firms. (Several states have even passed “veggie libel” laws, outlawing criticism of local farm products. These are clearly unconstitutional, but the effort and expense of fighting them in court is a deterrent to challenging them.) Attitudes toward giant firms are shaped by attitudes formed from the social structure of the old-time plantations: a small group of extremely powerful bosses, who can do what they want, ruling a vast uneducated and servile workforce.
The southern system developed when the south was economically dynamic and powerful. It persisted and strengthened when the south was economically less successful, in the early 20th century, but continued to strengthen with the rise of the “Sunbelt” in the late 20th century. Its spread throughout the United States, especially rural and small-town areas, follows from economic decline.
The correlation of all this with upbound and downbound is fairly solid. Less educated white males are, in general, downwardly mobile, and they see that the rising successes of our age are very often young and nonwhite—all those blacks and Chicanas fresh out of college, all those immigrant engineers from India.
The right wing has been overwhelmingly successful in the US, through absolute solidarity and absolute commitment to basic principles, coupled with absolute immorality about everything else. Key has been the trinity of violent emotional arousal, junk science, and solid cooperation with the more reactionary corporations. The left and environmental movements have to copy the better part of this—the solidarity and principle. Then stir up more decent emotions and use real science, and work with the forward-looking interests of all kinds. Then focus on real immediate problems, especially population and biodiversity, also food production—critical now is the desperate need to reform agriculture to feed more people while being less environmentally damaging.
Nor Is the “Left” Innocent
The self-styled liberal or progressive end of the American political spectrum has had its own evolution in the same direction. Besides the sillier “nanny state” measured condemned by reasonable conservatives, there are much more sinister, and far less noticed, problems.
Education declines into drilling for standardized tests. Defunding public and university libraries is part of this, but much of it is ideological, a part of “educational reform.” Meanwhile, children never get outside or get any meaningful environmental education (Louv 2005). Educational levels are rapidly sinking, because of reforms pushed by both left and right that privilege the mindless standardized tests more and more, and push actual study and learning into the background. Schools now do little beyond drilling students for the tests. Science, music, art, history, civics, and physical education are pushed to the wall. The right and left have agreed broadly on these savage reforms; the Obama administration has simply continued the Bush administration’s policies.
Students naturally lose respect for education under such conditions—especially since the schools are now among the shabbiest and most poorly-maintained buildings in cities and suburbs. So, instead of school, children are socialized by mindless pop culture. This is one of the factors in the increasing alienation of more and more people—especially the young—from politics and civic participation.
One of the best ideas of the conservatives is a return to civics and American history. Too many conservatives confuse this with dishonest indoctrination, as in Texas recently, but the general goal is still laudable. We sorely need honest teaching in these areas.
On the (self-styled) left, we have also seen the rise of the “postmodern” moment in academia, which, in spite of claims that it is “progressive,” is a return to the right-wing German idealism of the late 19th century. It stems largely from Nietzsche, and later from the outright Nazi philosophers Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man, as well as from other European right-wing thinkers such as Paul Ricoeur. This is why it propagates from the elite private schools, which may seem “liberal” to Fox News but are basically elitist rather than liberal. One part of it is the kind of elitist pessimism and negativism seen in the cynical philosophies of Foucault and Derrida. Only the richest of the rich can afford the luxury of giving up like that.
A key, and widely shared, belief, stemming from this tradition, is that people are motivated basically by the search for power, that society is thus an amoral power struggle, and that discourses are constructed to serve the needs of this search. Truth-value does not inhere in discourse; humans either cannot know truth or do not choose to. Their beliefs and interpretations are set by power needs. Thus, science, political liberalism, human rights, and civil rights are all mere discourse, purely arbitrary, lacking in definition or truth-value. They are condemned to the ash-heap of history.
This renders meaningless the classic question of social justice. Bad enough that we cannot very seriously hope for economic, personal, or social justice in a world of giant corporations; the academics who serve those corporations have defined the very concepts out of existence.
Another result is the essentialization of “race,” gender, ethnicity, and other arbitrary social markers. Academia is balkanized, and the wider society troubled by a form of “multiculturalism” that sees cultures, or ethnic or racial groups, as closed worlds totally cut off from and alien to each other. This is, of course, the extreme right-wing position, and it is truly disturbing and frightening to see it prevail on the “left” too.
The fact is that America is still the great melting pot—more now than ever—and our groups blend, merge, mix, cross-cut, borrow, and intermarry with glorious freedom. This remains a major hope and blessing, and something to be celebrated, not denied.
Modern education is declining into mindless cramming or job training. Culture, in the old sense, is left to the mass media, which go for the lowest and worst common denominator. The postmodern turn in academia has led to a great deal of “media studies” that takes such stuff seriously. We should have opened up the canon, but to the great productions of the whole human species, not to the trash. Postmodernist philosophy coupled with “media studies” simply opens the way for the corrupt administrators and the job-trainers.
Saving the Nation
Basically, the need is to understand what is going on, forthrightly oppose it, and campaign on that basis. Liberals, moderates and genuine conservatives must unite in this effort.
The first need is for anyone of good will to get the word out about what is really going on: a power grab by extremist political forces motivated by hate, and heavily funded by giant backward-looking corporations that see their interests advanced in the short run by playing the “big lie” game. The corporations themselves can only lose in the long run, since they are taking the country down to ruin. Current right-wing politics is not about small government, free enterprise, or capitalism!
This perception should bring liberals, moderates, and any remaining genuine conservatives together. Liberals and conservatives of good will would certainly unite in opposing the giant corrupt bureaucracies that fuse government with big firms and eliminate accountability and recourse in both cases. Subsidies, corporate giveaways, failure to enforce laws and rules (after due under-the-table donations), special tax breaks, and other special favors to big business have to be stopped (Myers and Kent 1998; Pye-Smith 2002). It may help to remember that all these favors come at the expense of small businesses and small farms, which have to compete on a very nonlevel playing field. Accountability and recourse have to be restored.
Big businesses that rely on highly skilled and educated labor and on free, creative thinking need to realize that they have to break with firms that want to defund education and science.
The power of the giant corporations has to be tempered. This means reversing the huge tax cuts to the super-rich, eliminating subsidies (direct and indirect), and stiffening the resolve and ability of regulatory agencies. It means taking corporations to court for abuses and crimes.
Waste, pollution, wanton destruction of valuable natural areas, and other ecological crimes have to be stopped also. Experience shows that this happens only when people genuinely love nature, in whatever form, and thus can be emotionally mobilized to fight for the environment and save environmental amenities.
However, the most important thing is to try to get America back together. The country is sinking down into a “perfect storm” of mutual hatreds. Liberals and conservatives, blacks, whites, browns, religious and antireligious groups are all at each others’ throats, at precisely the time when the country needs unity to deal with economic downturn and environmental deterioration. Even the corporations must realize, at some level, that they cannot keep backing the hate-merchants much longer.
We have to get back toconsidering the public good. With even minimal repairs to bridges, highways, and ports stopped, with police and fire protection cut steadily, and with environmental protection gutted, even minimal survival is endangered. Again, reasonable small-government conservatives cannot really believe that we can get along without any public maintenance or security. All but the most libertarian would presumably add public education.
This means doing something about the media crisis. We have to reverse the decline of book stores, publishing, newspapers and investigative reporting, and the rise of the Big Lie media.
Ultimately, if we survive long enough, we will have to reform the educational system—and in exactly the opposite direction from current reforms. The steady replacement of literature, arts, and ethics by mindless drill for mindless testing is national suicide.
Providing a common education in the finest of our world heritage is critically important. This means gong back to the classics, including classics from all world cultures. We need the solidarity that comes from such common ground.
That done, education must then be in actual life skills, notably including writing, solving real math problems, doing science, studying nature in outdoor environments, and doing community work. These must be assessed by seeing if students can actually do them, as opposed to guessing about them among four arbitrary choices on a sheet of paper.
There is no way to deal with any of the above except by emotional driving of solidarity, loving nature, conservation, and responsibility. Rational choice will not do it, because all the problems involve sacrificing immediate self-interest—especially of the elites—for long-term, wide-flung benefits. By the time they come back to bite even the elites, it’s too late.
We must also restore the primacy of individual work that involves both initiative and cooperation. This is what made America great, and made it concerned with education, the environment, tolerance, and democracy in the first place.
The cutting edge has to be on actual life-and-death rights, where every decent person can actually be mobilized. Support for reducing infant mortality, ending environmental pollution (including global warming), ending starvation, ending slavery, reducing war, ending gross bias and prejudicial treatment, and above all ending human rights abuses (torture, etc.) provide the main hope. Environmental protection has to be in there with real knowledge search, real science, and birth control. On a more positive note, saving biodiversity, conserving renewable resources, and reforesting are among many goals that no sane person (right or left) can disagree with. Wide coalition-building around these ends would mobilize people, discredit the giant hierarchic systems, and form broad coalitions—since everyone from left to right has to pay at least lip service to them.
The essence of morality is tolerance. We have to realize we are all in this together, and thus have to treat people fairly and decently even if we fear them. Hate and scapegoating must be minimized, but cannot be prevented, humans being what they are. Thus we have to have extremely comprehensive and strong civil rights laws, to prevent invidious treatment.
Obviously, tolerance and valuing diversity make up the absolute core of fixing anything. We must get people to realize that we are all involved in countless cross-cutting groups, all depend on each other, and all must work together to survive; therefore we must all care for each other. Those ethical principles have been held in contempt lately by all political factions. Yet without them no country can survive. We have to create some sort of genuine solidarity, by shared heritage and interest.
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