Discourse dies if power triumphs

During the grim years of the early post 9/11 Bush presidency, when asking myself "can it happen here?" in the most frightening Sinclair Lewis sense was almost a staple of daily life, I discovered David Neiwert's blog Orcinus. Here was someone who was asking that question, but he actually knew something about the extreme far right, having written about the "Patriot" (I'm damned if I'll cede that label) movement in the Northwest, as well as the internment of the Japanese on the West Coast during World War II. He taught me most of what I know about the legal issues involved in hate crimes laws in Death on the Fourth of July.

Neiwert has summarized his thinking that came out of that period in The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right. Eliminationism leads to "the death of discourse, as well as its dissolution into violence and the use of force." This book describes how many people, especially in rural areas, share some of the grievances and fears that feed far right sentiments -- but these sentiments don't crystalize and become active without a whole network of "transmitters" (hate radio jocks, but also unscrupulous preachers and white supremacists) who create a "transmission belt" that issues in the movement conservatism today embodied among the right fringes of the Tea Baggers.

Over the years I've read a lot of the accomplished decoders of the U.S right: Sara Diamond, Leonard Zeskind, Chip Berlet. Their work is invaluable, but after immersion in it, I often feel that I've been wandering through a strange labyrinth of interconnected but nearly incomprehensible mini-sects that spawn infinite minuscule variations. (The 1970s far left has this feel too.) Reading David Neiwert is not like that. Neiwert manages to make far right "conservative para-fascism" imaginable at the same time that he explains why it feels as if it can't be grasped:

At times it seems, when dealing with the movement, as if we've entered a funhouse mirror maze. Or more to the point, a dark and labyrinthine cavern, twisting through an endless maze whose architecture we can only vaguely discern if we hold up our torches. ...

The mutability of truth is what has made confronting the conservative movement feel so maze-like, because factuality in its hands is like clay; you never know what bizarre argument they're going to come up with next. They even sometimes turn established historical consensus on its head. [He references Michelle Malkin's defense of the Japanese internment and Jonah Goldberg's nonsensical pretense that fascism is leftist.]

...The conservative movement ... is an ever shifting beast. Its drive is power, and in that drive it has gradually adopted the familiar architecture of another power-mad right-wing phenomenon of modern mass politics: fascism.

... This is the real danger of para-fascism: once certain forces are unleashed, they often take on a life of their own and prove impossible to contain. If enough of the natural barriers that keep fascism at bay in a democratic society break down, then the half-formed hologram of fascism takes on substance and becomes the real thing, This is the danger movement conservatism has unleashed on America.

This country is by no means conquered by the right yet, but there's lot of para-fascism all around us. And there are frequent suggestions that segments of the political elite in the Republican party think they can ride this tiger without being consumed by it. Historically, that bet has not gone well for the countries of those who made it.

One of the most valuable sections of this slightly disjointed book is the chapter "Eliminationism in America: A Short History." Anyone teaching the country's history would do well to assign this, perhaps with some balancing material from Mike Lux's The Progressive Revolution: How the best in America came to be. There has been eliminationist horror, but there has also been resistance.

David Neiwert's Orcinus seems to be quiescent these days, but the author's reporting and wisdom is available at Crooks and Liars where he is managing editor. I'm still attending to this writer.

Disillusionment and resistance ICHH, part 5

Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), author
Copyright 1997 State Historical Society of Wisconsin


The historical setting in which Sinclair Lewis' It Can’t Happen Here takes place is very different from the one in which we live today. Our economy is not in collapse, leaving millions unemployed and starving. (At least not yet -- there are some disturbing omens, such as a growing gulf between rich and poor, out of sight oil prices coupled with an insane balance of payments deficit, and a steeply declining dollar, but the world may conspire to pull the US through.) In Lewis' time European fascism was on the march and the US ruling class, with less reasoned evidence, saw Soviet Communism as also an aggressive challenger.

We do live with far too many parallels -- we too suffer from noxious media that inflame populist passions against the rule of law, from racism and xenophobia (now aimed particularly at those other Semites, those perceived to be A-rabs), and from unscrupulous corporate profiteers and politicians who think that they can hold on to power by manipulating the baser passions of some of the people -- and who may learn that their "dupes" own them.

But history does not repeat itself and novels shouldn't be asked to predict reality. What lingers after reading ICHH is how acutely Lewis observes and describes human character traits that persist under extreme stress.

For example, this unsettling passage:

Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn "reasonable" and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to stop and speak and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive.

He is merely saying that we are not all heroes. Most of the time that doesn't matter. When push comes to shove, it does, a great deal, but that doesn't change who we are. Painful, but I think true and better to admit it than to pretend otherwise.

Or this, a reflection by his reluctant protagonist on life's meaninglessness under the insurgent fascist Corpo state:

Day on day he waited. So much of a revolution for so many people is nothing but waiting. That is one reason why tourists rarely see anything but contentment in a crushed population. Waiting, and its brother death, seem so contented.

Lewis' view of human frailty was too unstinting to allow him to suggest an easy overthrow of the monstrosity whose rise he imagined. But he gives his unenthusiastically resisting protagonist these meditations on why fighting back matters. Doremus Jessup is a newspaper editor; his resistance begins with illicit writings:

Their feeble pamphlets, their smearily printed newspaper, seemed futile against the enormous blare of Corpo propaganda. It seemed worse than futile, it seemed insane, to risk martyrdom in a world where Fascists persecuted Communists, Communists persecuted Social–Democrats, Social–Democrats persecuted everybody who would stand for it; where "Aryans" who looked like Jews persecuted Jews who looked like Aryans and Jews persecuted their debtors; where every statesman and clergyman praised Peace and brightly asserted that the only way to get Peace was to get ready for War.

What conceivable reason could one have for seeking after righteousness in a world which so hated righteousness? Why do anything except eat and read and make love and provide for sleep that should be secure against disturbance by armed policemen?

He never did find any particularly good reason. He simply went on.

I'm with Lewis. When all else fails, keeping on keeping on is what makes us human -- that and the fact that we never know how any story ends until it is over.

Brutal Violence ICHH, part 4

KKK marching in DC in 1925


The defining characteristic of Sinclair Lewis' fictional fascist USA is brutal violence directed against any opposition and against scapegoats.

In It Can't Happen Here, frustrated, angry men (and a few token women) who have lost their livelihoods because of economic dislocation and who have lost their hope in conventional politics because Roosevelt's Democrats elected in 1932 didn't deliver, turn to a demagogue for hope. Organized first as the League of Forgotten Men by Bishop Prang, these morph into "Minute Men." And in the crucial turning point of the novel, they discover how much they enjoy killing.

New President Buzz Windrip announces immediately after his inauguration that he will rule without Congress and imprisons those Congressmen who resist.

The recalcitrant Congressmen had been penned in the District Jail. Toward it, in the winter evening, marched a mob that was noisily mutinous toward the Windrip for whom so many of them had voted. Among the mob buzzed hundreds of Negroes, armed with knives and old pistols, for one of the kidnapped Congressmen was a Negro from Georgia, the first colored Georgian to hold high office since carpetbagger days.

Surrounding the jail, behind machine guns, the rebels found a few Regulars, many police, and a horde of Minute Men, but at these last they jeered, calling them "Minnie Mouses" and "tin soldiers" and "mama's boys.". . . Half-a-dozen policemen with guns and night sticks, trying to push back the van of the mob, were buried under a human surf and came up grotesquely battered and ununiformed--those who ever did come up again. There were two shots; and one Minute Man slumped to the jail steps, another stood ludicrously holding a wrist that spurted blood.

The Minute Men--why, they said to themselves, they'd never meant to be soldiers anyway--just wanted to have some fun marching! … That instant, from a powerful loudspeaker in a lower window of the jail brayed the voice of President Berzelius Windrip:

. . ."I tell you that you are, ever since yesterday noon, the highest lords of the land--the aristocracy--the makers of the new America of freedom and justice. Boys! I need you! Help me--help me to help you! Stand fast! Anybody tries to block you--give the swine the point of your bayonet!"

A machine-gunner M.M., who had listened reverently, let loose. The mob began to drop, and into the backs of the wounded as they went staggering away the M.M. infantry, running, poked their bayonets. Such a juicy squash it made, and the fugitives looked so amazed, so funny, as they tumbled in grotesque heaps!

The M.M.'s hadn't, in dreary hours of bayonet drill, known this would be such sport.

Windrip's USA becomes a vicious prison of random violence, lethal to Jews and Blacks, dangerous to any who cross the newly empowered angry M.M.s.

Every moment everyone felt fear, nameless and omnipresent. They were as jumpy as men in a plague district. Any sudden sound, any unexplained footstep, any unfamiliar script on an envelope, made them startle; and for months they never felt secure enough to let themselves go, in complete sleep. And with the coming of fear went out their pride.

Lewis may have written a preachy, unfashionably engaged novel that disappoints admirers of literature, but in passages such as these he uses all his gifts to describe all too familiar human behaviors.

Contemporary US society certainly has some echoes of Lewis' fictional dystopia. We suffer from an ample supply of angry white men who feel that somehow they aren't getting their due -- pollster Stanley Greenberg calls them the "F-You Boys" and estimates they make up 13 percent of the population as well as a significant part of the Republican base. And we have contemporary Minutemen playing vigilante on the US border with Mexico, holding off the Brown hordes. (By the way, Lewis' fascist USA invades Mexico to keep up its martial spirit when enthusiasm for the Windrip's Corpo state begins to wane.) But we also live in a country where an Eric Rudolph (the abortion clinic and Olympic bomber) does go to jail and we execute a Timothy McVeigh -- political violence with impunity is not yet the order of the day.

The main locus of violence in US society today is far from the F-You boys and our home grown fascists. Whole communities, mostly Black and brown, are war zones, where young people are brutalized and can't count on growing up. Recently a 16-year old girl randomly cut the throat of a retired white woman in an upscale Berkeley neighborhood. The local media went berserk -- how could such a thing happen? San Francisco Chronicle columnists Joan Ryan wrote a column delving more deeply into the crime:

Walter Jackson, an assistant district attorney in the Alameda County juvenile department, is prosecuting the case. Susan Walsh works on the other side of the aisle; she is in charge of the public defenders in the juvenile department. They agree that the most unsettling aspect of this case is the fact we think it is unusual. Or that we think it has anything to do with evil.

The only thing unusual about this case, they say, is its location. There hasn't been a violent attack in that Berkeley neighborhood for as long as anyone can remember. But this girl seems like so many of the low-income, neglected, mentally ill kids Jackson and Walsh see every day.

"If you sat in Juvenile Court, you would see tragic stories just like this one every day,'' Walsh said.

Certainly we have to fear the violent posturing of the wingnut faction of the Republican right, but also this society must find a way to help these children growing up in circumstances where order and law are a joke.

That old time religion ain't good enough anymoreICHH, part 3

Father Coughlin first took to the airwaves in 1926, broadcasting weekly sermons over the radio. By the early 1930s the content of his broadcasts had shifted from theology to economics and politics. Just as the rest of the nation was obsessed by matters economic and political in the aftermath of the Depression, so too was Father Coughlin.

He began as an early Roosevelt supporter, coining a famous expression, that the nation's choice was between "Roosevelt or ruin." Later in the 1930s he turned against FDR and became one of the president's harshest critics. His program of "social justice" was a very radical challenge to unbridled capitalism and to many of the political institutions of his day.

A modern writer, Donald Warren, describes Coughlin as an ardent anti-Communist who backed the fascist regimes of both Hitler and Mussolini, but is probably best-remembered for his anti-Semitic tirades. He labels him "the father of hate radio."

In Sinclair Lewis' novel, a Fr. Coughlin-like "religious" broadcaster not only promotes the presidential candidacy of the fascist Senator Buzz Windrip, but also, through his organized followers, provides the muscle to go with his drive to power.

The rival to Senator Windrip in public reverence was a political titan who seemed to have no itch for office—the Reverend Paul Peter Prang, of Persepolis, Indiana, Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, a man perhaps ten years older than Windrip. His weekly radio address, at 2 P.M. every Saturday, was to millions the very oracle of God. So supernatural was this voice from the air that for it men delayed their golf, and women even postponed their Saturday afternoon contract bridge.. . .

To the pioneer Father Coughlin, Bishop Paul Peter Prang was as the Ford V-8 to the Model A.. . .

No man in history has ever had such an audience as Bishop Prang, nor so much apparent power. When he demanded that his auditors telegraph their congressmen to vote on a bill as he, Prang, ex cathedra and alone, without any college of cardinals, had been inspired to believe they ought to vote, then fifty thousand people would telephone, or drive through back-hill mud, to the nearest telegraph office and in His name give their commands to the government. ...

There was a theory around some place that Prang was only the humble voice of his vast organization, "The League of Forgotten Men." It was universally believed to have (though no firm of chartered accountants had yet examined its rolls) twenty-seven million members. ...Hither and yon, Bishop Prang, not as the still small voice of God but in lofty person, addressed audiences of twenty thousand persons at a time, in the larger cities all over the country, speaking in huge halls meant for prize-fighting, in cinema palaces, in armories, in baseball parks, in circus tents, while after the meetings his brisk assistants accepted membership applications and dues for the League of Forgotten Men. When his timid detractors hinted that this was all very romantic, very jolly and picturesque, but not particularly dignified, and Bishop Prang answered, "My Master delighted to speak in whatever vulgar assembly would listen to Him," no one dared answer him, "But you aren’t your Master—not yet."

Scary stuff in a time when we have a House Majority leader telling the Washington Times that an "out of control" judiciary has imposed "a separation of church and state that's nowhere in the Constitution." This stuff keeps on coming back.

Poignant, at least for me, is Lewis's picture of US Christianity providing no defense whatever against aggressive fascism. As repression takes hold in the protagonist Doremus Jessup's small Vermont town, he visits the local Episcopal Church. The well-known prayers merely saddened him:

The lovely, familiar old ritual seemed meaningless to him now, with no more pertinence to a life menaced by Buzz Windrip and his Minute Men, no more comfort for having lost his own deep pride in being an American, than a stage revival of an equally lovely and familiar Elizabethan play. ...However exalted [the priest] himself might be, most of the congregation were Yorkshire pudding. ...the whole place smelled to Doremus of stale muffins.

I have to wonder, has "mainstream" Protestantism any more moral authority or backbone than the class-bound, conventional Christianity Lewis portrays here?

Lord what fools these mortals be. . .* ICHH, part 2

On October 27, 1936, It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis, opened simultaneously in twenty-one theaters in seventeen states. The Los Angeles Yiddish production, pictured here, featured Morris Weisman as "Buzz" Windrip. Federal Theatre Project Collection


For those of us who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, at least in the north and west, US fascists seemed pretty darn remote, even quaint. Of course there were segregationists clubbing freedom riders and blowing up kids in churches, but that seemed another country and certainly against the law of the land. There was a nutcase named George Lincoln Rockwell who paraded around with swastika armbands. But threatening fascists were figures of European history, monsters our parents' generation had defeated in World War II.

Sinclair Lewis's novel springs from a premise that certainly would have seemed far-fetched in those days: a demagogic fascist senator, one Buzz Windrip, wins the nomination of the Democratic Party for the presidency in 1936, after Franklin Delano Roosevelt fails to find solutions to the economic and social distress caused by the Great Depression. (This certainly seems wildly farfetched today as we know Roosevelt swept 46 states in that year; however, before opinion polls, progressives really feared that attacks by right wing demagogues might sweep him from office. One of the best accounts of this period I know of is the second volume of Blanche Wiesen Cook's biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, The Defining Years, 1933-1938.)

Roosevelt, in horror, bolts the Democrats to form the Jeffersonian Party, splitting the opposition to Windrip with the Republicans. The US majority rallies to the man who promises everything to everyone (except for Jews and Negroes) and fascism is voted into office.

Lewis's description of the emotionally charged political environment rings too many bells for my comfort:

The conspicuous fault of the Jeffersonian Party, like the personal fault of [its candidate], was that it represented integrity and reason, in a year when the electorate hungered for frisky emotions, for the peppery sensations associated, usually, not with monetary systems and taxation rates, but with baptism by immersion in the creek, young love under the elms, straight whisky, angelic orchestras soaring down from the full moon, fear of death when an automobile teeters above a canyon, thirst in a desert and quenching it with spring water -- all the primitive sensations they found in the screaming of Buzz Windrip.

The rest of the novel catalogues the horrors perpetrated by the fascist regime so blithely elected.

Lewis ends his novel, still bemoaning the ignorance of the people in general. After terrible atrocities, some revolted, but the revolt stalled:

. . .because in the America, which had so warmly praised itself for its "widespread popular free education," there had been so very little education, widespread, popular, free, or anything else, that most people did not know what they wanted -- indeed knew about so few things to want at all.

There had been plenty of schoolrooms; there had been lacking only literate teachers and eager pupils and school boards who regarded teaching as a profession worthy of as much honor and pay as insurance-selling or embalming or waiting on table. Most Americans had learned in school that God had supplanted the Jews as chosen people by the Americans, and this time done the job much better, so that we were the richest, kindest, and cleverest nation living; that depressions were but passing headaches and that labor unions must not concern themselves with anything except higher wages and shorter hours and, above all, must not set up an ugly class struggle by combining politically; that, though foreigners tried to make a bogus mystery of them, politics were really so simple that any village attorney or any clerk in the office of a metropolitan sheriff was quite adequately trained for them. . . .

I have to admit that this description depresses me: arrogant nationalism, anti-intellectualism, and failure to grasp and act on our own economic interests seem still among our country's besetting sins. I know most teachers try hard to impart something more, but through emphasis on testing rote learning and "starving the beast," we more and more make our schools places of confinement for the young, rather than arenas in which they learn to exercise independent thought.

*A Midsummer Night's Dream

It Can't Happen Here (ICHH) by Sinclair Lewis, part 1

Okay, having appropriated Lewis' title for my blog theme, I've read his novel. I found it plenty rich enough so that this will be the first of a series of posts bouncing off it. It Can't Happen Here is a scary fable of homegrown US fascism overwhelming the US political system in the context of the Depression 1930s.

Sinclair Lewis had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in the 1920s; his fiction so honored satirized the bumptious, shallow middle class in the United States. During the Depression of the 1930s, he had intimate reason to understand the rise of fascism in Europe, as his wife, Dorothy Thompson, had worked as a correspondent in Berlin during Hitler's rise to power. In 1935 he responded to the fascist potential he saw around him by dashing off this novel, which quickly became a bestseller; it was also widely produced as a play by the Federal Theatre Project.

Interestingly, apparently I'm confessing my crassness and naiveté by thinking highly of this book. Literary critics are pretty dismissive of ICHH. Robert E. Fleming of the University of New Mexico calls it "artistically inferior." David Neiwert of Orcinus whose writing on contemporary fascist tendencies I'll be visiting in these posts, calls ICHH "one of his weakest works; it lacks most of the human detail and probing realism of his greatest novels."

Most oddly, Michael Meyer, the professor of English who thought the book important enough to write the introduction to the 2005 Signet paperback edition, puts us on notice that many reviewers "complained about the novel's loose melodramatic plot, flat and even corny characters, weak clichéd dialogue, padded political discourse, awkward sentimentality, and heavy handed satire and irony…"

Why so dismissive? I think this book scares the beegeesus out of anyone who is seriously considering whether US fascism is possible or likely. None of us want to admit that we do have to raise the question. Lewis can't answer it for us; he's dead. But the question, "can it happen here?" is all too live.