The following is an excerpt of an op-ed written by President Roosevelt’s Vice President, Henry A. Wallace, which appeared in the New York Times in 1944. He was responding to a question regarding the connection between American fascism and unregulated capitalism and corporate control of a government. He wrote:
The American Fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy. They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.
Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself.
Democracy must develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels.
Happily, it can be said that as yet fascism has not captured a predominant place in the outlook of any American section, class or religion. It may be encountered in Wall Street, Main Street or Tobacco Road. Some even suspect that they can detect incipient traces of it along the Potomac. It is an infectious disease, and we must all be on our guard against intolerance, bigotry and the pretension of invidious distinction.
Wallace’s fears have been realized with the rise of the extreme conservative corporatist movement of the past 30 years. The conservative corporatist worldview is closer to that of the 19th century French occultist, Joseph Alexandre St. Yves d’Alveydre than Lincoln’s, Eisenhower’s, or Goldwater’s conservative Republican Party. St. Yves’ vision was of a unified Europe governed by regional councils made up of bankers, industrialists and corporate representatives. Corporate interest would be the political governing power creating a Pan-Europe where the interests of labor (the middle class) were secondary; the early concept of fascism. St. Yves’ coined the term “Synarchy” to describe the government he envisioned that would be controlled by a secret society. This emphasis on hierarchy is naturally totalitarian and is found in the views of the conservative corporatist in the US today.
The extreme conservative corporatists today are an extension of the neo-conservative movement of the Reagan Revolution. The neo-conservatives then, and by extension, todays corporatists, were influenced by, not only the philosophy of St. Yves, but also the 16th century political philosopher, Niccolo Machiavelli and the Nazi jurist, Carl Schmitt. Schmitt’s foreign policy philosophy was that of perpetual enemies and “states of emergency” designed to erode civil liberties under the guise of national security that would ultimately empower a dictatorship. Schmitt believed in an all-powerful executive above the law. We saw the implementation of this philosophy during the Cheney / Bush Administration. Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, among others, attempted to create a presidency above the law during the Nixon administration. With a monopolized, now corporate press, corrupt Congress, and an apathetic citizenry, they succeeded in doing so with the Bush administration. No administration in history has done as much damage to democracy as has the Bush/Cheney co-presidency.
In the 1960’s the neo-cons considered themselves liberal intellectuals; hawkish democrats that supported the war in Vietnam, although none of them served in the military, and an expansion of the US nuclear arsenal to counter the Soviet Union. In the 1970’s they opposed the Nixon and Kissinger policy of détente with the Soviets. As opposition to the war spread throughout the country and to college campuses and with the rise of the counterculture and the civil rights movements of the 60’s, that occasionally included violence, the neo-cons believed they were witnessing a country coming apart at the seams. What they failed to see was that this period was democracy at its finest moment. It was the rightful owners of government, We the People, opposing injustices and demanding to be heard by our elected representatives. Democracy is not static. It lives and breaths and is sometimes turbulent and gives the appearance of instability. It was the appearance of instability that made them afraid that democracy, which perpetuates liberalism, would eventually lead to nihilism and anarchy.
As they morphed from liberalism to conservatism, they sought to ensure stability. The desire for stability became more important than democracy, in their view, and they set out to change the political landscape of the United States where democracy would no longer be tolerated. They found the rational for their views in an obscure political philosopher teaching at the University of Chicago named Leo Strauss. Straussian followers were found throughout the Bush administration and included Paul Wolfowitz, the former Deputy Secretary of Defense, who studied philosophy under Strauss in 1972. Strauss blamed liberalism and tolerance, and by extension democracy, for the collapse of the Weimer Republic in Germany that led to the rise of Hitler. Strauss wrote extensively about Niccolo Machiavelli.
The neo-conservatives subscribed to the Straussian view that there are “essential truths” that the masses cannot comprehend and that Machiavelli was right in his view that there was a natural hierocracy destined to lead the masses. In Machiavelli’s letter to Lorenzo de Medici, ruler of Florence, titled “The Prince,” he lays out the requirements to maintain stability and power over the people. He explains the theory that the ends justify the means and that the prince must understand “how to colour one’s actions and to be a great liar and deceiver. Men are so simple, and so much creatures of circumstance, that the deceiver will always find someone ready to be deceived.” Machiavelli also advises the prince to disregard the connection between ethics and politics. “To those seeing and hearing him, he should appear a man of compassion, a man of ethics, a man of integrity, a kind and a religious man. And there is nothing so important as to seem to have this last quality.” However, the prince “need not have all the good qualities, but should certainly appear to have them. I would go so far as to say that if he has these qualities and always behaves accordingly he will find them harmful; if he only appears to have them they will render him service.” Lying to the masses, therefore, becomes not only necessary but morally acceptable; deception becomes policy, the exploitation of the religious right becomes useful.
Strauss devoted a great deal of time writing of the natural order of a small elite ruling class he referred to as the “philosophers” and the masses which he referred to as the “gentleman.” The gentleman should have no role other than that of the malleable authoritarian follower. The elites would recognize that there is no God or morality but would be strong enough to use religion to keep order among the masses. Strauss taught another means to unite the masses was to have perpetual external threats, “even if one has to be manufactured” to create a belligerent nationalism. “Noble lies,” as Strauss called them are essential political tools for the elite to use for the “good” of the masses. The extreme secrecy we saw in the Bush administration is also out of the Straussian manifesto for authoritarian rule. Strauss wrote, “The rule of the wise must be absolute. Rulers ought not to be responsible to the unwise subjects.” Strauss subscribed to a form of governance first advocated by Plato and later Machiavelli and St. Yves; a pure authoritarian form of government, or as Dick Cheney referred to it, an all powerful “Unitary Executive.”
While their speeches are always wrapped in respect for the Constitution, freedom and democracy, the stability the neo-conservatives seek requires a Machiavellian or Straussian form of authoritarian rule. To understand their fears and their need for stability over democracy all one has to do is simply listen to their own words. The Contributing Editor for the website FamilySecurityMatters.org, Philip Atkinson recently posted an article on that site titled, “Conquering the Drawbacks of Democracy.” In it he made the argument that Bush should annihilate the Iraqi people, with nuclear weapons if necessary, to “end the civil chaos caused by the continually squabbling Congress.” Bush, he argues, should then follow the historical example of Julius Caesar and use “military power to become the first permanent president of America,” president for life. Atkinson may not be widely known however, the Family Security Matters website is a creation of a conservative Washington think tank known as The Center for Security Policy, whose board of advisors included the Vice President of the United States, Richard Cheney and the neo-conservative advisors to the Bush administration Richard Perle and Elliot Abrams.
A better-known figure in politics, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, speaking at a conference on religion and public life in November of 2002 discussed the morals of the death penalty. In his remarks he said, “Government derives its moral authority from God [not We the People]…with powers to ‘revenge,’ to ‘execute wrath,’ including even wrath by the sword.” He said this is the consensus of Western thought but that this consensus “has been upset by the emergence of democracy.” He goes on to blame democracy for instability and appears to argue against government of, by and for the people. “The mistaken tendency to believe that a democratic government is nothing more than the composite will of its individual citizens” he said “and has no more moral power or authority than they do as individuals has adverse effects in other areas as well. It fosters civil disobedience.” There is the need for stability over democracy once again. Civil disobedience is an essential part of democracy and is protected by the Constitution. Dissent and civil disobedience is the first thing all despots crush early in the takeover of a democratic society. His argument is for an authoritarian or fascist form of government. His record on the Supreme Court reflects the comments he made.
Defending the Constitution and democracy is not what motivates the conservative corporatist agenda. The decisions of a right wing extremist Supreme Court that allows corporate interest unlimited access to buy legislation, control our voting process, and become more powerful than our government itself has replaced “We the People” with corporate fascism. Coupled with decisions that allow for the detention of people as enemy combatants without judicial review, warrantless spying, and presidential executive orders and signing statements creating laws outside of the legislative process and conducting government in extreme secrecy is antithetical to democracy. These are the actions of despotic regimes.
The actions of thirty years of conservative, libertarian corporatism is responsible for the deterioration of our Democracy that will conceivably take years to restore. The adverse impact of these actions cannot be overestimated. The Constitution, to the conservative corporatist movement that has taken control of our democracy, is nothing more than an archaic relic from another era.
The time to question the possibility of an American fascism has past. The reality is that we are there. The neo-conservative desire to transform the world has begun with the creation of a corporate controlled government, a unitary executive branch, and laws that are increasingly stripping away civil rights and turning the US into a police state. The greatest fear of the Wall Street one percent is that the working class will wake up and demand their democracy back.
Jay Ell
Like this:
One blogger likes this post.
