The Myth of the Fascist Establishment, Part I

By Ian Jobling •  4/7/08

Last year, feminist author and former Democratic political consultant Naomi Wolf published an article in The Guardian called “Fascist America, in 10 easy steps.” The article discussed the typical measures governments use to establish dictatorships, such as creating an exaggerated sense of danger from an enemy, building a gulag, and controlling the press. America, Wolf passionately argued, was in the midst of taking all of these measures in the name of the War on Terror. The enemy the Bush administration had invoked was Islam, our gulag was Guantanamo Bay, and our persecuted journalist was Joseph C. Wilson of “Plamegate” fame, whose wife was supposedly outed after he criticized Bush.

Similarly, on February 15, Keith Olbermann, host of MSNBC’s Countdown, called President Bush a “fascist” for pressing for immunity for telecommunications corporations who had aided the government in terrorist wiretapping.

If you believe in the seamless mutuality of government and big business, come out and say it! There is a dictionary definition, one word that describes that toxic blend. You’re a fascist! Get them to print you a T-shirt with fascist on it! What else is this but fascism?

The basis for Wolf’s and Olbermann’s accusations have been refuted so thoroughly by mainstream and conservative commentators that I won’t spend much time doing so here, although some of their criticisms will be addressed in the second part of this article. The general response to their accusations is that if America really were a fascist state, or anything like one, Wolf and Olbermann would not be able to air their views in this country. Yet Olbermann broadcast his complaint on an American network and Wolf’s most recent book, which expands on the ideas in her article on fascist America, is published by an American company.

Despite the implausibility of their claims, commentators like Wolf and Olbermann generate fanatical support among a large segment of the American public. A good way of judging the popularity of commentators is examining their reception at the social bookmarking website Digg, where readers can vote for, or “digg,” articles with one mouse click. Articles and videos by or featuring Wolf and Olbermann and commentators of similar ilk, like Noam Chomsky, are among the most popular on Digg, often garnering several thousand diggs. Conservatives fare poorly by comparison. In fact, I have never seen a conservative article make the first page of Digg’s most popular political opinion articles.

Nor is this sentiment confined to the media. As we will see in the second part of this article, politicians, while rarely using language as extreme as Wolf and Olbermann, cater to the fantasy that America is one step away from fascism.

Where does the obsession come from? Why are so many people invested in the idea that America is, or is soon to become, a fascist state?

The reason is that we live in a culture in which rebellion against a repressive authority has become the key sign of authenticity. Rebellion is so crucial to the Western identity that we must fabricate fascism in order to have something to rebel against.

The culture of rebellion originated in the 19th and early 20th centuries when nationalist, racialist, and authoritarian ideologies prevailed in the West. Such ideologies ranged from the relatively benign, like the old American WASP establishment, to the virulent, like the Nazi regime. In this era, whites, men, and dominant religious groups were privileged, whether by law or by custom. The old authoritarianism inculcated a fierce, often jingoistic, nationalism and patriotism and ostracized those who deviated from sexual norms. Authoritarian nationalism was suspicious to the extent of paranoia about the influence of foreigners.

The old authoritarian establishments have been swept away, however. Today, all the values of the old authoritarianism have been cast as evil and dangerous. Indeed, our culture designates the old ideology as “fascism,” thus reducing authoritarianism to its starkest and most destructive form.

Today, we have a new, liberal establishment which has made racial egalitarianism, multiculturalism, and sexual liberation our society’s reigning values. Despite the victory of liberalism, the empty form of rebellion remains. Founded in the battle against authoritarianism, liberals must constantly summon up the image of their long-dead enemy and kill him over again, even though he is now only a harmless wraith. Liberals project their fantasies of the fascist establishment onto Republicans, even though the GOP itself was long ago converted to liberalism on most issues.

The confusion induced by the myth of the fascist establishment has been disastrous. While the old authoritarianism deserved many of the criticisms directed against it, it also recognized many truths that are essential to the maintenance of Western civilization.

The most hysterically and unjustly reviled of these truths is race realism. It was a matter of common sense to the old authoritarians, and rightly so, that the races differed in civilizational capacity. Today’s establishment rebels have made it impossible for defenders of race realism to get a fair hearing. Liberalism also vilifies the traditional values of sexual normality, national security, patriotism, all of which are crucial to the maintenance of our society.

Today’s rebellion is no more heroic than the desecration of a corpse. In fact, true rebellion today consists of defending the old authoritarianism against vilification and vindicating its real insights, while recognizing its flaws.

The first part of this article will define the myth of the fascist establishment and attest that this fantasy is common wisdom in America today through an examination of the work of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who is convinced that America is one step away from a theocratic one-party state. The second part, to be published later, will demonstrate the influence of the myth on the Democratic party, examine the myth critically, and discuss its destructive effects.

The concept of the fascist establishment

Let’s define the concept of the fascist establishment more precisely. To begin with, “establishment” means a group that holds the monopoly of power in a society. The common wisdom today holds that the American establishment is:

• Pro-white. This is my neutral term for the usual one, “racist.” Liberals believe that the establishment sides with whites over non-whites.
• Anti-democratic: The establishment seeks to suppress dissent and to block people who oppose establishment values from voting.
• Fear-mongering and propagandistic: The establishment produces propaganda designed to inculcate irrational fears of an enemy in order to further its anti-democratic agenda.
• Theocratic: The establishment wishes to abolish the distinction between church and state and impose Christian rule.
• Repressive of alternative lifestyles: The establishment wishes to suppress non-traditional lifestyles, such as homosexuality, and persecute their practioners.
• Rapaciously capitalist: The establishment supports policies that enrich the wealthy at the expense of the poor and middle class.
• Imperialist: The establishment wishes to impose American rule on the rest of the world.

The work of Paul Krugman as an example

My claim that the above represents the common wisdom today may strike you as surprising or laughable. However, the myth of the fascist establishment is promulgated by many of America’s most popular and influential opinion makers. Out of many possible examples, I will discuss the writings of New York Times columnist and Princeton economics professor Paul Krugman. That Krugman is able to promote his views at one of America’s elite universities and in its flagship newspaper indicates that the myth of the fascist establishment is mainstream, not confined to marginal or cult figures. Krugman is held in high esteem. The Washington Monthly magazine called him “the most important political columnist in America.” Furthermore, Krugman’s work provides a detailed statement of the myth, as he has elaborated it in two books and innumerable columns.

Krugman does not express his belief in the fascist establishment subtly. He has stated quite baldly that he believes the goal of the Republican Party is to create a non-democratic, one-party, theocratic, imperialist state. Consider this statement from his 2003 book The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century.

If you combine [Republicans’] apparent agendas, the goal would seem to be something like this: a country that basically has no safety net at home, which relies mainly on military force to enforce its will abroad, in which schools don’t teach evolution but do teach religion and—possibly—in which elections are only a formality.¹

Krugman’s latest book The Conscience of a Liberal, published in 2007, provides the most detailed statement of his views. To ground his theory that the Republican Party is fascist at its core, Krugman goes all the way back to the writings of William Buckley in the National Review of the 1950s. There is little doubt that National Review at this time did promote the old authoritarian values. Buckley defended the Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco and the disfranchisement of American blacks in the South.²

Krugman then makes the mind-blowing claim that the ideology of American conservativism has not changed in any important respect since the 1950s: “In the half-century since those articles were published, movement conservatives have learned to be more circumspect.”³ Faced with the impossibility of a military coup of the kind that Franco had carried out, conservatives merely changed their tactics, rather than their underlying ideals. They started paying lip service to democracy in order to transform the US into a fascist state.

As Krugman says later:

Movement conservatism has been antidemocratic, with an attraction to authoritarianism, from the beginning, when National Review praised Francisco Franco and defended the right of white Southerners to disenfranchise blacks. That anti-democratic, authoritarian attitude has never gone away.⁴

This effort to impose fascism on America has given birth to a “vast right-wing conspiracy”—Krugman enthusiastically endorses Hillary Clinton’s notorious phrase.⁵ The core of the conspiracy is the collaboration between right-wing organizations and Big Business. “Today we take it for granted that most of the business community is solidly behind the hard right.”⁶ Krugman makes it clear that he thinks we are right to do so. Businessmen have provided “solid financial support”⁷ to right-wing think-tanks and lobbying organizations. Consequntly, the American right has a “financial backing beyond the wildest dreams of [conservatism’s] liberal opponents.”⁸ In return, conservative politicians have enacted pro-business policies that enrich the wealthy at the expense of the majority. This cooperation between business and conservatism is the cause of “the great divergence” in wealth that has occurred in America since the 1980s.

Thus, Krugman thinks that the allegedly anti-democratic, authoritarian, and pro-white views of Big Business and the Republican Party are the ideals at the heart of today’s establishment. Liberals like himself, by contrast, are marginalized and poorly funded dissidents who are at risk of being silenced by the establishment.

Krugman believes that the fascist establishment garners popular support by exploiting white resentment towards non-whites and those who engage in non-normative behaviors. While liberalism is about “democracy and the rule of law,”

Those who call themselves conservative are on the other side, with a political strategy that rests, at its core, on exploiting the unwillingness of some Americans to grant equal rights to their fellow citizens—those who don’t share their skin color, those who don’t share their faith, don’t share their sexual preferences.⁹

Conservative racism is one of the primary themes of Krugman’s book. One of his examples is Ronald Reagan’s supposed racial demagoguery. Though Reagan was never explicitly racist, nevertheless, he was implicitly so, Krugman claims. When Reagan spoke against “welfare queens,” he was “tapping into white backlash [against the civil rights movement] without being explicitly racist.”¹⁰ Krugman takes it for granted that high rates of welfare usage among blacks are due solely to their exclusion by a racist society. He thus views any white resentment over welfare, which has resulted in a massive transfer of wealth from whites to blacks, as irrational scapegoating.

In Krugman’s view, conservatives also systematically prevent blacks and other minorities from voting. Once again, Krugman equates modern conservatism with the racialist authoritarianism of the pre-Civil Rights era. Today’s conservative ascendancy is, he says, “aided by systematic vote suppression that is more subtle than that of Jim Crow, but nevertheless can be decisive in close elections.”¹¹ His evidence: voter identification laws, which were actually intended to make voter fraud more difficult. Furthermore, he suggests that because touch-screen machines are vulnerable to hacking, conservatives are using them to fix elections.¹²

Not only does the fascist establishment use propaganda to promote paranoia about blacks, but also about other external and internal enemies. For Krugman, the threat of the communist “Evil Empire” of the Reagan years and the current “War on Terror” are just so many “weapons of mass distraction” that blind us to the real problems that America faces. The Bush administration has won “by exploiting terrorism to the hilt” and “[perpetuating] a war psychology.”¹³ “Bush’s party engaged in raw political exploitation of the 9/11 atrocity, including ads in which the faces of Democrats morphed into Saddam Hussein.”¹⁴

The fascist establishment also promotes an intolerant “Christian nationalism” that threatens to transform America into a theocracy. Christian nationalism is a “totalistic political ideology that asserts the Christian right to rule.” The Justice Department has “in important respects, been taken over by the Christian right,” as have other executive branch agencies.¹⁵

Krugman has been raising alarms about the fascist establishment for years. For example, in the 2002 New York Times column “White Man’s Burden,” Krugman implied that the planned invasion of Iraq was motivated by the same white supremacist cultural imperialism that dominated America in the early 20th century.

Krugman has also compared the supporters of the Iraq War to Nazis. In his 2003 column “Channels of Influence,” Krugman wrote of a pro-Iraq War rally, “To those familiar with 20th-century European history it seemed eerily reminiscent of Kristallnacht… But as Sinclair Lewis said, it can’t happen here.” The Times subsequently deleted the word “Kristallnacht” from this sentence and left an ellipse in its place, but the word did appear for a while in the online version of the paper. Krugman’s allusion is to Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, which dealt the rise of a fascist dictatorship similar to Hitler’s in America.

Krugman continued his theme that pro-war rallies were an ominous sign that democracy in America was in peril in an article published three months later. In “Toward One-Party Rule,” Krugman praised a forthcoming article by a fellow journalist:

In “Welcome to the Machine,” Nicholas Confessore draws together stories usually reported in isolation—from the drive to privatize Medicare, to the pro-tax-cut fliers General Motors and Verizon recently included with the dividend checks mailed to shareholders, to the pro-war rallies organized by Clear Channel radio stations. As he points out, these are symptoms of the emergence of an unprecedented national political machine, one that is well on track to establishing one-party rule in America.

A few more examples of Krugman’s wild accusations against the Bush administration. In 2004, he accused Attorney General John Ashcroft of having white supremacist sympathies. In an article on Hurricane Katrina, Krugman said Republicans harbored a “race-based hostility to the idea of helping the poor.” In “The Angry People,” Krugman compared Republicans to “rabid rightist” Jean-Marie Le Pen, the nativist French politician.

Krugman’s view of America is clear. America is governed by an establishment that is pro-white, anti-Democratic, theocratic, and imperialist. The fascist establishment maintains its rule through fear-mongering and propaganda. It promotes the interests of the wealthy over those of the American majority. In short, the establishment wishes to return America to the nationalist, authoritarian ideologies that prevailed in the West in the early 20th century.

The second part of this article will further establish that the myth of the fascist establishment is the common wisdom today and argue that this fantasy is rooted in Americans’ narcissistic desire to prove themselves authentic through easy, cost-free rebellion.

Click here for the second part of this article.

1. Paul Krugman. The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century (New York: Norton, 2003), 7-8. ↑
2. Paul Krugman. The Conscience of a Liberal (New York: Norton, 2007), 102-3. ↑
3. Ibid. 104. ↑
4. Ibid. 267. ↑
5. Ibid. 163. ↑
6. Ibid. 163. ↑
7. Ibid. 110. ↑
8. Ibid. 117. ↑
9. Ibid. 267. ↑
10. Ibid. 106 ↑
11. Ibid. 23. ↑
12. Ibid. 196-97. ↑
13. Ibid. 12. ↑
14. Ibid. 187. ↑
15. Ibid. 191-92. ↑

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