Impossibility: It Couldn't Happen

excerpted from the book

Friendly Fascism

The New Face of Power in America

by Bertram Gross

South End Press, 1980, paper

p331
Karl Popper
""It can't happen here" is always wrong: a dictatorship can happen anywhere."

p331
IMPOSSIBILITY: IT COULDN'T HAPPEN

The thought that some form of new fascism might possibly-or even probably-emerge in America is more than unpleasant. For many people in other countries, it is profoundly disturbing; for Americans, it is a source of stabbing anguish. For those who still see America as a source of inspiration or leadership, it would mean the destruction of the last best hope on earth. Even for those who regard America as the center of world reaction, it suggests that things can become still worse than they are.

An immediate-and all too human-reaction among Americans, and friends of America, is to deny the possibility. In other countries it might happen-but not here. In the Communist world, dictatorships of the proletariat or the Party . . . Military juntas in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Nigeria, and many other places . . . Other dictatorial styles in India, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines . . . But nothing like this in the prosperous, enlightened nations of Western civilization and the Judeo-Christian tradition. Above all, not in the United States of America, not in the land of the free and the home of the brave . . .

But why not? Why is it impossible?

Many of the arguments purporting to demonstrate impossibility actually demonstrate little more than an unwillingness to "think the unthinkable." Some people try to protect their sensibilities behind a tangle of terminological disputation. The word "fascism," they say, is an emotion-laden term of abuse, as though the brutal, inhuman realities behind other terms-whether "manipulatory authoritarianism," "bureaucratic collectivism," or "military junta"-do not also evoke deep human emotions. Some people argue that the future threat in America is socialist collectivism, not fascism, implying that those who detect a fascist danger are spreading leftist propaganda for the purpose of bringing on a different form of despotism. Others merely react to exaggerated claims that fascism is already here or is inevitable.

Nonetheless, there are at least three serious arguments used by those who think that it could not happen here.

One of the most subtle arguments is "American capitalism does not need fascism."

On this point, let me quote from Corliss Lamont, who grew up as a member of one of the families most closely associated with the Morgans and other titans of American banking:

The capitalist class in the United States does not need a fascist regime in order to maintain its dominance. The radical and revolutionary movements are weak and disunited. A large majority of the trade unions are conservative, and are actually part of the establishment . . . I do not see in the offing any constellation of forces that could put fascism across here.

To buttress his case, Lamont points out that the threat to American civil liberties was much greater during the periods of the notorious Palmer raids after World War I and of McCarthyism after World War II. He also cites various judicial victories in recent civil liberties cases. Unfortunately, he does not deal directly with the structure of the "capitalist class" and the Establishment, nor with any of the domestic and international challenges to American capitalism. Moreover, his thesis on the weakness of "radical and revolutionary movements" and the conservatism of trade unions is a double-edged argument. True, these factors are no serious challenge to capitalist dominance. By the same token, they could not be regarded as serious obstacles to creeping fascism. On this matter, Lamont leaves himself an escape clause to the effect that he does not see the necessary constellation of forces "in the offing."

A similar escape clause has been carved out by Theodore Draper. In a scholarly critique of an earlier article of mine on the subject, he added as an afterthought that he did not intend to give "assurances that we will not follow the German pattern of history into some form of fascism." And then he added that although the Republic is not "immediately in danger, if worse comes to worse, we may yet get some form of fascism.

A more widespread argument is "American democracy is too strong."

It is true, of course, that old-fashioned fascism never took root in a country with a solid tradition and history of constitutional democracy. The kind of democracy that grew up in both England and the United States was too much of a barrier to the Oswald Mosleys, the Huey Longs, and the Father Coughlins of a past generation. Even in France, the rise of the French fascists under Petain occurred only after military conquest by the Nazis.

But this kind of argument boils down to nothing less than the identification of obstacles. It provides no evidence to suggest that these obstacles are immovable objects that cannot be overcome or circumvented in the future.

In the early 1970s this argument took a more exhilarating-albeit occasionally flatulent-form. The democratic forces are becoming stronger.

In The Greening of America, Charles Reich predicted a "revolution of the new generation." He saw in the counterculture of youth a movement that would break through the metal and plastic forms of the Corporate State (which he held was already here) and bring forth a new flowering of the human spirit. This optimistic spirit was repeated in global terms by Jean Francois Revel a year later. In Without Marx and Jesus, Revel pointed out that dissent has always thrived in America and that the new dissenters are building not merely a counterculture but a counter-society that rejects nationalism, inequality, racial and sexual discrimination, and all forms of authoritarianism. As the first and best hope of the world, America will soon produce "a homo novus, a new man very different from other men."

I have never laughed at these salvationist predictions. They are based on an honest perception of many of the things that are not merely good, but wonderful, in my country. In fact, as I demonstrate in "The Democratic Logic in Action" (chapter 20), neither Reich nor Revel, nor other celebrants of America's potentialities have done sufficient justice to the variety of these hopeful currents. But they have tended to exaggerate their strength, perhaps on the theory that a strongly presented prophecy might be self-fulfilling.

I think it imperative to articulate more fully hopeful visions and to ground them on the more hopeful parts of the present. But in doing so, it would be highly misleading to ignore the fact that the new democratic currents represent a threat to all those elements in the Establishment that look forward to a more integrated power structure. This means conflicts whose outcomes cannot be predicted. Revel himself writes that America is "composed of two antagonistic camps of equal size-the dissenters and the conservatives." Writing before the rise of the new Radical Right, he then hazarded the guess that "the odds are in favor of the dissenters." Nonetheless, he accepted the possibility of the authoritarian suppression, sidetracking, or co-opting of the dissenters. I think he would agree with me today that if this should happen there would be many subspecies of the new man-and new woman-faceless oligarchs, humanoid technocrats, and comatose addicts of loveless sex, drugs, madness, and cults.

A third argument is that "While possible, a new form of fascism is too unlikely to be taken seriously."

I see this view as a tribute that blindness pays to vision. It is merely a sophisticated way of conceding possibility while justifying inaction. The outside chance, after all, rarely deserves to be a focus of continuing attention. In terms of its implications, therefore, "unlikely" may be the equivalent of either "impossible" or "so what?"

In daily life, of course, people and groups do take precautionary action to protect themselves or others against some unlikely events. This is the basis of the vast insurance industry in the capitalist world, which provides protection for some people against some of the monetary losses resulting from ill health, accidents, theft, fires, earthquakes, or floods. In all these cases of unlikely "bads," not insurance but prevention is the best protection. In the case of friendly fascism, it is the only protection.

Yet prevention is always difficult and requires entry into many fields. The prevention of disease and the prolongation of life go far beyond mere medical services; they involve nutrition, exercise, housing, peace of mind, and the control of pollution. The prevention of theft and corruption goes far beyond anything that can be done by police, courts, and jailers; it involves employment opportunities, working conditions, the reduction of discrimination and alienation, and a cleaning of higher-level corruption. The record is also discouraging in the case of all the unlikely major calamities of the modern age: power blackouts, the disposal of radioactive wastes from nuclear power plants, the control of plutonium from fast-breeder reactors, the spread of nuclear weapons, and the escalation in ever-deadlier forms of nuclear, chemical, and bacteriological overkill. Here preventive action spreads into other fields, going far beyond anything that can be done by "fail-safe" mechanisms. It involves nothing less than alternative forms of energy, human as well as solar, and the destruction of the deadliest weapons, if not the elimination of war itself as a mode of resolving conflicts.

There are two natural reactions in the face of the difficulties of prevention. One is to push the possibility into the background by mathematically based arguments that the statistical probability is very low. The other is to exaggerate both the horror and the probability of the calamities to be avoided, justifying such exaggeration on the grounds that it alone can move people to action.

I cannot accept either. As in the following chapters, I prefer to deal with preventive action directly. I do so because in my considered judgment, the coming of some new form of fascism in the United States- and other First World countries-is not only more likely than the extreme catastrophe, but it would also contribute to conditions under which most of the others would become less unlikely. At times, I find myself saying that friendly fascism is a two-to-one probability well before the end of the century. Then I stop and remind myself that in diagnosing broad historical trends no quantitative calculus is really possible. A more balanced statement is that friendly-or even unfriendly-fascism is a truly significant, not an insignificant possibility. Perhaps it is even highly probable.

INEVITABILITY: IT WILL HAPPEN

When Herbert Marcuse writes about "incipient fascism," when Kenneth Lamott used ``para-fascism" to describe California as the "distant warning system for the rest of the United States," when Michael Parenti talks about "creeping fascism," the main purpose is to identify present tendencies and future dangers. Similar use might be made of "proto-fascism" or-better yet-"pre-fascism." These are unwhispered words of warning, often engulfed by the vast silences on such subjects by the mass and elite media.

But the ambiguity of these words is often a weakness, one not to be overcome by stridency. They are wide open to anyone's interpretation that what creeps down the road will necessarily get to the road's end, that the latent must become full-blown. The "womb of history" metaphor used so vigorously by Marx tends to suggest that a little fascism is like a little pregnancy. With a strange innocence concerning the possibility of miscarriage or abortion, it can then be assumed that the pre- and the para- must eventually become the real thing itself.

But even without the use of such words I have found that any strong argument on the possibility of neofascism in America leads many people to conclude that it is inevitable. For some, both the logical case and the empirical evidence in present-day tendencies appear overwhelming. The fact that friendly fascism may come in a variety of forms and circumstances-rather than in some single guise and scenario-strengthens the sense of high probability. For others, perhaps, the judgment of inevitability heightens whatever masochistic pleasure people may get from premonitions of doom, or provides justification for personal escapism from any form of political activism or commitment. For still others, I suspect, the sense of inevitability is intensified by disenchantment with liberalism, socialism, and communism. Many of the very people who in previous periods were attacked as agents of "creeping socialism" or "creeping communism,, now feel that if either were to arrive in America-unlikely though this possibility may be-the result might not be too much different from the fruition of "creeping fascism." Indeed the possible convergence of neofascist state-supported capitalism and high-technology state socialism tends to give the impression that there are few alternatives to some form of repressive collectivism as the profile of man's fate by the end of this century.

The power of modern determinism lies in its "if-then" formulation: "If one does A, then B will result." In truly scientific terms the "will result" is generally a probability statement. But in the real world of political or managerial control, there is always a strong tendency to let the probabilistic tone fade into the background and to exploit the propagandistic potentialities of a more deterministic mood. In the work of many self-styled Marxists, this has led to an interesting contradiction. On the one hand, the collapse of capitalism under the battering ram of a proletarian revolution is often seen as inevitable. On the other hand, the leaders of the working class must not merely ride the waves of an inevitable future. Rather, they must work strenuously to bring the inevitable into being. Expressing the essence of a long stream of philosophic thought from Kant through and past Hegel, Engels put this powerfully in his cryptic thesis that "freedom is the recognition of necessity." While anti-Marxists are always eager to attack the alleged determinism of Karl Marx, they are rarely unloath to voice their own form of determinism. Thus Friedrich Hayek vigorously argues that (1) it was the socialist trends in Germany that led to German fascism, (2) a little bit of socialism leads inevitably to large-scale collectivism, and (3) socialism inevitably leads to fascism. In other words: "If s, then f."

Finally, in modern science there is a large strain of hope and faith in the eventual discovery and elucidation of deterministic laws of social control. B. F. Skinner has expressed this hope and faith more frankly than most of his colleagues in psychology and other disciplines. His critics have argued cogently that his views have a totalitarian bent-and I have already suggested how Skinnerian reinforcements could be used to help economize on terror and develop what Stephen Spender once called "fascism without tears." Another critical comment is in order, however. The very idea of deterministic control tends to spread inner feelings concerning the inevitability of some repressive form of collectivism- whether Skinner's type or some other. In turn, the sense of inevitability tends to undermine any serious efforts to develop alternatives or fight. The prediction that "It must happen"-particularly if the subjective feeling is more powerful than the rationalistic qualifications and "ifs" that most self-respecting intellectuals will automatically tack on to it- can contribute to a sense of hopelessness and the apathetic acceptance of the unfolding logic. It thus holds forth the potentiality of possibly-not inevitably-becoming a self-confirming prophecy.

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IRREVERSIBILITY: ETERNAL SERVITUDE OR HOLOCAUST

To shake people out of apathy toward some future danger, the self-destroying prophecy is often attempted. Its essence is the confident prediction of doom, either confined or unconfined. Thus the coming of neofascism to the United States may be seen as the maturation of an invincible oligarchy, or even as prelude to the global holocaust of all-out nuclear warfare.

I am peculiarly sensitive to this temptation. When a few of my students argued a decade ago that fascism would shake Americans from torpor and prepare the way for a more humanist society, I countered one irrationality with another by arguing that the "improbability of any effective internal resistance" to neofascism would doom all hopes of a humanist future. I drew an exaggerated parallel with the past by pointing out that after all serious internal resistance had been liquidated by the German, Japanese, and Italian fascists, "the only effective anti-fascism was defeat by external powers." Since the "only war that could defeat a neofascist America would be a nuclear war, a holocaust from which no anti-fascist victors would emerge," I concluded with the prophecy: "Once neofascism arrives, the only choice would be fascist or dead." 6

My phrasing at that time was an echo of Franklin D. Roosevelt's wartime rhetoric: "We, and all others who believe as deeply as we do, would rather die on our feet than live on our knees."-itself borrowed from the exhortation of the communist leader, Dolores Ibarruri ("La Pasionaria") in rallying the Loyalist forces against the Franco uprising in Spain. It was an effort to suggest "better dead than fascist." The aim in each case, of course, was to stress the urgency of vigorous and dedicated opposition to tyranny-indeed, to give up one's life, if necessary, to prevent the victory of tyranny.

Today, while still agreeing with Roosevelt that there arc things worth dying for, I would rephrase the ancient rhetoric this way: "Better alive and fighting tyranny in any form than dead and unable to fight." If neofascism should come to America, people may have to learn how to fight on their knees. The guiding rhetoric should be Churchill's statement that "We shall fight in the fields and in the streets; we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." ~ To paraphrase: "We shall face

p349
William H. Hastie
"Democracy is a process, not a static condition. It is becoming rather than being. It can easily be lost, but is never fully won. Its essence is eternal struggle."

p351
"Sure, we'll have fascism, but it will come disguised as Americanism." This famous statement has been attributed in many forms to Senator Huey P. Long, the Louisiana populist with an affinity for the demagogues of classic European fascism. If he were alive today, I am positive he would add the words "and democracy."

p356
Mary Parker Follett
"We are not wholly patriotic when we are working with all our heart for America merely; we are truly patriotic only when we are working also that America may take her place worthily and helpfully in the world of nations . . . Interdependence is the keynote of the relations of nations as it is the keynote of the relations of individuals within nations."

p359
James Fenimore Cooper
"The vulgar charge that the tendency of democracies is to leveling, meaning to drag all down to the level of the lowest, is singularly untrue; its real tendency being to elevate the depressed to a condition not unworthy of their manhood."

p359
Louis D. Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth in a few hands, but we can't have both."

p382
Mahatma Ghandhi
"For me patriotism is the same as humanity. I am patriotic because I am human and humane. It is not exclusive. I will not hurt England or Germany to serve India . . . My patriotism is inclusive and admits of no enmity or ill-will."

p383
George Washington, Farewell Address
"Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism."

p384
In his Militarism, USA, a sober critique based on years of experience in the U.S. Marine Corps, Colonel James A. Donovan:
identifies the dangerous patriot: "the one who drifts into chauvinism and exhibits blind enthusiasm for military actions. He is a defender of militarism and its ideals of war and glory. Chauvinism is a proud and bellicose form of patriotism . . . which identifies numerous enemies who can only be dealt with through military power and which equates the national honor with military victory."

p384
In The Reason for Democracy, published after his death in 1976, Kalman Silvert of New York University provided another pungent description of false patriots:
"People who wrap themselves in the flag and proclaim the sanctity of the nation are usually racists, contemptuous of the poor and dedicated to keeping the community of 'ins' small and pure of blood, spirit and mind."

p386
In Germany today the true patriots are those who, among other things, are trying to come to grips with the essence of past Nazi horrors. In the Soviet Union the true patriots are those who try to understand the nature and roots of Stalinism and the Stalinist legacy, rather than simply uttering some words about "the cult of personality" and running away from the subject. In America the true patriots are those who face the fact that Americans have always been both right and wrong and, instead of trying to squelch criticism, calmly take the position "My country right and wrong." They are those who defend the good, the true, and the beautiful in American life. They are willing to take risks in attacking what is wrong...

Friendly Fascism

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