After the Future

May 2, 2007

Authoritarian Watch (Updated)

Is there a line that respectable commentary cannot cross and still remain respectable. I can understand why lots of conservatives feel the malaise they do, but Thomas Sowell crosses a…

Is there a line that respectable commentary cannot cross and still remain respectable. I can understand why lots of conservatives feel the malaise they do, but Thomas Sowell crosses a line with a comment like this one in National Review Online:

When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our
media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I canât help wondering if
the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is
a military coup. (By way of Kevin Drum.)

He’s thinking that a military coup would be salvation?!! I realize a lot of nonsense comes from the NRO, but a mainstream, serious conservative magazine feels comfortable publishing this kind of thing? What problem does this country presently have for which a military coup is even a remotely conceivable solution? Is it just the litany of things he complains about in the rest of his column? Such talk makes me shiver because if he feels comfortable enough to say such a thing in his column, there are plenty of people thinking it. This kind of talk in our current environment cannot be blithely dismissed as the ravings of a marginal crank. Sowell is not so easily laughed off.

Nevertheless, the title of his piece, "Don’t Get Weak: Random thoughts on the passing scene" points to the underlying paranoia which produces this kind of mindset. In what mental universe is the U.S. weak? If there is a sane place in the collective consciousness from which such ideas can emanate, I have no idea where it is. But I suppose if enough people think this way, it becomes normal reality no matter how nutty it is. Do I think we are in imminent danger of a military coup? No, but I won’t feel comfortable until this kind of talk is pushed to whacko fringe and is roundly denounced by anyone who has an ounce of public credibility.

Update. If a military coup ever occurs, it will be because of the Christianist Wing of the military in the aftermath of another terrorist attack will feel the need to protect America from the debilitating weakness from which people like Sowell think it suffers. I don’t think it’s possible to exaggerate what these crazies are capable of doing. Chris Hedges‘ book and this new book by Weinstein and Seay make the unthinkable quite plausible. The Air Force since the days of Curtis Lemay has always been particularly scary.

Second Update. Just saw this piece by Greenwald about the WSJ op ed piece by Harvard’s Harvey Mansfield laying out the justification for one-man rule over the rule of law. In his article Mansfield actually says, "A free government should show its respect for freedom even when it has to take it away." Ten years ago this was crank stuff. Now it’s not. Something is coming to a head here. The crisis is far more serious than most Americans think, and Greenwald is someone who gets it:

The point here is not to spend much time arguing that Mansfield’s authoritarian cravings are repugnant to our political traditions. The real point is that Mansfield’s mindset is the mindset of the Bush movement, of the right-wing extremists who have taken over the Republican Party and governed our country completely outside of the rule of law for the last six years. Mansfield makes these arguments more honestly and more explicitly, but there is nothing unusual or uncommon about him. He is simply expounding the belief in tyrannical lawlessness on which the Bush movement (soon to be led by someone else, but otherwise unchanged) is fundamentally based. . . .

That continues to be the central political crisis we have in this country. It is an encouraging development that Congress is exercising aggressive oversight and investigative powers, but the administration is stonewalling completely, and will continue to, because they do not recognize any duty to respond, to answer questions, to be subject to scrutiny or accountability. We live in stormy times, and thus, as Mansfield says: "In stormy times, the rule of law may seem to require the prudence and force that law, or present law, cannot supply, and the executive must be strong."

The crazies are currently running the asylum, and until this movement is rendered completely impotent, we had better remain on our toes.

Comments

8 responses

Matt Zemek

May 3, 2007

Jack,
I can remember–as a teenager, when I was profoundly unsophisticated as a political and world observer–wanting to throw up whenever I came by Sowell’s syndicated column, which ran in my hometown paper, the Arizona Republic.
I recall glancing at one of his columns when in Phoenix several years ago, and having the same reaction.
He has long been one of the most odious, strident and militant voices in the media cosmos for quite some time. It used to amaze me–it now just reduces me to a dumbstruck silence–when a guy like Sowell laments the lack of civility and rationality in the land. His writing style and its underlying tone have the feel of one great collective sneer in the face of any slightly divergent viewpoints.
In the piece you linked to, I found the illegal alien/drug dealer comment just as offensive as the military coup line.
What’s sad, though, is that a number of his sentences or sentence fragments, such as the first half of the excerpt you provided, are sentences that you and I could have written.
“Degeneracy” is seen by Tom Sowell and Jack Whelan in the country, but for entirely opposite reasons.
So sad.
It’s quite fascinating–if also painful–to see the formation and calcification of certain ideological worldviews as they morph into (and anchor) subcultures that sink their meathooks into large swaths of human organisms.

Reply
Matthew

May 3, 2007

Sure, Sowell’s a wack job … but didn’t Jefferson say that the U.S. needed a revolution every few decades?

Reply
Mike McG…

May 3, 2007

Jack:
I too find Sowell´s commentary deeply disturbing. The failure to denounce crazy rhetoric like that of Sowell is surely regrettable but, hey, the inclination to cut slack to perceived enemies of enemies isn´t new and isn´t confined to the right.
You´ll think me naive, but I take issue with your assertion that it would be impossible to exaggerate what ´these people´ are capable of doing. It would deeply discredit the powerful discourse of serious thinkers like you if such fare were subject to ´fascists under every rock´ caricature.
In these comboxes a month or two ago you clarified for my benefit your political geography (right, left and center) and I found it helpful. I am now wondering how you would populate and name these groups.
Recently you have written, I believe approvingly, of a 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 split. Are you saying that the 1/3 of Americans who vote Republican or self-define as conservative Christians are fascists? Fellow travelers? Worthy of the mirror image of the 1950s ´pinko´ epithet? Surely not…but then isn´t it important to say who isn´t being painted with a broad brush?
You consistently bemoan the progressive inability to image something that could call forth a ´yes´ so if the outlines of just future are obscure to us how can we expect others to jump in with both feet?
I know some of ´these people´ and they are not nearly as grotesque as those you seem to bump into. None of them are fascists (unless we use the word as promiscously as McCarthy used communist) and none of them are looking for an excuse to overthrow the government. Their worldview is deeply out of favor. I prefer your frame to theirs but…yes…it is possible to exaggerate their power.

Reply
Jack Whelan

May 4, 2007

Mike–
Most Americans are decent people without a political agenda, but the same could be said for the Germans and the French. I don’t think that the American population as a whole is significantly better or worse than the French or German population. The everyday people we know in our everyday lives, no matter what their political opinions, are not the driving force behind extremist political movements, and the same could be said of the everyday French and Germans. But when extremists take over, the everyday people tend to go with the flow, and to convince themselves that it’s all for the best. At the beginning there are always reasons to justify the extremist takeover. The everyday people tend not to think too much about such things, and can find ways of adapting and implicitly approving evil if they aren’t affected too much by it. Think about all those everyday, decent white southerners who were fine with segregation.
I think that at least one third–probably half–of Americans would react to a fascist coup in this country in the same way that the French approved of the Vichy government. I talk about this in a post I put up a couple of months ago, which you can find here: http://afterthefuture.typepad.com/afterthefuture/2007/01/latent_authorit.html It was eye-opening for me to learn that most of the French were quite comfortable with the alliance forged with the Germans, so long as they were given the great war hero Petain as their figurehead leader. Petain stood for French patriotism and the Catholic religion, and for most of the French, that was all that mattered. And for the everyday American, that’s all that matters too–the symbolism that affirsm their group identity.
It wasn’t until two or three years after the 1940 invasion that the French people started catching on to what had really happened to them, and that’s when the resistance emerged, but even so the resistance was mainly composed of marginal types and were perceived by the everyday French not as freedom fighters but as terrorists. Now we see it through the lens of deGaulle and the mythology of the resistance, but in 1940-42 de Gaulle and the resistance were not at all players in the French drama.
Most Americans don’t want a fascist dictatorship, but they’ll adjust if one emerges. Americans have lost to a larger extent than most of us realize our democratic spirit and habits, and a substantial number of Americans, maybe most, don’t really care who’s running the government so long as they are left alone. And of course in the beginning, they will be left alone. It’s what happens later, after the infrastructure is laid, that the trouble begins.
So the reason for my concern lies in that a substantial part of that infrastructure has been laid by the current administration and people like Sowell are are allowed to say this kind of thing in mainstream publications. Ten years ago I would have rolled my eyes and shrugged it off, but the infrastructure wasn’t there then the way it is now. I honestly feel that we are more vulnerable now than ever before in our history. All it will take is another serious terrorist attack.
If you really believe I’m overreacting, read John Dean’s book and Chris Hedges book, and get back to me. There are factions within the U.S. which are profoundly un-democratic and lean heavily toward authoritarianism. They are organized, impassioned, and well funded. And given the right circumstances these factions could push their way into power. And I’m not seeing who’s gonna stop them.

Reply
Jack Whelan

May 4, 2007

Matt–
You’re right. There’s much that I agree about with the conservative critique of American cultural decadence, but the solution lies in the cultural sphere, not the political. The insanity of thinking that there’s a poltical/military solution for a fundamentally spiritual problem is what gets us into trouble time and time again.

Reply
Brian

May 4, 2007

Syndicated op-ed columnist (and staunch Christian fundamentalist) Cal Thomas penned a column a couple months back, in which he related a letter he’d received from a U.S. solider in Mosul: http://www.townhall.com/columnists/column.aspx?UrlTitle=a_letter_from_mosul&ns=CalThomas&dt=02/13/2007&page=full&comments=true
Thomas quotes the young man thusly:
“The American military has shown a stone-cold professional veneer throughout the seething debate raging over Iraq. Beneath that veneer, however, is a fuming, visceral hatred. We feel as though we have been betrayed by Congress…It stings me to the core to think that Americans would rather sell their honor than fight for a cause…We on the front lines long to see the white-fisted, purple-faced, raging hatred for our enemies that we saw on the morning of the 12th. We long to see America seeking victory as much as we do.”
Thomas’s piece, and the musings of his correspondent, chilled me to the bone. The disproportionate (and growing) representation in our armed forces of right-wing, fundamentalist, dominionist Christians who see themselves in a literal holy war against the Islamic world – and who may be growing increasingly impatient with civilian politicians, and a civilian populace, who in their estimation lack “the stomach” for the fight, is indeed a troubling development.
This is one of the problems, I think, with an all-volunteer military. Such a military seems inherently prone to being dominated by mercenaries or zealots (or both) who are cut off from the life of the nation they’re ostensibly defending.

Reply
Matt Zemek

May 5, 2007

Brian:
Add on the terrors and traumas of war, and battlefield action is only likely to increase animalistic, vengeful sentiments.
Witness the story today in the Seattle Times that 4 in 10 soldiers approves of torture if it would ferret out insurgents.
The lack of reporting on mental health and marital traumas on soldiers in this war is yet another example of lax media coverage (lack of coverage on Iraqi casualties another as well… so much dehumanization here, yet no Christian response from ostensibly Christian officials and leaders in government……)

Reply
John

May 8, 2007

Hi,As a keen Australian observer of USA politics & “culture” I dont find the said comment at all surprising—it has always been the subtext of right wing politics—its now very much on the surface.
Right wing so called “conservative” commentary is full of inherently authoritarian, and inherently fascist, language and intentions—and also as a necessary corollary the demonising of any one on the “left” who tries to offer a different perspective. The politics of binary exclusions and scape goating. If only those damed leftists and liberals(and Moslems) were out of the way everything would be hunky-dory. then we can get on with our “god”-mandated purpose of creating one capitalist market under “god”—manifest destiny rules OK!
I came across this book in my favourite Melbourne book store on the weekend.
To my left-liberal mind it is a superb description of the origins & consequences of the pathological state of the USA body politic.
Please check out:
http://www.morrisberman.com

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Authoritarian Watch (Updated)

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