The Rise of Pseudo Fascism

Part 1: The Morphing of the Conservative Movement

Part 2: The Architecture of Fascism

Part 3: The Pseudo-Fascist Campaign

Part 4: The Apocalyptic One-Party State

Part 5: Warfare By Other Means

Part 6: Breaking Down the Barriers

Part 7 [Conclusion]: It Can Happen Here

Almost certainly, Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here, published in 1935, is his most peculiar novel. For one thing, it's the closest thing to speculative fiction he ever wrote. It describes the rise to power of an American fascist named Buzz Windrip, who arrives on the political scene to rescue America from a plague of labor unions, welfare cheats, godless atheists, and gun-grabbing Jews.

It's an intriguing enough premise -- one to which, obviously, Philip Roth owes at least a small debt in his new The Plot Against America, which follows a similar premise -- but, to be honest, Lewis fails to make it very compelling. Certainly it lacks the power of later visions of a totalitarian society like Brave New World or 1984.

In most respects, it's one of his weakest works; it lacks most of the human detail and probing realism of his greatest novels. It also was written after he had been awarded the Nobel, and actually marked the beginning of his decline as a writer.

Nonetheless, it's intriguing because Lewis was writing in a time when fascism was still a very familiar thing, and before it had mutated into the Holocaust Horror we think of when we think of fasicsm today. And the book is, of course, a denunciation of fascism and its potential in America. Lewis may have lost his writer's touch, but he still understood Main Street better than most, and some of his detail is very telling indeed, at least in a political sense. Regardless of what he had lost as a writer at this point, his insight was still intact.

The title comes from an exchange in Chapter 2:

"... Wait till Buzz takes charge of us. A real Fascist dictatorship!”

"Nonsense! Nonsense!" snorted Tasbrough. "That couldn't happen here in America, not possibly! We’re a country of freemen."

"The answer to that," suggested Doremus Jessup, "if Mr. Falck will forgive me, is 'the hell it can't!' Why, there's no country in the world that can get more hysterical -- yes, or more obsequious! -- than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns HIS State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio—divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding's appointees? Could Hitler's bunch, or Windrip's, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and somebody actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty measles'? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the -- well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy? ... Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution? ... Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition -- shooting down people just because they MIGHT be transporting liquor -- no, that couldn’t happen in AMERICA! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! We're ready to start on a Children's Crusade -- only of adults -- right now, and the Right Reverend Abbots Windrip and Prang are all ready to lead it!"

It isn't hard to hear not just precursors but parallels to today's political milieu. Especially noteworthy: the reference to "Liberty measles" ("Freedom fries," anyone?), as well as the "wartime censorship of the papers".

But Lewis was speaking of the kinds of character traits that a nation has to have to lead it into fascism, and how despite (and in fact, largely because of) our blithe self-denials, we remain vulnerable to this peculiar brand of totalitarianism, much more so than other kinds. The names have changed, but the traits are still with us. How many doubt that Rush Limbaugh is just a fresh incarnation of Father Coughlin? That the Republican warnings about what Al Smith might do to people's religious beliefs are being recycled as RNC flyers intimating that Democrats intend to ban the Bible this year?

As it happens, most serious scholars of fascism agree with Lewis, ranging from Stanley Payne (who is more skeptical, however, than most) to Roger Griffin to Robert O. Paxton. In his The Anatomy of Fascism, Paxton writes [pp. 201-202]:

The United States itself has never been exempt from fascism. Indeed, antidemocratic and xenophobic movements have flourished in America since the Native American party of 1845 and the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s. In the crisis-ridden 1930s, as in other democracies, derivative fascist movements were conspicuous in the United States: the Protestant evangelist Gerald B. Winrod's openly pro-Hitler Defenders of the Christian Faith with their Black Legion; William Dudley Pelley's Silver Shirts (the initials "SS" were intentional); the veteran-based Khaki Shirts (whose leader, one Art J. Smith, vanished after a heckler was killed at one of his rallies); and a hot of others. Movements with an exotic foreign look won few followers, however. George Lincoln Rockwell, flamboyant head of the American Nazi Party from 1959 until his assassination by a disgruntled follower in 1967, seemed even more "un-American" after the great anti-Nazi war.

Much more dangerous are movements that employ authentically American themes in ways that resemble fascism functionally. The Klan revived in the 1920s, took on virulent anti-Semitism, and spread to cities and the Middle West. In the 1930s, Father Charles E. Coughlin gathered a radio audience estimated at forty million around and anticommunist, anti-Wall Street, pro-soft money, and -- after 1938 -- anti-Semitic message broadcast from his church on the outskirts of Detroit. For a moment in early 1936 it looked as if his Union Party and its presidential candidate, North Dakota congressman William Lemke, might overwhelm Roosevelt. The plutocrat-baiting governor Huey Long of Louisiana had authentic political momentum until his assassination in 1935, but, though frequently labeled fascist at the time, he was more accurately a share-the-wealth demagogue. The fundamentalist preacher Gerald L.K. Smith, who had worked with both Coughlin and Long, turned the message more directly after World War II to the "Judeo-Communist conspiracy" and had a real impact. Today a "politics of resentment" rooted in authentic American piety and nativism sometimes leads to violence against some of the very same "internal enemies" once targeted by the Nazis, such as homosexuals and defenders of abortion rights.

Of course the United States would have to suffer catastrophic setback and polarization for these fringe groups to find powerful allies and enter the mainstream. I half expected to see emerge after 1968 a movement of national reunification, regeneration, and purification directed against hirsute antiwar protesters, black radicals, and "degenerate" artists. I thought that some of the Bietnam veterans might form analogs to the Freikorps of 1919 Germany or the Italian Arditi, and attack the youths whose demonstrations on the steps of the Pentagon had "stabbed them in the back." Fortunately I was wrong (so far). Since September 11, 2001, however, civil liberties have been curtailed to popular acclaim in a patriotic war upon terrorists.

Paxton, correctly I think, identifies today's far-right militia/Patriot and white-supremacist organizations -- who remain largely relegated to the fringe in the national conception of things -- as the remnants of genuine proto-fascism in America. (Proto-fascism, of course, is genuinely fascist at its core -- in contrast to pseudo-fascism, which has the outward structural appearance of fascism but is different in its underlying nature.)

Paxton's assumption is that any American fascism will arise under the same mechanism as that of fascisms of the past: as a discrete movement that moves in to take advantage of political space created by the failures of the traditional political powers. That is, under this conception, it would have to emerge as a third party that displaces the Republican and Democratic parties.

What he doesn't seem to consider, in fact, is the possibility of an alternative mechanism: namely, the transformation of an existing party into a fascist entity from within -- not necessarily by design, but by a coalescence of political forces already latent in the landscape. This possibility, actually, is raised by the fact that, as Paxton describes in detail, fascism is not so much an ideological "ism" but a constellation of traits that takes on a pathological life of its own. And these traits, as he details, are very much present, historically speaking, in American political life.

In fact, this very mechanism was raised by the one of the significant American fascist "intellectuals" who arose in the 1930s. His name was Lawrence Dennis, and in 1936 -- a year after Lewis' novel -- he wrote an ideological blueprint titled The Coming American Fascism.

Dennis predicted that, eventually, the combination of a dictatorial and bureaucratic government and big business would continue exploiting the working middle class until, in frustration, it would turn to fascism. What's especially noteworthy were the kind of conditions he foresaw for this to happen:

Nothing could be more logical or in the best political tradition than for a type of fascism to be ushered into this country by leaders who are now vigorously denouncing fascism and repudiating all that it is understood to stand for...

And, needless to add, these principles would mean the replacement of the existing organizational pattern of public administration by that of a highly centralized government which would exercise the powers of a truly national State, and which would be manned by a personnel responsible to a political party holding a mandate from the people. This party would be the fascist party of the United States-undoubtedly called, however, by another name...

Yet how infinitely better for the in-elite of the moment to have fascism come through one of the major parties of the moment than to have it fight its way to power as the program of the most embittered leaders of the out-elite. ...

This description has an ominous ring in an era in which the dominant party in power in America is frenziedly declaring war on "Islamofascism" while itself taking on many of the traits of fascism itself. It's unlikely that Dennis' thinking guided any of the intellectuals in today's mainstream conservative movement, though it is worth noting that his work is enjoying a renaissance in the paleo-conservative movement, particularly in such places as The Occidental Review, the far-right publication sponsored by William Regnery.

Rather than being guided consciously (and there certainly is no evidence whatsoever for an ideologically fascist conspiracy), this transformation is occurring almost spontaneously, as the forces that fascism comprises gradually come together under their own gravity.

The primary impetus has been the change under which conservatism became a discrete movement intent on seizing the reins of power. In the process, the means -- that is, the obtaining of power -- became the end. And once the movement became centered around obtaining power, by any means necessary, then ideology became fungible according to the needs of its drive to acquire power, just as it was with fascism. This virtually guaranteed it would become a travesty of its original purpose. The nature of today's "conservative movement" is no more apparent than in how distinctly un-conservative its actual conduct has been: busting budgets, falling asleep at the wheel of national security, engaging wars recklessly and without adequate planning.

Two things occurred to the conservative movement in this drive for power:

-- It increasingly viewed liberals not merely as competitors but as unacceptable partners in the liberal-conservative power-sharing agreement that has been in place since at least the New Deal and the rise of modern consumer society. Ultimately, this view metastacizes into seeing liberals as objects to be eliminated.

-- It became increasingly willing to countenance ideological and practical bridges with certain factions of the extremist right. This ranged from anti-abortion and religious-right extremists to the neo-Confederates who dominate Republican politics in the South to factions of the Patriot/militia movement.

The combination of these two forces exerted a powerful rightward pull on the movement, to the point where extremist ideas and agendas have increasingly been adopted by the mainstream right, flowing into an eliminationist hatred of liberalism. In the process, their own rhetoric has come to sound like that on the far right. A lot of the dabbling in far-right memes has been gratuitous, intended to "push the envelope" for talk-radio audiences in constant need of fresh outrageousness.

Fully enabled, free of any of the traditional checks on its power, by the earth-shaking effects of Sept. 11, the movement morphed into a genuinely radical force. And in its outward shape, it has come to resemble fascism, particularly in the way it has adopted nearly all of the "mobilizing passions" of fascism to some degree, whether greater or lesser.

But at its core, it is not fascism. At least not yet. Remember Paxton's rather clear description of fascism in the context of the history of ideologies: it is, in essence, "dictatorship against the Left amidst popular enthusiasm." Well, there can be little doubt of its overt anti-leftism; increasingly the mainstream right's entire raison d'etre is, in Mussolini's phrase, "to break the bones of the Democrats of Il Mundo". But it is not yet a dictatorship, though the conservative movement's efforts to create a one-party state approach that. Neither does it enjoy true popular enthusiasm. Sure, they have a sizeable and boisterous following, and their increasing conversion of mass media to a propaganda arm of the right is a serious problem that does not bode well for stopping them from actually gaining a majority following.

Put it this way: The fact that nearly half the country is willing to endorse the manifest incompetence of a man like George W. Bush, by returning him to the Oval Office for another four years, is not a good sign in this regard. The remarkable levels of delusion and misinformation among Bush supporters is another confirmation that this is not a healthy political milieu.

At every step, rather than disconfirming the trend, the Bush White House confirms it. First we have the Bush campaign's bizarre authoritarian behavior surrounding his public appearances. Non-Bush supporters (and even those deemed insufficiently supportive) are prevented from entering, and even ostensibly neutral messages like "Protect Our Civil Liberties" are cause for being ejected and threatened with arrest.

Then, Chris Suellentrop at Slate recently uncovered the "Bush Pledge," a pledge of allegiance to Bush himself that thousands of Republicans have apparently taken:

"I want you to stand, raise your right hands," and recite "the Bush Pledge," said Florida state Sen. Ken Pruitt. The assembled mass of about 2,000 in this Treasure Coast town about an hour north of West Palm Beach dutifully rose, arms aloft, and repeated after Pruitt: "I care about freedom and liberty. I care about my family. I care about my country. Because I care, I promise to work hard to re-elect, re-elect George W. Bush as president of the United States."

Billmon (as always) put it best:

The truly sinister thing -- and the reason why that Slate story made the hair stand up on the back of my neck -- is that even as these people move, like sleepwalkers, towards a distinctly American version of the cult of the leader, most of them honestly appear to have no idea what they're doing, or creating. I'm not even sure the Rovians themselves entirely understand the atavistic instincts they've awakened in Bush's most loyal followers. But the current is running now, fast and strong. And we're all heading for the rapids.

Likewise, the continuing trend toward disproportionately ugly and violent behavior related to the election, especially on the part of Bush supporters, and in some cases directly related to the Republican campaigns, is even further cause for concern. Because it is the point at which violence becomes an organizational response that the conservative movement will cease to be pseudo-fascist.

Regardless of the mechanism, Paxton is clear that not only can fascism take root in America, but that it will also take a peculiarly American shape:

The language and symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of course, have little to do with the original European models. They would have to be as familiar and reassurign to loyal Americans as the language and symbols of the original fascisms were familiar and reassuring to many Italians and Germans. No swastikas in American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy.

Around such reassuring language and symbols in the event of some redoubtable setback to national prestige, Americans might support an enterprise of forcible national regeneration, unification, and purification. Its targets would be the First Amendment, separation of Church and State (creches on the lawns, prayers in the schools), efforts to place controls on gun ownership, desecrations of the flag, unassimilated minorities, artistic license, dissident and unusual behavior of all sorts that could be labeled antinational or decadent.

It's worth observing, of course, that nearly all of these themes have played significant roles in the campaign waged by the conservative movement in 2004 -- particularly in the monumental attacks on gays and lesbians under the pretense of stopping gay marriage, coinciding with a de facto antagonism to church-state separation, represented by the Republican National Committee's hiring of David Barton, a noted anti-separation extremist, as a campaign consultant and speaker at RNC events.

What's still lacking, however, from the basic recipe for genuine fascism is the emergence of a genuine crisis of democracy. Unfortunately, because of the extreme volatility of the political environment, the potential for such a crisis erupting exists regardless of whatever among the likely scenarios plays out in Tuesday's election:

Bush wins legitimately and cleanly. Under this scenario, the conservative movement gains a death grip on the reins of power. Democrats will be gerrymandered and maneuvered into meaninglessness, paving the way for an essentially one-party state. And unencumbered by the need to win re-election, as well as empowered by an actual mandate, Bush's radical social and political agenda will begin to take effect. Democratic institutions across the board will suffer.

Kerry wins cleanly. In this event, there will continue to be heated opposition to any reforms he might attempt, waged often through the propaganda organs of the mainstream press. There will be continuous claims that Kerry won illegitimately. Moreover, the True Believers of the conservative movement -- many of whom have become radicalized to an unusual level over the course of the campaign -- will act out their resistance to a Kerry regime violently. Expect a sharp spike in domestic terrorism, and further divisiveness from the conservative movement, much of it centered around Kerry's supposed "treasonousness." Expect the rhetoric to become truly violent when the debate focuses on the United Nations.

Bush maintains power illegitimately. This is the most potentially troubling of the scenarios. Considering their manifest willingness to do anything to win -- even litigate their way into the White House in the face of a popular-vote loss -- the Bush campaign is nearly limitless in what it will attempt to maintain its hold on power this year. This may range from massive lawsuits contesting election results because of alleged "voter fraud" in heavily minority precincts, to resorting to Republican state legislatures overriding the outcome of their elections (if pro-Kerry) and selecting in their place a Republican slate of electors -- a decidedly possible outcome, since the Supreme Court made clear in the 2000 Florida debacle that legislatures had the right to do this. Recall, if you will, Antonin Scalia's chilling remark: "There is no right of suffrage under Article II," meaning, there is no constitutional right to vote for president.

Major terrorist attacks occur during the election. As Richard Hasen pointed out in Slate, this is "the true nightmare scenario": An attack on a major city in a battleground state could prevent thousands, even millions of voters from making it to the polls, triggering a political and legal fight over how to handle the matter afterward. It's worth noting, of course, that not only are Oklahoma City-style domestic terrorists the potential perpetrators of such acts, they are, under the current charged milieu, those most likely. But if such an attack does occur, the presumptive suspects of course will be al Qaeda.

Of course, terrorist attacks needn't occur only on Election Day to have a potentially profound impact on American society. Indeed, if they are severe or frequent enough, it is clear that they would clearly represent a continuing source of crisis for democracy. Regardless of the outcome of Tuesday's vote, the power of terrorism to spark such a crisis remains profound.

In other words, it's clear that the "crisis of democracy" necessary to create a genuinely fascist dynamic is a real potential that lies around many corners on our current path. The key, then, is to finding the path that does not take us there.

If fascism is indeed latent in our political landscape and rising to the surfact, then the critical question becomes this: How do we prevent it from doing so?

First, it's important to understand the conditions under which fascism's attempts to take root and gain power have failed. I described some of these in Part IV of "Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism," referencing Paxton's work on the failure of French fascism. Put briefly, fascism only obtained power by forming alliances with mainstream conservatives -- and there was no "political space" for that in France. The same, I explained, was true of the previous failure of American fascism:

Fascism as a political force suffered from the same sort of bad timing in the United States when it arose in the 1920s -- conservatives were in power and had no need of an alliance with fascism, and there was no great social crisis. When it re-arose in the 1930s, the ascendance of power-sharing liberalism that was as popular in rural areas as in urban, again left fascism little breathing room.

And in the 1990s, when proto-fascism re-emerged as popular movement in the form of the Patriots, conservatives once again enjoyed a considerable power base, having control of the Congress, and little incentive to share power. Moreover, the economy was booming -- except in rural America.

What the current pseudo-fascist phenomenon represents is a different kind of mechanism, one in which the political space is created not apart from the major parties, but from within one of them -- the one that had been traditionally hospitable to the traits that constitute fascism. This tendency dates back to the days of the America First Committee.

This tendency has finally metastacized into a genuinely dangerous situation, one in which the GOP has become host to a Stalinist movement that exhibits so many of the traits of fascism that the resemblance is now unmistakable.

This means a complete reconfiguration of the calculations of any "political space" that might be created by a serious crisis of American democracy. Instead of creating an opportunity for a fascist movement to gain legitimacy through an alliance with conservatives, what such a crisis instead creates is a situation in which the latent fascist elements come to the surface and, in turn, come to dominate the nature of a party already in power.

This makes any potential for a crisis of democracy potentially more dangerous in terms of the opening it creares for fascism, because it can manifest itself much more rapidly, and without any requisite shift in the political space. This is especially the case for an entity like the conservative movement, which already in so many ways dominates the American political landscape now.

By far, of the potential scenarios for a crisis of democratic institutions outlined above, the most likely to produce a real outbreak of fascism is the third one, in which Bush again takes charge of the Oval Office through litigation or some other abrogation of the norms of democratic rule. If it happens a second time -- and particularly if Bush does so by once again disenfranchising voters -- then there will be a strong, perhaps violent reaction from the left, who will have (quite rationally) come to the conclusion that Bush and his regime not only have no respect for democratic institutions, but that they intend to undermine if not destroy them outright.

The danger lies with that reaction, which in this scenario would almost certainly produce mass protests: marches, demonstrations, anti-Bush rallies. These would almost certainly be accompanied by a nominal level of violence: arrests, police confrontations, some provocation-related violence, property damage. This violence would then become justification for violent counters -- the organizational groundwork for which has already been laid in the form of such anti-liberal provocateurs as the Freepers and Protest Warriors.

The reaction to a second Bush term under illegitimate conditions, then, would likely spark a counter-reaction that would manifest condoned, organizational violence, the lack of which is one of the distinguishing characteristics of pseudo-fascism. This is the scenario in which the danger of fascism lies closest to the surface.

The prospects under a Bush-victory scenario are not much brighter: Bush with a mandate will be Bush Unleashed, and the volatility of this election will likely release a lot of pent-up frustrations at liberals, but it's difficult to say how high the levels of violence are likely to be. On the other hand, the conservative movement's totalitarian impulses, particularly in gerrymandering the political system a la Texas, to ensure the GOP's continued political dominance, raise the chilling prospect of, at the very best, a Stalinist/PRI-style one-party state, where every person in the government is first a member of the party. This shift will be more incremental in nature, but there is also bound to be a breaking point at which a cumulative reaction arises against it.

The prospect for a Kerry win is the most promising, but also the most troubling. Certainly the likelihood of large contingent of radicalized, Patriot-style extremists bent on opposing his presidency is a daunting thought, but unfortunately, the extraordinary penetration of the "Kerry is a traitor" meme to a broad segment of the voting population is a certain recipe for producing these kinds of radicals should Kerry in fact win.

On the other hand, there are many indications that the extreme pressures under which the conservative movement has cobbled together its innately limited ruling coalition may in turn cause that coalition to crack apart. As the Washington Monthly recently observed, the gap between the religious right and the neoconservatives who rule the White House roost is growing. Even a Bush victory may not ensure the alliance will hold together, and a Bush loss is highly likely to shatter it.

Indeed, one of the dynamics likely to emerge from a Kerry win will be a split between the "theocons" of the religious right, who appear inclined to form an alliance with the "paleocons" who are agitating for immigration reform, while the neoconservative faction is likely to gravitate in the direction of traditional, non-movement Republicans.

Regardless of which of these outcomes emerges Tuesday and afterward, it is clear that the forces which the conservative movement has put in motion are going to have harmful consequences in the long term, particularly when it comes to attacks on democratic institutions like voting and privacy rights. Even more egregious is the larger harm to the health of the body politic; the divisiveness sown by conservative ideologues is not going away any time soon, regardless of how thoroughly they may be repudiated. If they are not, then it will worsen.

On the meta level, preventing fascism means averting a crisis of democracy, and dismantling the fascist architecture of the conservative movement by repudiating its tenets. If Bush wins, especially illegitimately, that will entail resisting the urge to give in to violence and anger. It will be understandable, of course, but progressives have to understand that it will only fuel a fascist nightmare by giving movement ideologues the pretext to unleash the dogs.

If Kerry wins, we have to be prepared for the backlash that will not need any time to build. Indeed, it is already in place, and it will make the attacks on Bill Clinton look like a walk in the park. It has to be confronted directly; Democrats can no longer afford to presume that their political opponents are willing to play fair by normative rules. A unified, firm and clear response -- especially to the inevitable claims of Kerry's illegitimacy -- has to become the standard of operation instead of an afterthought.

If there is going to be any healing, it will have to begin after the attack style of politics -- in which the smearing an opponent substitutes for the lack of any substance or accomplishment -- has been relegated to the ashheap of history. And that will probably never disappear until the nation's mass media are effectively reformed and the trivialization of the national discourse ceases.

But there is also the personal level at which we have to deal with this as well. As I've discussed previously, the influence of this movement has pervaded our personal lives and relationships as well. Families, longtime friends, and communities are being torn apart by the divisive politics of resentment and accusation that have become the core of the conservative movement's appeal.

One of the realities about coming to terms with fascism is that it is not an immediately demonizing force -- that is, instead, one of its long-term effects. Conservative-movement adherents are still human beings, and seeing them in terms of participating in a kind of fascism should not render them into mere discardable objects. It's much clearer if we understand that many of them are simply responding naturally to the psychological manipulation inherent in the movement's appeal.

Recognizing what we are up against -- namely, a kind of fascism -- is critical to dealing effectively with it, because even if wielding the term in discourse can be unhelpful (it remains a loaded term easily misinterpreted), this model gives us a key to understanding the thought -- or rather, emotive -- processes that are the core of the pseudo-fascist appeal. Getting our opponents to see that, for example, dissent is not treason but patriotism, requires getting them to let go of their preconceptions. It means, in the end, getting them to see us as human beings too. And when we do that, the fascist facade will crumble.

This is, of course, easier said than done. It often is simply impossible. But maintaining this approach, standing firm, and refusing to descend into eye-for-an-eye contemptuousness is, in the end, our only way out of the dark, cavernous maze into which our national politics have descended.

- 30 -

Storm warning

It's already starting to look like the Kerry haters are going to eclipse the Clinton haters for sheer bile, and potentially violence as well, as revealed in this telling report from Salon's Michelle Goldberg:

Lisa Dupler, a 33-year-old from Columbus, held up a rainbow-striped John Kerry sign outside the Nationwide Arena on Friday, as Republicans streamed out after being rallied by George W. Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger. A thickset woman with very short, dark hair, Dupler was silent and barely flinched as people passing her hissed "faggot" into her ear. An old lady looked at her and said, "You people are sick!" A kid who looked to be about 10 or 11 affected a limp wrist and mincing voice and said, "Oh, I'm gay." Rather than restraining him, his squat mother guffawed and then turned to Dupler and sneered, "Why don't you go marry your girlfriend?" Encouraged, her son yelled, "We don't want faggots in the White House!"

The throngs of Republicans were pumped after seeing the president and the action hero. But there was an angry edge to their elation. They shrieked at the dozen or so protesters standing on the concrete plaza outside the auditorium. "Kerry's a terrorist!" yelled a stocky kid in baggy jeans and braces. "Communists for Kerry! Go back to Russia," someone else screamed. Many of them took up the chant "Kerry sucks"; old women and teenage boys shouting with equal ferocity.

... Dave, a 54-year-old electronic technician, said that if Kerry wins, "I'm going to leave the country and go to a Third World nation and start a ranch." His wife, Jenny, laughed and accused him of hyperbole, but he insisted he's been studying Portuguese, the language of Brazil, "so we'll have an escape route." Sitting near him was Greg Swalley, a blond electrical contractor. "I think Kerry is the anti-Christ," he said, only half-joking. "He scares me."

... Looking at the small knot of protesters, many of whom were chanting, "Four more days," 22-year-old Nick Karnes, wearing a knit ski cap and baggy jeans, yelled, "Shut up!" Then he turned to his friend and said, "We can take 'em."

"I'm definitely gonna vote for him," Karnes said of Bush. "Because he's been the president for four years and nothing bad has happened since Sept. 11. He's kept me alive for four years." If Kerry becomes president, he said, "We'll be dead within a year."

Karnes told me that most of his friends are voting for Bush, too, but a couple are voting for Kerry. "I'm not speaking to them right now," he said.

When the crowd came pouring out of the arena, the vitriol only increased. One clean-cut man, holding his son by the hand, yelled "coward!" at one of the protesters. I asked him what made him say that, and he said, "Because he's demeaning our troops by saying they are fighting a lost cause."

... A few of the protesters, meanwhile, were red-faced from yelling at their antagonists about homophobia and budget deficits and a senseless war. Republicans were incensed. A blond woman dragged her young redheaded son toward the protesters, pointed to them, and said, "These are the Democrats," speaking as if she was revealing an awful reality that he was finally old enough to face. As she walked away with a group of other mothers and children, she was so angry she could barely speak. A friend consoled her by promising her that Bush would win. After all, she pointed out, "Look how many more Bush supporters there were on the street!"

That calmed the angry blond woman down a little. But she was still mad. "We," she said, stammering and gesturing contemptuously at the demonstrators, "we are the way it should be!"

As I was saying ... the appearance of violence and intimidation tactics, encouraged by campaign rhetoric, and spouting beliefs that not only are disattached from reality, but threaten apocalyptic violence should Kerry win -- that is one of those the signs that the conservative movement is becoming less pseudo-fascist and is stepping closer to the real thing.

If it continues beyond Election Day, and it becomes expressly encouraged, watch out.

Sign-theft silliness

Another funny sign-theft story:

Homemade security catches act on tape

This involves a man in Encinitas, Calif., who put up a big Kerry/Edwards sign on his property. He also set up a security system in case someone decided to mess with it:

A man triggered the alarm and light Tuesday just before midnight as he ripped the sign, which is highly visible to traffic on Encinitas Boulevard, from the wall, according to an incident report filed with the Sheriff's Department.

Nolan said the man dropped the sign after realizing it was firmly attached to the structure by a thick rope, then jumped a fence and jogged south onto North Vulcan Avenue.

As neighbors called the Sheriff's Department, Nolan said, he chased the man, caught up to him near Vulcan and Encinitas Boulevard, grabbed his arm, then tackled him and "sat on him until the police got there."

The suspect, whom the sheriff's report identified as Jessie Irvin Mathews, 22, of Vista, initially told deputies that Nolan had "jumped him and tried to rape him" for no apparent reason, Nolan said.

One problem with that: Mathews was caught on camera pulling the banner off the garage and starting to run away with it, according to the incident report.

After viewing the tape, deputies transported Mathews to their Encinitas station and cited him for attempted petty theft.

Nolan, 40, said he "had a pretty good feeling" he would catch someone in the act and was overjoyed that his homemade security system did its job.

"It's my Republican trap," he said.

Add this to the collection.

Who benefits

The Osama bin Laden tape was a "little gift"?

Sure. And 9/11 was like "hitting the trifecta".

Why is it that when these characters say little things like this that reveal the shape of their "reality" -- the recognition (perhaps unconscious) that while the rest of America takes the hit from terrorists like bin Laden, Team Bush actually benefits from their activities -- no one ever seems to notice?

[Via Atrios.]

Liar in Chief

Happened to catch Nick Kristoff's bizarre ramble in the NYT the other day, in which he makes the argument that even though Bush lies, they're not really that important:

The current president's hyped version of the incident reflects his casual relationship with truth. Like President Ronald Reagan, reality to him is not about facts, but about higher meta-truths: Mom and Dad are loving grandparents, Saddam Hussein is an evil man, and so on. To clarify those overarching realities, Mr. Bush harnesses "facts," both true and false.

We all do this to some extent, of course, discounting data points that don't fit our preconceptions. My Times colleague John Tierney wrote a few days ago of a new report suggesting, based on their scores on military intelligence tests taken in the 1960's, that Mr. Bush had an I.Q. in the 95th percentile of the population and that John Kerry's was in the 91st percentile. Yet most liberals have not revised their view that Mr. Bush is a nitwit.

In fact, I'm convinced that Mr. Bush is not only smarter, but also a better man than his critics believe. Most important, he's not a panderer. While Mr. Kerry zigs and zags on trade and Middle East policy, Mr. Bush has a core of values and provides genuine leadership (typically, I believe, in the wrong direction, by trying to reshape America and the world according to a far-right agenda).

As Bob Somerby pointed out:

But note how weak Kristof's reasoning is. He builds an entire column about Bush's honesty around this one silly, trivial incident. And he doesn't seem to have tried to determine whether Bush even knew that his story was semi-false.

What's especially noteworthy is that Kristoff hasn't even bothered to look at cases where Bush's "casual relationship with the truth" has had a role in making some of the most colossally incompetent decisions in presidential history. Instead of examining a trivial incident like this one, Kristoff should have examined one of Bush's lies with greater consequence -- say, the WMD "threat" posed by Saddam Hussein.

Or how about the "trifecta" joke? I wrote about it some time back:

Bush has now been telling the same, spectacularly tasteless joke to a variety of mostly Republican audiences as part of his stock stump speech for the better part of four months now. This is its basic telling:

"You know, when I was running for President, in Chicago, somebody said, would you ever have deficit spending? I said, only if we were at war, or only if we had a recession, or only if we had a national emergency. Never did I dream we’d get the trifecta."

According to the transcripts, this joke usually elicits laughter from the mostly GOP crowds to whom Bush tells it.

So far, Bush has told the joke on the record at least 14 times. It originated, evidently, as an anecdote he told to business leaders Oct. 3, 2001, when he explained his three-part reasoning for going into deficit spending.

However, the real problem with the joke is that it is a complete falsehood.

Bush never told any audience, or any reporter, in Chicago that he could foresee three conditions under which deficit spending might be necessary. In fact, throughout the entire campaign, Bush had been insistent that budget surpluses would continue, and only once does he appear to have told any public audience at any time that deficit spending might become necessary -- a Sept. 22, 2000 interview with Paula Zahn, in which he defended his tax cuts even in the face of a "short-term deficit." The only other times that Bush ever seems to have brought up the subject of deficit spending were those when he accused Al Gore of planning to resume the practice.

When reporters have sought the original remarks, the White House press office has been unable to come up with any evidence that Bush ever made the remarks that he claims. ...

This joke, of course, had it all: the pandering, the brazen falsity, and its use to deflect blame on a matter of great national import -- a veritable trifecta itself of reasons why it should have rung a few bells on Kristoff's outrage-o-meter. Guess he just wasn't keeping track of that one.

The real problem with non-thinking like Kristoff's is that it excuses the inexcusable. Bush lies, as he did in both these cases, because it's a way to manipulate others, including patsies like Nick Kristoff. And he does it without much conscience.

That strikes me as a serious character flaw that plays out in his policy choices. It obviously lends itself to a mindset in which the man only wants to hear what he wants to hear. Bush seems above all to be a guy who insists on creating his own truth (one of "history's actors," as it were); if the facts on the ground stand in his way, well, damn the facts.

That isn't providing genuine leadership -- that's a kind of megalomania. It certainly isn't, shall we say, reality-based. And this "casual relationship with the truth" isn't just a tic; it's bound to affect his judgment negatively.

In fact, that lack of judgment manifested itself in important ways: in the failure to heed the pre-Sept. 11 terrorist-attack warnings and being, essentially, asleep at the wheel when it came to terrorism on Sept. 10; and then by going to war in Iraq under what proved to be false pretenses; and most of all, his failure (despite multiple warnings) to adequately prepare or plan for an extended occupation coupled with a violent insurgency, not to mention providing enough troops to secure all the former Iraqi weapons sites.

How has Bush answered the justifiable criticism for these massive blunders? By questioning the patriotism of his opponents, of course.

But then, what else could we expect from someone with such a casual relationship with the truth?

Thugs R Us

It's certainly looking like the prospects of a clean Kerry victory are becoming plausible. But in case anyone forgot, that's just the first battle. America is the most divided it has been in more than a century. Feelings are running extremely high on both sides. It's a bitter, ugly environment, and there's going to have to be a real effort to heal the divide. The people who have brought us to this pass -- the dividers, not uniters -- are not going to go away. In fact, they're almost certainly going to step things up. And considering the frenzy they are in now, it could get ugly. Consider, for instance, the following contribution to civility from our friends at the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler (whose disturbing eliminationist activities in previous instances have been duly noted), this time from a fellow named "B.C., Imperial Torturer":

The Backstabbin' Beantown Bastard Pisses On More Brave Soldiers' Graves

The levels of venom really are remarkable, with Kerry described as "a treasonous gold-digger", and the charming conclusion:

Rope. Tree. Justice. The only three things that Qerry deserves for his "service".

Hm. Well. I'm sure all the same people worked up over that ugly piece in the Guardian will leap to denounce this one, too, right? Anyway, here's what this kind of rhetoric inspires. Down in the comments, another writer responds thus to an earlier post about how a Kerry presidency was sure to be the country's ruination:

Pretty much in the ballpark on all that, useless. The effects of which will be, as LC Corey predicts above, the death of Liberty and the Grand Experiment which was America. The evidence is abundant that Kerry has no concept of unintended consequences. He has been protected from those all of his life. Nutured as he is in the ideas so dear to the Left, of victimology and irresponsibility, of class warfare and division, of "situation ethics", nannystatism and "internationalism", he is as ill prepared to deal with the results of his "policies" as he is to tell the truth... or even to know what truth is. He'll be sure to fuck it all up while remaining clueless, protesting his own innocence and blaming it all on Bush. He simply must not be allowed to take office, no matter what the rigged results of the election may be. And we must not tolerate the kinds of post election shenanigans the dipocrats are planning. It is our American tradition to tolerate the elction of those with whom we disagree. Gear up for the next election and try to reach some accomadation with the other side, for the good of the Nation. That has been or practice and our salvation. And we have been trying in naive good faith to accomodate the Left for most of a century, to our sorrow and peril. Most of the ills in our politics and in society generally can be ascribed to this alone. This time, there will be nothing left of that Nation in which this was the way of peaceful and civil governance. If Kerry "wins", it will be too late to save the Nation which showed the world the miracle of representative republican government. Our soveriegnty and our Constitution will be further demolished, our economy and military weakened, our enemies emboldened, our confidence and spirit disheartened and, most likey, we will suffer catastrophic physical attack on our own soil. The combination of disasters ensured by a Kerry "victory" amounts to a national crisis that we simply cannot allow. In four more years, it will be far too late. Posted by LC Jon , Imperial Hunter at October 28, 2004 11:32 PM

OK. Now, just put the keyboard down, son. Nice and slowly. Sheesh. And please, don't try to tell us this is supposed to be humor. Well, I've frequently warned that, if these people see their grip on power genuinely threatened, their teeth will be bared. The violence quotient is already rising. If this kind of sentiment is common among the charged-up True Believers of the Right, look for a real volatile week, perhaps more in the aftermath of the election. Also worth noting: This blog continues to be featured in the blogroll of certain prominent bloggers with supposedly mainstream reputations. [Hat tip to Warren Terra.]

The clone army

Sure, everyone's enjoying a chortle or two over Bush's clone army.

Pretty soon, the truth will come out: Those images weren't photoshopped. Those really were clones! Bwah ha ha ha ha.

Go ahead, laugh. Call it a lunatic fringe conspiracy theory if you like. You'll see. You'll be sorry someday.

See, there's already been talk within GOP ranks about using a clone army to solve the Iraq manpower problem. Why, it sounds brilliant to me.

Matt Taibbi reported this a couple of weeks ago in Rolling Stone, in his piece about going undercover inside the Bush campaign:

In my first month on the campaign, I did not meet many people who came into the office with the serious intention of working hard for the president. I did, however, meet a great many very lonely people who came in because they knew the Bush offices were the one place where they could share certain deeply held ideas without being ridiculed.

Part of my job, I soon came to understand, was to be supportive when people like portly Tampa sheriff's deputy Ben Mills came in to share their very serious utopian ideas -- like the benefits of having a society guarded by a clone army. "We'd save a hell of a lot on benefits and medical expenses," he said. " 'Cause you know if they got wounded..."

"You could just shoot them," I said.

"Exactly -- pow! Just shoot 'em dead, right in the ground."

He went on.

"We'd just have a big breeding farm in Colorado," he said. "Course, it'd be a security problem if they got out, you know, if you had rogue clones running around. You'd have to have a special security force to maintain 'em."

"That's where folks like us would come in," I said.

"Exactly," he said.

Folks like us. I was getting the hang of it.

Sound like Sheriff Mills has been having an audience with the Strong and Resolute One Himself.

Maybe that'll be Bush's secret plan for winning the election: Clone voters!

The more things change ...

[Photo of a billboard in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1949 by Charles "Teenie" Harris. Pittsburgh Courier Archives.]

[Hat tip to d. eaton.]

Shrill and creepy

I expected, when I undertook the work of documenting the interaction between the extremist right and mainstream conservatism -- particularly in such pieces as "The Rise of Pseudo Fascism" -- to have to deal not only with a lot of utter noncomprehension from the right, but also some vicious personal attacks. I just didn't expect it to be so ... half-assed.

Dean Esmay weighed in this week with a genuinely nasty little hit piece. Once you wade through the ad hominem, the attack comes down to this:

Back in May, a really creepy obsessive named Dave Neiwert, well known for lunatic fringe conspiracy theories, decided to identify your host (Dean Esmay) as a secret Nazi sympathizer. Or at least a fascist at heart, though my dark desires are hidden to anyone but clever brave scribblers such as the brilliant Dave Niewert, anyway.

Now, you'll notice that Esmay doesn't link anywhere to my site or to the post in question. (Nor did he, in lieu of that, extend the basic courtesy of notifying me of the attack; this is why I wasn't even aware of it until Wednesday afternoon.) Ostensibly this is because I'm such a reprehensible wretch he doesn't want to give me the hits.

I think there's another reason as well: He doesn't want his blithering idiocy immediately apparent. Because anyone actually reading what I wrote can see that Esmay's characterization is simply false -- a shrill overreaction to a relatively mild observation.

Now, here in its entirety is the post in question:

Remember Dolchstosslegende -- the Legend of the Stab in the Back?

It was one of the cornerstone myths of the Nazis, fueling both their rise to power, as well their justification for the Holocaust. The "stab in the back" of the German military in World War I -- and thus the source of German defeat -- you see, was a product of Communists and Jews.

Well, now that the invasion of Iraq is turning out not so well, we're getting a fresh version of the legend, tailored for the 21st century (Josh Marshall noticed it being trotted out awhile back).

Dean Esmay rather approvingly provides us with a recent example.

Now, you may read through this post a hundred times, and I don't think you'll find a anywhere a statement that I think Esmay harbors secret Nazi sympathies. For that matter, I don't even imply it.

Here's how Esmay puts it:

I once posted a cartoon that made a strong political statement about the hate-soaked left, and Niewert concluded that if anything looks like anything the Nazis ever put out, well, you do the math, right?

Now, is there anything in that post telling people to "do the math"? No. Anything in there saying, "This suggests Esmay has Nazi sympathies"? No.

What I clearly am saying is something that fits in with my larger thesis in pieces like "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism": Memes from the far right -- some of them with deep historical roots, like this one -- not only continue to have a half-life in modern society, they have been finding their way into mainstream conservatism in recent years.

Many of them appear almost unconsciously, out of the zeitgeist, the environment created by the shifts in the political framework that make society more receptive to these ideas. Many are boosted by the increasing interactions of mainstream conservatives with extremist belief systems. "Transmitters" -- figures like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter -- play key roles in bridging the two sectors by picking up extremist ideas and agendas and clothing them in rhetoric suitable for mainstream consumption. Regardless of the mechanism, ordinary conservatives then pick them up and run with them, often utterly oblivious about the origins of the ideas they're absorbing and then promoting.

Esmay, I think it's clear, falls well into this latter category. And nothing in the post even suggests otherwise.

The logic (or lack thereof) by which Esmay reached his absurd conclusion is roughly the same as that deployed by Glenn Reynolds when he accused me of "hurling unsubstantiated charges of racism" for tweaking his work thus: "the root of all evil in Reynoldsland are the twin threads of dark-skinned Muslims and left-wing antiwar liberals."

Now, regular readers are well aware that one of my recurring themes -- so much so that I sound like a stuck record, in fact -- is the fact that Americans generically, and the media/pundit class particularly, have a peculiar blind spot when it comes to terrorism. When they're white right-wing extremist Christians, they're just "aberrations" and "isolated incidents." When it's committed by brown-skinned foreigners of another religion, we declare a "war on terror."

This point, in fact, was made in the very first post on this blog, and I've repeated it so often it's gotten a little old: I've made it here, here, here, here, and here (for a quick sample). I've also discussed it in depth on several occasions, notably here.

The poke at Reynolds was clearly written within that context. All it says is that Reynolds shares the same blind spot when it comes to terrorism.

Indeed, I think that couldn't be more clear than in the Reynolds post that I cited in the post he attacked. In it, he says this:

One thing that's troubling is the potential for cooperation between Arab terrorists and domestic extremists.

Anyone who knows the rudimentary facts about Islamist extremism knows immediately that this is a false and narrow racial stereotype. Al Qaeda-style extremism includes not only Arabs, but also Persians, Pakistanis, Filipinos, Indonesians, and a wide range of other races.

Now, Reynolds does have a better case than Esmay for his complaint if you remove the remark from this context. But even then, at the worst, all one can definitively say is that I slyly imply that Reynolds partakes of and proliferates racist stereotypes.

And that simply does not, in my book, constitute racism. Racism, as I've explained in depth previously, entails an eliminationist contempt for other races, and always promotes exclusion and bigoted discrimination. Wallowing in racial stereotypes is endemic across all of society, and while it's problematic, it is not "racist" per se.

No, as I've pointed out before, when I think of someone "hurling unsubstantiated charges of racism," I think of prominent bloggers who call a campus Latino-pride group best known for holding bakes sales and voter-registration drives "fascist hatemongers", "racist and homophobic," and comparing them to Jim Crow and (in the case of another renowned conservative pundit) the Ku Klux Klan.

But maybe that's just me.

Now, as for the rest of Esmay's screed, I'm not going to waste too much of my time or yours rebutting this kind of nonsense. Suffice to say that, having examined and debunked hundreds of conspiracy theories in the process of reporting on the militia movement and writing In God's Country, I know enough about them to tell you that Esmay hasn't the slightest idea what he's talking about. (And yes, I've debunked many Larouchite conspiracy theories.)

For a sample of a more sensible approach to conspiracy theories, see my previous discussion of them. Moreover, there's simply nothing in any of the material that Esmay references (obliquely) that even suggests I think an actual conspiracy is at work here, particularly in the spread of right-wing extremism into the mainstream. It couldn't be more clear, I think, that I'm arguing on the side of a larger political dynamic that has nothing to do with conspiracy.

Oh, and Dean? The next time you want to devote 1,160 words to an ad hominem attack on someone, it really helps if you spell their name right.

Now, in somewhat better faith (and certainly more honest, not to mention competent) have been the critiques from Eric at Classical Values, especially his most recent entry. But it's hard to take this commentary seriously when it's clear he can't even distinguish between my ideas and those of Robert O. Paxton, or even acknowledge that the entirety of the ideas I'm basing my analysis upon is drawn from serious scholars of fascism. As anyone who's actually taken the time to read my work knows, I'm not drawing these ideas out of thin air. Moreover, he simply dismisses the heart of Paxton's thesis (that fascism is better understood as a set of "mobilizing passions" than as an "ism") without explanation. There's simply no substance to Eric's critique to address.

Well, as I said, I did expect to inspire a reaction from the right based on a simple failure of reading comprehension, or a lack of reading altogether. That's easy to predict, considering that the right has a well-established track record of distortion based on misrepresentation and non-comprehension. And my personal experience has been that they decline to read or comprehend simply because they don't want to.

But that's the thing about fascism. We tend to think of it in terms of alien things like Nazi uniforms and concentration camps. The reality is that the popular of imagery of fascism (as Paxton's work details) is actually derived from its later stages, when it proceeds into serious metastasis; while in the stages at which it has traditionally obtained power, fascism is constituted of things which seem everyday and familiar to us. It's when they come together in a particular constellation of political pathology that they take on a life of their own. But we often refuse to recognize it for what it is because it seems so ... familiar.

Not that I expect an intellectual titan like Dean Esmay to take the time to figure that out. It's so much easier to shriek, distort and falsify. That's the right-wing style of argument nowadays. And coming from someone who insists, no, demands, despite a remarkable paucity of evidence, that he really is a liberal, dammit, it frankly is kinda ... creepy.

[Update: Speaking of creepy: One of Esmay's admirers seems to be urging him to punch me. Or at least "come this close" to doing so. Or is it just a Larouchite? But then, he and Esmay seem to think I am a Larouchite, right? Hard to tell, because this is of course just idiocy.]

[Update II, to Infinity and Beyond: Dean Esmay writes back, in his best Buzz Lightyear (pre-awareness phase) imitation:

Utterly hilarious.

You are a sad, strange little man. You have my pity. Farewell!

Dean

Well hey. I'm convinced!]

More nastiness

Both of these are from Florida:

Presidential Politics Gets Ugly in Fla.

VERO BEACH, Fla. (AP) - An anti-John Kerry demonstrator was charged with felony aggravated assault with a gun for allegedly pointing a weapon at the head of a Kerry supporter.

Michael Garone, 52, was released from jail Tuesday on his on recognizance.

Garone and others were holding anti-Kerry signs at a street corner Monday in Vero Beach when Trevor Pickering drove up and said ``Go Kerry,'' according to an arrest affidavit.

Pickering argued with the anti-Kerry protesters, and then got out of the car and knocked a sign out of the hands of one of the demonstrators.

``That's when (Garone) walked up to my car and stuck a gun to my head,'' Pickering said. ``I said 'I'm sorry' and 'Please don't kill me,' drove away and called the cops.''

Garone denied pointing the gun at anyone.

And here's a story that speaks, I think, to the Bush appeal to the masculinity-obsessed:

West Boynton man allegedly threatens to kill girlfriend for backing Kerry

WEST BOYNTON -- When an 18-year-old couldn't convince his girlfriend that George W. Bush was the right choice for president, he became enraged, put a screwdriver to her throat and threatened to kill her, sheriff's officials said.

"You won't live to see the next election," Steven Soper told Stacey Silveira on Tuesday night as the two fought inside his gray, two-story home west of Boynton Beach, according to a police report.


... On Tuesday, Soper stormed off after Silveira's brother mentioned the family, including Silveira, supported Kerry, family members said.

Soper called and ended the relationship, so Silveira drove to his house in the 7500 block of Oakboro Drive to return his belongings. That's where things turned violent.

He dragged Silveira into the house kicking and screaming, a police report said. Neighbor Lisa Belout was watching television, heard the commotion and called 911.

Inside, Soper threw Silveira to the floor, spit in her face and bit her cheek, she said, pointing to the brown bruise on the left side of her face.

"He went and got a knife and put the knife in my hand and said, `Kill me because if you vote for Kerry I'm going to die anyway,'" she said while standing outside her home, which has a Kerry/Edwards campaign sign in the yard.

Deputies found an enraged Soper with a screwdriver to Silveira's throat, a police report said. He was ordered to put the tool down but refused, so they used Taser stun guns to subdue him, officials said.

"He shoved a Marine [video] tape in my face and said that's what I was going to be ruining for him if I went for Kerry," Silveira said Wednesday, having just returned from filing a restraining order against him.

Whew. Okaaay ...

These, of course, are being added to the Thuggery File.

The facts we know

Following up on yesterday's post about the nuclear material stolen in Iraq after the invasion, apparently by experts ... nuclear-proliferation expert Peter Galbraith -- a supporter of the invasion -- has a must-read op-ed in the Boston Globe:

Eyewitness to a failure in Iraq

Galbraith provides detail on just how widespread the failure to secure key facilities was on the part of the Bush/Rumsfeld planners. He confirms much of the Sydney Morning Herald report, and provides even more detail about the wholesale theft of entire nuclear laboratories:

There was nothing secret about the Disease Center or the Tuwaitha warehouses. Inspectors had repeatedly visited the center looking for evidence of a biological weapons program. The Tuwaitha warehouses included materials from Iraq's nuclear program, which had been dismantled after the 1991 Gulf War. The United Nations had sealed the materials, and they remained untouched until the US troops arrived.

The looting that I observed was spontaneous. Quite likely the looters had no idea they were stealing deadly biological agents or radioactive materials or that they were putting themselves in danger. As I pointed out to Wolfowitz, as long as these sites remained unprotected, their deadly materials could end up not with ill-educated slum dwellers but with those who knew exactly what they were doing.

This is apparently what happened. According to an International Atomic Energy Agency report issued earlier this month, there was "widespread and apparently systematic dismantlement that has taken place at sites previously relevant to Iraq's nuclear program." This includes nearly 380 tons of high explosives suitable for detonating nuclear weapons or killing American troops. Some of the looting continued for many months -- possibly into 2004. Using heavy machinery, organized gangs took apart, according to the IAEA, "entire buildings that housed high-precision equipment."

This equipment could be anywhere. But one good bet is Iran, which has had allies and agents in Iraq since shortly after the US-led forces arrived.

This was a preventable disaster. Iraq's nuclear weapons-related materials were stored in only a few locations, and these were known before the war began. As even L. Paul Bremer III, the US administrator in Iraq, now admits, the United States had far too few troops to secure the country following the fall of Saddam Hussein. But even with the troops we had, the United States could have protected the known nuclear sites. It appears that troops did not receive relevant intelligence about Iraq's WMD facilities, nor was there any plan to secure them. Even after my briefing, the Pentagon leaders did nothing to safeguard Iraq's nuclear sites.

On the campaign trail today, George Bush attacked John Kerry for his criticism of the failure to secure the missing 380 tons of explosives at Al Qaqa, saying: "The senator is denigrating the action of our troops and commanders in the field without knowing the facts."

Kerry isn't denigrating the performance of the troops. He's questioning the plainly incompetent judgment of the people at the top who put too few troops in to handle the job properly. It's clear that Al Qaqa was not the only such case. And the more facts we know, Mr. Bush, the clearer that picture becomes.

[Via Mark Follman at Salon's War Room.]

Tracking the thuggery

Projection: It's not just for theaters anymore.

The talk of the horror of a rising tide of left-wing nastiness is popping up all over among the chatterers of the right. In addition to the recent accusations from Professor Bainbridge, a fresh round of accusations comes our way from T. Bevan at Real Clear Politics [permalink seems not to be working, so scroll down to the entry titled "The Civilized Barbarians"].

Now, take a hard look at Bevan's list of "shameful incidents":

Dredging up decades old images of racism to play on the anger and fear of African-American voters.

There's nothing particularly shameful about this. The reality is that the efforts of conservatives to disenfranchise black voters has a long and ugly history, and it appears to be continuing today. If they don't like being reminded of it, well, too bad. In any event, there's nothing about this behavior suggestive of actual violence, or even advocating it.

Screeching "YOU'RE A CREEPY LIAR" uncontrollably at the top of their lungs on national TV instead of debating with facts and logic.

Good grief. Has this guy watched Bill "Shut up! Just shut up!" O'Reilly? Or, for that matter, any of the army of vitriolic right-wing pundits (see Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, et. al., for starters) who've made careers out of popping corks on national TV and radio? Was he watching TV during the Clinton impeachment fiasco and the buildup to it?

Apparently not. But a liberal finally gets out of the Alan Colmes milquetoast mode and pops a cork, and suddenly civilization itself is on the brink.

Trashing signs of political adversaries.

Yes, sign theft and destruction is just awful. Funny thing about this is that I've covered politics as a reporter since 1978, and have never had a campaign go by without doing stories of sign theft/damage, with largely equal amounts on both sides. Last week's hilarity in Colorado was just one instance of rampant sign theft by Republicans too. As you go through the links I'll catalog below, you'll find stories of sign theft reported throughout. Here's one from Minnesota -- as well as a piece making clear it's happening on both sides.

Reality check: Sign theft and destruction is a commonplace of nearly all campaigns, and the mutual damage is nearly always roughly equal.

Breaking into offices of political adversaries.

As the local accounts of these break-ins make abundantly clear, there is simply no evidence that the thefts were connected to Democrats or even Bush opponents; they were just as likely crimes of opportunity. As Democratic chair Paul Berendt noted, his party had similar problems before moving their offices: "People would walk in, in broad daylight, and take laptop computers, just steal them."

Until they come up with stronger evidence, it's simply a smear to assume these break-ins were political in nature.

Throwing cinder block bricks through the front door of offices of political adversaries.

This is a clear-cut case of inexcusable violence, and it's clearly political.

Shooting bullets through the windows of offices of political adversaries.

Though again there is no evidence that these shootings were related to politics, this is nonetheless a disturbing occurrence.

Laying siege to offices of political adversaries

This appears to have been a political counter-rally (a commonplace tactic for Republicans as well) that got boisterous. If this is intimidation, well, Republicans are guilty of it too. See, e.g., the activities of Freepers (who often boast of the harassment) and the Protest Warriors.

Paying workers with crack cocaine for voter registration forms -- mostly fraudulent ones at that.

There is simply no evidence that this was associated with the Democratic Party or Kerry supporters -- and, like most of the stories of supposed Democratic voter fraud, is purely anecdotal. It has not been associated with Democratic officials in any fashion -- unlike the apparent voter-registration fraud being perpetrated systematically throughout the battleground states by an organization with undeniable ties to the Republican Party, including funding.

Sending out flyers making fun of the Special Olympics and suggesting that only a mentally retarded person would vote for George Bush.

This appears to be a false accusation. The evidence so far, as Steve Clemons has detailed [more details here], is that this was in fact a political dirty trick intended to smear Democrats.

And in the meantime, it's hard to imagine a worse flyer than the one circulated in West Virginia and Arkansas accusing Democrats of planning to ban the Bible and promote same-sex marriage. And RNC money paid for that one.

Bullying voters in line at polling places.

I'm sure none of those poll watchers being sent out by the GOP to largely minority districts in battleground states will be bullying voters, will they? Heavens no.

In any event, if we look at Bevan's list, it's clear that only two of them involve actual cases of violence -- and most of them are questionable at best, especially in terms of their actual connection to Democrats.

Best yet, though, Bevan goes on to say:

In the interest of fairness I went looking to put together a similar list of shameful incidents involving Republicans. But aside from the currently disputed and unproven allegations of some Democratic registrations being ripped up and thrown in the trash out in Nevada, I couldn't find anything comparable. In fact, using the exact same search criteria that turned up pages of stories involving the vandalism of Bush offices, etc. around the country yielded surprisingly few results when applied to John Kerry. If you know of any incidents of Republicans targeting Kerry offices or supporters with vandalism or thuggish behavior, please send them through so I can post them.

Well.

Regular readers of this blog are aware I've been running posts involving examples of right-wing thuggery, ranging from violence to threats and intimidation to lesser acts of nastiness, ever since the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. There's no doubt the levels of virulence were worse then -- replete with death threats and violent provocations aimed at war protesters -- but the ugliness is more widespread now. And, as Bevan suggests, it's clearly spread to both sides.

However, as I argued earlier:

I am fairly confident, however, that if we were to catalog all of these acts, both big and small, over the past four years, the list on the right side of the aisle would be considerably longer, and considerably nastier, than that on the left. And there's a reason for that: Unlike the nastiness on the left -- which is often reactive -- the impetus for that on the right is being encouraged (and in some cases directly fomented) by people in positions of national leadership of the conservative movement.

This ranges from figures like Rush Limbaugh (who fantasizes about killing all liberals except for a few to be kept in museums) and Ann Coulter (who argues in favor of "a little local fascism" and thinks Tim McVeigh should have targeted the New York Times Building) to Dick Cheney, who tells a senator on the floor of the Senate to go fuck himself -- and then not only refuses to apologize, but recommends such discourse as a feel-good measure.

Now, what follows will be no doubt an incomplete list. But here, for the benefit of Tad and his readers -- as well as anyone else interested -- I thought it might be useful to compile a brief catalog of incidents that have been gathered here and elsewhere.

Now, to keep things simple, I haven't included here all the instances of Kerry supporters or other dissidents being prevented from even attending a Bush/Cheney event -- just because they are simply too numerous to track. In many cases, these have involved examples of nasty intimidation, including Bush workers ripping tickets out of the hands of teenagers; as well as cases bordering on the absurd, as when three schoolteachers were threatened with arrest for wearing T-shirts saying, "Protect Our Civil Liberties."

And, obviously, there isn't a lot of sense in talking about minor acts like cable-TV screamfests or campaign sign thefts. This takes place on both sides, and it's difficult to say who's worse.

Instead, I've chosen to restrict the list to actual violence, threats or intimidation. I've broken these down by categories:

Attacks on campaign headquarters

Sacramento, California

Lawrence, Kansas

Toledo, Ohio

Barberton, Ohio

Boone, North Carolina

Galveston County, Texas

Lafayette, Lousiana

State College, Pennsylvania

Grand Rapids, Mich.

Bush supporters intimidate/assault Kerry supporters/war protesters

Vero Beach, Florida

West Boynton, Florida

Portland, Oregon

Colmar, Pennsylvania

Greenwood, Colorado

Temecula, California

Fresno, California

San Francisco, California

Police mistreat protesters

New York City

Jacksonville, Oregon

Hamilton, New Jersey

Kerry supporters' homes/cars vandalized

Seattle

Threatening Kerry supporters' employment

Decatur, Alabama

Logan, Utah

Now, these comprise, as I've mentioned, an extremely limited list. I've also tried to relegate them to this year, omitting the many cases of right-wing thuggery surrounding the protests of the war in Iraq (many of which I cataloged at the bottom of this post).

If anyone else wants to help me flesh it out, please feel free to send them to my e-mail (dneiwert@hotmail.com) or in the comments thread.

UPDATE: I'm going to be regularly updating this post as fresh info comes in. In that way, I hope to make it a kind of permanent resource for people who are interested in refuting the right-wing claim that violence is emanating just from the left. And the more contributors, the merrier. Please, for now, let's try to relegate the incidents to those which fit into the five categories above; I'm well aware that there's all kinds of nastiness out there, but for now let's stay focused on the acts which are potentially criminal (i.e., assault, battery, vandalism, threats, and intimidation), the use of official force for political purposes (police abuse), or those which cross the line of lively political discourse (threatening a person's job).

Team Bush's threatening exclusion of non-supporters from his rallies is, frankly, a bizarre development that really deserves consideration on its own.

UPDATE 2 (10/25): I've added incidents in Sacramento (a really ugly one, at that); Barberton and Toledo, Ohio; Boone County, N.C.; Galveston County, Texas; and in Vero Beach and West Boynton, Fla.

Smoking gun indeed

While everyone is focused on the disastrous disappearance of explosives materiel at Al Qaqa, it's important to remember that this is not the only significant material that's been taken away by "looters".

So were massive amounts of Iraqi nuclear materials -- as well as the facilities for building them:

As a direct result of President Bush's decision to invade Iraq without sufficient forces to secure and protect its nuclear research and storage facilities from rampant looting, enough radioactive material to build scores of dirty bombs now is missing and may be on its way to the international black market.

It didn't have to turn out this way. In the weeks before the invasion, the U.S. military repeatedly warned the White House that its war plans did not include sufficient ground forces, air and naval operations and logistical support to guarantee a successful mission. Those warnings were discounted — even mocked — by administration officials who professed to know more about war fighting than the war fighters themselves.

What's so devastating about these thefts of nuclear capacities is that they were not conducted by mere "looters", according to this report last week from the Sydney Morning Herald [registration req'd]:

Nuclear material taken by experts not looters, say diplomats

October 16, 2004

The removal of Iraq's mothballed nuclear facilities took about a year and was carried out by experts with heavy machinery and demolition equipment, diplomats close to the United Nations have said.

The UN nuclear watchdog, which monitored Saddam Hussein's nuclear sites before the US-led invasion last year, told the UN Security Council this week that equipment and materials that could be used to make atomic weapons had been vanishing from Iraq but neither Baghdad nor Washington had noticed.

"This process carried on at least through 2003 ... and probably into 2004, at least in early 2004," a Western diplomat close to the International Atomic Energy Agency said.

US, British and Iraqi officials have downplayed the disappearance of the equipment, saying it was part of widespread looting after the March 2003 invasion, which the US, Britain and Australia said was to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.

However, several diplomats close to the nuclear agency said on Thursday that this was not the result of haphazard looting.

They said the removal of this dual-use equipment - which until the war was tagged and closely monitored by the agency to ensure that it was not being used in a weapons program - was planned and executed by people who knew what they were doing.

"We're talking about dozens of sites being dismantled," one diplomat said. "Large numbers of buildings [were] taken down, warehouses were emptied and removed. This would require heavy machinery, demolition equipment. This is not something that you'd do overnight."

Diplomats in Vienna say the agency fears these facilities, part of a pre-1991 covert nuclear weapons program, could have been sold to a country or militants seeking nuclear weapons.

Keep in mind, of course, that the materiel stolen at Al Qaqa has been specifically identified as the kind used in detonating nuclear bombs.

Also keep in mind: There is simply no question that these removals occurred well after the invasion.

What was that again, the talk that this war was supposed to about removing the "smoking gun" of a mushroom cloud?

"Incompetent" doesn't even begin to describe this administration.

[Thanks to Greg Saunders for the tip.]

The reality-based community

Despite the best efforts of the GOP to cocoon their fearless leaders -- you know, the fellows who are "history's actors" -- Dick Cheney came face to face yesterday with a member of the reality-based community:

WILMINGTON, Ohio (AP) -- Dick Cheney came face-to-face with the war in Iraq when a 62-year-old grandmother confronted him on the campaign trail.

Phyllis Hobbs told Cheney she had sacrificed a grandson to the war.

"I'd like a little peace," she pleaded with the vice president.

Unlike others who have lost loved ones in the war and have had the audacity to confront the Bush campaign, this one was an remains a Bush/Cheney supporter. So she wasn't dragged out by the Secret Service. Which would have made for some interesting footage, since she was in a wheelchair.

Hobbs' son, her daughter-in-law and another grandson all have served in Iraq, and her son is headed back for another stint, probably around Thanksgiving.

Her daughter-in-law just re-enlisted and would be heading back to Iraq too, but she's pregnant, and will go next year instead.

Hobbs' other grandson, a Special Forces soldier, just returned and "I hope he's home for good," she said.

Her grandson Steven D. Conover, 21, was among the U.S. soldiers killed last November when insurgents in Fallujah shot down the Chinook helicopter he was riding in.

Devastated by the loss and the fear of what else could happen, Hobbs said her health deteriorated to the point where she suffered kidney failure the month after her grandson's death, putting her in a wheelchair.

Cheney spotted her in her wheelchair in an audience of rabid Bush-Cheney supporters and invited her to ask him a question.

Hobbs asked Cheney, "Is there anybody who knows a time limit" for pulling out of Iraq? "I have four over there. ... I had one killed. ... I'd like a little peace."

Given to understatement, the vice president calmly replied: "I appreciate very much obviously the sacrifice they made. ... If you put an artificial date on it, what with the terrorists just waiting until that day arrives, Americans withdraw, and then they'll reinsert themselves, that's not acceptable."

You could call that "understatement" if you're a propagandist. You could also call it cold.

The renowned actor of history couldn't give her the peace she wanted -- because the truth is, there is no time limit for the Bush/Cheney war. And that's the way they want it.

Such compassionate conservatism.