This time, alas, the culprit is Stephen Bainbridge (Law, UCLA), who purports to take issue with my extended discussion of nascent fascism in the United States. Readers may recall that I discussed (depending on how one individuates them) two to three dozen different kinds of evidence--cultural, intellectual, rhetorical, political, economic, legal, etc.--pointing towards fascist tendencies in the current political climate.
Professor Bainbridge's "response": he cites to one recent story about Vladimir Putin's authoritarian power grab in the wake of the various terrorist atrocities, and another about an internal investigation by the U.S. Justice Department of the persecution of an Oregon attorney suspected, falsely, of links to the Madrid train bombings. (As a sidenote, one wonders whether there are also investigations on-going of the many other cases where individuals have had their lives destroyed by fake "terror" prosecutions/persecutions.) With these two pieces of "evidence" in hand, Professor Bainbridge offers the following analysis of their import:
"If you can't tell the difference - or aren't willing to acknowledge it - between (A) a functioning democracy trying to find an appropriate balance between civil liberties and security during a time of war and (B) a dysfunctional regime that never quite made it as a true democracy and is now lapsing back into real authoritarianism, you contribute nothing useful to the debate."
This is odd along many dimensions, but here are a few that come to mind:
1. Although Steve linked to my original discussion, it is not clear he read it. For example, there is no mention of Vladimir Putin there, and nothing that would suggest I thought he was not, indeed, a crypto-fascist (though less "crypto" of late).
2. That the current situation in the United States is less obviously fascistic and authoritarian than the current situation in Russia is not probative of anything. Perhaps if the original posting had said, "The situation in the U.S. these days is no better than in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia" such a rejoinder would be relevant, but of course, the original posting said nothing even remotely close to that. In general, false contrasts of this kind are distractions.
3. State actions related to what Steve calls the efforts to find "an appropriate balance between civil liberties and security during a time of war" constituted about 3-5% of the evidence adduced in the original discussion of nascent fascism in the United States. To have shown that I am "blind" (per the obnoxious title of his posting) to important differences, Steve would have to discuss the remaining 95% of my original evidence, and would have to say rather more about the "Patriot [sic] Act" and the abuses by the Justice Department and the FBI, many of which I've called attention to in my original posting, and since.
4. That the actions of Bush & co. are properly characterized as efforts to find "an appropriate balance between civil liberties and security during a time of war" is one interpretation of recent events that Steve can't possibly think is established on the basis of one anecdote about an internal investigation at the Justice Department. The accumulated evidence that I have remarked on over a period of several months might also suggest another interpretation, namely, that there is a crazed rush for "security" at almost any cost, under the pretense that we are at "war." (We are, or at least would be if we had competent leadership, engaged in an international manhunt for Osama bin Laden and allies, but that is not a war; we ourselves launched a war against Iraq, but that was unrelated to the actual terrorist attacks on the United States, except to the extent they provided cover for war mongers in the current Administration.)
Although, then, there is almost no rational content to Professor Bainbridge's rejoinder, and although it manages to ignore at least 95% of my original posting on the subject of nascent fascism, these facts are, in themselves, significant: for they indicate that the dangers imminent in the current situation are still not visible within mainstream culture--indeed, not visible even when the details are laid out at length before the reader. At the point at which they become visible, it is, alas, likely to be far too late.
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