It's "America" Not "Amerika"

[R.A. Hettinga]

<http://www.techcentralstation.com/113004G.html>

Tech Central Station  

It's "America" Not "Amerika"

By Pejman Yousefzadeh
 Published 
 11/30/2004 

Let's put a silly myth to bed, shall we? Contrary to what some believe,
American politics is not devolving into a state of fascism.

We read and hear warning cries alerting us to the supposed incipient
fascist threat quite often nowadays. Many of these "alerts" inform us that
our freedoms and liberties are at risk, that the American
democratic-republic is gradually giving way to an authoritarian or
totalitarian establishment, and that our leaders are reminiscent of Nazis.
Thus we have Internet threads comparing George W. Bush with Hitler, or at
the very least, with Mussolini or Leonid Brezhnev. By extension of the
Hitler analogy, America may be like Germany in 1939 -- on the cusp of
embracing fascism if it hasn't completely done so yet.

You might shrug off this kind of rhetoric by saying that it is confined to
crank quarters of the punditocracy, and to be sure, those who argue that
America is sliding into fascism are ripe for ridicule. But the argument --
while wrong -- has the virtue of being simple and simplistic, meaning that
it has the potential to be spread rather easily. (This is most interesting
-- usually it is the fascists who have the simplistic arguments on their
side. In this debate, however, it is the supposed anti-fascists who are
trying to win converts to their argument with simplistic cries about
fascism being in the ascendant in the United States.) Because the argument
of "America as the Fascist State" can be so easily spread through
simplistic arguments, it is high time to fight the demagoguery with a
little perspective.

A key component of the fascist state is the presence of authoritarian or
totalitarian laws that clamp down on civil liberties. Those who decry the
supposed onset of fascism in the United States like to claim that the
Patriot Act is the instrument by which our rights and liberties is being
curtailed. Putting aside the fact that many of the Patriot Act's critics
haven't even carefully read the Act and its provisions, many of the
arguments made against the Act are just plain wrong. Myth-busting articles
and blog posts on the Internet setting the record straight regarding the
Patriot Act -- like this one, for example -- are quite plentiful because
there is a market for them thanks to blatant misreadings of the Patriot Act
that are all too common in news and punditry circles. Many of the supposed
totalitarian aspects of the Patriot Act were already in existence when the
Act was passed, and as of July of this year, out of the nearly 1300 alleged
abuses of the Patriot Act that were forwarded to the Inspector General of
the Justice Department, the Inspector General found that none of those
complaints had any merit whatsoever. (Surely, we will be told that the
Inspector General is simply covering up the abuses of the crypto-fascist
state, but there does come a point where such circular arguments are no
longer worthy of any attention whatsoever.)

The supposed loss of civil liberties and the onset of fascism were key
components of the argument made to elect John Kerry as President. Kerry
himself spoke to this issue when he promised in his acceptance speech to
the Democratic National Convention that he would "appoint an attorney
general who will uphold the Constitution of the United States." Of course,
anyone who has been paying attention to political rhetoric over the past
four years knows that John Ashcroft is closely connected with the supposed
rise of American fascism, and politically, it was quite convenient for
Kerry to pose as the remedy to the fascist Ashcroftian annihilation of
American civil liberties.

But when one compares the civil liberties voting records of Senator Kerry
and former Senator Ashcroft, Ashcroft plainly comes out ahead as the more
capable and ardent defender of civil liberties. And Ashcroft is not alone
as the miscast Republican fascist. When the Clinton Justice Department was
working on the development of "Carnivore" -- a cyber-surveillance tool --
it was former Republican congressman and House Majority Leader Dick Armey
who campaigned against Carnivore as a threat against civil rights and civil
liberties. Indeed, Armey pressed both Attorney General Janet Reno and
Ashcroft on the issue of Carnivore -- strange behavior, to be sure, from
the former leader of the House contingent of America's supposed fascist
party. Strangely enough, those loudest in denouncing the incipient rise of
American fascism ignored and ignore all of this.

Of course, it isn't just Americans who are claiming the onset of fascism in
the United States. In Europe, comparisons between the Bush Administration
and fascist elements like the Nazis have also been plentiful. This is
peculiar because the state of civil liberties in Europe is far more parlous
than it is in America, and if the state of civil liberties in America
actually descended to the European level, warnings regarding the incipient
rise of fascism might actually have some merit. In his recent Thanksgiving
holiday blog post, law professor Orin Kerr gave thanks for the fact that we
live in a country that respects civil liberties a great deal more than they
are respected in Europe. His remarks are well taken, but I wonder why we
haven't heard alarm bells ringing regarding the rise of European fascism
from the same quarters that like to claim American fascism is a threat to
be taken seriously.

None of this is to say that when it comes to fascism, "It Can't Happen
Here." But those who make the claim that America is becoming a fascist
state have an obligation to be responsible with the facts, lest others stop
taking them seriously. Ironically enough, fascism has its best chance when
those who line up to denounce it discredit themselves with one too many
false alarms. The next time they sound the alarm, they may have reason to.
But few people will be inclined to listen if those who make the claims have
proven themselves to be untrustworthy demagogues in the past.

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'