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American Fascism in Ten Hysterical Steps: Naomi Wolf in the Guardian
By Joey Kurtzman / April 26, 2007
During the six years I was marooned in the British Isles, I became, by necessity, an amateur taxonomist, like those dilettante Victorian naturalists who poked around looking for new types of dung beetles or butterflies. I wasn’t after dung beetles, though; I was cataloguing the diverse forms of obeisance with which American liberals try to elicit the condescending approval of Europeans, that sublime reassurance that “You, you’re not quite like most Americans, are you? You’re rather…European.”
I lovingly collected my specimens, and identified the occasional species—for example, Declinatio pessumus absurdus (Kurtzman, 2003), the warbly faux-British intonation with which the American Europhile triumphantly peppers the end of any sentence in which he’s asking a question. Or the dreaded Fellatio iratus michaelmooricus (Kurtzman, 2003), which sees the disgruntled American lecturing his European hosts on the exquisite sophistication of their own culture, and the hopeless barnyard vulgarity of American culture.
But every so often I would be so mesmerized by some virtuoso performance, some unclassifiable peacock display of American self-loathing, that I’d pine for a systematizing genius, a sociological Linnaeus who would catalogue the entire fauna of overseas American life and just hand me the multi-volume taxonomy necessary to describe the whole writhing ecosystem.
I mention all this because Naomi Wolf has a mindblowing new article in the Guardian, and it’s the first time since I’ve been back in the States that I’ve felt that way. Fascist America In Ten Easy Steps is Wolf’s Cassandra cry that America is headed very truly and quickly down the road to fascism.
The piece is a mandatory read for everyone, if only because it’s such a jackpot of delightful absurdities, little gems of rhetorical lunacy, that it’s likely to get you weirdly excited and shouting “No she didn’t! No she didn’t!” until your irritated wife wakes from her nap, walks into your office, and hisses at you to shut up, freak. It’s that good.
Wolf knows that the American government is not yet slicing off the eyelids of religious nonconformists or shutting down all small liberal arts colleges, as per Sinclair Lewis’s classic vision of a totalitarian America. But just you wait. Wolf’s got an inexhaustible arsenal of fatuous Hitler allusions to prove that we’re well on our way. For example, you know that little word “homeland” that Bush uses? Hitler used a similar German word! QED.
But even if you’re not as pleased as I am by egregious reductios ad hitlerum, fear not. There’s plenty more here. Wolf identifies ten steps by which a free society is made into a dictatorship, and then asserts “it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these ten steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.” The fun is in the way she tries to demonstrate that that the steps have been “initiated” in America.
For example, step number 3: Wolf argues, reasonably enough, that any successful fascist movement must have a “thug caste” to physically intimidate political opponents.
When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.
All well and good. But who in Bush’s America could possibly correspond to the SA, the profoundly thuggish Brownshirts who disappeared early German opponents of Naziism and instigated Kristallnacht? Open your eyes, Polyanna:
Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000.
Wolf is referring here to an incident in which Democrats claimed that Republican protestors harassed the three members of the Dade County canvassing commission during the Gore-Bush recount. The angry protestors chanted “Fraud! Fraud! Fraud!” because the Democrat-dominated commission had relocated the vote recount from a public setting to a private one where neither media nor anyone else could observe the process. One of the three members of the commission described the event as a “noisy, peaceful protest,” and none of the three agreed that they had been “harassed” by the protestors. But for Wolf, when a protestor is a Republican, they cease to be a protestor. They are instead a sinister thug, a threat to the very right to protest, and, amazingly, a sign that fascism is nigh.
And what about that classic outfit of a fascist militia, the “identical shirts and trousers” worn by the protestors? They were novelty t-shirts ordered by Republican activists, and featuring punny recount-related slogans such as “Sore-Loserman.” When done by a Democrat, this sort of thing would be plucky activism. But because it’s done by a Republican, Wolf tells us in utter seriousness that it’s a sign that America is undergoing a “fascist shift.”
The entire article is as ludicrous as this. Every one of the ten points. This sort of puerile Manichaean fantasy belongs on a LiveJournal page. And that’s without mentioning some of the annoying factual promiscuities that should never have gotten past the Guardian editors. For example, Martin Niemöller’s endlessly misquoted comments about “First, they came for the Communists/Jews/Cubs Fans/any other group of your choosing” get the treatment yet again here, with Jews winning the spot at the front of the line. Niemöller almost certainly never put them there.
Anyway, I’ve got libertarian inclinations and a suspicion of any state’s motivation for undercutting civil liberties. But this article is not about civil liberties. It’s an entertaining but disturbing postcard from the fantasy world of secular urban lefties like Wolf, who cannot accept that they must share this country with 150 million mostly decent, rational people who just happen to disagree with them about a great many things.
American democracy is not threatened by Wolf’s fantastical “fascist shift”; it’s threatened by her intensely parochial unwillingness to grapple with a worldview different from her own, and the impoverishing effect this has on public dialogue. Democracy doesn't require her to agree with Republicans, but it does require that she engage them as fellow citizens and not as jackbooted strawmen. When she’s done basking in the praise and sympathy of the European left, she might try getting serious about democracy and having some real discussions with members of the American right.
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Well, I think the writer of this article IS a fascist.
He has participated in the destruction of a country and murder of hundreds of thousands, and is a war criminal.
Bush, Howard and Blair should be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity, as they are evil men.
Thank you for allowing me to speak freely.
Maybe that’s the name everyone’s looking for. Or not. The thing is, fascism cannot describe a post-industrialised society where powerflux is networked. But I do believe that after the Democracts win, the Republicans will be back in power and it will be final blow. We won’t have concentration camps, but we will definitely be seeing something new and ugly. It’s just too soon to understand what extacly, but it’s coming.
I’ve read the Wolf article on 10 Steps to Fascism in America. I’m an Australian, and in the process of writing an article applying her insights to the Howard Government here, over the past 10 years.
Frighteningly, our Government fits 9 out of 10 of Wolf’s criteria for a shift to fascism in my country. I’m not familiar enough with the niceties of American polics to know if the Bush Administration is turning fascist, but Australia certainly is. For example, we have had fasscist thugs rioting on Cronulla beach against Australian Lebanes, something that would have been unthinkable here 10 years ago.We do have a Government that has introduced legislation aimed at destroying the Union Movement, which if successful will virtually render the Labor Opposition inoperable as it depends on the Unions for much of its electoral funding. We have had a sustained campaign by right-wing ideologuestargetting academics and media personalities who don’t agree with Howard’s view of Australian society. It is such an obvious influence on our society we even hage a name for it -the History Wars. We have had a neo-fascist anti-immigrant anti-Aboriginal political Party get members elected to our Federal Parliament and some State Parliament. We have Anti-Terror Laws with secrecy provisions that have such a wide application they can target anyone who opposes the Government and temporarily imprison them without trial. We do have an offshore gulag where illegal refugees are imprisoned without appeal. We have had journalists and newspapers fined for not revealing sources when they’ve written articles based on leaked Government documents ceitical of the Howard Administration. We’re so used to Howard lying to us we accept ity as part of the normal political process, something that would have been unthinkable even fifteen years ago.
Believe me, from an Australian perspective, Wolf’s article is reality, not lunacy.
I just read through Naomi Wolf’s piece for the second time and I think you dismiss it and mock it with wit and verve, but I don’t think you really do justice to it at all. I’d encourage everyone to read it for themselves. I think it’s extremely difficult—wishful even, perhaps?–to see the “entire article” as “ludicrous.” If only it were ludicrous, that would be much more comforting.
But you start with some lines mocking ex-pat Americans who seem overeager to distance themselves from their native land (though I’m not sure if Wolf is currently an ex-pat, even if she did publish her piece in The Guardian). I haven’t had the experience of living in England, so it’s possible that I’d have a reaction similar to yours if I were marooned there for six years, but, these days, I can certainly understand the desire to let people in other countries know I don’t agree with many of the ways America seems to be trending. I don’t think pointing out such disagreements would be symptomatic of “American self-loathing.” Adam Gopnick’s great and powerful piece about Virginia Tech in the current issue of The New Yorker seems relevant here. Again, I’d encourage everyone to read it for themselves, but the piece is a commonsensical discussion essentially based on the following statement: “there is no American particularity about loners, disenfranchised immigrants, narcissism, alienated youth, complex moral agency, or Evil. There is an American particularity about guns.”
Gopnick points out the absurdity of the notion that we should somehow wait for a while before talking about gun control:
“If the facts weren’t so horrible, there might be something touching in Governor Tim Kaine’s deeply American belief that ‘healing’ can take place magically, without the intervening practice called ‘treating.’ The logic is unusual but striking: the aftermath of a terrorist attack is the wrong time to talk about security, the aftermath of a death from lung cancer is the wrong time to talk about smoking and the tobacco industry, and the aftermath of a car crash is the wrong time to talk about seat belts.”
Gopnick goes on to argue that whether Americans wanted to talk about it or not, the rest of the world was already having the same old conversation:
“The whole world saw that the United States has more gun violence than other countries because we have more guns and are willing to sell them to madmen who want to kill people….[O]n a recent list of the fourteen worst mass shootings in Western democracies since the nineteen-sixties the United States claimed seven, and, just as important, no other country on the list has had a repeat performance as severe as the first.”
I suppose I’ve wandered from the piece by Wolf and your response to it. I’ve done so simply to suggest that it’s not a bad thing these days for Americans to attempt to see themselves as they might be seen by people from England, or elsewhere. It’s not symptomatic of any sort of self-loathing to work to understand how we might look to others and why. It’s also not really a liberal or a conservative thing to do. It’s simply human, compassionate, and, I like to think, necessary. It has the added virtue of occasionally being illuminating.
People can read Wolf’s ten points for themselves and see how many they find “ludicrous.” People can see for themselves if her discussion of the development of a “thug caste” is accurately described in your post. For her part, I think Wolf puts her argument clearly and, for the most part, forcefully:
“It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society.”
“I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.”
You write that the piece is “a mandatory read for everyone, if only because it’s such a jackpot of delightful absurdities, little gems of rhetorical lunacy.” Perhaps Wolf is at times too strident and too alarmist, but that doesn’t mean her piece deserves to be mocked, cherry-picked, and summarily dismissed. At least we agree that it is, in fact, “a mandatory read for everyone.”
One final note: I had the good fortune the other night to hear Steven Bach talk about his recent biography of Leni Riefenstahl
http://www.amazon.com/Leni-Life-Work-Riefenstahl/dp/0375404007/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-5779479-5434227?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1177628587&sr=8-1
When asked what was the most difficult part of working on a project about Riefenstahl for so long, he didn’t give the predictable answer about how hard it can be to spend so much time with a rather distasteful person (no matter how fascinating Riefenstahl might be). Instead, he said that the historical patterns he observed as he immersed himself in the life and times of Riefenstahl made him feel so frightened and depressed that he could barely keep working. Bach, as you may know, was once Vice President and Head of Worldwide Production at United Artists. I don’t think he’s alarmist by nature. After all, for better or worse (mostly worse), he let Michael Cimino keep working on Heaven’s Gate.
Joey,
I’m not saying Naomi Wolf is right, but i do think that there have been some frightening undemocratic practices in the past two elections. I have always been proud of our constitution, of the checks and balances built into the system, and of our democratic elections. But I watched the past two
presidential elections with disbelief….in the obvious corruption and the lack of outrage from the victims of the theft….Many Americans living abroad
want to be proud of their country, their heritage, their system, their history. I used to read the Declaration of Independence to my kids, cite the Bill of Rights as one of our greatest possessions. You can well imagine my dismay. Joey, I wept when John Kerry accepted the nomination in 2004….because I wanted so to be proud again. Perhaps I will be, I hope, sooner not later.
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