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Harper's Magazine: We
Now Live in a Fascist State
Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 13:34:38 -0700
The article below appears in the current issue of Harpers
and was written
by Lewis H. Lapham
www.harpers.org/LewisLapham.html
Knowing the source of this piece makes it all the more
disturbing. It is not every day that the editor of a respected
national magazine publishes an essay claiming that America is
not on the road to becoming, but ALREADY IS, a fascist
state.... or words to that affect.
To help prepare you for what follows, here are the final
sentence from this piece.... [I think we can look forward with
confidence to character-building bankruptcies, picturesque
bread riots, thrilling cavalcades of splendidly costumed
motorcycle police.]
On message By Lewis H. Lapham Harper's Magazine, October 2005,
pps. 7-9 "But I venture the challenging statement that if
American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force,
seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of
our citizens, then Fascism and Communism, aided, unconsciously
perhaps, by old-line Tory Republicanism, will grow in strength
in our land." -Franklin D. Roosevelt, November 4, 1938
In 1938 the word "fascism" hadn't yet been
transferred into an abridged metaphor for all the world's
unspeakable evil and monstrous crime, and on coming across
President Roosevelt's prescient remark in one of Umberto Eco's
essays, I could read it as prose instead of poetry -- a
reference not to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse or the
pit of Hell but to the political theories that regard
individual citizens as the property of the government, happy
villagers glad to wave the flags and wage the wars, grateful
for the good fortune that placed them in the care of a sublime
leader. Or, more emphatically, as Benito Mussolini liked to
say, "Everything in the state. Nothing outside the state.
Nothing against the state."
The theories were popular in Europe in the 1930s (cheering
crowds, rousing band music, splendid military uniforms), and
in the United States they numbered among their admirers a good
many important people who believed that a somewhat modified
form of fascism (power vested in the banks and business
corporations instead of with the army) would lead the country
out of the wilderness of the Great Depression -- put an end to
the Pennsylvania labor troubles, silence the voices of
socialist heresy and democratic dissent. Roosevelt appreciated
the extent of fascism's popularity at the political box
office; so does Eco, who takes pains in the essay
"Ur-Fascism," published in The New York Review of
Books in 1995, to suggest that it's a mistake to translate
fascism into a figure of literary speech. By retrieving from
our historical memory only the vivid and familiar images of
fascist tyranny (Gestapo firing squads, Soviet labor camps,
the chimneys at Treblinka), we lose sight of the faith-based
initiatives that sustained the tyrant's rise to glory. The
several experiments with fascist government, in Russia and
Spain as well as in Italy and Germany, didn't depend on a
single portfolio of dogma, and so Eco, in search of their
common ground, doesn't look for a unifying principle or a
standard text. He attempts to describe a way of thinking and a
habit of mind, and on sifting through the assortment of
fantastic and often contradictory notions -- Nazi paganism,
Franco's National Catholicism, Mussolini's corporatism, etc.
-- he finds a set of axioms on which all the fascisms agree.
Among the most notable:
The truth is revealed once and only once.
Parliamentary democracy is by definition rotten because it
doesn't represent the voice of the people, which is that of
the sublime leader.
Doctrine outpoints reason, and science is always suspect.
Critical thought is the province of degenerate intellectuals,
who betray the culture and subvert traditional values.
The national identity is provided by the nation's enemies.
Argument is tantamount to treason.
Perpetually at war, the state must govern with the instruments
of fear. Citizens do not act; they play the supporting role of
"the people" in the grand opera that is the state.
Eco published his essay ten years ago, when it wasn't as easy
as it has since become to see the hallmarks of fascist
sentiment in the character of an American government.
Roosevelt probably wouldn't have been surprised.
He'd encountered enough opposition to both the New Deal and to
his belief in such a thing as a United Nations to judge the
force of America's racist passions and the ferocity of its
anti-intellectual prejudice. As he may have guessed, so it
happened. The American democracy won the battles for Normandy
and Iwo Jima, but the victories abroad didn't stem the retreat
of democracy at home, after 1968 no longer moving
"forward as a living force, seeking day and night to
better the lot" of its own citizens, and now that sixty
years have passed since the bomb fell on Hiroshima, it doesn't
take much talent for reading a cashier's scale at Wal-Mart to
know that it is fascism, not democracy, that won the heart and
mind of America's "Greatest Generation," added to
its weight and strength on America's shining seas and fruited
plains.
A few sorehead liberal intellectuals continue to bemoan the
fact, write books about the good old days when everybody was
in charge of reading his or her own mail. I hear their message
and feel their pain, share their feelings of regret, also wish
that Cole Porter was still writing songs, that Jean Harlow and
Robert Mitchum hadn't quit making movies. But what's gone is
gone, and it serves nobody's purpose to deplore the fact that
we're not still riding in a coach to Philadelphia with Thomas
Jefferson. The attitude is cowardly and French, symptomatic of
effete aesthetes who refuse to change with the times.
As set forth in Eco's list, the fascist terms of political
endearment are refreshingly straightforward and mercifully
simple, many of them already accepted and understood by a
gratifyingly large number of our most forward-thinking fellow
citizens, multitasking and safe with Jesus. It does no good to
ask the weakling's pointless question, "Is America a
fascist state?" We must ask instead, in a major rather
than a minor key, "Can we make America the best damned
fascist state the world has ever seen," an authoritarian
paradise deserving the admiration of the international capital
markets, worthy of "a decent respect to the opinions of
mankind"? I wish to be the first to say we can. We're
Americans; we have the money and the know-how to succeed where
Hitler failed, and history has favored us with advantages not
given to the early pioneers.
We don't have to burn any books.
The Nazis in the 1930s were forced to waste precious time and
money on the inoculation of the German citizenry, too
well-educated for its own good, against the infections of
impermissible thought. We can count it as a blessing that we
don't bear the burden of an educated citizenry. The systematic
destruction of the public-school and library systems over the
last thirty years, a program wisely carried out under
administrations both Republican and Democratic, protects the
market for the sale and distribution of the government's
propaganda posters. The publishing companies can print as many
books as will guarantee their profit (books on any and all
subjects, some of them even truthful), but to people who don't
know how to read or think, they do as little harm as
snowflakes falling on a frozen pond.
We don't have to disturb, terrorize, or plunder the
bourgeoisie.
In Communist Russia as well as in Fascist Italy and Nazi
Germany, the codes of social hygiene occasionally put the
regime to the trouble of smashing department-store windows,
beating bank managers to death, inviting opinionated merchants
on complimentary tours (all expenses paid, breathtaking
scenery) of Siberia. The resorts to violence served as study
guides for free, thinking businessmen reluctant to give up on
the democratic notion that the individual citizen is entitled
to an owner's interest in his or her own mind.
The difficulty doesn't arise among people accustomed to
regarding themselves as functions of a corporation. Thanks to
the diligence of out news media and the structure of our tax
laws, our affluent and suburban classes have taken to heart
the lesson taught to the aspiring serial killers rising
through the ranks at West Point and the Harvard Business
School -- think what you're told to think, and not only do you
get to keep the house in Florida or command of the Pentagon
press office but on some sunny prize day not far over the
horizon, the compensation committee will hand you a check for
$40 million, or President George W. Bush will bestow on you
the favor of a nickname as witty as the ones that on good days
elevate Karl Rove to the honorific "Boy Genius," on
bad days to the disappointed but no less affectionate "Turd
Blossom." Who doesn't now know that the corporation is
immortal, that it is the corporation that grants the privilege
of an identity, confers meaning on one's life, gives the
pension, a decent credit rating, and the priority standing in
the community? Of course the corporation reserves the right to
open one's email, test one's blood, listen to the phone calls,
examine one's urine, hold the patent on the copyright to any
idea generated on its premises. Why ever should it not? As
surely as the loyal fascist knew that it was his duty to serve
the state, the true American knows that it is his duty to
protect the brand.
Having met many fine people who come up to the corporate mark
-- on golf courses and commuter trains, tending to their
gardens in Fairfield County while cutting back the payrolls in
Michigan and Mexico -- I'm proud to say (and I think I speak
for all of us here this evening with Senator Clinton and her
lovely husband) that we're blessed with a bourgeoisie that
will welcome fascism as gladly as it welcomes the rain in
April and the sun in June. No need to send for the Gestapo or
the NKVD; it will not be necessary to set examples.
We don't have to gag the press or seize the radio stations.
People trained to the corporate style of thought and movement
have no further use for free speech, which is corrupting,
overly emotional, reckless, and ill-informed, not calibrated
to the time available for television talk or to the
performance standards of a Super Bowl halftime show. It is to
our advantage that free speech doesn't meet the criteria of
the free market. We don't require the inspirational genius of
a Joseph Goebbels; we can rely instead on the dictates of the
Nielsen ratings and the camera angles, secure in the knowledge
that the major media syndicates run the business on strictly
corporatist principles -- afraid of anything disruptive or
inappropriate, committed to the promulgation of what is
responsible, rational, and approved by experts. Their
willingness to stay on message is a credit to their
professionalism.
The early twentieth-century fascists had to contend with
individuals who regarded their freedom of expression as a
necessity -- the bone and marrow of their existence, how they
recognized themselves as human beings. Which was why, if
sometimes they refused appointments to the state-run radio
stations, they sometimes were found dead on the Italian
autostrada or drowned in the Kiel Canal. The authorities
looked upon their deaths as forms of self-indulgence. The same
attitude governs the agreement reached between labor and
management at our leading news organizations. No question that
the freedom of speech is extended to every American -- it says
so in the Constitution -- but the privilege is one that musn't
be abused. Understood in a proper and financially rewarding
light, freedom of speech is more trouble than it's worth -- a
luxury comparable to owning a racehorse and likely to bring
with it little else except the risk of being made to look
ridiculous. People who learn to conduct themselves in a manner
respectful of the telephone tap and the surveillance camera
have no reason to fear the fist of censorship. By removing the
chore of having to think for oneself, one frees up more
leisure time to enjoy the convenience of the Internet services
that know exactly what one likes to hear and see and wear and
eat. We don't have to murder the intelligentsia.
Here again, we find ourselves in luck. The society is so
glutted with easy entertainment that no writer or company of
writers is troublesome enough to warrant the compliment of an
arrest, or even the courtesy of a sharp blow to the head. What
passes for the American school of dissent talks exclusively to
itself in the pages of obscure journals, across the coffee
cups in Berkeley and Park Slope, in half-deserted lecture
halls in small Midwestern
colleges. The author on the platform or the beach towel can be
relied upon to direct his angriest invective at the other
members of the academy who failed to drape around the title of
his latest book the garland of a rave review.
The blessings bestowed by Providence place America in the
front rank of nations addressing the problems of a
twenty-first century, certain to require bold geopolitical
initiatives and strong ideological solutions. How can it be
otherwise? More pressing demands for always scarcer resources;
ever larger numbers of people who cannot be controlled except
with an increasingly heavy hand of authoritarian guidance. Who
better than the Americans to lead the fascist renaissance, set
the paradigm, order the preemptive strikes? The existence of
mankind hangs in the balance; failure is not an option. Where
else but in America can the world find the visionary
intelligence to lead it bravely into the future -- Donald
Rumsfeld our Dante, Turd Blossom our Michelangelo?
I don't say that over the last thirty years we haven't made
brave strides forward. By matching Eco's list of fascist
commandments against our record of achievement, we can see how
well we've begun the new project for the next millennium --
the notion of absolute and eternal truth embraced by the
evangelical Christians and embodied in the strict
constructions of the Constitution; our national identity
provided by anonymous Arabs; Darwin's theory of evolution
rescinded by the fiat of "intelligent design"; a
state of perpetual war and a government administering, in
generous and daily doses, the drug of fear; two presidential
elections stolen with little or no objection on the part of a
complacent populace; the nation's congressional districts
gerrymandered to defend the White House for the next fifty
years against the intrusion of a liberal-minded president; the
news media devoted to the arts of iconography, busily minting
images of corporate executives like those of the emperor
heroes on the coins of ancient Rome.
An impressive beginning, in line with what the world has come
to expect from the innovative Americans, but we can do better.
The early twentieth-century fascisms didn't enter their golden
age until the proletariat in the countries that gave them
birth had been reduced to abject poverty. The music and the
marching songs rose with the cry of eagles from the wreckage
of the domestic economy. On the evidence of the wonderful work
currently being done by the Bush Administration with respect
to the trade deficit and the national debt -- to say nothing
of expanding the markets for global terrorism -- I think we
can look forward with confidence to character-building
bankruptcies, picturesque bread riots, thrilling cavalcades of
splendidly costumed motorcycle police.
- END -
Lapham, Lewis H.
(1935 - )
Sources
Born January 8, 1935, in San Francisco, California; educated at
the Hotchkiss School, Yale University (B.A., 1956) and Cambridge
University; newspaper reporter for The San Francisco Examiner
(1957-1959) and for The New York Herald Tribune
(1960-1962); managing editor of Harper's Magazine
(1971-1975); editor of Harper's Magazine (1976-1981 and
1983-present). Syndicated newspaper columnist (1981-1987).
Mr. Lapham is the author of several books of essays (Fortune's
Child, Money and Class in America, Imperial Masquerade, Hotel
America, Waiting for the Barbarians and Theater of War)
which have prompted the New York Times to liken him to H.
L. Mencken, Vanity Fair to suggest a strong resemblance
to Mark Twain, and Tom Wolfe to compare him to Montaigne. The
Penguin Press will publish Gag Rule: On the Suppression of
Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy in June 2004
Lapham writes a monthly essay for Harper's Magazine
called "Notebook." He won a 1995 National Magazine
Award for three of those essays, in which the judges discovered
"an exhilarating point of view in an age of
conformity." He has also written for Life, Commentary,
National Review, The Yale Literary Magazine, Elle, Fortune,
Forbes, The American Spectator, Vanity Fair, Travel and Leisure
Golf, Golf Digest, Parade, Channels, Maclean's, The London
Observer, The New York Times, and The Wall Street
Journal.
Mr. Lapham has lectured at many of the nation's leading
universities, among them Yale, Princeton, Stanford and the
Universities of Michigan, Virginia and Oregon. He is a frequent
guest on television and radio talk shows both in the United
States and in England, France, Canada, Germany and Australia. He
was the host and author of the six-part documentary series
"America's Century," broadcast on public television in
the United States and in England on Channel Four in the autumn
of 1989. Between 1989 and 1991 he was the host and Executive
Editor of "Bookmark," a weekly public television
series seen on over 150 stations nationwide. Lapham is a member
of The Council on Foreign Relations, The Century Club, the
Advisory Council to the New School University and Chair of the
Board for The Americans for Libraries Council. He lives in New
York City.
This is Lapham, Lewis H., an
author and a
human being. He is part of Authors,
which is part of Human
Beings, which is part of Connections,
which is part of Harpers.org.
Author Of
Morte De
Nixon
The Road To
Babylon (May 28, 2003)
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