Fascist America: Are We There Yet?

[NicholeW.]

Fascist America: Are We There Yet?
Campaign For America's Future
By Sara Robinson
August 6, 2009 - 1:23am ET

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009083205/fascist-america-are-we-there-yet

All through the dark years of the Bush Administration, progressives watched in horror as Constitutional protections vanished, nativist rhetoric ratcheted up, hate speech turned into intimidation and violence, and the president of the United States seized for himself powers only demanded by history's worst dictators. With each new outrage, the small handful of us who'd made ourselves experts on right-wing culture and politics would hear once again from worried readers: Is this it? Have we finally become a fascist state? Are we there yet?

Unfortunately, all the noise and bluster actually obscures the danger. These people are as serious as a lynch mob, and have already taken the first steps toward becoming one. And they're going to walk taller and louder and prouder now that their bumbling efforts at civil disobedience are being committed with the full sanction and support of the country's most powerful people, who are cynically using them in a last-ditch effort to save their own places of profit and prestige.

[tekla]

This:
Lacking legitimate routes back to power, their last hope is to invest the hardcore remainder of their base with an undeserved legitimacy, recruit them as shock troops, and overthrow American democracy by force. If they can't win elections or policy fights, they're more than willing to take it to the streets, and seize power by bullying Americans into silence and complicity.

And this:
These people are as serious as a lynch mob, and have already taken the first steps toward becoming one. And they're going to walk taller and louder and prouder now that their bumbling efforts at civil disobedience are being committed with the full sanction and support of the country's most powerful people, who are cynically using them in a last-ditch effort to save their own places of profit and prestige.

I don't think we're there yet, but the all the bricks are in place for it to happen, what we're closer to is collapse a la the former Soviet Union model, which I think is a necessary prerequisite for this type of shift.

[Hazumu]

I saw this at Alternet.  I found the article made scary sense.  I do hope, though, that some event turns it into the last gasp of the tantrum of the newly-disenfranchised, the way the bombing of the Murrah building in Oklahoma City caused the unorganized militia movement to STFU.

Else, as the article states, we top the chain hill and gravity rules for a while.

Dennis, how do I emigrate?

=K