Too Little, Too Late?

Today's Times has a front-page story about attack ads now, finally being launched by Democratic Congressional candidates. It seems that these campaigns have finally recognized that many of the Republicans running against them are sleazy, corrupt, tools of big business, or out 'n out lunatics.

The question, of course, is whether it is too late to alter the dynamics of these races. Had they been run right after Labor Day, perhaps; in the last week of September, I dunno.

At the risk of stating what is so obvious it is cliche, the issue now is voter turnout. There is no question who the angry motivated voters are: they are the roughly 30% of Americans who are, in their own way, fascists. I don't use that term glibbly - we ought to be forthright that a sizable portion of the tea baggers, the Palinites, the Bachmann-ites, were they a political movement in a European country, would be described as "far-right" "ultra-nationalist" and "neo-fascist." Like the National Front in the UK or the Le Pen movement in France. In this country, however, we call them a major and respectable political party.

So will these ads wake up the rest of us and get us out to the polls? It is too late to change minds, I suspect, but it isn't too late to turn out voters.

Fear and Loathing at 30,000 feet

Recently I was stuck in airport purgatory, thanks to USAir's inability to keep track of its planes, its crews or its schedules (and I didn't even check any bags). So with unending amounts of time to kill, I spent much of it perusing the book sellers in two different airports.

Featured are several of the latest titles from the cast of Fox News and Friends: Hannity, Coulter and several others. They all have "books" out just at the moment (I'm reminded of a sneer that Gore Vidal, or was it Truman Capote, made toward another author's book: "That isn't writing; it's typing.") I didn't actually touch any other them for fear of getting some dreadful (anti)social disease. But the titles are revealing.

They all use the Manichean language of freedom and tyranny; liberty and war.

I'm not particularly interested in what these books say - all one needs to do is read is the title and you get the punchline - nor do I think most Americans care either. Ann Coulter, after all, has given dumb blondes a bad name. These are books which will be advertised as "best-sellers" and then sent straight to pulp.

Nor I am surprised about that language: Republicans for a generation now have been wrapping their looting of American society as super-patriotism or as god's work, or both.

What confuses is me is why we don't call this rhetorical posturing what it really is: American fascism.

Pretend for a moment that a far-right political party emerged in France or England. It claimed that the interest of the state and the interest of the party were identical; it insisted that any opposition to that party was a form of treason; it drew thinly-veiled racial distinctions between the "real" French and those others; it fulminated that those others were responsible for the decline of everything good and right. What would you call such a party?

Of course, you'd call it a fascist party, and we have seen exactly such politics in England with the National Front and in France with the Le Pen movement.

But the examples I've cited above all come from the last 15 years of the Republican party - from Sarah Palin's "Real Americans" speech to Newt Gingrich's 1995 declaration that Democrats were ipso facto traitors. And as we've seen since January, the notion of a loyal opposition has been perverted by Republicans to mean only opposition to Obama and loyalty only to the party.

So let's start calling these people what they are: American fascists. They appeal to a substantial percentage of the population for sure - I remind students that the closest we've come to electoral unity in a presidential election was 61% - which means 39% voted for the other guy (Alf Landon in 1936; Barry Goldwater in 1964). But we should at least be forthright about what we're now dealing with.