IS FASCISM IN THE CARDS FOR THE USA?

The tea party, Christian nut-cases, anti-immigrant xenophobes, militias and Ayn Rand worshipers aren't worth worrying about. The “war on terror” is turning the USA into a centralized corporate run police state.
by R. Congress

Gore Vidal on The National Security State:
“...fifty years ago, Harry Truman replaced the old republic with a national-security state whose sole purpose is to wage perpetual wars, hot, cold, and tepid. Exact date of replacement? February 27, 1947. Place: The White House Cabinet Room. Cast: Truman, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, a handful of congressional leaders. Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg told Truman that he could have his militarized economy only IF he first "scared the hell out of the American people" that the Russians were coming. Truman obliged. The perpetual war began. Representative government of, by, and for the people is now a faded memory. Only corporate America enjoys representation by the Congress and presidents that it pays for in an arrangement where no one is entirely accountable because those who have bought the government also own the media. Now, with the revolt of the Praetorian Guard at the Pentagon, we are entering a new and dangerous phase. Although we regularly stigmatize other societies as rogue states, we ourselves have become the largest rogue state of all. We honor no treaties. We spurn international courts. We strike unilaterally wherever we choose. We give orders to the United Nations but do not pay our dues...we bomb, invade, subvert other states. Although We the People of the United States are the sole source of legitimate authority in this land, we are no longer represented in Congress Assembled. Our Congress has been hijacked by corporate America and its enforcer, the imperial military machine..."
Gore Vidal: Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, 2002 (Thunder Mouth/Nation Books)

Is the threat of a fascist America coming from the Tea Party and it's ilk? Is rightist revolution from below on the agenda? Or is the impulse to end democracy in the U.S. Coming from a different direction? Actually “creeping fascism” has been happening for a while and it's not just the military/industrial types and the neo-cons pushing us toward dictatorship. Zionist schmucks like Charles Schumer and Jerry Nadler are in the vanguard of the stampede of Democratic Party “liberals” (Pelosi, Boxer, Feingold et al) to destroy democratic rights for the good of the empire (and Israel too).

There was a brief blip of pro-bill of rights legislation and an effort by some to shore up democratic rights in the immediate post-Watergate and post-Vietnam war period. But as a rule, both parties have supported the gradual chipping away at democracy that went along with the evolution of our National Security State.

The Obama administration has embraced the damage done to the Constitution by the Patriot Act and the out of control use of “state secrecy” and “terrorism” to spy on everyone. The abomination of the “enemy combatant” status, created by the Bush Justice Department, which allows the government to imprison anyone it wants for as long as it wants with no due process still stands. Guantanamo is still open. Secret CIA prisons are still operating. Rendition and torture still go on. Now, via predator drones, the CIA and military can routinely assassinate who ever they want, when and where ever they choose. The recent Supreme Court ruling that will criminalize even speaking about so called “terrorists” groups is another nail in the coffin.

The USA has always been a predatory imperialist power. Even in the days of the “old republic” that Gore Vidal is nostalgic about, the United States was ripping off land from the Indian Nations, filching half of Mexico and with the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 declaring South America to be its (not Europe's) sphere of influence. Now American imperialism is in decline and is desperately retooling it's organs of state control both internally and externally .

In an earlier post I described the uproar from the “grass roots” tea party people as the death agony of a dying demographic. These people are older, white, middle-income and deeply racist. They are losers, on the way out. They have no potential to sweep the nation like Hitler's brown shirts. Conditions here are also not the same as those that bred the “classical fascism” of the 1930s.

True, the German bankers and industrialists opted to support the Nazis once they were in power. But social conflict and economic disaster was more severe by a whole order of magnitude and the Nazis had already gained a lot of support in a more homogeneous country than ours. A bunch of obese suburbanites yammering about the evils of big government are not going to lead a seizure of state power. Real fascists like big government. They want to use it to mold all of society in their image.

Besides, our state has already been seized by corporate America. The repressive apparatus of social control is coming more to the fore as U.S. foreign adventures fall to pieces and other developed countries see that the USA is in economic, military and political decline and flex their muscles.

Too much internal dissent is also seen as a security threat by our corporate/military/security state. The questioning of Israel's treatment of Palestinians and dissent in general that is growing among the American population is putting Zionist apologists very ill at ease. AIPAC, J Street (a liberal leech on the ass of Abe Foxman) and the politicians they lead around by the nose are quite happy to equate criticism of Israel with overt, prosecutable support of an open-ended list of designated terrorist organizations. It's a short reach from that position to paint critics of the Afghan and Iraqi (and Pakistan, and Yemen etc.) wars as aiding terrorism. Is this over reacting? We'll see.