Trump Will Soon Leave Office, But The Ingredients of Homegrown Fascism Remain, Extant Since 1930s
'Trump will soon leave office. But the ingredients of homegrown fascism remain,' The Guardian, Jan. 8, '21. -Ed:
I’ve spent decades reporting on inequality in America. I’m terrified by the poverty I see – and the rage.
Several months into the pandemic, a friend drove us away from the southern CA coast into barren, dun-colored mountains, where roadside signs were riddled with bullet holes. We came across an abandoned service station with the windows blown out. On the back wall was a graffito: fucked at birth. “I knew you’d like that,” my friend said as I took photos of the words that encapsulated what I’d been trying to say for the past 40 years in my work as a journalist documenting the ever-expanding class chasm in America. In the early 1980s, I believed awareness would instigate political and social change. Now, after so many articles and books, I felt that they were like some tired country ballad playing in a honky-tonk where everyone is drunk and not listening to the music. I was done with the work.
In the coming days, however, I was haunted by the juxtaposition of the flag and the spray-painted words. It was time to change the song. I decided to drive across America and visit homeless encampments, meatpacking towns, crippled onetime industrial cities, showing people a picture of the gas station’s exterior and what was inside, and let those I encountered tell me what it meant. The responses always came fast. In Sacramento, John Kraintz, who had been homeless: “In the Declaration of Independence, they said all men are created equal. That was the first big lie. If you’ve got money, they care about you.” In Denver, the BLM activist Terrance Roberts: “You ask me about being fucked at birth? I mean, I’m an African American male.” In NYC, my former student Megan Cattel: “That’s the millennial rallying cry.”
- West Ohio Minutemen at the Republican National Convention, Ohio, 2016.
The words – fucked at birth – are perhaps harsh. They are simply reality for ever-increasing numbers of Americans. I also came away from my recent cross-nation reporting tour convinced that the 2020s are going to be this century’s 1930s. The stock market is overvalued more than any time since 1929. The Eviction Lab at Princeton Univ. fears as many as 30 to 40 Mill people face being thrown out of their rental homes which seems destined to create an unprecedented wave of homelessness. Don’t be fooled by what’s going to happen later this year: when the vaccines are widely distributed, the top two quintiles of the American population will start spending money. A lot of it. But this won’t immediately translate into good times for the bottom three quintiles.
Tens of millions of the precariat were already living in a de facto Great Depression before the pandemic, and many working-class jobs will not return in the short term – if ever.
This widening disparity creates a level of rage among voters that inexplicably continues to evade Beltway journalists’ understanding. Just look to the past. I’ve long been a student of the 1930s – fascism was on the rise in the US throughout the Great Depression. It’s something that never went away. Many of the 74 Mill who voted for Trump in 2020 would be quite happy with authoritarian leadership. Long before there was an internet and television, fascist ideas thoroughly infiltrated the culture. Rev. LM Birkhead, a Unitarian minister traveled in 1935 to investigate the authoritarian governments of Italy and Germany. In 1938, he released a list of 800 “antidemocratic” organizations in the U.S. that were aligned with the Nazis and fascism. He believed that one out of every three Americans was being reached by fascist materials. In early 1939, a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden drew 20,000 people.
The rising authoritarian movement was covered in a 1940 Harper’s magazine article, 'The American Fascists,' by Dale Kramer.
In the modern era, the Youngstown State labor studies professor John Russo recognized early that anger over the loss of good jobs was leading to a resurgence of fascism. When I interviewed him in 1995, he foresaw the emergence of a Trump-like figure...
More, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/08/trump-homegrown-fascism-inequality-poverty
By Dale Maharidge.
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- 'The Return of American Fascism,' New Statesman, Sept. 2, 2020,
https://www.newstatesman.com/international/places/2020/09/return-american-fascism
- Youth camp of the pro-Nazi US organisation the German American Bund, in Griggstown, New Jersey, 1930s.
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