Chomsky's Nightmare: Is Fascism Coming to America?

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Noam Chomsky - Cover story

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

On April 8, Noam Chomsky came to Madison, Wisconsin, to receive the University of Wisconsin's A. E. Havens Center's award for lifetime contribution to critical scholarship. He spoke at the Orpheum Theatre to more than 1,000 people, and he used the occasion to warn about the risk of fascism coming to the United States.

"I'm just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler's speeches on the radio," he said, "and I have a memory of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs, and I have the dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering" here at home. "The level of anger and fear is like nothing I can compare in my lifetime," he said. He cited a statistic from a recent poll showing that half the unaffiliated voters say the average tea party member is closer to them than anyone else.

"Ridiculing the tea party shenanigans is a serious error," Chomsky said.

The attitudes of the tea party people "are understandable," he said. "For over thirty years, real incomes have stagnated or declined. This is in large part the consequence of the decision in the 1970s to financialize the economy."

There is class resentment, he noted. "The bankers, who are primarily responsible for the crisis, are now reveling in record bonuses while official unemployment is around 10 percent and unemployment in the manufacturing sector is at Depression-era levels," he said.

Obama is linked to the bankers, Chomsky explained.

"The financial industry preferred Obama to McCain," he said. "They expected to be rewarded and they were. Then Obama began to criticize greedy bankers and proposed measures to regulate them. And the punishment for this was very swift: They were going to shift their money to the Republicans. So Obama said bankers are fine guys and assured the business world: 'I, like most of the American people, don't begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free market system.' People see that and are not happy about it."

He said "the colossal toll of the institutional crimes of state capitalism" is what is fueling "the indignation and rage of those cast aside."

"People want some answers," Chomsky said. "They are hearing answers from only one place: Fox, talk radio, and Sarah Palin."

Chomsky invoked Germany during the Weimar Republic, and drew a parallel between it and the United States. "The Weimar Republic was the peak of Western civilization and was regarded as a model of democracy," he said.

And he stressed how quickly things deteriorated there.

"In 1928, the Nazis had 2 percent of the vote," he said. "Two years later, millions supported them. The public got tired of the incessant wrangling, and the service to the powerful, and the failure of those in power to deal with their grievances."

He said the German people were susceptible to appeals about "the greatness of the nation, and defending it against threats, and carrying out the will of eternal providence."

When farmers, the petite bourgeoisie, and Christian organizations joined forces with the Nazis, "the center very quickly collapsed," Chomsky said.

No analogy is perfect, he said, but the echoes of fascism are "reverberating" today, he said. "These are lessons to keep in mind."

W hat to make of Chomsky's dire warning? "He's exactly right. It's time for a conversation about it," says Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates and an expert on the rightwing in America. "It's starting to smell pretty bad. There is real danger here."

"Rightwing populist movements seldom become full-blown fascist movements or take power," he says. "But none of that has to happen to have harmful or even deadly consequences."

Berlet says we can already see "scapegoating of immigrants, the poor, and other targets," and he worries that some on the far right will engage in "mob violence, terrorism, or even selected assassinations."

Here's how he sees things playing out.

"The mentally unstable people act first," he says. "They fly a plane into an IRS building in Texas or they shoot police officers in Pittsburgh," referring to Andrew Joseph Stack and to Richard Poplawski. "What happens next? Some underground cells, whether out of a militia or white supremacist movement, do a 'propaganda of the deed' [a dramatic violent act] to move the tea party into armed revolt."

Berlet says such an action wouldn't necessarily discredit the far right. "After Timothy McVeigh, the militia movement continued to grow for two years," he says, and mainstream politics moved to the right.

Berlet is particularly concerned about the social base of the current rightwing movement.

"A very large rightwing populist middle class revolt is extremely volatile," he says. "It's like a tornado. It has all this energy. It's unpredictable. It can blow...