More musings about the drift toward fascism in America

     "Ahh, the "either/or" logical fallacy at work."  
     Some of you saw this post on Facebook recently:   "Strange that some young singles know so very much about marriage without ever having been in that kind of love...it's almost like hearing "holy" and "expert" ecclesiastical celibates expound authoritatively on the subject. One out of three marriages in America does end in divorce; so, what does that actually mean? Is that actually a bad thing? Does that mean all marriages are bad? Bad some of the time? Bad all of the time? Bad compared to what? Bad compared to singleness? Bad compared, say, to a drunken stupor at the end of an unsuccessful Saturday evening of looking for Mr/Ms Goodbar? Bad compared to life in old age without children? Generalities simply can't apply to the hundreds of millions of individual human male and female and transgender lives, all of them different, and lived in hundreds of thousands of cultures. Ya makes your choice and ya lives with it; stop advising me about my own choices! Put your big, biased, and inexperienced paintbrush away; there is nothing to paint with it."

     In my older age, which does come with greater experience and wisdom (sorry, 20-somethings...)  I grow more angry with illogic and its drift toward fascism, which is born and nurtured by illogical thinking.  The greatest gift from any god that may or may not exist -- and surely the greatest gift of our species-- is the ability to think, and thus, to reason.  The gift is not faith, it is not identity, it is not even culture itself.  The gift is to be able to reason logically.  

I have written elsewhere about the characteristics of fascism as outlined by Umberto Ecco, who both studied and lived with it.  I see the steady creep of fascist extremism in American culture more and more.  Four examples:

*Religious fascists:  "Our god is the one god and his (nearly always "his") way is the one way and the one truth. This being so, we cannot tolerate or recognize anyone who does not believe as we believe, and we are justified in punishing them for their blasphemy."
*Political fascists:  "Our party is totally right and yours is totally wrong.  Compromise and state-craft are impossible due to the fact that we have unilaterally declared a grave crisis in our country, offering as evidence whatever we choose to offer.  We shall win by crushing our opponents, not listening to them.  I know all these things to be true because a man in a strange hat tells me so in my house of worship which is the only legitimate house of worship."
*Social facists:  "My way of living is superior to your way of living.  My choices should be your choices or else you are stupid and uninformed, and you certainly cannot be counted among my friends.  If I can, I will institutionalize discrimination against you" ("you" based on gender, age, sexual preference, race, religion, etc etc).
*Educational facists: "Our way of schooling is the only way of schooling.  Traditions as we have identified them, must be maintained at all costs.  Whatever was done in the past is to be venerated, and the past was better than the present."

Fascism ( I will re-post my summary of Ecco's outline) is about bullying.  It starts by excluding and labelling, and quickly moves to excluding, punishing, and even exterminating perceived "enemies.  In my view, America is terribly ripe for fascism now.  This is not about the tyranny of the majority; fascism grows from the tyranny of a minority who find a way to seize power, and then exploit the helplessness or passivity of the masses.

But I hear some voices:  this is the old, tired promise of mere relativism.  This is just a guy making sure there can be no right or wrong, which translates into permission to believe or do anything at all.  Wrong!  There are basic laws of right and wrong, subscribed to by all human beings everywhere on the planet earth.  I refer readers to C.S. Lewis on this fact ("The Law of Human Nature"...an essay that used to appear in high school literature anthologies until the Texas Christian right wingers drove it out).  One example is that there is no culture anywhere on earth that highly values and praises betrayal of trust.  See Lewis for many other examples here on my blog.

I hear readers saying to themselves that I am also way overstating the danger of fascist thinking in current America, but I don't think so.  Fascist thinking becomes a habit of thought, replacing logic and humanism and those "laws of human nature" that Lewis outlines so well..  It aims to destroy and humiliate its opponents in whatever category, not to exercise free speech and debate in a democracy.  For example, if I was to say out loud that America was not, is not, and never shall be a Christian country, I would be a target for lynching and car-bombing these days.  And yet, America is not a Christian country; it is a FREE country, where no national religion can ever be established BY LAW.  This fact stuns and angers many Americans, particularly in a time when they feel threatened by the realities that Americans may no longer have the highest standard of living, no longer have the best health care system, no longer have the top educational system, no longer have the safest economy, the safest food supply, the most secure jobs, the most solvent banks....or even the shreds of the so-called "American Dream."  

Hard times indeed.  I can forgive anyone for being angry, most especially the legions of of young people for whom all American promises seem to have been broken, but I won't tolerate anyone bullying me.