Greer has written a interesting thought experiment on how a neofascist party might come to power in America in the future. Its a good read and quite realistic (not so sure about the CC/PO references to the party) but even so, realistic way on how a fascistic party might gain power in the flawed American political system.
To explore the way that unfolded, let’s engage in a little thought experiment. Imagine, then, that sometime this spring, when you visit some outdoor public place, you encounter a half dozen young people dressed identically in bright green T-shirts, surplus black BDU trousers, and army-style boots. They’re clean-cut, bright, and enthusiastic, and they want to interest you in a new political movement called the American Peoples Party. You’re not interested, and walk on by.
A couple of months later you run across another dozen or so of them, just as bright and clean and enthusiastic as the first bunch. Now the movement is called the National Progressive American Peoples Party, NPAPP for short, and it’s got a twenty-five-point program focused on the troubled economy. You take a flyer, mostly because the young person who hands it to you is kind of cute. The twenty-five points don’t seem especially original, but they make more sense than what either Obama or the Republicans are offering. What’s more, the flyer says that the economy’s a mess and peak oil and climate change are real problem that aren’t going away, and this impresses you.
Over the months to come you see more and more of them, handing out flyers, going door to door to invite people to local caucus meetings, and doing all the other things that political parties used to do back when they were serious about grassroots organizing. A news website you follow shows a picture of the party’s chairman, a man named Fred Halliot;* he’s an earnest-looking guy in his thirties, an Army vet who did three tours in Afghanistan and earned a Silver Star for courage under fire. You glance at his face and then go look at something more interesting.
(*Yes, it’s an anagram. Work it out yourself.)
Meanwhile, the economy’s getting worse in the same slow uneven way it’s been doing for years. Two of your friends lose their jobs, and the price of gasoline spikes up to $5.69 a gallon, plunges, and finds a new stable point again well above $4. Obama insists that the recovery is already here and people just need to be patient and wait for prosperity to get to them. The Republicans insist that the only reason the economy hasn’t recovered yet is that the rich still have to pay taxes. The media are full of cheery stories about how the 2014 holiday season is going to be so big a hit that stores may run out of toys and electronic gewgaws to sell; there are record crowds on Black Friday, or that’s what the TV says, but nobody you know has the spare money to buy much this year. Not until midway through January 2015 does the media admit that the shopping season was a disaster and that two big-box chains have just gone broke.
Through all this, the new party keeps building momentum. As spring comes, Halliot begins a nationwide speaking tour. He travels in a school bus painted green and black, the NPAPP colors, and a Celtic tree-of-life symbol, the party’s new emblem. The bus goes from town to town, and the crowds start to build. A handful of media pundits start talking about Halliot and the NPPAP, making wistful noises about how nice it is to see young idealists in politics again; a few others fling denunciations, though they don’t seem to have any clear sense what exactly they’re denouncing. Both mainstream parties, as well as the Libertarians and the Greens, launch youth organizations with their own t-shirts and slogans, but their lack of anything approaching new ideas or credible responses to the economic mess make these efforts a waste of time.
The speaking tour ends in Washington DC with a huge rally, and things get out of hand. Exactly what happened is hard to tell afterwards, with wildly different stories coming from the feds, the mass media, the internet, and the NPAPP headquarters in St. Louis. The upshot, though, is that Halliot and two of his chief aides are arrested on federal conspiracy charges. The trial is a media circus. Halliot gives an impassioned speech justifying his actions on the grounds that the nation and the world are in deep trouble, radical change is needed to keep things from getting much worse, and civil disobedience is justified for that reason. He gets sentenced to four years in prison, and the other political parties breathe a huge collective sigh of relief, convinced that the NPAPP is a flash in the pan.
They’re wrong. The NPAPP weathers the crisis easily, and publicity from the trial gives Halliot and his party a major boost. Candidates from the new party enter races across the country in the 2016 elections, seizing much of the limelight from the frankly dreary presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Haley Barbour. When the votes are counted, the new party has more than three hundred city and county positions, forty-three seats in state legislatures, and two seats in the House of Representatives. The major parties try every trick in the book to overturn the results of each race, and succeed mostly in making themselves look corrupt and scared.
Then Halliot gets released from prison, having served only nine months of his sentence. (Word on the internet has it that the whole point of locking him up was to keep him out of the way during the election—but is that simply a NPAPP talking point? Nobody’s sure.) It turns out that he put the time to good use, and has written a book, A Struggle for the Soul of America, which hits the bookstalls the same week President Barbour is inaugurated. You leaf through a copy at the public library; it’s not exactly a great work of literature, and it’s written in a folksy, rambling style you find irritating, but it’s full of the kind of political notions that Americans swap over beers and pizza: the kind, in other words, that no mainstream party will touch.
The book has an edge that wasn’t in NPAPP literature before Halliot’s prison term, though. The government of the parties, he insists, must be replaced by a government of the people, guided by a new values consensus that goes beyond the broken politics of greed and special interests to do what has to be done to cope with the disintegrating economy, the challenge of peak oil, and the impacts of climate change. Time is short, he insists, and half measures aren’t enough to avoid catastrophe; a complete transformation of every aspect of American life, a Great Turning, is the only option left. Edgy though his language and ideas have become, you note, he’s still the only person in national politics who takes the economic, energy, and climate crises seriously.
The next autumn, as if on cue, the economic troubles go into overdrive. Petroleum prices spike again—you start commuting via public transit when the price of gasoline breaks $8 a gallon—and a big Wall Street investment bank that had huge derivative bets the other direction goes messily broke. Attempts to get a bailout through Congress freeze up in a flurry of partisan bickering. Over the next two months, despite frantic efforts by the Barbour administration, the stock market plunges and the credit markets seize up. Job losses snowball. Through the fall and winter, NPAPP people are everywhere, leafleting the crowds, staffing impromptu soup kitchens, marching in the streets. You would pay less attention, but by spring you’re out of a job, too.
The following years are a blur of grim headlines, hungry crowds at soup kitchens, and marching crowds in green and black. In the 2018 election, there are rumors, never proved, of NPAPP squads keeping opposition voters away from the polls in critical districts. One way or another, though, Halliot’s party seats six senators and 185 representatives in Congress, and takes control of the governments of a dozen states. The three-way split in the House makes it all but impossible to get anything done there, not that the Democrats or Republicans have any idea what to do, and the administration copies its last two predecessors by flailing and fumbling to no noticeable effect. One thing of importance does happen; to get NPAPP support to push a stopgap budget through the House in 2019, President Barbour is forced to grant a full federal pardon to Halliot, removing the last legal barrier to the latter’s presidential ambitions.
Fast forward to the 2020 elections, which are fought out bitterly in a flurry of marches, protests, beatings, riots, and charges and countercharges of vote fraud. When the dust has settled, it turns out that no party has a majority in the electoral college. The election goes to the House, and since neither of the major parties is willing to vote for the other major party’s candidate, Halliot ends up winning by a whisker-thin majority on the forty-second ballot. He is inaugurated on a bitterly cold day, surrounded by NPAPP banners and greeted by marching files of party faithful in green and black. He announces that he’s about to call a constitutional convention to replace the government of the parties with a government of the people, get the country back on its feet, and sweep away everything that stands in the way of the Great Turning that will lead America and the world to a bright new future. The crowd roars its approval.
Later that year, the crowds go wilder still when the old constitution is scrapped and the new one enacted. Those with old-fashioned ideas find some aspects of the new constitution objectionable, as it lacks such minor details as checks and balances, not to mention meaningful and enforceable guarantees of due process and civil rights. The media doesn’t mention that, though, because the “new values consensus” is enforced by Party officials—the capital letter becomes standard usage very quickly—and those who criticized the new constitution too forcefully, well, let’s just say that nobody’s quite sure where they are now, and most people know better than to ask.
And you, dear reader? At what point along that trajectory would you have decided that for all its seeming promise, for all the youth and enthusiasm and earnestness that surround it, the National Socialist German Workers Party and the folksy, charismatic veteran who led it were likely to be worse—potentially much, much worse—than the weary, dreary, dysfunctional mess of a political system they were attempting to replace? Or would you end up as part of the cheering crowds in that last scene? You don’t have to tell me the answer, but in the silence of your own mind, take the time to think it through and face the question honestly.
