Secrecy, Democracy, and Fascism: It Looks Like You've Blown A Seal

The “national conversation” about the direction in which the United States is moving has grown ridiculouser and ridiculouser, if it can even be called a “conversation” at all. In fact, the definite lack of anything even resembling a “conversation” has turned the entire country into a madhouse of hyped-up fears and misdirected anger that are tearing the fabric of democracy into tiny, tattered pieces. While they see themselves as “patriots,” defending what they believe to be the real values and integrity of the United States of America against the agenda of a group of less-righteous reformers, these quite recently fired-up conservative activists are doing the nation a terrible disservice by preventing any constructive conversation from occurring, thus subverting the process of deliberative democracy and laying the groundwork for the very kind of social disharmony that Mussolini played upon in Italy and Hitler utilized in Germany.

The largest point that the “Teabaggers” are missing is the concept of “speaking truth to power,” where such tactics as citizen protests and street marches are necessitated by groups who have no voice in a national conversation, due to repression or social inequality instituted by the state, itself. But the people who are causing such a scene now are by no means a repressed group. They already have a seat at the table and are fully able to make their voices heard through regular channels of communication, through public discussion forums, through the news media, through access to their representatives, etcetera. Unlike the Iraq War protesters, for example, whose reasonable opposition to the attacking of a nation without any discernible proof of the existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction or connection between Saddam Hussein and the actual 9/11 attackers was completely ignored by the Bush Administration and subverted by the war-mongering media, having been labeled as “unpatriotic” for wanting to be sure about these things before sending our troops into battle, not to mention destroying the lives of innocent people in Iraq and destabilizing the entire Middle East, there is no silencing and no sidelining of the groups who are taking to the streets now. The Obama Administration has been trying to invite conversation with conservative groups, and because of the fear that the president would be labeled as a “socialist” by these groups that it is actually the progressive, single-payer supporters who are being left out of the discussion.

So, whereas legitimate protest movements can only arise organically through bottom-up, grassroots community organization of repressed voices, which is actually the case for the single-payer movement, what is occurring now is an attempt by a set of top-down, well-funded, politically-connected, behind-the-scenes power brokers – insurance and health industry lobbyists, small-government ideologues, and other social and economic conservatives – to stir up unwarranted fear and underlying prejudices in order to simply shout down their opposition, instead of allowing any conversation to occur at all. This is a dangerous situation, indeed, for let us not forget that the Nazis came to power within the framework of a democratic government, and were enabled to commit their atrocities against the Jewish people by demonizing them as internal enemies of the state, just as progressives are being demonized by the right today. Italy was not a democracy when Mussolini rose to power, but there, too, internal enemies of the state were declared and targeted, Jewish people being primary among them, as well as anyone who did not go along with Mussolini's single-minded plan to create a better, stronger, and more pure Roman Empire.

In the face of these disgraceful and entirely undemocratic tactics, where facts do not seem to hold any sway and even the very nature of what democracy is supposed to be about has been co-opted by religious and economic ideologues, those who believe themselves to be centrist as a way of bringing the nation together have been bending farther and farther over under their pressure, which means that the result of the Obama presidency, so far, has been a reactionary lean to the right instead of the opening up of the national political discussion that progressives believed that Mr. Obama represented during the election.

Up until, well, today, when I read Matt Taibbi's recent articles on the fuckfest that “health care reform” has become (Sick_and_Wrong; PhRMA's Big Bribe Comes In) I had been arguing that President Obama has been cunningly biding his time to be able to work forward an eventual and practical progressive agenda, patiently negotiating the political landscape, showing Solomon-like leadership qualities, and living up to his promise to be everyone's president, not just the partisan Democratic party leader. However, I have finally come to the conclusion that he has, indeed, fallen prey to the Presidential Bubble, surrounded as he is by his army of advisers and assistants, out of touch with his campaign promises and his earliest grassroots progressive supporters. As Matt Taibbi so expressively points out, President Obama has already sold the country out on health care reform, and unless something changes drastically very soon, there will be no meaningful reform at all, rather, things look to get even worse for the citizens of the United States.

This is disastrous for democracy, for the nation, for the Democratic party, for progressives, and for virtually everyone except the healthcare industry. I am glad that I was able to get out of the United States and into a country where reasonably-priced healthcare is available (Uruguay) before this shit-storm hit the fan. The man who campaigned on a platform of change – and, very specifically, on health care reform - has turned out to be more timid about this change than his rhetoric promised. He has let the political hacks persuade him to retain the status quo, to not upset the apple cart too much, to take bribes from the pharmaceutical industry to ensure that his campaign coffers will be full. He has acquiesced to the demands of the noisy, violent, and misguided right, which is beyond disappointing. While I believe that Barack Obama is in no way fascist, I do believe that by allowing this health care reform “debate” to be guided by the industry lobbyists and their reverberating echo chamber on the right, who do not see the connection between individuals' access to health care and the health of the nation, itself, by failing to show leadership and direction on this, one of the most important issues that he campaigned on, Mr. Obama is allowing insipid fascism to sneak into his presidency and infect everyone that it touches more severely than the swine flu virus ever could.

Looking back again at History's lessons, let us remember that both Italian fascism and German Aryan fascism grew out of a desire to find a centrist, “Third Way” that would bring all segments of society together as one in service of a stronger, more unified, more pure, more directed, and supposedly more superior nation. Both of these fascist movements originally portended to represent this centrist middle way between the conservative, wealthy old guard who sought to maintain their positions of exclusive power, and the organizations of low-class laborers who were demanding more opportunities to participate in their own governance, the great promise of a new type of government called “democracy.” Fascism grew out of the desire to quell divisive polarizations, and the draw of this centralizing idea around the strength of the unified nation makes the present day struggle between the left and the right and the desire of this president to draw them both together, however that can be achieved, concerning to behold from this historic perspective. For what was accepted as the “middle ground” was, in truth, quite a bit further to the right than what was publicly admitted by the fascists who needed the support of the masses, the workers, at the same time that they much more discretely sought the wealth of the elite. It is this behind-the-scenes connection with sources of wealth, while purporting to be working in the interests of the general population, that is of greatest concern to me, and it defines the connection between Secrecy, Democracy, and Fascism that I have been exploring in these essays.

The key here is to determine what fascism really is, and to not make false accusations. President Obama is not a fascist, as he has been accused of being by elements on the right. Socialism is not the same thing as fascism. And Obama is nowhere near being a socialist, anyway, having, for example, rejected offhand the single-payer option and accepted those pharmaceutical industry bribes. It is, frankly, ridiculous to even insinuate that a single-payer health insurance plan is somehow tyrannical socialist fascism. What it is is the government using its massive size to drive down the cost of health care, a notion that is actually highly capitalistic. What we have right now is actually more tyrannical and anti-capitalistic, where insurance companies interfere with the real supply-and-demand equations and create an inefficient, bloated, and politically protected system that costs the consumer more than what the services and products are actually worth, considering that the whole rest of the world pays less for their healthcare needs than the citizens of the United States are forced to pay. Just look at the financial disclosures of these companies – they are up there with the oil companies in percentages of pure profit that they are raking in as more and more U.S. citizens fall behinderer and behinderer.

If government officials insist on listening only to the health industry lobbyists, with their campaign contributions and exclusive party favors in hand, who have been infecting the “national discussion” about health care reform with self-serving vitriol that plays upon the emotions of people who are easily led astray by media personalities who gleefully revel in the effects that their enormous, gaseous egos have upon the single-minded and ill-informed, well, then that is what is fascist in this equation: the secretive collusion of business interests with government, along with their emotionally-laden, propaganda, dispersed by their allies in the media posing as independent agents, preaching uber-nationalism and phaux-populism and laying false blame for the nation's financial problems upon illegal aliens and big-government teat-suckers and hippie-dippie, love-in lovin', peace-nickety, morally-deprived, long-haired, dirty, Air America-listening, socialistical, untrustworthy intellectualistic, community-organizing “America”-haters...

To sum up, dear citizens of the United States of America: You are foaming at the mouth, and your engine is smoking, and in every sense of the phrase imaginable, it looks like you've blown a seal!