By Ian Jobling • 5/8/08
The first part of this article argued that it is currently mainstream, conventional wisdom that the United States is governed by a fascist establishment that is pro-white, anti-democratic, rapaciously capitalist, repressive of alternative lifestyles, and so forth. Mainstream pundits like Paul Krugman, columnist for The New York Times and economics professor at Princeton University, are taken seriously when they say that Republicans are about to impose a pro-white theocracy in which “elections are only a formality” on America. The “vast right-wing conspiracy” that promulgates fascism is a product of the collaboration between big business and the far right.
The myth of the fascist establishment is not only an illusion, but a total inversion of reality. On issues of race and diversity, American mainstream opinion is quite liberal, and the wealthy and powerful, including the business elites, are considerably to the left of most Americans. Indeed, the idea that “diversity is a strength” is so entrenched and defended so zealously that it is virtually impossible to criticize it. So far from being an incipiently fascist society, the prevailing culture in America is one of dogmatic rebellion; we are reflexively anti-authoritarian and anti-traditionalist.
As conventional wisdom in America, the myth of the fascist establishment is not confined to pundits, but is the basic ideology of the Democratic Party. Though Democrats fail to state the myth in terms as stark as pundits like Krugman do, the myth constitutes the kernel of their beliefs.
Take the views of Barack Obama. In his notorious “Bittergate” comments, he said of small-town, and implicitly white, Americans that, given their economic hardship, “it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Why do white Americans express their grievances in this pathological manner? Because corporations have instilled a right-wing “false consciousness” in them that prevents them from recognizing their true interests. As Obama said in his speech on race in Philadelphia:
Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.
Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze—a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.
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Obama’s views are, in essence, the same as Krugman’s. Big business has promoted a pro-white social conservatism in order to bend Americans’ will to its own interests.
The intensely biased nature of Obama’s remarks demonstrates the power of the myth of the fascist establishment to distort perception. After all, whites’ support for immigration law enforcement is an expression of the value they place on the rule of law. Religion is a natural and universal human impulse. Yet Obama chose to interpret these phenomena as the result of a corporate scam.
Democrats take it for granted that the American establishment, as represented by the Republicans, is pro-white, despite forty years of affirmative action that has made blacks and Hispanics a privileged class. Consider Democrats’ reaction to Katrina, for example. Howard Dean said:
We have to come to terms with the ugly truth that skin color, age, and economics played a deadly role in who survived [Katrina] and who did not. And this question, forty or fifty years after Dr. King and the civil rights movement, is, “How could this still be happening in America?”1
Senator Edward Kennedy chimed in with similar sentiments: “The stark and tragic images of human suffering in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina have reminded us yet again that civil rights and equal rights are still the great unfinished business of America.”2
Another of Dean’s remarks is particularly telling. In 2005, during the congressional debate over HR 4437, a bill that would have toughened immigration law enforcement, Dean stated that the bill was the product of “right-wing extremists,” as though only fascists would respect American immigration laws. Even more ridiculously, he sought to associate President Bush with the bill, even though Bush concurred with Dean in opposing it. The president had “picked on” homosexuals in order to drum up popular support in 2004:
In 2006, it’s immigrants. That’s what their strategy is on the Republican side: divide people, scapegoat them, set them aside, point the finger at them.
That Dean would accuse Bush of malicious scapegoating despite the fact that the two politicians’ opinions were the same reveals that Democrats project fascist traits onto Republicans.
The influence of the myth is particularly evident in the debate over warrantless wiretapping of terror suspects. The Democrats, following the liberal media, have cast this commonsensical and perfectly legal measure to protect national security as the coming of Big Brother.
In 2005, the New York Times revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) was conducting warrantless wiretapping of terror suspects within the United States during international calls. Warrants were still required for purely domestic calls.
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| Not exactly. |
Although ordinarily surveillance of Americans requires a search warrant, there are many exceptions and the type of wiretapping performed by the NSA was one of them. Before beginning the program, the Bush administration consulted with judges and other experts about its legality. The consensus was that the program conformed to long legal precedent that gives the president power to engage in warrantless surveillance of foreign powers and their agents. In fact, previous administrations, including those of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, have conducted warrantless searches under the same justification. Furthermore, Congress had granted the president the authority to use military force against Al-Qaeda. Collecting intelligence is a key component of the war effort, and it is suicidal to extend civil liberties protections to suspected enemy combatants.
However, the purveyors of the myth of the fascist establishment immediately went ballistic. Editorials on the subject began accusing the administration of tyranny and nicknamed the president “King George.” The fact that part of the dispute involved the question of whether telecommunications corporations should be prosecuted for cooperating with the NSA enabled demagogues like Keith Olbermann to press their point that the fascist right was powered by corporations.
Democratic politicians, far from taking a principled stand against this demagoguery, poured gas on the fire. Sen. Edward Kennedy called the program “Big Brother run amok.” Sen. Al Gore said, “A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government.” Patrick Leahy ridiculously wailed, “My concern is for the peaceful Quakers who are being spied upon and other law-abiding Americans and babies and nuns who are being placed on watchlists.”3 Other Democrats have accused Republicans of “fear-mongering” and “scare tactics” designed to justify the dismantling of constitutional freedoms.
The myth of the fascist establishment not only interprets conservatism maliciously, but seriously distorts the actual nature of American society. In fact, liberal values are mainstream, and they are especially dominant among the wealthy and powerful.
There is no myth at once so accepted and so unfounded in American society as that corporations are on the side of the right. This belief is the foundation of the political outlook discussed in the first part of this article, and Democrats constantly use it as an attack point on Republicans, who are supposed to be beholden to corporate lobby.
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| Swimming in corporate cash. |
However, the Capital Research Center, a group that tracks corporate charity, has shown that corporations are much more likely to donate to left-wing than to right-wing causes. In fact, corporate charities give about 15 times more money to left-wing groups than to right-wing ones. Groups receiving the largest sum of corporate donations included the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the National Council of La Raza, and the American Civil Liberties Union.
This should not be surprising. As the CRC notes, many corporate CEOs are liberal. Jon Corzine, who is one of the most liberal senators, left a career at Goldman Sachs to go into politics.
The Inverted World article Class and Racial Liberalism established that liberal views of race are dominant in America, particularly among the wealthy and powerful. One central component of the liberal outlook is race denial, or the rejection of the belief that socioeconomic differences among the races are rooted in biology, as in fact they are. By this measure, American whites are overwhelming liberal: only nine percent of American whites are race realists, and only five percent of those earning $90,000 or more per year. Wealthy white Americans are also the most likely to believe that immigrants improve American society by bringing in new ideas and culture and that it is important for the government to protect the rights of minorities. Liberalism rises with education as well as wealth. Holders of bachelor’s and post-graduate degrees are the most liberal on issues of race and diversity. Professionals and executives/managers are the most liberal occupational groups.
Such has been the case for decades. As I showed in The Ideology of the Professionals, in the 1970s and 80s, professionals were about twice as likely as blue-collar workers to support government programs to help blacks, racial integration, environmental spending, civil liberties, women’s equality, reducing the role of the military in American life, and the rights of the accused in criminal prosecutions. They were no less than four times more likely to support busing than any other class.
In the 1970s and 1980s, American businessmen were more liberal on social issues than the working class, although less so than professionals. In the succeeding decades, the liberalism of the business community has become more pronounced.
Certainly, support for a black presidential candidate is a telling measure of liberalism. Barack Obama’s appeal to the “white wine” crowd has been so obvious as to become a truism. Although Hillary Clinton defeated Obama by a large margin in the Pennsylvania primary, Obama trounced Clinton among voters earning more than $200,000 per year.
Furthermore, liberals’ view that the Republican Party is pro-white is little short of delirious. The neo-conservatives currently in power entirely accept liberalism on racial issues. President Bush and current Republican nominee John McCain have made clear their belief that a racially diverse population is good for America and that resistance to a white minority America is motivated by “racism.”
During his 2000 campaign, Bush welcomed the prospect of a majority non-white America:
American has one national creed, but many accents. We are now one of the largest Spanish-speaking nations in the world. We’re a major source of Latin music, journalism and culture.
Just go to Miami, or San Antonio, Los Angeles, Chicago or West New York, New Jersey….and close your eyes and listen. You could just as easily be in Santo Domingo or Santiago, or San Miguel de Allende. For years our nation has debated this change—some have praised it and others have resented it. By nominating me, my party has made a choice to welcome the new America.
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| George Bush welcomes the new America. |
The ruling Republicans are eager, even desperate, to reach out to Hispanics. As Ken Mehlman said in 2005, “While I don’t yet speak Spanish, there is one phrase I memorized as Republican National Committee chairman: ‘Mi partido es su partido.’ (‘My party is your party.’)”
As such, the Bush administration has pushed for amnesty that would hasten the demographic transformation of America. John McCain has been responsible for the past three amnesty bills introduced in Congress. He also has a long record of support for bilingual education for Hispanics and has regularly taken the view that enforcing immigration laws is motivated by white “racism.”
This liberalism carries over to Islamic issues as well. After 9/11, Bush defended Islam:
The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.
When we think of Islam we think of a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world. Billions of people find comfort and solace and peace. And that’s made brothers and sisters out of every race — out of every race.
He castigated those who wanted to pressure Muslims into leaving the country:
Those who feel like they can intimidate our fellow citizens to take out their anger don’t represent the best of America, they represent the worst of humankind, and they should be ashamed of that kind of behavior.
Bush does not have nice things to say about “nativism” either: “I’m troubled by isolationism and protectionism … (and) another ‘ism,’ and that’s nativism.”
Bush condones the standard liberal view that white mistreatment of blacks is the reason for the latter’s failure. He told the NAACP:
I understand that racism still lingers in America. It’s a lot easier to change a law than to change a human heart… We must work as one, and that’s why I came today.
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| Conservatives didn’t stand up for James Watson. |
Neither the Republican Party nor the conservative establishment comes to the aid of serious critics of liberalism on racial issues. When Nobel Prize-winner James D. Watson was fired from his job for pointing out the undeniable fact that Africans have lower IQs than whites, no Republican politician defended him. Conservative pundits by and large ignored the injustice committed against him.
Answering other charges of fascism against the Bush administration would make for a long article, but given the emptiness of claims that Republicans are pro-white, that big business is funding right-wing ideologues, and that the Bush administration enacted “Big Brother” violations of Americans’ civil liberties, it is clear that they are making mountains out of molehills. One would be hard pressed to find any actual changes in US policy that Bush’s alleged “theocratic” leanings have caused. Claims that white officials are intentionally suppressing black votes universally turn out to be false. In fact, one of the few voter suppression cases that has stood up in court in in recent years involved blacks’ suppression of the white vote in Noxubee County, Mississippi.
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| Bobos in Paradise |
To grasp the fallacies at the heart of his outlook, Krugman need have done no more than consult the work of his fellow New York Times columnist David Brooks. Brooks’ analysis of the contemporary upper class in Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How it Got There ought to have disabused Krugman of the illusion that today’s wealthy elites are fascist, or even conservative. Rather, they are the most consistently multiculuralist segment of American society.
Brooks argues that 1960s radicalism has become an integral part of the business world. “Business is chic” among wealthy bobos, or “bourgeois bohemians,” but only because every business now portrays itself as “a social movement.” “Cause capitalism” and “liberation marketing” are ubiquitous: in the bobo supermarket, you can “save the rainforest, ease global warming, nurture Native American values, support family farms, spread world peace, and reduce income inequality” just by buying food.
As a result, contemporary elite culture is drenched in multiculturalism. The bookstores in the chic locales where the elites live are all the same: “you can’t get the New Republic or anything to its right,” but you are guaranteed to find a large and prominently displayed “ethnic studies” section, which you can sample while listening to “World Music.” The folk art of “colonial victims” is the preferred décor of the homes of social strivers: “In fact, if you tour a super-sophisticated home, you will see an odd mélange of artifacts that have nothing in common except for the shared victimization of their creators. An African mask will sit next to an Incan statue atop a tablecloth fashioned from Samoan, Brazilian, Moroccan, or Tibetan cloth.”
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| Nation of Rebels |
Multiculturalism is motivated by a spirit of rebellion against the “Protestant Establishment,” the previous American elite. That America, swept away after the 1960s, was, as Brooks says, governed by “a network of men’s clubs, country clubs, white-shoe law firms, oak-paneled Wall Street firms, and WASP patriarchs.” The ruling class believed in a natural aristocracy based on race and breeding. People boasted of their descent from the original settlers of America and felt free to exclude Jews and other minorities from their organizations and businesses. Today, the Protestant Establishment is mostly remembered as an era of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and so forth. Although people are very aware of the negative stereotypes of this period—“lockjaw accents, the Social Register…, constant rounds of martinis and highballs,” and so forth—few recognize that the nation the Protestant Establishment created was probably the most innovative in history.
Brooks captures the culture of rebellion of today’s elites beautifully. Successful businessmen wear “Days of Rage” T-shirts while they exercise, thereby celebrating a 1969 spree of violence by student radicals who sympathized with the Black Panthers. Nike uses the Beatles song “Revolution” in its marketing. “Business leaders … scream revolution at the top of their lungs, like billionaire Abbie Hoffmans.”4
In Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter focus on today’s culture of rebellion. Like Brooks, they think the ideas of the 1960s counterculture, according to which the only authentic life was one of rebellion against conformist, deadening mass-society, now dominate mainstream culture.
The traditional critique of mass society suggests that most people are members of the herd, cogs in the machine, victims of mindless conformity. They lead vacuous, hollowed-out lives ruled by shallow, materialistic values. They are manipulated to serve the functional requirements of the system, and so will never experience true creativity, freedom or even complete sexual fulfillment. That having been said, who could possibly want to be a member of mass society? If anything, people should be desperate to prove that they are not victims of conformity, that they are not merely cogs in a machine.5
Both political radicalism and the taste for “alternative” fashions and lifestyles are products of the culture of rebellion. People are so eager to be anti-authoritarian that they look on the most innocent of social norms as “fascism.” Speaking of 1960s figures like Abbie Hoffman, who originated the culture of rebellion in its modern form:
The countercultural rebels took the observation that all cultural norms are enforced, and concluded, on this basis, that all of culture is a system of domination. A continuum was posited between Adolf Hitler and Emily Post—both were regarded as fascists, trying to impose their rules on people to deny them pleasure. Any rebellion against any sort of social norm was therefore positively valued.6
There is no greater obstacle to the acceptance of race realism than the myth of the fascist establishment. Stunning as it may be, if you say that you believe the races are inherently different and that rising populations of non-whites put our culture at risk—statements much stronger than the one that got James Watson fired—liberals will assume that you are a member of the establishment that they are obligated to rebel against to demonstrate their authenticity. They will attack you with a special zeal and self-righteousness and will repeat their cliches about diversity as though they were uttering revolutionary truths for the first time.
Furthermore, the myth enmeshes realists in a dense web of often unwelcome associations. As soon as you declare yourself to be a realist, people will assume you are also undemocratic, a fundamentalist, a merciless capitalist, and so forth. You can expect to be attacked for holding these positions even if you are opposed to them.
However, the myth also undermines views that are much less controversial than race realism. The myth breeds an intense paranoia about any kind of authority that makes normal human impulses, such as patriotism and respect for national security and the rule of law, suspect.
Consider that Paul Krugman viewed rallies in support for the Iraq War as analogous to Nazism. A simple examination of the motives of Iraq War supporters shows how delusional such a characterization is. These people were were proud that America was going to depose a military dictator who slaughtered, tortured, cheated, and impoverished his people. They were proud that the US was going to try to create democracy in Iraq in which people would enjoy the rights and freedoms that Westerners cherish. Although such ambitions may not be realistic, nothing could be further from Nazism.
Similarly, the myth causes Democratic politicians to regard efforts to enforce immigration laws as xenophobic scapegoating and commensensical measures to protect national security as paranoid fear-mongering. The Obama “Bittergate” scandal revealed that liberals view perfectly normal and healthy human impulses and beliefs, such as respect for the rule of law and religion, as the consequences of a mental illness.
It is essential for race realists to understand the myth in order to be effective in debate. If you make your belief in biological racial differences public, you should expect to be attacked for holding other prototypically “fascist” views. You must prepare to answer these attacks, and this requires that you think through your beliefs on religion, capitalism, homosexuality, and so forth.
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| Fight back! |
Furthermore, it is essential to be able to counteract the general dogmatic anti-authoritarianism that prevails today. However, here’s one example of how you might go about this. Ask liberals who believe that enforcing immigration law is “xenophobic” whether they seriously believe that respect for the rule of law is a mental illness and that a society that does not respect the rule of law can survive. And then follow up by asking which races seem most inclined to show respect for the law.
Moreover, when debating liberals, it is essential to undermine their belief that they are rebels. It is always a good idea to point out that big business donates more money to liberal and leftist causes than to conservative ones, and then ask liberals who is the real establishment. Also, you should point out that liberals are able to silence critics like James Watson and other race realists; the ability to silence criticism is the essential trait of politically dominant ideologies.
Finally, you should do your utmost to make plain the social snobbery that is at the heart of liberalism. The Bittergate controversy gives us a golden opportunity to make this point. Point out how Obama’s remarks are an example of the way in which elites slander the white majority so that their own superior tolerance and openness can shine by comparison.
The myth of the fascist establishment is a destructive lie that has undermined not only white racial consciousness, but also our respect for the rule of law and the national self-interest. Race realists tend to think of their intellectual struggle as confined to narrow issues of race. However, race realism is imbricated in a much larger set of ideas concerning society, and in order for our movement to be successful, we must be aware of the larger perspective. Indeed, one likely reason for the antipathy to white pride is that whiteness has become a symbol for the very idea of authority that our society so loathes. People associate pride in race with authoritarian styles of government, whether those of the early 20th century fascists or that of the old American Protestant Establishment. For this reason, we race realists must be able to defend not only the truth about race, but the very idea of social authority. Indeed, probably the best course for race realists is to engage in a systematic defense of the more benign forms of authoritarianism that were swept away by the culture of rebellion.
Click here for the first part of this article.