COMMENTARY: Fascism, American-style

c. 1999 Religion News Service (Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and sociologist at the University of Chicago National Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.) UNDATED _ There is a whiff of fascism in the air, fascism American-style, fascism that appeals […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and sociologist at the University of Chicago National Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

UNDATED _ There is a whiff of fascism in the air, fascism American-style, fascism that appeals to the dark strains in American culture and the dark subbasements of the American character.


American fascists do not wear fancy shirts or march in goose steps or give stiff-arm salutes. Rather they continue the traditions of far-right populism that appeal to the American capacity for and need to hate. They are the heirs to men like Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin.

Who do many Americans love to hate? Foreigners, immigrants, intellectuals, artists, radical women, Jews?

As a people, we generally do not need inkblots into which we can project our frustrations. Only when we are troubled by war or haunted by economic decline do such emotions surge up out of the murky swamps of our history. However, we must not kid ourselves; the swamps are still there and the monsters still lurk in them.

Moreover there are still demagogues, wizards and false prophets who are only too willing to say the magic words or engage in the magic rituals that will bring the monsters to the surface.

For example, Patrick Buchanan.

Even if you don’t listen to what he says, you can see that he is a hater from the twisted expression on his face, the tough set of his jaw, the hard, cold glint in his eyes. He doesn’t like foreigners, immigrants, intellectuals, Jews, artists and radical women. He touches a sore spot in the soul of many Americans who resent these people too.

Can you win an election on a campaign that keeps picking on such sore spots? Probably not now. Not ever? Ever is a long time.

Or Jesse Ventura, who poses as the tough, rugged, vigorous male from the depths of society _ and thinks there’s nothing much wrong with naval aviators, men much like himself, pawing and groping women.

Could he be elected president of the United States with the support of men who think that there’s nothing wrong with a little groping and that women ought to be put back in their place? Probably not now. Yet he was elected governor of the great progressive state of Minnesota, mostly with the plea that he will always say what he thinks, no matter how raw or how rough it might be.


Then there is Rudolph Giuliani, the ruthless prosecutor (most of whose major Wall Street convictions were overturned on appeal) who wants to close down museums that present art he doesn’t like and does his best to restrain freedom of expression in New York.

His police hassle and harass blacks daily and occasionally torture them or gun them down in a hail of bullets. Yet he praises the police (as do many New Yorkers) for lowering the crime rate _ though the crime rate has declined in every major city without the need of a police force that acts like storm troopers. He is, as other lawyers tell me, a hard-charging prosecutor who never has second thoughts.

Could such a man be elected president? Has he not been elected mayor of the country’s largest and, by its own admission, most sophisticated city? He’s likely to be elected to the U.S. Senate a year from now, defeating Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Many of the white people in New York support and admire him because he has stuck it to African-Americans. This fact makes me wonder if in the final analysis the Big Apple is almost as depraved as its basketball team.

Three dangerous men, all of whom know which buttons to push to activate the swamp monsters. One is broken-down wrestler, another a failed columnist and commentator, and the third a prosecutor whose victories are overturned and whose violations of freedom of expression are slapped down by the courts. (And two of them, God protect us, Catholics.)

Could they really ever take control of our country? Not now, certainly. Ever?

I am reminded of Cardinal George Mundelein, who back in the 1930s said he was astonished that an intelligent and sophisticated people such as the Germans could turn over their fate to a man who was an Austrian paperhanger, and a poor one at that.


IR END GREELEY

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