TPM Reader MG:
You were right on … in your post “Troubled History.” I thought you were especially sharp to draw a loose comparison between substance addiction behavior and the American right’s relationship to violence because it really does seem that there is an element of “they know not what they do” involved in this. It is compulsive, but not entirely self-aware.
As a former student of 20th century European history, the issues surrounding fascism (what it was, what it meant for modern politics, how it starts, and how to avoid it) are deeply intriguing. Recently, however, they have become more disturbing.
Historians of fascism are quick to caution that the word “fascism” brandished as a political weapon is next to meaningless. I think it was Zeev Sternhell that wrote that everybody is somebody’s fascist (paraphrasing). So I get that passions run high long enough and pretty soon you get both sides calling each other Hitler.
But if we were to see some people forcefully denouncing the carrying of guns to public townhall events as a fascist or proto-fascist action, I think they would have a lot more to stand on than your garden variety Hitler accusation. Even cataloguing the recent history of political violence on the right, it could be said to be directed at the government (federal buildings) or to be issue specific flashpoints (abortion clinic violence). But this is of a different sort than even those hanous acts (which had the terrible reality of killing people). This is people showing up to rallies and engaging in action either deliberately intended to supress free political speech or that has that direct effect.
The intimidation of good faith free speech is a very dangerous place for a political movement to be if one is looking for a comparison to fascism. After all, it wasn’t that brownshirts engaged in violence per se that was the problem (after all, we live with a crime rate that is random and senseless every day)–it was that their violence was specifically to intimidate and silence their political opponents. To draw a distinction, violence at an abortion clinic or government building is directed (in the wackos’ eyes) at the perpetrators of certain deeds. These are not quite the same thing as an attack on the very idea of people assembling and having a free exchange of ideas.
I am not saying carrying a gun is worse than actually killing people. In the specific sense, that is obviously false. But in the sense that this specific type of display of force in a way touches us all, it is definitely of a different sort. In short, I am saying this is something new, something closer to fascistic behavior than we have seen in recent memory.
I think the saving grace (if there is one) is that our fellow citizens do not have in mind an aim to build the kind of state that would truly warrant the idea that what we are seeing now is a replay of the fascism of the history books. But then again, we don’t know. When elites see willing henchmen out there, who knows what kind of stuff they might think it possible to direct them to do? We already see the oil lobby gearing up to repeat this behavior with regard to climate legislation.
One way or another, it is time for people to begin speaking out. If I was a Democratic congressman, I would file a bill proposing a national ban on carrying firearms to (or around) these types of events and I would use that as a springboard to discuss just how damaging these actions are for free speech and open debate in America. Now is the time for those who want to be on the right side of history to caution their fellow citizens about the path they are on.
Call it an intervention.
