Thinking ahead

 Well THAT was interesting. I'm hoping today's results will signify the end or at least the beginning of the end of America's latest dark journey, although I think we're not out of the woods yet.

I've been thinking a lot about my walk across Spain two years ago on the Camino de Santiago. More than once I passed through what were mass graves of people like me who were murdered by Franco's fascists during the Spanish civil war of the 1930s. For the last few years, I kept reminding myself that many admirable nations had gone on journeys as bad and much worse than ours but eventually emerged.

Still there's a lot to watch out for. Lot's of people, including myself and colleagues with the American Friends Service Committee, have been thinking about worst case election related scenarios, up to and  including the possibility of a coup. We of course are willing to accept an outcome that accepted all votes but were worried about other irregularities that might threaten the integrity of the eleciton, such as voter suppression and/or intimidation.

Assuming the constitutional anchor holds, the next big fight starts next week, when the freshly stacked deck of the US Supreme Court will consider taking away the health care of millions of Americans, to the delight of West Virginia's attorney general Patrick Morrisey.  There are any number of scenarios there.

Keeping that assumption, we might be in for gridlock in Congress but will at least be spared an American approximation of authoritarianism. 

West Virginia is going to be weird in any case. But, as my late friend and WV poet Norman Jordan, who with his wife Brucella operated an African American heritage museum in his home town of Ansted for years, wrote in a funny poem, I guess you can't have everything.

On the positive side, and assuming no funny stuff, we're going to see the end of a federal department of education, led by someone who never attended any institute of public education, trying to sabotage it. We're going to see the end of administrative policies aimed at taking away food assistance of millions of low income Americans and public school students. 

Assuming parts of the Affordable Care Act remain, we're likely to see the end of federal policies encouraging states to impose bogus work reporting requirements designed to deprive people of health care. We might at least see some harm reduction on the climate change front.

There's still so much to do. Many people with whom we disagree were our friends and allies not so many years ago. The country is still tragically divided. Even with a peaceful transition, many of the policies some of us hope to see will be blocked  until that is changed.

But I'll think about that tomorrow.

Statement on federal officers in Portland, elsewhere

Unidentified federal law enforcement agents in Portland, Oregon, have detained protesters,
whisking them away in unmarked cars. This shocking practice is evocative of repressive methods
used by authoritarian governments.

Over the objections of local elected officials, the Trump administration recently deployed a variety
of federal agents to Portland, including U.S. Marshals and Customs and Border Protection officers,
purportedly to protect federal buildings during demonstrations. However, detentions have
reportedly occurred elsewhere. It is not immediately clear which federal agency is responsible.

Since the arrival of federal agents, local officials have complained that they are using excessive
force against protesters. On July 6, a U.S. Marshal shot a protester in the head with an “impact
munition” fracturing his skull and leaving him critically injured. U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) has condemned the federal deployment, saying, “These shadowy forces have been escalating, not preventing, violence.”

Federal officials have rejected the calls for de-escalation. On July 16, Acting Secretary of Homeland
Security Chad Wolf criticized local officials for failing to curb “lawless anarchists.” “This failed
response has only emboldened the violent mob,” he said.

Since the murder of George Floyd by police, Americans across the nation have taken to the streets to
exercise their First Amendment rights. Many times these peaceful protests against police violence
have been met with more violence, including by the Portland Police Department.The continued
deployment of federal forces in Portland, against the wishes of local elected officials, is the latest
example of the Trump administration’s policy of demonizing the protesters and peddling conspiracy
theories about outside agitators.

Reports that PPD may be formally or informally coordinating or sharing information with federal
agencies raise additional concerns.

Everyone has the right to protest freely and to speak out for a better world. Individuals do not
forfeit this right, even when others engage in vandalism or similar unlawful acts. Officers are only
legally authorized to arrest a person based on individualized probable cause that the individual has
committed a crime.

The use of unidentified militarized federal forces against the wishes of local officials, the exercise of
excessive force against peaceful demonstrators and the seemingly arbitrary detention of some of
them without a clear reason for arrest are designed to intimidate protesters into surrendering their
First Amendment rights.

We condemn these practices. We call for all unwanted federal forces to be removed from Portland
and urge Congress to investigate the pattern and practice of abuses against protesters.

(The American Friends Service Committee was one of several organizations to sign on to this statement. Click link for more.)

The other pandemic

Italian author and philosopher Umberto Eco (1932-2016)

Umberto Eco was a brilliant thinker who is probably best known for his 1980 novel The Name of the Rose, which became a popular film. Aside from that bestseller, he wrote many works of fiction, criticism, and philosophy. His specialty was semiotics, which has been defined as the study of signs symbols and their interpretation.

Eco was born during Mussolini's fascist rule in Italy and remained fascinated with--and opposed to--that kind of political movement. He was also fascinated with conspiracy theories (a theme in his baroque novel Foucault's Pendulum) and the potential role of new technology in creating post-modern authoritarian political movements. Here's an interesting article on what Eco saw coming, including his 14 characteristics of fascism.

Some items on his list hit pretty close to home these days, including an exalting of traditionalism (often imagined), rejection of modernism and Enlightenment values, cult of action for action's sake, viewing disagreement as treason, fearing differences, contempt for the weak, social anxiety and frustration (usually of the middle class) as a driver, an obsession with plots and conspiracies, selective populism, a cult of machismo and weaponry, and Newspeak as in the distortion of language to impede critical thought (fake news!). There's more as listed in the article above.

He pretty much nailed it. The rise of the internet and social media, with all its positive features, provides a perfect environment for this kind of thinking to grow, especially in times of anxiety and frustration.

His views of how this plays out on social media were particularly scathing:  “Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community  . . . now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It’s the invasion of the idiots.” I think it's actually darker than that, given the deliberate use of misinformation for political purposes by people--and algorithms--who/that are very good at it.

Eco seemed to retain a faith in reason and the self-destructiveness of the fascist mentality. 

We'll see.

Here we go again...

It's been nearly 10 years since I made a pilgrimage to Okinawa. When I was there, I made friends with a freelance writer who likes to ping me on days when some weird news story breaks from West Virginia...

...which is to say, we've been in touch a lot.

The best such days are when it's just something weird, like maybe a real X Files-type story. The worst are those days when WV makes the national news over some acts of bigotry and/or craven groveling to exploitative corporations.

The last year or so has been an X Files bust and a bigotry/groveling boom.

Where are Mothman, Bat Boy, and the Braxton County monster when you need them?

Let's start with groveling. Top of my list in that department was the time when a representative of a business group told legislators that we didn't need to update safe water standards since West Virginians are heavier, drink less water and eat less fish.And won the day.

For real.

That moment was another example of why I want to update the state motto from "Mountaineers Are Always Free" to "You Can't Make This **** Up."

But it's been a real banner year for bigotry. We had the state delegate who made a joke about drowning his children if they turned out to be LGBTQ. We had the Islamophobic outburst at the state capitol. We now have a public library board about to consider banning a non-sexually explicit LGBTQ-friendly children's book.

You can probably guess where I'm going with this.

I agree with what WV Senator Joe Manchin said in the wake of the publication of a photo of corrections trainees raising their hands in an apparent Nazi salute: "This is not the West Virginia I know or grew up in."

But things have changed here over the last few years. Dramatically. And, while the outbreaks are by no means confined to West Virginia,they seem to be occurring more frequently here.

It makes me think of the early phases of an epidemic. In Albert Camus' novel The Plague, a parable about the rise of fascism and Nazism that I've often quoted, the first signs begin when dead rats start showing up in the Algerian city of Oran.

Nobody noticed that much at first. Then it was just a nuisance. But pretty soon, it wasn't just rats any more.

I keep going back to something one of the heroes of that novel said about the epidemic:

"All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences."

The book ends with a warning against being too complacent about such metaphorical outbreaks. The narrator cautions that:

"...the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city."

Thinking about the other f word

There’s been a lot of interest in the f-word lately. Of course, I mean the seven-letter one. To wit, fascism.

According to Merriam Webster, it was the most searched word on the internet on election night in 2016. It came close to being the word of the year for 2016 but it was trumped, no pun intended, by “surreal.” In Feb. 2017, The Washington Post reported that fascism’s share of internet searches in the new year was already five times the level of 2015.

Last year, former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, who spent her early years in its shadow in Europe, published a book titled “Fascism: A Warning.”

It’s shown up in the news quite a bit lately.

No doubt the word gets kicked around inappropriately, often coming to define a fascist as anyone with whom one disagrees.

The word had a fairly innocent origin. During the Roman Republic, one of the more democratic governments in the ancient world, lictors or bodyguards of officials carried fasces, a bundle of rods tied around an axe blade as a symbol of legitimate authority.

The symbolism was powerful. A single rod could be easily broken, but not many joined together.

It survived as a non-fascist symbol long after the ancient world, showing up both in the reign of French King Louis XIV (1638-1715) and in the symbols of the French Revolution which overthrew his dynasty in the late 1700s. You can even find fasces behind the podium of the US House of Representatives, on the left and right and on the seal of the US Senate.

It acquired its modern connotations when adopted by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Mussolini was originally a socialist before embracing authoritarianism, militarism, imperialism and extreme nationalism after World War I.

At first, Mussolini was more opportunist than ideologue. His initial platform called for women’s suffrage and social programs including greater representation of workers. However, those ideals soon faded as he reached an accommodation with traditional economic elites and crushed independent workers’ organizations.

Eventually the term was applied to other movements, most of which didn’t gain power. One notable exception, of course, was Germany, which would far eclipse fascist Italy in terms of power while it lasted.

Fascist movements often begin as a variety of populism, which can take many forms, some benign. Michael Kazin defined populism as “a language whose speakers conceive of ordinary people as a noble assemblage not bounded narrowly by class; view their elite opponents as self-serving and undemocratic; and seek to mobilize the former against the latter.”

John B. Judis distinguished between the populism of the left and right. In his recent book “The Populist Explosion,” he suggested that:

“Leftwing populists champion the people against an elite or an establishment. Theirs is a vertical politics of the bottom and middle arrayed against the top. Rightwing populists champion the people against an elite that they accuse of coddling a third group, which can consist, for instance, of immigrants, Islamists, or African American militants.” Or some other group. You can pretty much fill in the blank.

(Side note: I’d personally prefer we retire the language of left and right when it comes to current politics. Those terms refer to which side supporters or opponents of the French monarchy sat on at the National Assembly in 1789, which isn’t exactly a burning issue these days.)

Still, one can have populism of the “right” without having fascism. And fascist movements that gain state power generally ditch the populist agenda as leaders reach understandings with conservative and business elites. The populist base of such movements generally get thrown under the proverbial bus. A classic example of this is Hitler’s 1934 purge of more radical Nazi supporters in what came to be known as “the night of the long knives.”

So what does the word mean mean these days? And does it matter?

One scholar who has researched the history exhaustively is Robert Paxton author of “The Anatomy of Fascism” (2004). He defined it as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

He saw the mobilizing passions of early stage fascism to also include the need for authority and “the closer integration of a purer community;” belief in superiority of the leader’s instinct over reason and logic; the beauty of violence and the will in pursuing the group’s aims; and the right of the chosen group to dominate others without restraint.

He saw the movement as including stages from their emergence to their establishment in the political system to gaining power to wielding it to a final stage of either radicalization or entropy. The good news is that while authoritarian regimes can last a long time, fascist ones don’t have much of a shelf life. So far.

Ever since fascist movements emerged in the first half of the 20th century, many Americans have asked themselves if it could happen here, a question that has been asked more frequently these days.

I think it’s possible but not inevitable. While this may be to be the closest this f-word has had to a moment in the sun in this country, I’m hoping it’s more of a flirtation than a long-term relationship.

Still, it might be good to recall the words of Pearl Buck, the only West Virginian (so far) to win the Nobel Prize for literature: “When good people in any country cease their vigilance and struggle, then evil men prevail.”

(This appeared as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

Words from the oracle

For the last few years, my mind has kept circling back to the cryptic ideas of Walter Benjamin, a radical and somewhat mystical Jewish philosopher who committed suicide when in the Pyrenees when it seemed like escape from Nazi-occupied France would be impossible.

It's weird that I keep going back there because I'm pretty sure I don't understand 90+ percent of what he says, but every now and then a line will jump out at me and stop me in my tracks.

I have two quotes from him today. I can't find the original source for this one but here goes:

"Behind every fascism there is a failed revolution."

I take that to mean that when the positive movements of life are defeated and thwarted, the door opens for darker journeys. I've seen that happen over the course of my life.

Then there's this thought about the nature of social change:

“Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.” 

In any case, I'm not crazy about the train ride we're on now.

A tweet-sized rant

The latest bad news to break from the US border (that would be the one about the racist and misogynistic  Facebook group set up by past and current border patron agents in case another story just as bad breaks in the meantime) reminds me of a quote attributed to poet Maya Angelou:

"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."

I believe. Although it's not the first time.

The bacillus never dies...

It's been a long time between blog posts, thanks mostly to Frontier Communications, which hasn't been able to get our interwebs going for 10 days or so. Apparently customer service isn't a huge priority there. Since I don't know how long our service will last I'll make this brief.

I just finished re-reading Albert Camus' The Plague for maybe the 20th time. Written during the Nazi occupation of France, it was a parable of fascism. The last paragraph contains a warning that seems way too timely for comfort:

...the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.

What's that scurrying sound?

Gazing into the abyss

It’s comforting to think that good and evil people are completely different, and that “our” side, whatever that is, is all good, while evil belongs exclusively to the other.

Too bad this is a dangerous illusion.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it in “The Gulag Archipelago,” his study of Soviet punishment camps:

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. ... During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish.

“One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood.”

He quotes a Russian proverb that, “From good to evil is one quaver,” noting it works the other way, too.

That’s a good summary of social science on how ordinarily good people sometimes do terrible things.

Someone who explored this field for decades is Philip Zimbardo, creator of the infamous Stanford Prison experiment and author of “The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil.”

He argues that we tend to attribute evil actions to the individual dispositions of people who do them but ignore the powerful forces situations exert on individuals. Further, powerful people create systems that put decent people in situations in which they do things they otherwise never would have.

He warns that we often have a dangerously inflated notion of our ability to resist evil influences.

“For many, that belief of personal power to resist powerful situational and systemic forces is little more than a reassuring illusion of invulnerability,” he wroted. “Paradoxically, maintaining that illusion only serves to make one more vulnerable to manipulation by failing to be sufficiently vigilant against attempts of undesired influence subtly practiced on them.”

Two powerful toxins that can unleash the beast in any of us are dehumanization and deindividuation.

Zimbardo: “Dehumanization is one of the central processes in the transformation of ordinary, normal people into indifferent or even wanton perpetrators of evil. Dehumanization is like a cortical cataract that clouds one’s thinking and fosters the perception that other people are less than human. It makes some people come to see those others as enemies deserving of torment, torture, and annihilation.”

Dehumanization happens at an individual level, but it is most dangerous when the powerful create systems that label and target some groups as being less than human.

When we dehumanize others, another process that kicks in is what social psychologist Albert Bandura called “moral disengagement,” when we convince ourselves that some people are unworthy of empathy and compassion.

Then it’s on.

Deindividuation happens when we identify so closely with a group that we lose our sense of individual responsibility. This happens in organized or informal ways. When countries send people off to war, the warriors are often deindividualized with shaved heads, uniforms and drills that emphasize following orders and acting as a unit. It can also happen in informal groups like mobs and gangs. Things like masks and hoods can add to the effect.

This is most dangerous at the systemic level, particularly when it goes hand in hand with dehumanizing some vulnerable group via ideology and propaganda. Throw in our tendency to conform and obey authority, and you have a pretty lethal brew. Signals from above give permission to abuse those below.

The scary side to group behavior has long been recognized. Sigmund Freud noted that, in groups, emotionalism rises while rationality falls (think political rallies, rock concerts, some sporting events).

He believed that when groups fall under the spell of a charismatic authority, the people in it regress to a more primitive mental state. He wrote, “It is not so remarkable that we should see an individual in a group doing or approving things which he would have avoided in the normal conditions of life.”

The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr even titled one of his books “Moral Man and Immoral Society.” He didn’t have any delusions about the flaws of individuals, but rather noted that, “In every human group there is less reason to guide and to check impulse, less capacity for self-transcendence, less ability to comprehend the needs of others and therefore more unrestrained egoism than the individuals, who compose the group, reveal in their personal relationships.”

After all, most individuals have consciences. But often the conscience of a group is a dissenting minority accused of disloyalty.

We live in are dangerous times. Polarization runs high. There are calls for dehumanization coming from high places around the world. America may be on its own dark journey, although it’s unclear how far it will go. I’m consoled by the thought that many other nations have gone through dark times and come out on the other side.

I hope we step back from the edge of the cliff and resist the temptation to see the other, whoever it may be, as some kind of monster.

As the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

(This ran as an op-ed in the Gazette-Mail a day or so ago.)

A blast (and warning) from the past

Since the tragic events of the last weekend in Charlottesville, a long forgotten video produced by the US War Department during WWII has gone viral over the internet. I think most of what's gone out over the interwebs has been excerpts from the full version, which lasted about 17 minutes.

The uncut version of the film "Don't Be a Sucker" is available here. It was first produced in 1943 and re-released in 1947. I highly recommend giving it a look. It's an eerily contemporary warning to Americans to resist the temptations of fascism and authoritarianism.

Too bad it's not just a curious relic of another time.

WV Council of Churches statement on Charlottesville

CHARLESTON, W.V. — West Virginia Council of Churches Condemns Violence in Charlottesville, VA

For many years, as stated in our Public Policy Issues Booklet “the West Virginia Council of Churches laments the deterioration of political debate in our society as it is expressed through the demonization of political adversaries, falsehood masquerading as truth for political gain, and the corrosive effect of anonymous money.  All of these have a negative influence on public trust and the participation of citizens in the political process.  We call for civility, mutual respect, financial transparency, disclosure, and truth telling in campaigning and other forms of political activity”  (WVCC Public Policy Issues Booklet, p. 7).

Today, in Charlottesville, Virginia, we have seen the end result of the failure to attend to those things that nurture civil society and of the failure to see one another as sisters and brothers.  We whole-heartedly condemn the violence and the hate that was displayed in Charlottesville, Virginia.  We unequivocally reaffirm our belief that Black lives do matter and that our country must come to terms with the racism endemic in our society.  We pray for peace and healing in Charlottesville and in our country.  It is our hope that all people of good will, politicians and citizens alike, will condemn this violence, begin to heal the wounds in our country, and “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5: 24).



The West Virginia Council of Churches (WVCC) represents 14 Christian denominations in West Virginia. Its mission is to make visible the unity of Christ's church, and to provide a Christian witness on public issues, as well as to engage in cooperative mission and service for all West Virginians.

Apropos of nothing again

I'm a philosophical fan of American pragmatism, especially of the William James variety. Not sure how I feel about John Dewey, but I'd probably like him better if he would have been a better writer. I've also read a few by the late Richard Rorty, who died in 2007.

Some lines from his 1998 book Achieving America have attracted attention lately. Here's a slightly condensed version:

[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. …

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

Jeez, good thing that didn't happen, right?

You can read more about Rorty's prediction here.

Apropos of nothing

So the last few days have been interesting or something, although I would have been fine with boring.

I'm thinking of three things I've read that crossed my path this week. One was this piece by Andrew Sullivan on the dangers of fascism to the USA from the Trump campaign. That was before.

Then a friend sent me this item from Vox about how Trump's proposed policies will be a disaster for the white working class.

Then there's this item from Jacobin about how urgent it is to engage in (small d) democratic political action.

Otherwise, I've been thinking about a book someone told me about with a title I can't print in a family blog. It was something like "**** yes: A Guide to the Happy Acceptance of Everything." The **** in question is neither scatological nor eschatological. I haven't read it (yet) but I think it's kind of a comic novel about someone who tries to say "Yes!" to everything that life throws at him. And yes can be kind of complicated.

I can't say that's my worldview, but I think at some point we all need to say "**** yes" to the challenges that have been thrown our way. And deal with them.

One last thing. A quote that has been on my mind lately is attributed to Mao Zedong (of whom I'm not a fan, btw). It goes like this: "Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent."

**** yes!

Make America what again?

If you're anything like me, you might have a sneaking suspicion that the subtext behind a certain political campaign is "Make American White Again." Well, it turns out there's some evidence that points that way. There's more on that here. And then, apropos of nothing, there's this.

Escape from freedom?

This op-ed of mine appeared in the Sunday Gazette-Mail.

Sometimes I get in the mood for a big fat Russian novel. It’s kind of like having a craving for a corn dog.

One hot mess of a novel that’s been on my mind lately is Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. It’s about the relationships between three brothers, the passionate and impulsive Dmitri, the saintly Alyosha and the tortured intellectual Ivan.

(If you think your family is weird, this book just might make you feel better.)

The most memorable part for me is the discussion about freedom and authority. It’s a riff on the New Testament story of the temptation of Jesus by Satan in the wilderness at the start of his ministry. In the novel, it takes the form of a “poem” or story told by Ivan about an imaginary encounter between Jesus and the Grand Inquisitor at the height of the Spanish Inquisition.

In it, Jesus appears as he did on earth even while heretics are being burned at the stake. He doesn’t make a scene but the people recognize him instantly and, drawn by his love and compassion, surround him asking for healing and his blessing.

The Grand Inquisitor is having none of it. He orders Jesus to be arrested immediately. The people are so used to being obedient to authority that they don’t object. That night he visits his prisoner in the dungeon and harangues him, asking “Why have you come to hinder us?”

In his view, Jesus’ fatal flaw was wanting people to be free to choose to follow him without coercion. The Inquisitor argues that freedom is the last thing people want and need, saying “nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom … I tell Thee that man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.”

In other words, what people really crave is a strong authoritarian leader who will tell them what they want to hear and overawe them with spectacle. The “wise and dread spirit” who tempted Jesus in the desert called it: Give the people “miracle, mystery and authority” (or at least the lying promise of it) and they will throw themselves at the feet of the charismatic leader.

Jesus listens in silence, gazing gently at his jailer. In the end, “he suddenly approached the old man in silence and softly kissed him on his bloodless aged lips.” The old man shuddered, opened the cell door and told him to go away and never come again.

Jesus disappears into the night.

As for the Grand Inquisitor, “The kiss glows in his heart, but the old man adheres to his idea.”

This story within a story isn’t really about an unfortunate period in European history. It’s about an unfortunate but periodically recurring tendency in humanity to willingly submit to authoritarian leaders, systems and regimes.

This was also the theme of Erich Fromm’s classic study “Escape From Freedom,” which was first published 1941. Fromm had fled Germany shortly after the Nazi takeover, which also prompted him to write the book.

His basic argument was that modern capitalist societies affect people in two contradictory ways: people become “more independent, self-reliant, and critical” while also becoming “more isolated, alone, and afraid.”

This leaves us with two alternatives: We can either move toward “positive freedom,” the often difficult step of creatively relating to others in work and love; or we can surrender to authoritarianism or conformity, both of which come at the cost of an authentic life. Of these, the former is more dangerous, particularly in hard times, while the latter is more common.

Those who give way to authoritarianism are aroused by and ready to submit to powerful leaders, whether they are individuals or institutions. They are also contemptuous of the weak and frequently target marginalized groups. For them, “the world is composed of people with power and those without it, of superior ones and inferior ones” and the lack of power of the “losers” is seen as a sign of guilt and inferiority.

Leaders of authoritarian political movements play on these feelings and on the resentments and frustrations of people in uncertain times. In “Mein Kampf,” for example, the worst of the lot wrote that the German masses really wanted after years of defeat and depression was “the victory of the stronger and the annihilation or the unconditional surrender of the weaker.” They “are far more satisfied by a doctrine which tolerates no rival than by the grant of liberal freedom …”

He described in detail how authoritarian movements help people overcome their sense of isolation:

“The mass meeting is necessary if only for the reason that in it the individual, who in becoming an adherent of a new movement feels lonely and is easily seized with the fear of being alone, receives for the first time the pictures of a greater community, something that has a strengthening and encouraging effect on most people. … If he steps for the first time out of his small workshop or out of the big enterprise, in which he feels very small, into the mass meeting and is now surrounded by thousands and thousands of people with the same conviction … he himself succumbs to the magic influence of what we call mass suggestion.”

That sounds like a contemporary political rally. It’s not a coincidence that both the Washington Post and the New York Times have recently published columns and news stories about the renewed debate on fascism in the United States and around the world.

Authoritarian movements and leaders can be tempting. At different times, many admirable peoples and cultures have fallen for them. The results generally aren’t good, either for their victims or supporters. The temptations of “the wise and dread spirit” and the Grand Inquisitor will always be there and at times they can seem very alluring.

It comes down to a choice.

(Note: Over 20 years ago I listened to a recorded lecture on this topic by now retired Barnard College professor Dennis Dalton. I found it fascinating but remote at the time. Recent events prompted me to revisit the sources.)

Random observations

Here are a few:

*It's a bit ironic that while congress is finally talking about dealing with mass incarceration, Democratic leadership is MIA.

*Someone else dropped the F-bomb.

*Meanwhile, back at the state capitol, the wrecking crew still hasn't come up with a budget even though we're less than a month from a government shutdown. This Gazette editorial is a day or so old but it sums things up pretty well. And this op-ed doesn't pull any punches.

*Urgent Neanderthal update here.

The other F bomb

If you are one of those people who are getting weirded out by the current political climate, and particularly with the whole Trump vibe, you're not alone. Recently Robert Kagan, a Brookings Institution fellow often regarded as a neocon published an op-ed in the Washington Post titled "This is how fascism comes to America."  Shortly after that, the NY Times published this piece about how the Trump campaign has helped spark a global debate about the F word.

Thing is, I didn't like it the first time around. In fact, my dad and two uncles spent a good chunk of the 1940s fighting against it. I'm hoping it's a false alarm but this isn't the kind of thing to ignore.

Apropos of nothing again

For some reason, a quote attributed to Walter Benjamin keeps coming to mind: "Every rise of Fascism bears witness to a failed revolution."

Modern paraphrase: a lot of shipwrecked hopes for a better day gave rise to the current political climate, in WV and the nation at large.

THE BIG SQUEEZE AND OTHER STUFF

Caption: These chickens had to scratch for a living.

(First, a correction to yesterday's post on "The Two Bums." A closer inspection of the photo reveals that there were in fact three bums in that picture. Second, a reminder that all the posts this week are loosely connected. Please click on the last few days if this is your first visit.)

Something good happened to this country between the end of World War II and the early 1970s. In that period, the US economy grew dramatically.

And, while there has always been great inequality in this country, the benefits of growth were shared among all sectors of the population.

But that positive trend came to an end in the 1970s. Contributing factors were the costs of the Vietnam War, the energy crisis, and economic stagflation that baffled many economists.

Stagflation refers to a slow economy with high unemployment accompanied by high inflation. This puzzled many economists at the time as the conventional wisdom was that you either had unemployment or inflation but not both at the same time.

Real wages for American workers began to stagnate and fall, a tendency that continued for more than a decade.

This crisis created the political opening for right wing, which had been building its political and ideological base since the mid 1960s , to gain power. They were aided in part by growing resentment among middle income Americans against “welfare queens,” unions, minorities, a backlash against the civil rights movement, etc.

The growth of the religious right enabled this movement to exploit divisive issues and “culture wars" and thus gain support from middle and lower income Americans for an agenda which would ultimately betray them.

Let them eat jihad…

Once in power, the right pursued policies that made the income gap between the very wealthy and everyone else begin to grow. As a result, when the economy grew, the benefits weren’t shared across the population as they had been in the post war period.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (get link) after tax income for the wealthiest one percent of the population grew by 111 percent between 1979 and 2002. It grew by 48 percent for the top fifth.

If the post-war pattern had continued, there would have been similar gains across the board. Instead, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the middle fifth gained on 15 percent, while the bottom fifth gained five percent. By other measures, lower income Americans actually lost ground.

As previously noted in this blog, Census data for every year since 2000 has reported increasing poverty, stagnant wages, and a growth in the number of the uninsured for every year since 2000.

It can’t be stressed enough that this growing inequality was not the result of “market” forces acting alone but through the use of political policies to shift budget priorities, promote trade deals benefiting multinational investors at the expense of ordinary people, attacks on unions, and cuts to the safety net.

As Dean Baker, economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, has repeatedly pointed out, there has been a conscious and deliberate use of the powers of government for the last 25 years to redistribute wealth upward. He calls it “a right turn leading to a dead end.”

The country can no longer afford the politics of resentment and the circular firing squad it creates.

But there is some good news, about which more tomorrow…

NO COMMENT. This item appeared in the UK Guardian.

WEST VIRGINIANS SPEAK OUT AGAINST THE WAR. A number of groups, including WV Patriots for Peace, WV Citizen Action Group, the AFL-CIO, and AFSC held a press conference yesterday on the occasion of President Bush's veto of the Iraq supplemental.

FIG TREE NOTES. Here's the latest edition of Jim Lewis's Notes from Under the Fig Tree.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED